Are you my mother?

I don't know if anyone else read that book as a child, but Are You My Mother by P.D. Eastman was a household staple for me. It details the story of a lost little duck-like bird who asks everything from cats to cows to airplanes if they are his mother. Fear not, he is eventually reunited with his actual mother, a bird, much like you would expect.

The point of bringing it up is to highlight the initial blindness the baby bird has: the extent of his definition of "mother" is the word alone. In The Reproduction of Motherhood by Nancy Chodorow, she explores how "mothering" is a female term, and has self-perpetuated from a biological statement to a social construct, making the women implicitly the primary parent. I agree that the word "mother" has expanded to mean more than merely the person who gave birth to you, but I don't believe that it discourages men from caring for their children in an intimate way. Perhaps I'm being optimistic, but I think that whether or not the socially imposed male/female parenting scheme affects the children depends on the parents themselves.

Before the hatchling bird has any idea of who his mother is, he asks around in ways humorous and somewhat bizarre. Obviously, an old car is not his mother, but if for some odd reason it declared it was and began to care for him, the hatchling would have complied. Society does, absolutely, assume that the "mothering" figure in a household will be female, but at the very beginning, children have no real preference except for strictly biological things they rapidly outgrow. Mothering is a learned construct, and I believe that with so many new household contents and developments, the male/female parenting binary will collapse as long as we maintain as open minds as the hatchling's.

Here, a lioness decided to mother a baby oryx, one of the animals she would usually eat. If animals can adopt their prey and mother them, I think as humans we need to get with the program and give up on gender-dividing parenting privileges. Chodorow makes a compelling argument for why mothering is typically female, and I think the next step from her discussion is a call to action. Our children should all be taught to mother, and what roles they choose to play in their children's lives should be independent of species--er--gender constraints.