M.alternative alternative. It happens in West Africa and precisely among the Aka, a pygmy people where women leave the village to go hunting and children stay with their fathers. And they stay there even when in the evening they go to drink the local palm wine among men only and bring them, the babies: if they were looking for mom’s breasts, no problem there are male nippleswhose sucking will not be nourishing but, as Charles Darwin explained, will be in line with their only function, which is to be a better alternative to other artificial objects if the mother is not around.
The Aka spend 47 percent of their time with their children, far more than other fathers on the planet, once as fulfilling as it is for the mother. Parental equality among the Aka, including male sucking, is a discovery by the American anthropologist Barry Hewlett reported in the first chapters of a illuminating essay like few in terms of motherhood: I do it for myself (Bur). Her author, Stefania Andreoli, psychotherapist and analyst who has been working for years with families, adolescents and schools, among other things also keeps a column of questions and answers every Tuesday on her Instagram profile. It is mainly mothers who show up. And it is from their torments as equilibrists in search of the right thing to do that she was inspired to write the essay and support the thesis that the myth of sacrifice (“I do it for him”) and that of the maternal instinct for which “whoever is not a mother cannot understand” – just to quote the most common mantras – have little road ahead. Or maybe they never had it: the explanation, which basically confirms the story of the Aka, lies in one word. Functional.
Because the real question we should ask ourselves when faced with a decision to make to find inspired answers to a healthy and contemporary motherhood is essentially: who do you do it for? There is not just one maternal way, but many: the most functional for you is the best. Take it as the opening words of a manifesto.
Motherhood and the Guilt Trap
In fact, there is much talk of motherhood today more than yesterday. It has become a trend, in every field. And parents have become litmus papers to explain society, predict and act on possible futures. The latest reflection on parenting brings up those parents who hate playing with their children (an attitude that for psychologists who deal with their parents’ childhood). Are the roots of the mothers’ infancy also for the me to sacrifice? «Once Oriana Fallaci said that sacrificed mothers have children with feelings of guilt: she was right, and she gives the measure of how long-lived and resistant the maternal votive myth is, over time and over time. We feel contemporary and attentive to gender issues and instead we do not realize that the fact that “mom” rhymes with “renunciation” is a belief we are still imbued with.. Just yesterday a patient told me something emblematic: she and her husband are doctors in the profession. He has always received patients from eight in the morning. She starts later, because it is taken for granted that the burden of taking the children to school will fall on her, after having prepared breakfast for everyone. Now that we are working on it, things are changing at home »adds Andreoli.
F for happiness
Thinking of mothers over 40, those who have desired and sought motherhood at all costs, perhaps one wonders if their self-denial is, however, an exception to be justified. “I don’t know if I would strictly speaking into an age question: the age of the mother is limited to being a numerical datum, if the woman in question enjoys help and mental health – at twenty, thirty and forty. Rather, in my experience, the variable that makes the difference is the resolution of accounts with one’s life, before creating another one. I see a clear difference between the maternal experience of those who have a child to be happy and those who are happy enough to decide to have a child too. A mother to be inspired by who has lived her life answering “I do it for me”? Myself, and I would find it a beautiful answer, whoever gives it. If I really do it for myself, it is me that I answer. It is not selfishness – which I praise in the book anyway -: they are called responsibility and self-authorization. Adult stuff. “
Maternity / paternity
“There are a lot of international studies that underline how motherhood has its own status, which has nothing to do with the mystique of sacrifice. Yet it still happens today that researches are considered “biased”, contributions “vitiated” by a feminist bias. Nothing more short-sighted. There is one fundamental thing: we are subject. People. The mother is, which is more than what she expresses in that role. The son is, who also transcends what she expresses in that bond. It sounds obvious, but it’s not. And there is nothing else to know that it has more value, “she concludes.
Difficult budgets
Nothing is taken for granted when reflecting on the theme that seems to be the most gutted ever. They still remember the second season of the Mexican series There is only mom … two just landed on Netflix, which tells of the solution devised by two women to correct the exchange of their daughters in cradles. And the reissue of Donatella Di Pietrantonio’s debut, My mother is a river (Einaudi). Different in tone, they both offer an opportunity not to forget that to tackle the issue we need a plural look: biological or made up of compromises, what does it matter. To keep a bond alive, the writer suggests, sometimes just memory is enough.
«The women of my generation have only known the model of the sacrificial mother. If a woman was not a mother she was not a woman and when she became one she had to sacrifice everything, in essence. By overturning it, and trying to be above all other and not just mothers, we have however left one question unsolved: that of sacrifice, ”says Di Pietrantonio, 60, writer and dentist. «We wanted to study and work but we also wanted children. I lived my motherhood in an ambivalent way and with great feelings of guilt. I lived in a provincial environment where, especially twenty years ago, the weight of the patriarchal culture was very much felt inside the home. I’ve always struggled between wanting to be a good mother and staying alive, which is myself. It wasn’t easy but I think I made it. The maternal instinct? I think it concerns a more basic level in relationships, then cultural myths intervene to orient us. Fortunately, the new generations make more informed choices, including that of rejection. In this sense I would like to quote three writers for the modern vision that comes out of their books in which motherhood is not self-annihilation. They are Sheila Heti, Guadalupe Nettel and Yasmina Barrera »argues Di Pietrantonio, mother of a boy who is now 23 years old.
Eleven years after its debut, the book looks like another creature. As happens with children. “That’s the reason I radically changed the cover. There is now the daughter in the picture, who is the narrator, and who represents all those daughters who one day will be mothers. I hope that the company, here in Italy, will support them more than you have done with us ».
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