MOTHERHOOD AS A WORK

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Mom is the most difficult, most important job in the world, as many psychologists say in the texts of their articles. With such a train of thought, if not the majority, then a significant part of those working in such an honorable position agree with great pleasure. Who wouldn't like such glorifying rhetoric? But not everyone likes it. Not everyone is understood and unconditionally accepted. After all, not all motherhood is a “job”.

Keeping a child alive has two aspects. One is the care and responsibility that are so necessary to ensure the life and development of the child. Another aspect concerns more important tasks than just preserving life, its task is to instill in the child the feeling that life is great. If the first aspect is completely satisfied with the mother's "work", then the second is satisfied with mother's love.

It is difficult to instill a love of life in a child if from the first days he becomes the object of mother's work, and not love. The work of a mother, of course, gives the child the opportunity to stay alive and healthy, but it will not infect him with the love of life. The biblical symbol illustrates this idea well. The Promised Land "flows with milk and honey." Milk - can be related to the work of a mother, honey - with her love. Honey symbolizes the sweetness of life, love of life and the joy of living in this world. How can a “working” mother “infect” a child? What attitude towards oneself develops in a child from the sensations of working mother's hands, eyes, posture, voice, intonation? I dare to assert that the children of "working" mothers at a deep level suffer from a feeling of inner deadness. They feel as if there is something inanimate inside them. This is not surprising, the attitude to the child as to an impersonal object, the approach to which the "working" mother reduces to a mechanical function, gives him a feeling of his own impersonality, inhumanity, inhumanization. In fact, these people cannot love themselves, unconsciously feeling themselves as an inanimate, utilitarian object.

Many of those people who have been in therapy for years are able to say: "Mom took care of me, yes, so that he was dressed warmly and not hungry." They are brought into therapy by the lack of a "taste" for life. For children and already adults, one can easily tell which of them received only “milk”, and who received “milk” and “honey”.

Motherhood is not a job at all, those who like such definitions should wonder why. Why is maternal love replaced by work? How is it for them to be in the position of a mother? Why would they do it? One member of the psychotherapeutic group, shrewdly remarked about herself: “Before, when I came somewhere, to a new team, I always said:“I am a mother of two children”. Today, having got into a new team, I didn’t say this for the first time”. Indeed, some women are happy to grab onto this “position” in an attempt to maintain a narcissistic balance and enthusiastically join a group of workers doing extremely important work in order to gain high self-esteem. Often, the title of a working mother hides ambitions that are not satisfied in completely different areas of implementation, but this is already the subject of a separate conversation.

A child is work, and if he brings joy, it is only because he is truly desired due to the fact that the woman has decided to take on this work and, in essence, calls it not work, but her child.