Motherhood places a myriad of demands and emotions blended with falsehoods and truths onto any woman undertaking the role. There is plenty to say about the job but nothing that can be taken as an absolute. Some women take to it naturally, much like Adèle Ratignolle in Kate Chopin’s shocking novel, The Awakening, which explores the absolute imprisonment of her central character, Edna Pontellier. Imprisoned by society’s expectations of mothers and wives, the limiting duties and beliefs of both. Edna chose death instead. Shocking even today as I write those words. But Chopin knew first hand the laborious demands of the job and gave her protagonist an out, a provocative out but the only one that worked for Edna. My own mother had little time to discover how she might want to be as a singular person. Married within two weeks of graduating college and holding her first infant nine months later. Baby after baby after baby occupied her life until her mid-thirties. Despite her boundless energy, her love of people and her natural ability to caretake, this was a arduous routine, and an overwhelming expectation which yoked generations of women, and even her I imagine with six of us making our demands. As women do, she networked, fought to survive, leaned heavily on unmarried sisters or young women willing to do what they must until they entered their own married life. But you’d be fool to think there was choice in their endless mothering. Choice wasn’t in their vocabulary.

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