Mommies & Sparents

Today is Mother's Day in the US and in Mexico (and probably other places as well). Mexico always celebrates Mother's Day on May 10th while in the US we celebrate our mamas on the 2nd Sunday in May. Why, you ask?

As holidays come along, I like to look into their purpose prior to the mass commercialization. (If I had been blogging the last couple of months, I would likely be hyperlinking 'mass commercialization' back to posts exposing the history behind St. Patrick's Day and Cinco de Mayo, maybe I can back date what I would have written on those days...).

Anyway, as Ruth Rosen reports on slate.com, Mother's Day was initially a day of political activism starting in 1858, and lasting for three decades, mothers protested against poor sanitation, war, child labor, lynching, trafficking of women and even consumer fraud.

Anna Jarvis was the first woman to organize a Mother's Day protest. In 1905, her daughter sought to honor her mother's activism with a national mother's day. In 1914, Congress formalized the second Sunday in May as Mother's Day. Jarvis' daughter was not too happy with what became a billion-dollar industry...

So as I watched my facebook feed fill with posts about mother's day and mommies and after I called my own Mom to wish her a happy day, I started to think about my choice to not become a mom. I prefer, as Elizabeth Gilbert put it in a recent lecture, to be a sparent. That is, I can be available, if necessary, on retainer to provide parental duties but I am not interested in parenting as a full-time endeavor. (The only exception I would make is for my nieces. In that case, I would pour my heart and soul into full-time parental duties.)

What does it mean to be a 30 year-old woman who does not want to be a mommy?

1. I have the privilege to choose whether or not to have children. This is indeed a privilege on many levels.
   
2. As a lesbian, becoming a mommy cannot happen accidentally.
3. My partner and I are (potential) DINKs and have the luxury (when we are both gainfully employed) that goes along with DINKdom.

I have been firm about this choice for many years, yet people still regard me as if I'm betraying biology or destiny by being childless by choice. I regard it as population control, a way I can feel less guilty about being selfish, and the one you can call when you need a 'sparent'.

So Happy Mother's Day to all the mommies. I admire you. You deserve more than one day, of course, just like African-Americans deserve more than the shortest month of the year. I hope that you have several lovely sparents in your life for those days (weeks?) that you need some time for you.

Oh, and next year, let's throw some political activism back into Mother's Day... let's make Anna Jarvis proud.