TheNation-May282018

44 The Nation. May 28, 2018

book or website; the pride and pleasure and
self-righteousness of doing it “right.” The
rage I sometimes felt when I sat down at the
end of the day, exhausted, and was forced to

acknowledge that my life was no longer my

own—a rage that was immediately checked

by long bouts of self-recrimination, then

sublimated into a series of perfectly posed

photographs of my children, beautiful and

happy and utterly oblivious to my distress. I

was grateful to Rose for giving voice to these

conflicted realities, for inviting her reader to

acknowledge them without fear or shame. It

struck me that she had positioned herself as a

mother to mothers, ready to soothe all of us

who felt like we were constantly failing.

O

ne of the cruelest ironies of mother-

hood is that the harder it becomes to

sustain the ideal of maternal perfec-

tion, the more women feel—and are

made to feel—beholden to it. “As

austerity and inequality increase across the

globe,” and as “more and more children

are falling into poverty,” Rose explains, the

“focus on mothers is a sure-fire diversion-

ary tactic, not least because it so effec-

tively deflects from what might be far more

disruptive forms of social critique.” For

Rose, the failures of mothers become leg-

ible as the failures of society at large, placing

motherhood at the heart of contemporary

debates over immigration policy and ethno-

nationalism, racism and police brutality, and

the future of the welfare state in the United

States and United Kingdom.

There is something oddly conspirato-

rial about Rose’s tone when she starts talking

about politics. “Because mothers are seen as

our point of entry into the world,” she insists,

“there is nothing easier than to make social

deterioration look like something which it is

the sacred duty of mothers to prevent.” The

exaggerated language of blame that Rose

attributes to unreal actors—those shadowy

entities using mothers as a “sure-fire diver-

sionary tactic” from more “disruptive forms

of social critique”—only further deflects

from the larger question of why austerity

has made mothering harder than before. It is

because austerity policies have shifted nearly

all the burdens of social reproduction from

the state onto families, making them wholly

responsible for feeding, clothing, educating,

and caring for their children, that mothers

are blamed for the persistence of problems

that previously were not exclusively theirs to

solve. Rose does, at times, acknowledge this.

But her larger project fails to emphasize that

this has nothing to do with the primal fears

or fantasies of individuals. It is a social and

historical failure—a dimension of caregiving

that Rose’s analysis largely sidesteps, yielding

some sweeping (and incorrect) claims about

the politics of motherhood.

It is in the realm of politics that we find

mothers whose vulnerability has provoked

extraordinary vitriol. Take Rose’s example

of mothers like Bimbo Ayelabola, the Nige-

from TRIPAS

Conduzco y conduces

—carpoolers & Catholics—

conduction wires to Latin.

“Brought together”

—heads bowed as if praying—

these women make

strange communion—

wafer after wafer,

paper-thin shavings from

ingots of germanium.

Solder-stitch to populate

breadboard to motherboard

or read ohm resistors

—by their bands of color—

in circuit board syntax.

Solid state switches—

a nascent ancient rotary

& tin can to starlight.

—

Chicana Cherríe Moraga writing

on her mother’s ‘piecework’

for the nearby electronics plant

explains how her mother nightly

sat before the TV ‘wrapping

copper wires into the backs of

circuit boards.’ Braiding, I thought,

to parse & plait those wires

that would light the very images

she watched. I then looked up

in Cosmo that knot-work.

French, Dutch, Halo, Fishtail,

Milkmaid, Spiral, & Braid to Bun

—those chongos my nana made

over the years—the yank

& tugged-tie, the brush-work

through the hair of sus hijas

that sometimes produced a spark.

BRANDON SOM