Mothering Queerly, Queering Motherhood: Resisting Monomaternalism in Adoptive, Lesbian, Blended, and Polygamous Families

Chapter 4: Making Room for Two Mothers: Queering Children’s Literature

119 4 Making Room for Two Mothers Queering Children’s Literature Unlike conservative narratives of family preservation, I believe that a child’s interests are best served by “maintain[ing] as many . . . parental connections with adults who wish to maintain these bonds as is . . . feasible in any given case” (Narayan 1999, 85).1 Protecting a child’s best interests thus requires a serious adjustment of child custody laws to allow for multiple, simultaneously occurring, parenting relationships . Legal approaches that “[allow] for a wider range of parental relationships to be preserved” would be preferable to, for example, the “all-or-nothing” approach that currently characterizes adoption law. Present laws provide a biological mother with an exclusive maternal claim prior to giving her child for adoption, and no parental claims after a statutory change-of-mind period has passed. The adoptive parents have no parental claims prior to the cessation of the biological mother’s rights and all parental claims thereafter. In contrast to this all-or-nothing approach, Uma Narayan (1999) suggests legal reforms that would recognize biological mothers who wish neither to assume full responsibility for a child, nor to surrender all ties to that child. Such reforms would better preserve the interests of mothers, while also having “the virtue of privileging a child’s interests above those of competing parents, treating children more as ends-in-themselves than as objects of property-like disputes between contending parents” (85). Maintaining as many child–mother (and other) bonds as possible also will require solidarity among a child’s various parents (e.g., 120 Mothering Queerly, Queering Motherhood genetic parents, birth parents, foster parents, adoptive parents, stepparents , etc.). As I subsequently argue, complex families require coalitional strategies in order to build solidarity among their different members. In the present chapter, however, I do not debate legal policy or even informal custodial arrangements. Instead, I direct my attention to the ways in which a child’s affective psychology might be queered to allow “room in her mind” for two (or more) mothers. In Borshay Liem’s story of coming to terms with having multiple mothers and multiple homes, the question of whether Alveen Borshay and/or widow Kang are Deann’s “real mother,” in the sense of real-for-her, is a separate question from who did or should have had legal custody of her. It is also a separate question from whether or not these women have participated or do participate in certain sorts of mother work—although as I suggest here, certain forms of mother work may detract from or contribute to a mother’s becoming real to her child. Although Borshay Liem eventually finds a way to make “room in her mind for two mothers” as an adult, her journey—like the journey of many adoptees—to this reformed affective geography is an arduous and painful one. My focus here is on developing an alternative to the ideology of monomaternalism that would permit young children to recognize multiple mothers (and thus re-cognize motherhood) for themselves— inside or outside of the context of legal or political reforms. To this end, I interrogate the social constructions of motherhood that, when taught to young children, give rise to a child’s sense of divided loyalties, arguing for a conception of “real mother” that is more fluid and inclusive than found in most childhood narratives about motherhood. Serial Motherhood and Children’s Literature A fluid metaphysics of maternity would allow that maternal status is not static. Traditional conceptions of motherhood treat genetic, gestational, and social mothering as indivisible, imagining motherhood as a stable concept and institution. Such a conception of motherhood ignores the historical realities of genetic families divided by poverty, war, and slavery . It is further contested by the now common forms of family created by adoption, divorce, and remarriage, and new reproductive technologies such as surrogacy and in vitro fertilization (IVF). Thus, we need a concept of family in general and motherhood in particular that allows for change over time. 121 Making Room for Two Mothers Unfortunately, the normative assumption of monomaternalism has largely responded to shifting family forms by allowing for what I call serial mothering. Here again the analogy between monomaternalism and monogamy is telling. As Laura Kipnis (2003) notes in her polemic against modern coupledom, the way in which the Western ideal of lifelong monogamy has yielded to serial monogamy through revamped divorce laws demonstrates that...