Book Review: Someone Other Than a Mother
Someone Other Than a Mother: Flipping the Scripts on a Woman’s Purpose and Making Meaning beyond Motherhood by Erin S. Lane (TarcherPerigee, 2022).
Stop me if you’ve heard any of these:
“Home is your highest duty.”
“You’ll regret not having kids.”
“Family is the greatest legacy.”
“You don’t know love until you become a mother.”
It’s that last one that really makes me want to bite people. But every childless person has their “favorite” (read: least favorite) among these platitudes. They’re so irritating, condescending, and rude that it’s almost unbelievable that they keep getting trotted out. And yet, they do.
In her book Someone Other Than a Mother, Erin S. Lane takes issue with these and other “social scripts” that assign higher value to those who have children. Now, if you’re a parent yourself, you may not be aware of just how pervasive this value system is. People are often shocked when I tell them about the kinds of comments I’ve had to deal with, but they shouldn’t be. Those comments, and the beliefs they represent, are pretty common. Sadly, they’re especially common among members of my own faith.
Lane shares that faith, though we have a number of ideological and theological differences, and she’s heard it all too. She and her husband were childless by choice for some time before deciding to foster and then to adopt three children. She’s quite familiar with the values system I described, and she’s well aware that it’s not only demeaning, but also un-Christian. As she points out, “The Bible … casts a vision in which embracing unity with God, rather than social differences (like ‘Jew’ or ‘Greek’) or biological differences (like ‘male’ and ‘female’), is the mark of spiritual maturity. Where once an individual’s sex may have been part of God’s grand plan for humanity, with the arrival of Jesus in human history, early Christians began professing baptism, not babies, as the true sign of faith—and a taste of the world to come.” But somewhere along the way, she laments, everything got turned upside down, and now in many circles, your parental status is proof that you’re a good Christian—or that you’re not.
Mind you, the book is anything but anti-child. Like me, Lane has always considered it a high priority to welcome the children God puts in her life, even when they’re not her own. But she’s never liked doing things in conventional or expected ways, which was part of the reason she eventually decided to foster and adopt. Still, however she chose to do it, those around her saw her making the approved move toward motherhood, and many responded with an enthusiasm that unnerved her. “Suddenly, an outpouring of back pats and attagirls—even thank-yous—appeared from our community,” she writes, “as if to say: Finally, your life makes sense. … Childfree, my life garnered the blank stare. Mothering, I got the gold star.”
In this book, Lane works her way through the complicated and conflicting feelings that arise from this situation. She’s dealing with so many clashing values and goals and emotions here that her thoughts tend to get muddled. At times she’d wander so far into the weeds that she lost me entirely, only to finally yank me back to solid ground with a pithy, profound statement.
And at times she needed to be yanked back herself. One of my favorite parts of the book was when Lane primly informed a therapist, during the adoption process, that her principles were against using terms like “daughters,” since her children had already been someone else’s daughters. “She agreed with my principles,” Lane recounts, a little sheepishly. “And she reminded me that kids don’t care about principles.”
So with all this going on, the book’s not the easiest read, and sometimes, in all honesty, it’s not the most coherent read. Yet it’s still an important book. We need more people, from all over the ideological spectrum, to say what Lane is saying about the value of all human beings, whether they’re parents or not. I truly appreciate her saying it.
(Cover image copyright TarcherPerigee)
Book Links:
Someone Other Than a Mother on Amazon
Someone Other Than a Mother on Bookshop