Are women’s and children’s liberation mutually exclusive?
A conversation with Sara Sadek on the ways our freedom is bound together.
“Where do our kids needs end, and where do our needs begin? How do we untangle the needs of these small magnificent beings from our own, when they once inhabited space within our bodies, within our wombs? How much do I surrender into what she’s asking, versus support her in stretching her capacity so I can keep taking up creative space?
I don’t know the answers, but I do know that we can’t self-sacrificially raise free people, because our freedoms are bound together. If we give up our personhood for our kids’ freedom, they will never become fully free. And they can’t give up their freedom for ours, or we will never become fully free.”
Sara Sadek, extract from I will not be in a zero sum game with my kids
This is a collaborative post with
and I am thrilled to be able to share our conversation below. We have both been grappling with our intuitive and intellectual understanding that all humans, including our children, deserve to be respected, cared for and free, and our lived experience of how challenging it is to practice meeting both our own and our children’s needs at once.I know we are not alone in this! I hope you enjoy our conversation below. You can find more of Sara’s writing at
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Fran: A lot of mainstream feminist discourse, the kind you might see in liberal legacy media or on Substack for example, treats feminism as being in direct opposition to the work of caring for children.
Sara: Yes! We’re often forced to choose between these two tropes: self-sacrificial trad wife at one extreme, neoliberal feminist girl-boss on the other. These are two bad options.
Fran: Children are often seen as getting in the way of women and femmes actually doing any real work, or the work they would like to be doing. Many writers who are also mothers talk about how motherhood is boring and soul-destroying, how they feel touched out and basically can’t wait to get away.
Sara: There’s a real tension here, given our current constructs, around mothers’ ability to take up creative space. And I so understand why resentfulness for tending work or childrearing is such an obvious place to channel that, because on the day-to-day, our tending work is often the direct obstacle or time-suck to our ability to nurture our creative practice. But when we zoom out, we see that the isolated nuclear family construct that our western society’s created places such an unfair, undue burden on mothers, and that construct makes tending work so single-threaded creating false time scarcity for mothers. That is actually the problem.
Fran: Yes absolutely, the problem is structural. We’ve been led (I certainly was) to believe that the goal is a nuclear family of our own, and yet once we find ourselves caring for our children alone we begin to wonder whether this is how we’re actually supposed to live. And so I don’t want to diminish that this feeling of overwhelm and exhaustion is a real experience for SO many, myself included, especially in the early days of parenting. And, I think these narratives often feed into a more insidious one: it is okay to put our own liberation before our child’s. In fact, our child doesn’t actually have a personhood to preserve, or a liberation to seek. And so it’s okay for us to not dig too deep into what a child wants and needs, especially when they are babies and toddlers, because what we want and need is more important. And so our freedom begins to look a lot like freedom from our children, not with our children.
Sara: Exactly. That narrative disconnects us from the basic needs, rights, and freedoms of our kids, if we let it, or on the other end from our own basic needs. Often times, from both. It gives us a reason to rationalize all sorts of childrearing behaviors that violate our children’s rights, or to put our children above ourselves and martyr our own needs for their sake. Neither are great outcomes of a system not designed for our thriving or our kids’.
Fran: Yes, totally. Our freedoms are seen as being in direct opposition, along the lines of, either I (the mother) gets a good night’s sleep and my child cries it out, or my child is comforted and I don’t get any sleep. And in practice, sometimes it really is like that! But the reasons why are much deeper than an inherent us v. them dynamic.
Sara: Yes, so many of us have lived that last scenario on repeat in a sleep-deprived hole we can’t claw our way out of. And really we should be asking, why is my home not full of grandmas and elders and aunties and siblings and cousins who can step in to hold my baby long enough for me to get some rest without resorting to disconnecting from my very small human’s basic needs for comfort and connection?
Fran: Precisely. I remember staying at my parent’s house one summer and being so utterly sleep-deprived that I walked away from my child for a while and left them in the crib, crying. My mother stepped in to comfort him, and I distinctly remember thinking it was a failure on my part and that she shouldn’t have to. Now I realise that actually, that’s exactly what SHOULD be happening, if we lived and existed in community. She was doing what we are supposed to do. It’s just that I still clung to the belief that I needed to do it all, as the primary person he was attached to (and this idea that our child needs one primary attachment figure, is itself a flawed concept we’ve been led to believe in, and which contributes to the individualism and overall impossiblity of modern motherhood).
The other piece of this is that Western women have historically been forced or conditioned to martyr ourselves for our children, to put them above us at all times. There was a time when many of us didn’t have any option but to stay home and care for children, and this labour is still very much unpaid and invisible. And so many women now want out.
Sara: Right—the self-sacrificial mother is put on this pedestal.
“How about we stop thanking mothers for being selfless, and putting their needs behind everyone else’s? And instead, we thanked them for being our first leaders, caretakers, and teachers? What if we asked how we could support them in return? What if we celebrated stay-at-home moms as the essential members of society that they are, rather than belittling their role?”
Fran: The backlash to a long history of martyr motherhood is what we are seeing now - our freedoms are finally asserted as the ones that matter, and motherhood becomes a zero sum game where we either get our needs met, or our children do (and it’s even debatable whether children have needs beyond what we decide they need).
Either we are martyrs and our children come first, or we assert ourselves as people and our children’s sovereignty and personhood takes a hit. And I wonder, does it have to be this way? Are the two things – our own liberation and that of our children – mutually exclusive, in our current situation?
Sara: Our society often makes us ping-pong between two bad options: self-sacrificial trad wife or neoliberal girl boss being the extremes in this case. They’re bad options because both of these are reactive and disconnecting.
Sacrificial mothering disconnects us from ourselves. We cannot actually raise free people if we ourselves are so disconnected from our own needs. And the neoliberal lean-in girl boss achtype disconnects us not only from our kids, but also from each other and our planet and often also ourselves.
Whenever I face a binary like that, I know we have an obligation to wayfind a third option. In this case, that third option is relational connection and freedom both: how can both my kids and me live deeply connected and work toward both our freedom?
Fran: Yes, we need a third option. We are confronted with a false binary and rejecting it is crucial. At the same time, I ask myself whether we live in a society that even allows for a third option. I can imagine alternative options, but in practice I don’t often know how to turn them into reality.
Sara: So many of us yearn for both! Both deep, loving, respectful, bonded connection with our children and creative expansion, fulfillment, and thriving.
As primary caretakers, it’s so easy as mothers to lose ourselves in our tending, becoming whisps of our full selves. Maybe that’s the piece so many of us relate to when we itch to bolt out a window toward our independence. But I don’t think that itch for freedom means mothers don’t want to tend—we just don’t want to be the only load-bearing beam holding everything up when it comes to the tending. We, as humans, aren’t designed to bear the entirety of that burden alone. We are meant to do it in community.
The pain we are feeling isn’t our kids’ fault—they are not robbing us from our freedom; a society that places an unrealistic burden on mothers to be the singular, weight-bearing beam for the these small humans is what creates a scarcity model for our time that can easily put us in a zero sum game with our kids.
It’s a systems problem, and the more we come up for air enough to name that, the better we’ll be able to challenge those constructs to find alternatives. And the alternatives have to involve sharing the load with our wider communities. What if beloved community is our third option?
Fran: I’d love to hear a bit about how you have reconciled the two, how you have married them and also how perhaps you’ve struggled?
Sara: I’ve been mothering for nearly a decade now, and this has been such a work in progress for me over the years, with pretty distinct chapters. In the first three years, I really ascribed to attachment theory, and was the epitome of the self-sacrificial mother. I took on a pretty gendered stay-at-home mothering role, though I did work to build robust counterculture parenting community. I had this instinct even then that were not meant to mother alone. That instinct was life saving. I got a glimpse of what community-based mothering could look and feel like.
When space started to open up—which really is to say, when I started getting more contiguous stretches of sleep—I started finding myself engaging in things that creatively fed me: screenprinting-as-activism, community organizing, starting a forest school. None of this was paid work, but all of it started to scratch that itch for me to start to show up in my fullness outside of just my identity as mother, and all of it helped weave tighter community to lean on—community that aligned with my values.
At some point, our finances quickly demanded that I work again, and that impetus to start my consulting practice ironically is what helped me carve out even more space for a me outside of mothering. I started bringing back online the strategic aspect of myself. But, I’m also very aware that the binary here is career mother or stay-at-home mother, and I’m so much more than just those two things.
That construct of managing both became impossible once COVID hit, because all of the robust web of community care I’d painstakingly worked to build evaporated pretty much overnight, and once again we were an isolated nuclear family, and we had a newborn, and two careers. At some point, one of us just had to buckle, and as the primary caretaker, I was the one to buckle, letting go of my financial autonomy to hold down the childrearing COVID demanded of us.
Since the world started opening back up, I’ve made some conscious choices about paving third options. I am fiercely protective of my writing time, and know I’m a better mother when I take the time weekly for that discipline. I work to create robust community of mutual care—friends who lean on each other outside the nuclear family construct for childcare, carpools, etc. I collaborate with other community members to create creative spaces where both my kids and I can co-exist together in our creative practice—places where we can see and honor each other in both connection and creative freedom. We have a bi-weekly soup and art hang at a community member’s home that my eldest and I attend together and it is such an example of how connected mothering and creative freedom can live in harmony.
Fran: I love these examples of the ways you are working on weaving both community care and your own work together. We recently moved back to the US, and I’ve been working on feeling rooted and building community in our town. What I’ve found is that it is a lot of little things, and that the connecting threads are, to put it bluntly, showing up and turning up.
wrote a piece about this recently - the importance of just getting out the door. For me, it’s two-fold. I turn up to things, and I commit to creating gatherings and building spaces. This isn’t as neat and tidy as it sounds - some weeks, even months, it feels tough. Sometime I definitely flake out, or just need to prioritise my family. But like many others have said, it’s a long-game, we’re not in it for immediate results.To pivot slightly, how do you feel about the role of Western feminism in shaping this discourse?
For anyone who needs context, I’m referring to the kind of feminism that centres the experience of white, more socio-economically privileged women, by focusing on the struggle to get women out of the home and in the workplace. It is sometimes referred to as ‘white feminism.’ In the process, it forgets that Black women, other women of colour, Indigenous women, immigrant women and poor women have always worked for pay, as well as working in the home. It forgets that for many Black women, to paraphrase bell hooks, staying home and caring for children might be the feminist act. And it’s the kind of feminism that ignores intersectionality and the role of capitalism and colonialism in shaping women’s experiences.
I have never felt close to the way this brand of feminism centres the idea that working outside of the home, and essentially aligning ourselves with capitalist ideals, or trying to win at capitalism, is peak feminism. I feel like I always saw through it but didn’t have the words for it until I read bell hooks and Angela Garbes and others and recognised that I wasn’t a bad feminist for wanting to stay home and care for my children, AND for also wanting to carve out some time for my own interests even if they don’t always have a monetary value. Can you speak to this?
Sara: As a millennial growing up in progressive Madison, Wisconsin, this neoliberal second-wave white feminism is what I grew up with: this very loud, spoken expectation that we would achieve pinnacle career success and that feminism was all but accomplished already, with the equally loud but very covert expectation that we marry and have babies, which was particularly loud for me as an Egyptian-American first-gen immigrant.
So many of us are essentially having to choose between these two forms of patriarchy: the patriarchy of capitalism that doesn’t grant us equal pay or an equal chance to win at capitalism, or the patriarchy at home, with so many of us living with patriarchal roommates that play out those power dynamics within the home.
I’ve come to see the fatal flaw in that wave of feminism of not making space for mothering and care work as fundamental to feminist and liberation struggle. If motherhood and carework isn’t a part of our feminist discourse, yet so many of us are living out the inequity and isolation of that reality, what are we all even talking about? That’s where I really struggle with white-feminist discourse—it assumes such a narrow vision is applicable across all of us and that’s just so far from reality. If we want to have proper discourse, we actually need to center those of us that don’t have the time and spaciousness to sit and write these essays. How we go about doing that should be central to our feminist praxis.
Fran: I think you’re correct. I live in a community that is very mixed socio-economically, and I see the very real struggles mothers confront, and the ways we as a society have been told to resolve these struggles: children need to suck it up because we need (not necessarily want) to work, because most families in the US right now need two incomes to survive (and sometimes even two incomes aren’t enough.) I feel like there is almost no time to reflect on what is happening here: women are in some ways resigned to the fact they need to make a choice, or that they don’t often even get to make a choice if they are to earn enough to feed, clothe and house their child. It’s a cultural issue, but perhaps more so a structural one. There’s no time to sit and reflect on the rights of children or on what we as mothers really need. To an extent, we’ve all experienced this, right? The feeling that all we need to do is get through the day and that the choice is whether we sacrifice a part of ourselves, or our child is told they need to deal with it. Does this make sense?
Sara: Yes. We have to remember that our time scarcity is by design. If we have to run ourselves ragged to survive, we don’t have time to come up for air to ask these big questions. At some point through, and it feels like every day careens us closer, running ourselves ragged to survive is no longer tenable, and we have to build a different together for how to do mothering, how to do child rearing, how to live life in this planet in a way that lets all of us thrive. In a world that feels so unsteady right now, I really do believe in those of us turning away from these systems and weaving alternative systems rooted in collective care.
As Sara mentioned above, the only way to break free of this impossible choice between our own personhood and our children’s, is to always point to the systems we live under, and work outside of and sometimes in parallel with those systems to challenge this binary. We hope you will find some support and resources in the links below, and perhaps be spurred into taking action.
Books:
How We Show Up, by Mia Birdsong
The Serviceberry, by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Be a Revolution, by Ijeoma Oluo
Let this radicalize you, by Kelly Hayes and Mariam Kaba
Essential Labor, by Angela Garbes
Ted Talk:
Anna Malaika Tubbs, How Moms Shape the World.
On Substack:
I run a month book group for paid members, where we read articles or books about parenting, education, unschooling and children’s rights - find out more here.
As always, thank you for reading and supporting my work!
Fran x
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