About Undoing Motherhood’s Mother
Hello!
I'm Natasha Coulis, a white, queer and neurodivergent writer, designer, mother of four, and creator of Undoing Motherhood.
I’m excited you’re here, finding me and my writing. I’ve been working on this project since 2020.
Undoing Motherhood is a lot. “Undoing” is often used in academia to mean dissecting, taking apart, and analyzing so we can rebuild it. (In fact, academic Katherine M. Johnson and Rutger’s University Press published in April 2023 a book called Undoing Motherhood!) This project takes apart and analyzes the cultural model of motherhood that causes us to all have such similar motherhood experiences.
If I had to summarize what I do with Undoing Motherhood in three beliefs, I’d say this:
That's my late mother at left, 18 years old, pregnant with me, and not ready to be a mom. Disabled and traumatized by violence and abuse, she raised me in poverty as a single mom, with the help of her parents and seven siblings.
In the photo beside her, I'm twinning out at 30 years old. I wasn't ready to be a teen mom, either, but you couldn't tell me that at the time. I adore children. As a teen, I subscribed to parenting magazines, planned my future home births, and extended breastfeeding. By age 18, I had joined a fundamentalist high-demand religion and married a lawyer nearly twice my age. By age 25, I had four kids (no twins!).
Those children are now grown. To summarize 25 years of parenting, nothing went as I thought it would. Actually, one thing: My kids are my favourite people on Earth.
The pandemic ushered in my empty nest and an abyss of existential angst and philosophizing. I thought about everything I wished I could re-do. I researched. I read tens of books and journal articles on the sociology and history of motherhood. I realized I would have had to understand motherhood differently from the beginning to prevent everything that would later pain me and my children.
Our culture's foundational beliefs about mothering are toxic. We are each set up to fail, by design. To achieve the standards put before us, with ever-moving goalposts, mothers are forced to centre our children to a co-dependent extreme. This extreme smothers and pressures our kids while exhausting and traumatizing us. It becomes our undoing, over and over.
Mothers represent and protect some of the most vulnerable people on the planet. Children need us to protect them, advocate for them, and even feel their emotions for them. We love our children so much, and our well-being is so interwoven with theirs that we’re vulnerable to exploitation. Parenthood is one of the most consequential—if not the most consequential—societal roles anyone can have and yet mothers are largely abandoned.
We’re expected to perform at superhero levels of success, running on the fuel of lip service: “You go, Mom!” “You’re SuperMom!” “How do you do it?”
We don’t need more patronizing praise that works to keep us hustling for approval. We need:
affordable and abundant childcare
wages for our mother labour
wage parity in the marketplace
community support
parental leave
breastfeeding support in the workplace
flexible workplace policies that value and support family life
bodily autonomy
state-managed proactively distributed child support post-divorce
and so much more.
Buy this sticker or other items here.
I created Undoing Motherhood to increase the accessibility of motherhood sociological scholarship, and to co-create new culture and practical solutions for and with mothers who recognize that motherhood needs a liberation movement. We are undoing our culture's current motherhood model and reimagining something healthier for everyone.
For press and collaboration inquiries, email natasha@undoingmotherhood.com
