Is maternal instinct a myth? A growing body of brain research explored in Chelsea Conaboy’s “Mother Brain” gives hope to adoptive parents, dads, lesbian moms – and maybe some Peppa Pig fans.
The nurse walked into our room and squinted at me like a birder trying to identify a strange species. “Are you the doula?” she asked. My wife, Ella, who had recently been medically induced and rendered frozen from the waist down via epidural, was kind enough — or maybe peeved enough — to answer on my behalf. “She’s the mom!” Ella muttered between contractions. “We’re both the moms.”
Instead, in the days following our daughter’s birth, where Ella struggled to soothe our cranky baby, I was often successful. Ella felt expendable: a mother with no instinct. Meanwhile, I wondered if I was really a mother at all. And yet the people Shepherd rudely dismissed as “somebody else” — a group that presumably includes dads, grandparents, and non-biological parents like me — may be no less inclined to nurturing than gestational moms.
In the books I crammed before our daughter’s birth, my role, the non-biological mom in a same-sex marriage, was, if mentioned, a footnote tacked onto a footnote. When Ella and I took the baby to the park, cooing strangers often mistook me for Ella’s friend or sister. Where the daily assumptions of the straight world had once been annoying, now they were decidedly painful.
“Within his revolutionary work,” Conaboy writes, Charles Darwin “codified very old ideas about the inferiority of women, rooted in their essential role as child bearers and their unquestioned self-sacrifice.” Indeed, in his most famous work, “On the Origin of Species,” Darwin concludes, “man has ultimately become superior to woman.”
The result, she argues, is a “belief in maternal instinct” that not only taints parents’ perceptions of themselves but also provokes political opposition to birth control and abortion. “For why should women limit the number of children they have … if caring for children is their essential biological destiny?” she writes. Maternal instinct, Conaboy contends, “divides the routes to parenthood into categories of “natural” and other.
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