HOLLY WAINWRIGHT: 'I've been a parent for 16 years. There's still one thing I'm afraid to say about it.'

This article originally appeared on Holly Wainwright's Substack, Holly Out Loud. Sign up here.

Do you think women are just better at being parents?

That they naturally care more, know more, understand more about raising children than men do?Do you think that those things come instinctively? That we were born this way?

These are big, provocative questions. Questions I've been thinking about, not only since Jessie asked me about it on Monday's Mamamia Out Loud, but for about… 16 years now.

Em, Jessie and Holly discuss the "promise" of maternal instinct on Mamamia Out Loud. Video continues below.

Last week, I was staying with a friend. Early on a cold morning, she draped her kids' school uniforms on the heater for a minute while we drank our tea and applied office mascara.

"I love doing mum stuff like that," she said.

I blinked. I had never thought about doing mum stuff like that.

Of course I know that heater-uniforms are not a significant measure of maternal superiority, but it's the kind of little-big thing I think about when I consider who's a natural, nurturing parent, and who isn't.

The fact that on that day I wasn't even home helping my (bigger) kids get ready for school probably played into that thinking. Because on an average week, I am away from them for at least two nights, and I definitely know some mothers who could never.

It's a squiggly line, but all this fed into the conversation we had on Friday's show when Jessie brought this question to the podcast table:

Do you think maternal instinct is a myth?

Jessie wanted to discuss a Substack by Sara Petersen called The Maternal Instinct Is A Lie, and a related New York Times article by Chelsea Conaboy. To clumsily paraphrase both, the argument is that women have been convinced we're naturally, instinctively caregivers because it's our birthright and not just because it's convenient for chaps. And capitalism.

The headline made Jessie, mother of an adored two-year-old daughter, bristle. She's sick of negative messages about mothering. She's sick of the way we frighten young women about everything from birth to the loss of freedom and opportunity and sleep that parenthood might bring. She thinks we don't talk enough about what becoming a parent gives you, rather than takes. She thinks we're trying to make women afraid that they're going to be shit at it, so that they need to buy this program, read this book.

She's got an absolutely banging point about all of that, of course. Despite my poor snack-pack game, becoming a parent relatively late in life has given me much, much more than it has ever taken.

The New York Times piece read in part:"The notion that the selflessness and tenderness babies require is uniquely ingrained in the biology of women, ready to go at the flip of a switch, is a relatively modern — and pernicious — one. It was constructed over decades by men selling an image of what a mother should be, diverting our attention from what she actually is and calling it science."

I have a feeling I'm supposed to agree that this is overreach, that motherhood is the most natural womanly state, and that this is some sort of flattening, "woke" rhetoric that should be roundly rejected.

Listen to the conversation about maternal instinct on Friday's Mamamia Out Loud.

And yet… for me personally, a bell of recognition dings loudly when the idea of non-maternal mothers is surfaced.

I truly believe that when we left the hospital with our first baby, a peachy little girl, and stepped, blinking, into a new reality, I had no more idea of what to do to keep that baby alive than my partner Brent did.

I had to learn. And since it was my — in those early days, weeks, months, at least — that was going to keep this peachy little person alive, I had to learn first. And fast.

And so I did. Trial and error. A lot of confusion. Baby Love in arm's reach on the lounge. A fair amount of panicked googling. Early childhood nurses and parents who had been there before. I began to build an understanding of how this baby-care business was meant to work. I shared what I learned with Brent — the other available adult who cared as much as I did — and we, slowly, together, learned how to be parents. When our son was born, we were better at it, generally speaking, because we had learnt how.

We're still learning, of course, because what it takes to be parents of teenagers is different to what it takes to parent a tiny baby. And yet, I continue, broadly, to have no idea what I'm doing.

I never did. I was always at the doctor when I shouldn't have been and NOT at the doctor when I should. Sometimes I didn't fight hard enough to advocate for my kids and other times I obsessed and fretted about things that didn't matter. Even now, when presented with one of my kids' myriad issues (we all have issues, not crossing any lines here) and stuff they're struggling with, my general first position is: And I'm supposed to know what to do about that?

I never feel more out of my depth — even now, a decade and a half into parenthood — than when I am in the company of confident mothers. The ones who seem to just know what their kids need — to eat, to hear, to learn, to have.

This is just me, of course. But generally speaking, if it's just me, it must be plenty of other women too. And suddenly, it seems, debating motherhood and whether or not women are naturally made for it seems to be back on the agenda in a big way, and I'm not sure it's helpful.

Is it radical to entertain that for SOME women mothering is instinctive and for SOME women it is not? That maybe we all sit on some sort of nature/nurture/science/environmental spectrum when it comes to our confidence in caring?

That parenting as women's natural business can be a trope used to keep us controlled AND also a source of enormous joy and pride?That women are various?

For me the most instinctive part of parenting has been The Love. As the "non-maternal type", the unrivalled pleasure and meaning my kids have brought to my life was, and is, a delicious and ongoing surprise.

But my mothering is reserved for them. I don't mother people who aren't my children. I don't cast myself as a mother-hen in the office or friend group. And I am rarely cast as 'mum' by others, who can just tell that choice would leave them exposed to being eaten by a bear.

So if you're 'that kind' of mother, too, it's okay. I think we still qualify.

By the way, I made a note about the heater-uniforms. I might surprise my kids with it, before winter is out.

We've learned how to fend off the bears so far, after all.

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Feature Image: Supplied.