Breathe
By Iran Sosa and Isabel Cortes, members of the Nunca Madres collective.
Motherhood is spoken of in the plural. Consciously or unconsciously we recognize that there are several ways of exercising it: a woman can become a mother by biology, a mother by adoption, or she can be part of the joint upbringing of her partner's children, among many other ways.
But when we talk about "non-motherhood", it seems that we always speak in the singular. We repeatedly encounter generalizations about women who are not mothers: in some discourses we are pitied for our inability to have children and the loneliness that this must cause us, while in others we are labeled as selfish and bitter for not having them even when we could have had them. These positions depend on who is expressing them and the beliefs they have about "no motherhood.
The reality is that women who live non-motherhoods are not a monolith. Non-motherhoods also exist in the plural.
