Dec 9, 2022
In this episode of The Brave Enough Show, Sasha and Erin Lane discuss:
About the guest:
Erin Lane grew up being told there was no love as strong as a mother’s love. As a young Catholic girl growing up in the Midwest, she was given two options for a life well-lived: Mother or Mother Superior. She could marry a man and mother her own children, or she could marry God, so to speak, and mother the world’s children. Both were good outcomes for someone else’s life. Neither would fit the shape of hers.
“Not birthing children doesn’t mean forgoing a family. It means faith in a wider, wilier vision of family,” writes Lane. “I have practiced making meaning beyond motherhood in two life stages now: one as a person intentionally without children and one as a person suddenly raising three through foster-care. Along the way, I’ve learned that the problem with the mother scripts is not simply that they don’t work for some women. The problem is that they’re assumed to work for all women, thereby shaming any woman who lives beyond their cloud of certainty.”
Interweaving Lane’s story with those of other women—including singles and couples, stepparents and foster parents, the infertile and the ambivalent—Someone Other Than a Mother challenges the social scripts that put moms on an impossible pedestal and shame childless women and nontraditional families for not measuring up.
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