6

Teasing Apart Gender, Object Choice,
and Motherhood in Lesbian Relationships

Deborah F. Glazer

In 1942, Helene Deutsch grappled with the issue of a woman's impetus to mother. She saw the wish or motivation to mother as occurring along developmental lines sep-arate from the sexual instincts, object choice, and gender identity. In fact, she spoke of the possibility of the wish to mother existing outside of the realm of sex, gender, and outside of the world of a woman's relationship to men. She saw the wish to mother as a complex developmental outcome, resulting from many developmental pathways, and determined that the striving to mother could be satisfied in a number of nontraditional ways. For example, she discusses woman raising children together.

Another form of motherliness … more frequent in America than in other countries … may be seen when two women active in some profession, living together in a more or less sublimated friendship, adopt a child. Usually one of the women assumes the role of mother and the other that of family provider. This division of interest is only relative, for usu-ally both women wish to gratify their motherliness. The two complement each other to form a whole of active motherliness in relation to the child [Deutsch, 1945, p. 34].

To Deutsch, these women seemed to live in a foreign country about which she could speculate, but never fully inhabit or understand. Despite her questioning of traditional models of gender and motherhood, Deutsch was not able to address fully many of the important and radical issues she herself had raised. Not until recently have feminist and postmodern analysts (Butler, 1990; Dimen, 1991; Goldner, 1991; O'Connor and Ryan, 1993; Domenici and Lesser, 1995; Glassgold and Iasenza, 1995; D'Ercole, 1996; Magee and Miller, 1997; Schwartz, 1998; Gould and Kiersky, 2001) taken up and expanded on the radical ideas about female sexuality and the impetus to parent found in Deutsch's early work.

In the modern world, gender, sexuality, and motherhood are being reevaluated and are not necessarily viewed as fixed, biologically constructed, interdependent truths (Glazer and Drescher, 2001). Psychoanalysis is beginning to move away from a conflation of sexuality and reproduction, a linkage that Deutsch believed allowed for continued sexuality in a culture organized around Judeo-Christian ethics and judgment. Today, mothering is being defined as a function rather than a purpose for sexuality or as a biological imperative. As Schwartz (1998) notes, “The de-construction of gendered motherhood allow[s] us to envisage a new parenting subject that would be less unitary and more conditional, a conception of mothering that transcends gender” (p. 152).

This postmodern view of mothering as a function can be seen in a children's television show The Rugrats. A young boy whose mother has died is being raised by his father. As Mother's Day approaches, he is trying to understand the concept of “mother.” His friends describe what a mother is: “She loves you, and feeds you, and takes care of you.” In a powerful moment of insight, the child proclaims that he does, in fact, have a mother. It is his father.

Societal definitions of family are changing, in part, due to advances in reproductive technologies, increased availability of adoptions, and advances in gay and lesbian civil rights. Contemporary psychoanalysis is caught in this trend and finds itself moving away from a belief in the causal links between gender, object choice, and maternal strivings. In the process, it remains open how each of these internal identifications and self-representations affect a woman's self-experience and feelings of adequacy. For example, Butler (1995) sees the construction of gender as an outgrowth of a heterosexual paradigm. It is the repudiation of her same-sex desire that allows a woman to feel adequate in her gender. Consequently, “threats to heterosexual-ity become threats to gender itself…. The fear of homosexual desire in a woman may induce a panic that she is losing her femininity; that she is not a woman; that if she is not quite a man, she is like one and hence monstrous in some way” (p. 168).

Like gender beliefs, the wish to mother, and the ability to achieve motherhood, biological or otherwise, can have powerful effects on a woman's self-experience. Notman and Lester (1988) suggest that a woman's “awareness of her reproductive potential is part of her self-esteem” (p. 139). This is the case in cultures where the early experiences and definitions of womanliness are based on a heterosexual or maternal model. According to Dinnerstein (1976), “The deepest root of our acquiescence to the maiming and mutual imprisonment of men and women lies in the monolithic fact of human childhood” (p. 28). Dinnerstein believes the traditional heterosexual model of current family life leads the mother to be the first love object, the first source of gratification, and the first source of punishment. For children, this early connection with the mother shapes their relationship to women and in particular shapes a girl's thoughts about being a woman throughout later life. This implies that a woman's self-perception, gendered expectations, and gender ideals are based on early childhood experiences related to the roles and models of the mother in the traditional, heterosexual family from which she comes. A woman's expectation of how and what she is to be as a woman is often based on her mother's role as wife, mother, and homemaker. So, despite current advances in reproductive technologies and societal freedoms that allow for increased procreative options for lesbian couples, a majority of women have internalized a maternal role that has been more traditionally defined.

While increased reproductive freedoms are allowing more women to make choices about motherhood, some women, both lesbian and heterosexual, are opting to be childless rather than engage in obligatory motherhood. They may have to face internal and external biases insofar as society often views marriage and motherhood as markers of womanhood. Childless lesbians are doubly stigmatized because they cannot rely on traditional signifiers of gender adequacy.

For some women with a powerful wish to mother, the decision to raise a child can have healing effects on early, painful self-representations. This is not to suggest that all women who choose mothering necessarily do so out of an attempt to restore a sense of pride or adequacy in their gender. In the case of the woman who does not express a wish to have a child, analytic exploration can address and reshape the fantasies, ideals, and self-judgments related to gender, gender adequacy, and object choice. In straying from the heterosexual model of their mothers, however, lesbians must navigate through a complex web of sameness and difference, both with the actual mother and with an internalized ideal of mother. For some women, the complex maze of identification and difference, the recognition of same-sex desire, and a belief that her same-sex desire precludes motherhood can result in painful feelings of gender inadequacy. They must come to terms with what it means to be a woman who is not a wife, to be a woman who loves women rather than men, and to be a woman who may not automatically desire to mother.

Clinical Examples

Susan entered analytic treatment complaining of sexual inhibition in her long-term relationship with her lover, Tina. Her sexual inhibition was multiply determined. Susan described herself as a sexually curious child, who enjoyed sexual exploration with both girl and boy playmates. As a child she took pride and pleasure in her body. As puberty approached, however, Susan began to realize that she was more interested in other girls and was increasingly disinterested in sex play with the boys. This left her with powerful feelings of shame and self-doubt.

As an adult, Susan expressed the belief that being a lesbian, and having never experienced intercourse with a man, made her flawed and inadequate. She believed that she was not entitled access into the world of women. This belief was often represented somatically, and Susan was continually self-conscious about her body. She could not tolerate signs of bodily roundness that she associated with traditional female sexuality. At the same time, she criticized herself for not having the bodily pride and freedom to experience arousal that she felt was the privilege of sexual (meaning heterosexual) women.

Susan also expressed a belief that she could not conceive a child, and that if she did the child would certainly not adequately grow within her. She felt this was because she was not a true woman, but rather a “hybrid” who had no rights to womanly experiences. Nevertheless she pursued the option of having a child. Despite her expectations of infertility, Susan conceived on her first alternative insemination and carried a healthy baby to term. For the first time in her adult life, Susan felt proud of her body and experienced herself as belonging to the world of women. Her usual disdain for bodily signs of roundness was overridden by a joy in her growing belly. Her breasts became a source of pride because with them, she could nurse her thriving baby. Susan realized that her same-sex desire did not preclude her womanhood and did not destroy her ability to mother. Although her sexual inhibitions did not fully dissipate, Susan began to experience increased desire for emotional and physical intimacy with her lover.

As Crespi (1995) has noted, some women cannot allow themselves to become mothers in a lesbian relationship because they are unable to mourn sufficiently the heterosexual object and identification. They cannot abandon the wish to conceive a child biologically with their lover. This was the case of Janice, a single, childless lesbian in her early 30s, who expressed this painful state of mind. Because she is a childless lesbian, Janice believes that she is not fully a citizen of the world. She describes herself as living in the dark recesses of society, never fully measuring up to her heterosexual, married friends who have children. She likens herself to Scully, the female federal agent in the television series, The X-Files. Janice recounted an episode in which Scully discovered that she had been kidnapped by federal agents and that her eggs had been surgically removed. Janice feels that her lesbianism and her childlessness have left her a damaged as a woman, a mutant created by the laws and lawkeepers of society.

Emma, in contrast to Janice, is more accepting of her lesbianism. She is able to allow herself a deep, committed, long-term lesbian relationship. Emma describes a powerful sense of longing to be a mother since early childhood. She loves children and volunteers to teach painting to inner city youth. Emma will not allow herself to conceive a child, however, until technology has advanced enough to allow for the melding of two eggs. This wish interferes with her ability to become a mother because this is the only option that she feels she and her lover can pursue in creating a biological child of their own.

This fantasy appeared to have origins in Emma's family mythology. As a child, she was told that she was initially conceived as one of two twins but that her sister failed to thrive in utero. Emma's fantasy was that her own greed and competitiveness had caused her to eat all the goodies inside her mother, causing her unborn sister to starve. Thus, the reality of carrying a baby while her lover did not felt to Emma like a terribly dangerous and destructive competition and a reenactment of her early fantasy of destroying her unborn sibling.

Emma's fantasy is consistent with an earlier observation that as they involve a reengagement of the earliest mother-child bond, experiences of motherhood can sometimes evoke powerful regressive feelings (Mendell, 1998). In a traditional heterosexual family, much of that early relationship requires the small child to deal with maternal power. The mother is seen as the omnipotent source of gratification and punishment. She is likely to evoke strong feelings of envy, but her power and the possibility of punishment at her hand makes it too frightening to compete with her (Dinnerstein, 1976; Harris, 1997). Many of these childhood feelings and fears may be reawakened through one's own mothering experience.

For the lesbian couple, these feelings may be particularly intense. Because technology does not currently permit women to conceive together biologically, and because legal co-adoption takes time, a lesbian couple must work out complex issues related to who carries or adopts the infant. This legal or biological distinction may often result in envy and competition regarding the parental role. As Harris (1997) notes, competition is stereo-typically defined as masculine behavior. Thus, feelings of envy and competition with the lover and coparent can provoke further discomfort in one's experience and sense of gender.

Brenda is a lesbian in her early 40s. She is in a long-term monogamous relationship, and is coparenting a child carried by her lover, Sue. Before this relationship Brenda had been in a heterosexual marriage. During that marriage, she tried for many years to conceive but was finally diagnosed as infertile. Nonetheless, Brenda agreed to raise a child at Sue's request. Brenda and Sue planned and conceived this child together and intended to coparent their child equally. They would both be “mother.” Brenda, however, finds it difficult to organize her role as mother. Her relationship with her lover has suffered greatly as a result. Watching Sue conceive, experience pregnancy, and deal with the birth and neonatal period brought up powerful feelings of envy and grief in Brenda. Although she says that she perceives herself to be their son's mother, internally Brenda cannot accept this role.

For Brenda, the experience of comothering evokes feelings of gender inadequacy as well as distressful feelings of envy. She says that she did not feel as comfortable with her son at his birth because she had not known him inside her body as Sue did. In a feeling echoed by many nonbiological lesbian mothers, Brenda felt less equipped to offer him anything soothing and sustaining. Sue had the capacity to soothe their son by nursing him. In keeping with Brenda's past pattern of relationships, she decided to care for him by providing more of the financial and organizational aspects of family life. This left her feeling out of the maternal loop and more identified with her internalized image of father. This exacerbated Brenda's feelings of inauthenticity or lack of authenticity as a mother and heightened her own feelings of grief about her inability to conceive.

A similar dynamic is seen with Jennifer, the mother of a son born to her lover, Tanya. She, too, experienced difficulty with the role of nonbiological lesbian mother. Jennifer felt envy at her lover's relationship with their child. She could not include her lover and son in office functions as she feared that her lover would nurse their child. She believed that seeing Tanya nurse would lead those watching to share Jennifer's view that she was not truly worthy of the term “mother.” When Jennifer and her lover wanted a second child, it was decided that Jennifer would carry the child. Whereas previously Jennifer had taken on the role of family provider, Jennifer was now faced with being pregnant, tired, and home much of the time. Although excited by the pregnancy, Jennifer began to envy her lover's freedom to be out in the world.

Some lesbians struggle with feelings of gender inauthentici-ty, and others find the gender transgression associated with same-sex desire to be gratifying. When the coming-out expe-rience is resolved and feelings of shame and gender inadequacy are worked through, there can be great freedom. In living as a lesbian, a woman can extricate herself from what Dinnerstein (1976) described as imprisonment. She may feel herself capable of moving more fluidly between the stereotypical, socially constructed male and female roles used to define gender, rather than being constrained by the artificial dichotomy these constructs can create. Pregnancy and the early maternal experiences of caring for an infant may intensify the rigid female identifications, while limiting the freedom and power to go out in the world. Physically, the birth mother must face the strenuous process of pregnancy, delivery, and recuperation, while her lover is not physically burdened. The biological mother may envy her lover's freedom to be a mother without having to relinquish the gender freedom her lesbianism allows her.

For both mothers, coparenting a child increases the need to be “out” in the world. A young child may experience no shame at her family constellation, and proudly introduce her two mommies wherever she goes. For women who are reluctant to be known publicly as lesbian, this can be particularly difficult. Cynthia is a biological lesbian mother who is raising a child with her lover, Trudy. They live in a blue-collar, suburban area. Although Cynthia says that she is not conflicted about her lesbianism, she is fearful of the judgments and prejudices of the people in her environment. As her son begins to speak, she is reluctant to teach him to call both of his mothers “Mommy”; she is afraid that his “outing” of his mothers will endanger all of them. For Cynthia, this fear is multiply determined. She has difficulty sharing the role of mother and does not want to relinquish the part to another woman. She is partly engaged in a competitive battle with her lover for her son's affections. In addition, Cynthia is living in a conservative neighborhood at a time when hate crimes are on the rise. Thus, her fear of assault and discrimination are not just fantasies, but based on real fears that resonate with intrapsychic ones.

Ironically, lesbian mothers must inevitably recognize that their children can face the same kind of biases that they, as gay people, experienced. For many women, antihomoseuxal bias toward their children can reawaken or exacerbate the painful, lifelong experiences of being a member of a hated minority. Brenda and Sue, who were discussed earlier, have a three-year-old daughter, Annabel, attending preschool. The daughter's teacher read a storybook about a lesbian family and then asked all of the children to draw a picture of their families. Annabel refused to draw her two mothers. In addition, lately she has been asking more questions about daddies. Brenda and Sue fear that they have brought a child into the world as part of an inadequate family — inadequate, that is, in heterosexual terms. In Butler's (1995) terms, just as they may have mourned a relinquished heterosexual object for themselves, they will also have to grieve their inability provide their child a father.

Conclusion

Increasingly, lesbians are enjoying the freedom to become mothers, yet with these new definitions of family, new issues emerge in the consultation room. Competition between the mothers related to issues of intimacy, authenticity, and responsibility may complicate the family dynamic. The child's recognition of her parents' homosexuality and societal biases expressed against the child and family may reawaken emotions related to the mothers' earlier coming out experiences.

Despite such difficulties, however, all the lesbian mothers discussed in this chapter feel that their lives have been greatly enriched by the maternal experience. They have worked hard to create and sustain their families. They love their children deeply and couldn't imagine life without them. Despite the difficulties they face, they all express deep fulfillment and joy in the maternal experience.

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