Editor’s note: The “Let’s Talk about Sexuality” series, which is intended to create a new, feminist sexual discourse, is funded by the Korea Foundation for Women’s Gender Equal Social Development Project. As a non-married queer woman, I hadn’t thought much about motherhood [moseong] (defined in the National Institute of the Korean Language’s Standard Korean Dictionary as “the mental and physical and physical qualities that women have as mothers, or such an instinct”) until lately. Until lately, motherhood wasn’t important to my life. Or really, it was something from which I actively wanted to distance myself. I was scared of being associated with it. I didn’t like idea of someone thinking of me as a person with strong maternal instincts. I wanted to be seen as a cool and independent person with no ties to something like motherhood. I thought that made me a stronger person. My relationship with motherhood – which could barely even be called a relationship – was an extremely distant one in which it wasn’t clear who was pushing whom away. Then, recently, I decided that I should take a proper look into this relationship. ▲ I felt resistance toward the image of motherhood, and wanted to distance myself from it as much as possible. [Sourced by Pixabay] I loved my grandmother, but I don’t want to become her When I think of the word “motherhood”, I think of my grandmother. I think of my mom too, of course, but my maternal grandmother was a more powerful representative of motherhood for me. She passed away 3 years ago, but she was the kind of person to run out of the house in socks to welcome you. I was her first grandchild, and she adored me. Because she lived practically next door to me until just before I started middle school, whenever my mom scolded me for something, I would run to her house. She would greet me, loudly calling out my name. In high school, when I put on quite a bit of weight and everyone else I knew was telling me that I needed lose it, she still told me I was pretty and praised me. When I botched my college entrance exam and ran away from home, her house was where I ran to. The reason that my grandmother always spoke loudly was not because she had a naturally loud voice, but because she couldn’t hear very well. I heard that when she was younger, because of some incident related to debt, someone hit her, damaging her ear. It would have been when I was in early elementary school. One of my classmates teased, “Your grandmother can’t hear! She’s deaf!” and I attacked them. That was the first and last physical fight of my life, and I think it shows how much I loved my grandmother. But even then, I think I knew intuitively that this kind of boundless love entails boundless sacrifice. At some point, I started seeing my grandmother as being stuck in a very small world that she couldn’t even hear well. Other people didn’t treat her well, and would even take out their anger on her. And maybe I sometimes did things like that too. As my grandmother, I thought she was a good person and loved her very much, but I didn’t want to be like her. Even though I had benefitted from the tremendous love and protection that motherhood has to give, part of me was scared of that boundless love. ▲ I recently visited my grandmother’s resting place for the first time since her funeral. Her face looked younger than I remembered, and this made me sad. The beliefs that “motherhood=sacrifice” and “mom=asexual being” If I explain my distancing myself from motherhood by saying it’s because the formula “motherhood=sacrifice” had planted in me a fear of it, that’s just me giving the version of the story that’s easiest to say out loud. In reality, the idea of becoming a motherhood and my sexuality have for a long time mutually rejected, envied, and clashed with each other. After the first time I had “real” sex (I say “real” because before that, I had had unsatisfying “fake” sex several times), it became important to me to acknowledge that I was a sexual being and to express that. This wasn’t just so I could experience orgasm, but because I was fascinated by the power that sex had to make me something special. So, I was extremely wary of things that would make me less sexual. And number one among these was becoming a mother. In the TV shows and movies I’ve seen since I was young, there would sometimes be a scene where, when the mom in a family would try to seduce or approach the dad, he would be startled and say, “But we’re family!” When I think about this now it makes me mad, but this was a pretty common gag. It’s a sad but undeniable fact that that kind of scene has affected my thinking. They’ve instilled in me the widespread idea that a mom is an asexual being, whether she wants to be or not. And so part of me thought that becoming someone associated with motherhood meant having to give up womanhood, becoming less sexual. Motherhood didn’t seem worth ruining the special sexuality that it had taken me more than 20 years to discover. ▲ Even though I had received the tremendous love and protection that motherhood has to give, part of me was scared of it. ©ilda I don’t want to/can’t become a mom Even when I was very young and had no idea of the existence or meaning of phrases like “sexual orientation” or “sexual identity”, I never dreamed of getting married. This also means that I never dreamed of becoming a mom. And as I grew up and came to know myself better, my resistance became more entrenched. The way that this society teaches and demands I become a mother is only by pairing by with a fertile man. So as a queer person (after identifying first as bisexual, then lesbian, then pansexual, I now feel that queer is the most appropriate identity for me), the chance of me entering a “normal” marriage and giving birth to and/or raising a child seemed very low. So I didn’t want to become a mom, but I also couldn’t. For a long time, I thought that I chose my life as a person who doesn’t want to become a mom, but isn’t it possible that I’ve also known for a long time that, in this society, I was the kind of person who couldn’t become one? Maybe that’s why I never dared to dream of it. My identities already made several of my dreams impossible, so maybe I didn’t want yet another one to be frustrated. When I started to realize that my self-image as “a cool person who has nothing to do with motherhood” might be a way of protecting myself, it really threw me into confusion. I couldn’t figure out what had actually been my choice, and couldn’t distinguish between my real feelings and those I had created to protect myself. I lost my way in the tangled relationship between motherhood and myself. Going beyond the physical to consider wider ideas of motherhood The thing that made me look into my relationship with motherhood despite this confusion was learning about feminism. Ironically, it was the issue of legalizing abortion that was the biggest motivator. I didn’t feel like this issue had much to do with me when I first encountered it - though it did remind me that my government, which made a map of places where there are many fertile women, and the people around me think of me as “a being with a uterus”. But when I learned that the issue of legalizing abortion doesn’t just involve demands to remove the constitutional ban on abortion but speaks to how patriarchal forces represented by the state control women’s bodies and sexuality, I realized that it was very much related to my own concerns. My motherhood is similarly controlled by the state, in that I don’t have the choice to become a mom because I have not been given the right to form a family. ▲ The cat that lives with me. Ever since I brought him home, I’ve considered myself his noona [older sister], not his mom. Why couldn’t I position as the mom of a pet? I’m looking into that question now. Even after intense conversations with myself, I still feel scared of motherhood. I think it will take a little more time to unravel the tangled threads of anger, envy, and ambivalence hidden inside me. At least now, however, I no longer think that motherhood and sexuality necessarily conflict with each other. I don’t think that moms are all the same in some way; I’ve come to see the diversity among them. I’ve started thinking again about my grandmother’s life. I’m so curious about the parts of it that I didn’t know about, and it makes me sad that I can’t ask her about them now. A few days ago, and for the first time in three years, I met up with a foreign friend who has lived in Korea for a long time. And I met her nearly-three-year-old daughter for the first time. I had wanted to see my friend since her daughter was born, and the fact that we hadn’t been able to find the opportunity because we live in different areas made our time together more precious. And while I would have been happy just to see my friend, our time together was also precious because seeing her family suggested a new possibility to me. I surprised myself as I spent time with her family, playing with her daughter. I had always been terrible with children, but this time I wasn’t bad. Had something changed in my heart? More than anything, it was seeing a queer family with two moms that made me think again about motherhood. Namely, I realized that if I wanted to access my motherhood without barriers, it needed to be in a situation in which, with no limitations or regulations, I could really choose whether or not to be a mom. I’ve now decided to slowly build a relationship with the concept of motherhood. This doesn’t mean I’m making plans to get pregnant and raise a child. It means that I’m setting motherhood as one facet of my sexuality, and choosing to think hard about it. I will also look for a broader meaning that motherhood can have, outside of actually becoming a mom. And if necessary, I am prepared to fight to protect that concept of motherhood. [Translated by Marilyn Hook] *Original article: http://www.ildaro.com/8334 Published Oct. 26, 2018 ‘엄마 되지 않기’를 선택한 나!? | 일다http://www.il 져스트릴게임 daro.com s like tha