Girls Just Wanna Use Props
🎵You wanna be the one who walks in the suuun🎵
NOVEMBER
Your IUD’s expiration date is approaching fast Virgo, and while the impetus for its insertion is headed back to the highest office in the land, your personal stance on motherhood hasn’t changed: it simply isn’t for you. But something has changed. In your early twenties, when you first got your IUD (the most violent pain you’ve ever experienced), the question of having a baby was a personal hypothetical. A theoretical conundrum you’d chew on in happy conversations with friends.
In the near decade since, The Motherhood Question has transformed from thought experiment to path not taken. Sure, you still have plenty of time to change paths should each aspect of your personality and lifestyle change in tandem—but will they? After so many years of feeling the same?
Even with very few responsibilities, it takes an astonishing, rube goldberg level of harmony for you to stay alive, happy and healthy. The addition of a human being needing you would transform these slim odds into a near impossibility. The herculean effort it currently takes to continue being alive would multiply frighteningly, exponentially, and it’s clear you do not have the strength to take that on, Virgo.
However, once the hypothetical of not having children fades away and you’re simply deciding each day, each egg, that you actively don’t want to have children, you can’t help but notice how many people have chosen the other path. Because of the sheer numbers, sometimes you feel the cultural understanding of Womanhood merging with the cultural understanding of Motherhood and you feel left out of Womanhood in a way that didn’t feel possible in your twenties, when The Motherhood Question was so suppositional.
This month, you won’t be chosen for a professional opportunity specifically geared towards women. After a year long fruitless job search, not being chosen for professional opportunities is your status quo, so this loss barely registers in the—now defunct—part of your brain that was once devoted to professional hope. However, this particular loss stands out from the rest since you learn who did get the opportunity. The organization sent out an email congratulating this person, and while you completely believe that whoever they chose deserved to be chosen, there was something about this person’s professional headshot that didn’t sit right with you. Within the tiny square confines of her professional photo was the face of an infant child.
The Skies couldn’t help but notice how little room there is for one face in a small square headshot—let alone two. The baby’s face takes up most of the photo, with the Mother (you assume) squeezed into the upper corner. The baby appears to be in motion, in the middle of a squirm and/or blink. If the baby were an adult friend of their Mother, to post such an unflattering photo of a pal would be an act so socially transgressive as to become criminal.
This leads you to believe that the baby is working as more of a prop in the photo. You love props, but something about this doesn’t feel right. Since this professional opportunity was for people who identify as women, the picture of the winner holding up a prized infant child makes it feel (in ungenerous moments) like the organization considers Motherhood the ultimate experience of Womanhood. Of course that isn’t what they’re saying, and you have no doubt the woman hoisting her child up a la Rafiki and Simba on Pride Rock was qualified and deserving of the opportunity. But that doesn’t stop you from being mad at her baby for ten minutes then spending several days mad at yourself for being mad at her baby for ten minutes.
Of course, this wasn’t the first child you’d seen in an adult woman’s professional photo. Conservatively, the small neighborhood you were raised in was home to six hundred billion blonde realtors. To set herself apart, you remember one realtor who placed enormous photos of herself holding her children on the lawn signs of the homes she was selling. The art of selling family values is never a subtle one, but this woman’s blatant approach always felt commendable in its overt unselfconsciousness.
The longer you’re in your thirties, the more it feels these two paths (Motherhood and Non-Motherhood) diverge. This month, you’ll watch a documentary exploring the outsized pressures of Motherhood and the under examined perils of postpartum depression, anxiety, and psychosis. However, it’s hard to buy what the filmmaker is selling when one consultant perinatal psychiatrist decrees the following:
“To say you’re not a good mother is probably the worst insult a woman would ever hear in their life.”
You don’t want to rip the consultant perinatal psychiatrist to shreds over semantics because she does great work, but this sentence was upsetting to hear. Because you’re a woman, and if someone told you that you weren’t a good mother, that wouldn’t hurt your feelings one bit! How could it!!! You aren’t one!!!!!
Since the Skies are also not Mothers (in the traditional way humans recognize—there’s no time to get into it), it’s not necessarily for us to say, but we’d hasten to guess that even some on the path of Motherhood could hear worse news than that they’re a bad Mother. The enormity of pressure on Mothers is clear even from the cosmos, but how can Motherhood ever become just one facet of a person’s identity if we keep acting like it’s this holy act singularly defining the Mother? Surely there is some Mother out there who, like you, would be much sadder to hear someone say they’re talentless, or ignorant, or that their dreams are doomed, or that they have to go into the 360 mirror with Stacy and Clinton!
You don’t feel like your experience of Womanhood is incomplete without a child, but sometimes it doesn't feel like everyone is on the same page about that. It used to feel like you were waving to the Motherhood path from your Non-Motherhood path with just a few little ferns and small trees between you. But the longer you stay on your path, there are times when it feels like you’re shouting at a rock face, unsure if anyone on the Motherhood path even knows you’re still there.
Your sensitivity in this area has caught you by surprise, Virgo. You don’t want to be picking silent fights with babies over their inexplicable appearances in professional photos. There simply is no possible argument for that being a productive use of your time. You don’t even have proof that the woman hoisting up her in-motion baby was the baby’s Mother. Nor do you have proof the local realtor of your childhood was posing with her own children. Those could have been actors! Nephews and nieces! The boxcar children!
Am I advising you to find the nearest baby to have a photoshoot that would endear you to the mainstream? Not explicitly, but I can’t say I’d begrudge anyone for doing the same. If you are opposed to using babies as props, perhaps there are other props you could incorporate into your image. A beautiful small bowl, a cartoonish large pair of scissors, an ornate golden altar? The choice is yours, Virgo.