{"id":2265,"date":"2012-11-17T07:26:25","date_gmt":"2012-11-16T23:26:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.taramoss.com\/?p=2265"},"modified":"2012-11-17T14:17:55","modified_gmt":"2012-11-17T06:17:55","slug":"a-mothers-natural-fierceness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.taramoss.com\/a-mothers-natural-fierceness\/","title":{"rendered":"A Mother’s Fierceness"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was recently interviewed for The Sydney Morning Herald<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>and the resulting piece, A Mother’s Fierceness<\/a>, ended up being published in ‘as told to’ style yesterday, without the interviewer’s questions included. (It was not actually an article I wrote, as some perceived it to be.) The topic appeared to hit a nerve with many parents.\u00a0In the interview I spoke about the common stereotype that women become soft when they have children, and my belief that motherhood often has the direct opposite effect.\u00a0Here is an excerpt:<\/p>\n

‘I have a fresh fierceness, for lack of a better word. I am fiercely protective of my family and also the world we live in. For me, there is a new level of engagement with the world, in part because I care deeply about what I will leave for my daughter when I pass on. I have always cared about social issues and world events, but never more than now.<\/p>\n

I remember one headline when my seventh novel was published soon after I became a parent. It was: “Moss softens as new mum”. I wondered about the basis for that headline. How, exactly, had I softened? At the time, I was hosting a crime show about psychopaths and criminal gangs, and I was writing the violent crime novel that would become\u00a0Assassin<\/em>. It seems like a curious automatic reflex for many people to describe women as \u2018softer\u2019 the moment they are mothers, as if childbirth and having a vulnerable little person to protect does not self-evidently have the direct opposite effect.’<\/p>\n

Read the rest at The Sydney Morning Herald<\/em> online<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Personally, I believe we conflate maternal love with softness, and we conflate the feminine \u2013 including motherhood – with weakness. This dismissal of women’s strength puzzles me, as it ignores the fierce protectiveness of mothers and the many examples we have of extraordinarily strong women – mothers and non-mothers.<\/p>\n

What do you think? If you are a parent, how did the experience change you?<\/p>\n

* UPDATE:<\/strong> I have received this response online:\u00a0\u00a0‘Soft is stronger than hard. Soft is flexible. Hard is brittle. Soft is not weak. Soft is not derogatory.’ – Niki Pidd.<\/p>\n

I love this response and the idea of ‘soft’ being a compliment. Unfortunately, common usage and dictionary definitions of ‘soft’, when applied to a person and not an object, are not so admiring. Here\u00a0are some of the reasons the term, when applied to women and mothers, grates on me:<\/p>\n

adjective<\/strong><\/p>\n

–\u00a0(of a person) weak and lacking courage<\/strong>:\u00a0soft southerners<\/em><\/p>\n

–\u00a0\u00a0informal<\/em>\u00a0foolish; silly<\/strong>:\u00a0he must be going soft in the head<\/em><\/p>\n

–\u00a0sympathetic, lenient, or compassionate, especially to a degree perceived as excessive<\/strong>; not strict or sufficiently strict:\u00a0the government is not becoming\u00a0soft on<\/strong>\u00a0crime<\/em><\/p>\n

adverb<\/strong><\/p>\n

– \u00a0informal<\/em>\u00a0in a weak or foolish<\/strong> way:\u00a0don\u2019t talk soft<\/em><\/p>\n

Definitions from the\u00a0Oxford dictionary<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have a fresh fierceness, for lack of a better word. I am fiercely protective of my family and also the world we live in. For me, there is a new level of engagement with the world, in part because I care deeply about what I will leave for my daughter when I pass on. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2271,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":""},"categories":[10,13,5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taramoss.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2265"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taramoss.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taramoss.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taramoss.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taramoss.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2265"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.taramoss.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2265\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2298,"href":"https:\/\/www.taramoss.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2265\/revisions\/2298"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taramoss.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2271"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taramoss.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2265"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taramoss.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2265"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taramoss.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2265"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}