Mother as Calendar

Until my mom passed away during the start of the pandemic in August 2020, I took for granted the collection of events and memories she held for our entire family.

In this short essay, I combine critical cultural insights with the approach of traditional media ecology for purposes of reframing the idea of “mother”-ing as a calendar, illustrating critical media ecological insights.

Long before calendars were said to be used (the Neolithic period), it has been written that the history of hu-(meaning: hook) man communication was first done by word of mouth. Societies meant to keep truth to themselves did this in order to build communities and ensure survival.

Hu-(read as: Who?), Man, you might ask, was responsible for retaining this communal form of knowledge? Elders. Their gender roles were unimportant (and will vary depending on who you ask in each field). What’s most important is that older members of collectives were respected for their abilities to pass down information that the preceding generations required to survive.  

Today, in the present-COVID-19 era, we have no shortage of surviving tales that were passed down by various artists, activists, and/or academics. So many humans acted as media – for better and for worse – only to culminate into devastating transnational and global processes. 

Differently brutal and dehumanizing stories made differences in each of our perspectives. 

Today, when you consume recent arguments regarding “the lost art of reading,” you can still find traces of ancient criticisms in the digital and algorithmic age. There must have been some truth to overly cited patriarchal critiques of the written word after all.

For instance, one popular remark is that our memories are worse. Now, when we want each other's company, instead of remembering each other’s phone numbers inside our brains we store them in smart devices. 

Us Millennial and Gen Z folks likely wouldn’t use phones to call each other, even if we could. 

Our “calling home” might look more like a group text than its vocally disembodied ancestor.

This all in mind, the main interest of my essay is less about a turn away from voice calls, and more about: what happens when the one who used to answer our call leaves?

Asked otherwise, in the present-COVID-19 era, what does it mean when the person who first felt like home, leaves this plane of existence “off the hook”? Or what do we do when our first home (our mothers) dies?

To be transparent, I’m one of many who has experienced the loss of their mom since the COVID-19 pandemic began in March 2020. Having to process her loss during the last few years, while finishing my PhD, has given me fresh insights into her familial role.

This piece is a brief about some key insights I hope will inspire a new way of viewing mothers. In short, in our umbilically disconnected patriarchal societies, mothers have long been taken for granted.

For instance, the binary conception of a cisfemale body, in particular, has been described (in no shortage of post-modernist literature) as little more than a “walking womb”. 

The cybernetic lens describes the human body as a machine andcannot wait to replicate it.

From circus-tested incubators to for-profit hospital complexes, nearly all present-COVID-19 babies are tube-tested, and mother approved.

“Frostie’d” eggs freeze time and prolong the life course, numerous years pre-conception. We once determined one’s age by the amount of time they existed (approximately 9 months after being “birthed”) from inside another’s womb. 

As Sara Martel’s chapter “Dear Incubator” in Sharma and Singh’s recent edited collection “ReUnderstanding Media: Feminist Extensions of Marshall McLuhan” disclosed, the incubator aptly reveals another element of “mother existing as a calendar” in the pre-COVID-19 world. 

In her heartfelt letter to the biomimicking womb, on one technological hand, Martel framed the incubator as an “almost mother,” serving as an extended womb-ic protector. Simultaneously, on the other hand, it technologically induces the labor of a newborn disservice: a premature mother-child disconnection.

In this post-Roe v Wade and ongoing present-COVID-19 age, I saw these twin services and disservices as crying out a primal question: What might we gain from reframing “mother as a calendar” in an age where a “womb” may no longer be needed?

Being that humans have now spent hundreds of years being raised into a view and act as if the body is a machine, exploring the idea of “mother as calendar” may come rather naturally. 

The calendar, as a media, is a type of “machine,” enabling us all a certain bodily orientation. 

Namely, existence here on this earthly plane. Like us, each calendar is born from certain conceptions of time (polychronic, monochronic, etc.), molded in a unique cultural image.

Additionally, describing “mother as calendar” shifts into an acknowledgement of their personhood. Someone who can become pregnant is not just a womb, but an entire ecology. All humans as media make decisions as agents in society building processes.

While on the surface describing humans as media might seem more dehumanizing than humanizing, my deliberate reframing of “mother as calendar” (in a context that has mechanized humans as norm) sparks a counter environment, foregrounding the subjecthood of a mother’s influence.

Even in a world where dehumanizing biases are built into everything (humans, languages, all our other technological extensions, and every institution) as features, our mother-ing remains.

Whether in absence, or in presence of technological extensions, subversively describing “mother as calendar” provides a new perspective documenting the integral loss of her role in the family after her passing. A loss of family stories, birthdays, recipes, hand-me-downs, etc. 

This descriptor both details the current contingency of the role of mother and reprioritizes it. In many families, mothers remain keepers of time in ways that fathers have not been demanded.

Relatedly, in her piece “Exit and the Extensions of Man,” Dr. Sharma (2017) explained that reductive conceptions of time have constrained who has and has not been allowed to “exit”:

“Exit[ing] is an exercise of patriarchal power, a privilege that occurs at the expense of cultivating and sustaining conditions of collective autonomy. It stands in direct contradistinction to care. Care is an opposing political force to exit. Care is that which responds to the uncompromisingly tethered nature of human dependency and the contingency of life, the mutual precariousness of the human condition. Women’s (sic) exit is hardly even on the table, given that women have historically been unable to choose when to leave or enter inequitable power relations, let alone enter and exit in a carefree manner. We are subject instead to forms of biopolitical management that do not allow for exit but rather a managed entrance into the sphere of the social, the public, the political, the institutional—the university, the corporation, the gym, the faculty club bar” (para. 5).

As Dr. Sarah Sharma explicated beautifully in the above quote, if, “...care is an opposing political force to exit,” and “, [presumably cis-] women’s exit is hardly even on the table…” then when those who may be able to become pregnant autonomously leave on their own accord, this act historically opposes the blueprint of their default role within patriarchal societies. 

Due to inequitable cisheteronormative gender relations mothers have remained timekeepers.

Furthermore, within my dissertation project I explored pre- and present-COVID-19 era sexual ecologies and observed two main take aways. Specifically, that especially millennial and Gen Z femme presenting folks on TikTok are experiencing individual and societal self-realizations.

For example, among other things, these users are vocalizing realizations about their low relational expectations of cishet men in regard to emotional, romantic, and sexual norms.  The findings in my work anticipated the recent pieces about “the rise of lonely single men”. 

Therefore, using a combination of Dr. Sharma’s insights and these dissertation explorations into the present-COVID-19 era sociosexual “syncing issues,” we can begin to parse out a key implication of the role of our “mothers” in current patriarchal societies.

In other words, the analogy of “mother as calendar” can illuminate a counter environment, breaking down our dominant way of seeing, to reveal a breakthrough: the lack of care inevitably nurtured through a patriarchal perspective, describing the impregnatable body as little more than a machine.

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Sharma (2017) Exit and the Extensions of Man: https://archive.transmediale.de/content/exit-and-the-extensions-of-man