Motherhood in Crisis

Comics about mothering (sorry dads...we know it's supposed to be your month).

Mothers are everywhere, but where are they in comics? In the past decade, several mothers are finally getting to share their stories through memoir comics, portraying individual and varied experiences that challenge stereotypical representations. We’ll look at how four female comics creators have expressed different stages of motherhood, from pregnancy to mothering adult children. 

A.K. Summers details a clash of personal identity and the physical reality of childbearing in Pregnant Butch: Nine Long Months Spent in Drag (2014). In this serialized memoir, the collection of graphic essays mostly aligns with the chronological confines of pregnancy—from deciding to have children, investigating DIY home insemination, travailing through the trimesters, and finally, birthing. 

Written as a letter to her daughter, Dear Scarlet acts as an epistolary comic that pulls no punches when confronting the reality of Teresa Wong’s postpartum depression (2019). We follow along as Teresa learns how to care for her daughter, seeking help from her mother, a psychiatrist, and a postpartum doula. Wong reveals that even with all these resources, motherhood is still isolating. 

In her widely lauded graphic memoir, Good Talk, Mira Jacob explores the idea of motherhood as a mother of color to her son, Z, growing up in Trump-era America (2019). In this “memoir in conversations,” Jacob opens with a funny, challenging conversation that reveals the book’s central concern—what it means to raise a child during an explicitly race-conscious era. 

Holocaust survivor Miriam Katin’s graphic memoir Letting It Go reveals the challenges of parenting that remain even once one’s child is an adult--such as wrestling with the fears that outweigh us and the memories that haunt us still, and trying, with all her might, to lay those aside for her son’s happiness (2013). Fears and doubts about Berlin, where her son plans to move for more work opportunities, dominate the emotional narrative of Letting It Go. Here, motherhood is not just the tangibility of diapers and throw-up burps, scraped knees and imaginary friends, but mothering older children as well. 

These comic memoirs are as diverse as the creators themselves, and vary in style, content, and stages of motherhood, to portray a multifaceted experience. In their graphic memoirs, these authors detail how motherhood changes their worlds through their authentic, embodied portrayals.

These comics show us that motherhood is an intersectional identity–one is never just a mother, one is a mother AND a person of color, an immigrant, a butch lesbian, a Holocaust survivor, etc. Motherhood complicates identities, even ones that have already been accepted and feel known or understood, creating a new layer and complexity to that identity. 

Autobiographical comix have a history of beginning with transgressive topics (such as Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary) which creates a space for a multiplicity of stories to be rendered in comics form, even stories that may not otherwise be told in popular forms, such as motherhood. So many graphic memoirs have been coming of age stories, but now more people are drawing about other life transformations… and motherhood itself, the world’s oldest subject, hasn’t always been told with such honesty, straight from the sources. Comics offer a unique and democratic form to embody the specifics of one’s life and challenge the notions of ideal motherhood.  

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Links to check out:

Leslie Stein’s I Know You Rider explores the decision to reproduce, or not.

The Graphic Medicine Conference is coming up next month in Chicago. Maybe we will see you there!