Note: this post is about child custody as it relates to parenting, not divorce. Consequently it may not be particularly relevant to the horrific, and often highly-gendered legal battles for child custody in contemporary divorce culture. —fl]

Via Vanessa at Feministing there was a report on non-custodial mothers on The Today Show. And earlier this month Miriam, also at Feministing (where there are some thoughtful comments), linked to a three-part series by Leah Goldman about non-custodial mothers at Marie Claire Magazine. Lisa Belkin at the NYT’s Motherlode blog, where there are also a ton of comments, mentions the Marie Claire article too.

The article itself about a woman, author Maria Housden, who lost a toddler to cancer, had another child soon after, before she and her husband separated. In the following excerpt I’ve highlighted three cool lines highlighting our relationship with the notions of motherhood and “nature.”

Housden longed to write about the devastating experience of losing a child, an undertaking that would require intense reflection — and freedom from the daily grind of raising three kids. It was Claude who first suggested that he retain physical custody. But the idea horrified her. “Are you crazy?” she yelled. “What kind of mother makes that decision?“

Unable to sleep that week, Housden realized that she was letting her fear of what the neighbors might think — “that I was incompetent or that I didn’t love my kids” — dictate what was best for her family. While the children needed stability, she needed time to process what had happened to her. Shortly after, she agreed to give up physical custody. She moved to an apartment three miles away from her children so she could see them on weekends.

...

Housden’s second book, Unraveled, published in 2005, tackled her agonizing decision to forgo custody. “I did something divorced fathers are expected to do every day. But when a mother does it, it’s abandonment,“ she says, recalling a stinging radio interview in which a caller suggested she be sterilized.

Read the quotes in context here.

That line “...her fear of what the neighbors might think” is a pretty big one. And, while I’m guessing legal-custody-obsessed MRAs have chimed in heartily, that line “divorced fathers are expected to do everyday” is another big one. Here’s why.

The first, trivial reason they’re big deals is that they’re thumbs in the eye for pop sociobiologists and pop evolutionary psychologists for whom cognitive, anticipatory, non-instinct-driven responses to social pressures that can vary widely between cultures and over time is an invisible 4th dimension. For all the talk about highly subtle, allegedly evolved behaviors related to waist-hip ratios or oxytocin receptors the genes they need to be looking for are the “what will the neighbors say” gene and the “but everybody else is doing it what’s your problem” gene.

The second, much bigger reason though, is that if “maternal instinct” really was and instinct then that’s just one more area where women magically have no agency isn’t it? For that matter, if… I dunno… the corresponding “paternal” child-abdicating instinct all that would do is cement the status quo.

But in fact it’s possible to love one’s children with all one’s heart with nary a “maternal bond” or “paternal pride” in sight. And it’s also perfectly possible to leave them.

Which makes it a bigger deal when people… men and women… stay with their children. Because it’s neither cute, nor heroic, nor admirable that we breathe, for instance. Breathing’s an instinct, and good luck trying to stop that. But parenting — being a mom, being a dad, being a parent, or grandparent, or aunt or uncle, or god-parent, or co-parent, or partner of a parent — can be cute, and heroic, and admirable or any of the other traditional adjectives because we can and not because we must.

Point being that acknowledging mothers who waive custody instead of condemning them or insisting something’s wrong with them makes it more cool, not less, to be a mother who shoulders custody. And the same, by the way, with acknowledging fathers who surrender custody instead of tin-whistling “but of course, men do that every day.”