Motherhood metaphor competition

Dear readers,

I am in the final stages of my book proposal and I need your help! I am trying to come up with a metaphor for how jarring contemporary motherhood is. The point I am trying to make with this book is that agriculture and industrialization have catapulted human mothers out of the context we evolved in over millions of years and into a novel context for which we are poorly adapted, thus setting the stage for struggle and mental illness.

To date, I have been using the metaphor of a frog in the desert. I like this metaphor. First, because I think it’s absurd and therefore funny (I have a soft spot for absurd humor). Second, because it’s extreme. We know the frog would die instantly, and this would be no fault of the frog’s. Rather, it would be due to a mismatch between the Frog’s environment and it’s biology (honed by millions of years of evolution in a radically different context). Third, because the desert represents scarcity, and therefore makes for an apt metaphor about the paucity of support for mothers in post-industrial society. Below you can find the original opening chapter of the book, which would need to altered (along with the title) if we change the metaphor.

However, certain readers (who shall remain anonymous) have challenged the legitimacy of this metaphor, and rightly so. A frog would dry out and die almost instantly in the desert. Mothers die less in post-industrial society than they did in the Paleolithic. Not only do we not die, we are capable of producing far more surviving offspring than we could in the deep past. So, by some measures we are thriving. At the same time, we are suffering. Rates of postpartum depression are high and skyrocketing. This is largely attributable to a shift in our social context and the loss of our support systems. As such, as more apt metaphor would be a bee without it’s hive, or a wolf without it’s pack. But it’s more than that. It’s not just the lack of social support. It’s also the dramatic change in work patterns, sleep patterns, breastfeeding patterns, equality in relationships, birth spacing, physical possessions, and more. How to encapsulate that in an easy-to-understand metaphor?

I leave it to you! The winner will be officially acknowledged in the credits and receive a free signed copy of the book when published.

Best of luck,

Elena

P.S. if you like the frog in the desert, feel free to defend her too

Not a bad frog

If you took a frog out of the jungle and put it in the desert, it would struggle to survive. Would you blame the frog? Would you judge it as being a bad frog? Would you frame its struggle as a personal or moral failing? 

No. You would not. You might suggest that the jungle frog is ill-suited to life in the desert. If you have an interest in biology or evolution, you might recognize that the frog evolved in the jungle and therefore possesses a myriad of traits that make it well-adapted for jungle life. The desert is so dramatically different from the jungle that the traits that allowed it to survive and thrive in the jungle do not confer any advantage in the desert. On the contrary, they set the poor frog up for certain failure. 

I would argue that the same is true for humans living in contemporary post-industrial societies like the United States. For about 99.7% of our existence as a species, humans lived as nomadic foragers, or “hunter gatherers.” The transition to agriculture only happened in the last 10,000 years, or about 400 generations ago, and the industrial revolution happened only a few generations ago. In a very short span of time, humans have managed to dramatically reshape the environments in which we live. Evolution, on the other hand, is slow; the result of incremental changes and selective pressure happening over thousands of generations. The result is that humans are now living in an environmental and social context that is radically different from the one in which we evolved over hundreds of thousands of years. We have put the proverbial frog in the proverbial desert, and evolution has not had time to catch up. 

We have understood for some time now that this kind of “evolutionary mismatch” accounts, in large part, for the proliferation of chronic diseases like type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and certain kinds of cancer, but what we are only beginning to recognize is that it also accounts for a large number of psychological disorders. Even less studied is how it relates to the experience of motherhood, and mental and physical outcomes for mothers (and for parents writ large). 

I believe that much of the suffering and exhaustion faced by mothers in contemporary post-industrial societies is the result of evolutionary mismatch. We are frogs in the desert, yet we rarely blame the environment for our suffering. Rather, we have internalized the patriarchal message that a “good mother” should be able to do it all without breaking a sweat. We believe we are bad frogs, when in fact, we are simply poorly adapted to life in the desert.