Parenting Practices for Non-Married Moms: Is It Really Realistic to Find a Few Friends to "Be a Mom Together"?

Text/Nanxi Zhang

Editor/Sydney King

Returning to Chengdu from a business trip, the first thing Cheng Suya did was to go to a friend's house to pick up her 4-year-old son Yangyang. The day before, Yang Yang had eaten too many fries in kindergarten, plus he was a little cold, and when he got home, he had a fever.

Cheng Suya is a photographer and a non-marital solitary mother.

For her, settling in Chengdu was a compromise choice. Previously, she and her 4-year-old son Yangyang lived in Beijing and hunan. However, the rent in Beijing is difficult for Cheng Suya to bear alone, and the educational resources in her hometown are relatively backward. Last year, she decided to take Yangyang to Chengdu to settle down. In order to let her son enroll in a fairly good primary school, she has already looked after the school district.

To become a mother, from the beginning of pregnancy, you have to go through endless trials. And if it is an unmarried mother, it means to single out all the tests on her own - a person who endures the pain of contractions in the delivery room, signs his own surgical notice, one person changes diapers, one walks the baby, one person sends him to elementary school; when he is rebellious, he must rationally tell him what smoking and alcohol mean, and cheer him up next to him when he cries because of his lost love...

Births out of wedlock, as the name suggests, are children born to men and women who are not married. This population accounts for a large proportion of children born out of wedlock in Western countries – according to OECD data, the proportion of children born out of wedlock in EU countries averaged 41.3% in 2018, compared with 60.4% in France. In the United States, it was 39.6%. At present, there are no statistics on children born out of wedlock in China. However, in recent years, many unmarried mothers have begun to appear in the news, and the fight for maternity insurance in Shenzhen and Shanghai has also attracted widespread attention.

What is it like to raise children outside the institution of marriage, and what are the challenges? Are there other possibilities beyond the traditional parenting model and the family model? Is there a broader definition of home, family, and marriage? During our visit, three mothers, including Cheng Suya, are practicing and experimenting with a more diverse parenting model. Maybe they eventually have to compromise with reality, but the process of trying has allowed them to change and grow to varying degrees.

Cheng Suya just gave YangYang a bath, and the children were very happy_Zhang Nanxi photographed

"Yes"

Chubby fingers pressed on one of the roads of the map, and the other small hand tightly tugged at mom's big hand, immersed in the joy of reading the map. After carefully examining for a while, he looked up and smiled at his mother, his eyes narrowed into a crescent moon, and he told his mother in a milky voice that he had found the location of the home.

Yang Yang likes maps. In the city of Chengdu, the stone carved topographic map at the entrance of the park, the intertwined road map in the subway station, and the hand-painted earth on the kindergarten wall will attract him to run over. At this time, Cheng Suya would also stop, and the two of them, one tall and one short, stood side by side in front of the huge map, patiently identifying various colors and graphic signs.

The appearance of Yang Yang was an accident. In the summer of 2017, Cheng Suya found out she was pregnant. The ex-boyfriend made it clear that she didn't want the child, but she was hesitant.

Cheng Suya went to the hospital alone for a maternity examination. She lay on the bed, the doctor rolling around on her stomach with a slimy instrument, facing the oversized high-definition screen, showing the appearance of a child—a life beating in a cloud of darkness, and unformed hands and feet seemed to be dancing with joy.

Cheng Suya is a very "hard" woman — at least that's how she describes herself. She photographs gay AIDS-infected people, drug addicts, transgender people, pole dancers, she carries a huge photographic bag alone, from the city and the countryside to find them out, she wants to show the love and pain of these marginalized people. She comes from a family with indifferent affection, and has never thought of having children and getting married before, and the most she thinks about is to leave her hometown and live alone in a distant place.

But at the moment of seeing the silhouette of the child, Cheng Suya's tears suddenly flowed out. She felt the connection between two lives, and she longed to protect the child in her belly. The doctor said, congratulations on your mother, you can't cry so easily, sensitive and fragile in the future.

"After doing the B ultrasound, I actually made a decision, and I felt a little joy in my heart, but a little heavy." Cheng Suya said that this was a turning point in her thirty-year-old life. She knew that in the future, raising a child alone would have to face all kinds of discrimination and pressure, there might be no one to help, she might lose her job, it would be very hard, but she still decided to keep him.

Like Cheng Suya, Miao Zi never wanted to let a child enter her life.

Naeko became pregnant in 2019, and her ex-boyfriend was eight years younger than her. At first, I was willing to raise children together. But his work and mood are unstable, and Miaozi has to take care of herself and the baby in her belly, and she has to take care of him. In the end, she decided to raise the baby herself.

When the child grew up in Naeko's body for the seventh week, she saw the color supermap for the first time — the picture was of a vague baby, "a bit like the people in the comics." At that time, I felt that if I wanted it, it was an affirmation of my entire life and of people themselves. If not, I think I'll be terrible. She recalled to a reporter from City Pictorial in 2020.

She named the child "A Chao", which means "the part that is super-out". She still remembers Ah Chao's small, wrinkled appearance when he was carried out of the incubator by the nurse. She joked that he was like a friend who was extremely different physically and mentally, and in particular needed attention.

Before Ah Chao, Miao Zi lived unfettered, poor and free. She graduated from the Fashion Design Department of the Academy of Fine Arts, opened a Taobao shop, and transformed old clothes, all based on love. She also plays the band casually and hates deliberate rehearsals the most. She and most of her friends around her live without savings, and their monthly income ranges from a few hundred yuan to a few thousand yuan, just enough.

But the moment she chose to keep her child, Miaozi forced herself to change the rhythm of life - she quit smoking and stopped staying up late day and night; she learned to cook her own food and eat three meals; she never worried about money became very anxious, worried about a life in debt, unable to afford Ah Chao's life, and she even began to plan to find a fixed job.

For Liang Xiwei, making the decision to "leave the child" requires greater courage. Because that was 20 years ago.

Liang Xiwei's diary in middle school, one of which is a picture of a well-behaved boy born before the age of 20

She was in a relationship with the child's father for three years, and for various reasons, she finally decided to break up, have children and raise the child alone, and after the breakup, they never contacted each other again. "My child is the crystallization of love, but love does not last." 」 Ms. Liang said she had decided to give birth to a child after barely doing much psychological struggle. Not long ago, she flipped to her diary from middle school, which contained many wishes, the first of which was "May world peace" and the other was "To be born a beautiful boy before the age of twenty."

She also vividly remembers the days of the 2002 World Cup. In the morning, she went home from a check-up alone, and in the evening, as soon as the semi-final between Brazil and Turkey began, she became popular. The pains came on a regular basis, each time making her almost worse than dead.

At two o'clock in the morning, she lay on the delivery bed with tubes in both hands and feet, waiting for a caesarean section. When the anesthesiologist was just about to insert the needle, the attending physician suddenly stopped, and then put Liang Xiwei flat and asked her to try the force of the contraction. Unexpectedly, as soon as she tried, the child came out smoothly, and the nurse at the end of the bed almost did not catch the child in the scream. Relieved, Liang Xiwei actually felt full of energy. It didn't take long for her to get up on her own to go to the toilet. While pacing back and forth in the hospital corridor, the cheers of fans outside the window as they watched the replay were also heard.

"I didn't want to cry at all, I was so excited I wanted to laugh, jumped up and shouted, 'I've had a son.'"

Liang Xiwei's circle of friends on a certain day discussed the scientific spirit with her son: "Do you think what you think is what you think?" ”

secular

In fact, when she decided to give birth to a child, Liang Xiwei knew that she would need to pay an expensive fine - "social support fee". The money was to be punished by both parents, but she did not want to cause a follow-up adverse effect on the child's father, and offered to bear all of it herself.

Social maintenance fees, which began in the early 1980s, have been associated with the family planning system and have been disputed for many years. Since the official landing of the "comprehensive two-child" in 2016, 30 provinces across the country have revised their family planning regulations, and some localities have successively cancelled social support fees for children born out of wedlock. By 2021, the Population and Family Planning Law of the People's Republic of China will be amended to advocate the implementation of the three-child birth policy, the formal abolition of social support fees, and the clearance and abolition of relevant penalties.

Because her son's birthplace and her hukou are not in the same district, Liang Xiwei is running between multiple departments while working hard to earn money, and she hopes to make herself and her son live more confidently. When her son was almost 6 years old, she paid tens of thousands of yuan in social support fees, settled her son's house, and successfully attended primary school.

In the summer of 2017, Cheng Suya no longer needed to pay social support when she gave birth to a child. But she also faces other pressures. When she was more than seven months pregnant, she returned to her hometown with a big belly to prepare for delivery. The most direct reason is that because there is no marriage license, it is impossible to file a file in the community hospital in Beijing to have a child.

Before that, unemployment made her already poor. When her employer learned of her birth out of wedlock, it refused to provide her with maternity leave and maternity allowances (referring to the living expenses paid by the maternity insurance fund according to the salary standard for working women during the period when she left her job due to childbirth). She fought with the Ministry of Personnel, "Maternity insurance has always been participating, why not give me the benefits I should have?" But it was rejected. Seeing that the child in her belly was getting bigger and bigger, she had to passively leave her job.

"I want to have a child, but the other party doesn't want to," Cheng Suya told her parents, back in a small county town in Hunan, more than 1,700 kilometers from Beijing. Her parents looked at her and always felt like a poor woman who had been abandoned by a negative person. Until she gave birth, her father did not dare to face her stomach — she walked from the bedroom to the living room to sit down, and the father would walk away, avoiding direct communication.

Cheng Suya has talked to many people about "out of wedlock", and she hopes to make this huge but always neglected and marginalized group of people face up. But no matter what profession— artist, poet, photographer, or her classmates and friends back home — they all naturally hold the same view, believing that "out of wedlock" is pitiful, irresponsible, and abandoned.

The always rebellious Naeko is also fed up with such a vision, and she wants to use her own way to break the inherent expectations and stigma of her relatives and friends.

Her parents have lived in Chaoshan for many years, have a strong family concept, and have always had the expectation of "getting married" for her. When Naeko returned to her hometown after she became pregnant, relatives visited the door, so she had to hide in her room and take a walk until it was dark before going out.

In September 2019, when she was five months pregnant, Naeko decided to hold a grand "marry the air" wedding for herself and her friends.

The wedding takes place in a ballroom full of retro 1980s atmosphere. Colorful lanterns and crystal ball lights make the whole space shine brightly, and the stage screen plays a video taken by Miaozi not long ago.

The "City Pictorial" reporter who was at the wedding scene at the time remembered that Miaozi wore a white wedding dress that her aunt had picked up in the garbage can and went to the hospital with her friends to do a B ultrasound; at the entrance of the church, kicked a bouquet of Teachers' Day flowers into the air; she and a group of friends ran on the street, free.

"My wedding should be in the middle of a definition. Some people think it's a wedding, some people think it's not, and some people are wondering if it is. I experience it in my own way with the idea of going through a wedding. Miao Zi later told City Pictorial that she gave her parents expectations for the wedding in such a grand and lively way, and it was also an escape and break free from the shackles of reality.

Miao Zi is in jieyang hometown, and several sisters in the village are doing some costume transformation design while taking the baby_Photo courtesy of the interviewee

In the video recorded that day, you can see that there are many friends who come to the wedding. Dressed in brightly colored and strangely tailored costumes, everyone performed a drama based on the Chao opera "Ten Immortals Celebrating Birthday" - "Bitter! Words and sentences paint blood and tears, fertility is pain or freedom, open the channel of language, I am the part of the transcendent, ready to become human, the brain produces the initial consciousness, I can already distinguish between morning, afternoon and evening", Miaozi sang on the stage.

Neither of Naeko's parents ended up at the wedding. My brother and two cousins came to Guangzhou. A cousin gave her a red envelope and left. Another cousin had to go back to catch the bus in the middle of the wedding. Only Miaozi's brother sat offstage and watched the whole wedding, and he had been silently supporting Miaozi for the previous years and years after that.

For Cheng Suya, in addition to being stigmatized and possible financial problems, she also worried about her child's mental health. Previously, in her hometown, friends heard that she was going to give birth to this child, and they all held an opposing attitude, believing that the child would have psychological problems growing up in a family without a father. Because of a report on an unmarried mother, Cheng Suya met Liang Xiwei during her pregnancy. On the way to Guangzhou to find Liang Xiwei, she also carried this question.

When she arrived in Guangzhou, she threw the problem to Liang Xiwei. The latter told her that ten years ago, she had even anxiously sought out a psychiatrist over the problem. The psychiatrist told her, "The child was born without the company of his father, which may be a flaw in his life, but it does not prevent him from pursuing perfection." And there is no absolute definition of a perfect life. ”

This passage supported Liang Xiwei all the way over. Her son is an adult, speaks four Chinese, has excellent grades, and loves the art major. Cheng Suya asked him carefully, do you want to know and know your father, who has never met? He replied graciously, "To me, he is an insignificant man, someone who has never existed." ”

Liang Xiwei used her blog to record the bits and pieces of her son's life, and these happy moments continued to happen

"Be a Mom Together"

Sticking to the photography job you love means traveling, sometimes not being able to spend time with your children. Before picking up her son to Chengdu, Cheng Suya seriously had a conversation with him.

"If you want to go with your mother, you have to go to Chengdu." Mom has to work and take care of you. Sometimes when you are not at home on a business trip, you have to learn to be strong, and together we bravely overcome difficulties. Of course, you can also continue to stay with your grandparents in your hometown, and they will accompany you. Yang Yang nodded, as if he understood, and he chose to live with his mother without much thought.

Cheng Suya has several good friends in Chengdu, and Yangyang recognizes them as "dry mothers". She rented a house near a friend's house, also considering that when traveling, friends could help take care of the children. A relationship of community mutual help was gradually formed between them - one of them was loving and righteous, and every time she tried her best to bring Yangyang, she seemed to have become a ghost child and played with him; there was also a dry mother who learned to host the broadcast, very good at teasing children, and the dubbing of the second change cartoon animation often made people laugh.

Miaozi imagined "being a mother together" with a few friends during her pregnancy, which was a further plan - all those who were willing to raise Ah Chao formed a family, called "Super Family", where everyone lived together lively and lively, became friends with relatives, and became relatives with friends.

The idea was originally because, after she became pregnant, some of her friends around her did not persuade her to beat up the child or force her to ask her whether she wanted to have a child or not, but paid attention to her daily needs, such as asking "where are you", "when to go to the hospital", "what did the doctor say?" Check how the results are" "Sleep well".

After Ah Chao was born, when the epidemic eased, MiaoZi returned to Guangzhou and began to practice the "super family" plan. She and a few friends, plus Ah Chao, live in an old house. Because it is a house borrowed in the name of Ah Chao, Miao Zi advocates that everyone should take Ah Chao in shifts and arrange everyone's tasks every day - who cooks, who washes dishes, who takes Ah Chao to play. But in practice, especially when it comes to raising babies, all the details may diverge.

Some people want to take Ah Chao out to visit the material market, but Miaozi is worried about the poor air in the market and bad for the baby, and does not want them to go; Miaozi found a parenting encyclopedia, hoping that everyone will read the 1 to 3-year-old parenting code, but some people did not pay attention to this matter. In daily discussions, friends will mention issues such as equal rights and decentralization in the mode of bringing children together, but MiaoZi only cares about the milk that Ah Chao drinks, whether it is three spoonfuls of milk powder flushed with 45 degrees Celsius. In the midst of these small disagreements, everyone's emotions will also affect each other.

The practice of raising Ah Chao together did not last long. And some relatives and friends who have helped each other have gone their separate ways for many reasons.

Mentioning these in the interview, Miaozi felt stressed. She worries that her one-sided narrative alone will not be able to show the full picture of the whole picture, and she hopes that others will be seen and heard. "Just like I'm interviewing now, the identity of my mother will be burned deeply into me, so unfortunately, the more interviews I accept, the farther away they will be from me."

Miao Zi is in jieyang hometown, starting a business with the neighbors and sisters. Do the production of baby clothes, but also shoot micro-films _ courtesy of the interviewee

Today, together with her partner Leopard Mother, she takes Ah Chao to live in her hometown of Jieyang. When Ah Chao was 22 months old, he went to kindergarten, but he seemed to be more self-reliant and taller than other children. Miaozi started a business with some other women in the village, making dolls, exhibitions and short films. After experiencing the chaos of the early stages of raising children, their lives gradually calmed down and they gained a certain sense of order.

But was the previous pattern a complete failure? Naeko doesn't think so. She is now more relaxed as a mother, learning to let go of her mentality, "no longer so much to carry all the burdens on one person."

The leopard mother is also reflecting that the core problem of multiple people raising babies is to have a clear division of roles, and it is best to form text rules. In practice, everyone must understand what responsibilities and boundaries are, otherwise they will fall into endless confusion and constantly sway.

The leopard mother will also feel that the nominal "love" is not important, what is important is that love becomes a direct action. They don't have a fixed family type, but a pluralistic family can be a concrete moment, and everyone can do it immediately. "Mutual help may be integrated into some seemingly ordinary atmosphere, beyond the moment of atomizing the nuclear family, sometimes in a dance at the mouth of the village." Leopard mom said.

Up to now, there are still a few friends who come over regularly and take Ah Chao with Miao Zi and Leopard Mother, and some of their luggage has been stranded in Miao Zi's house for a long time. There are also many people who are paying attention to Ah Chao in their own way. They are all Ah Chao's family.

Everyone traveled and played together, from left to right: Leopard Mother, friend Xin Heng from Wuhan, Chao Sauce, and neighbor children Ke'er_ Interviewee provided pictures

A friend who has performed on the same stage as Miaozi usually does not talk much, does not like to talk much about his life, and only talks about working as a chef in a fast food restaurant. After knowing Ah Chao's affair, he would greet Miaozi every once in a while, and each time there were only a few words "How is it lately?" "Then send a red envelope and insist that the seedlings be accepted." Ah Chao is everyone's, not just yours. He said that this was to help Ah Chao pay tuition.

There is also a friend from the northeast who came to Jieyang and wanted to help take Ah Chao, but he did not know how to take care of the children at all. One day, everyone went to the City God Temple in Chaoshan to worship the old man. My friend had a sudden thought, saying that I came to pay homage to Ah Chao! So the six-month-old Ah Chao sat on the temple door, and his friends worshiped him. Unexpectedly, Ah Chao also came back.

"How to live outside the traditional family system is still a virgin land, and it is necessary to constantly re-examine in the process of exploration, reconstructing the concept of home and one's own identity positioning." It's just hard. Alexwood, a friend of Naeko's and a radio anchor who focuses on gender issues, said.

Last year, when Miaozi practiced the multi-person doll raising model, Liang Xiwei was losing sleep for her son to fill out the college entrance examination volunteer. Along with Liang Xiwei, there is also her son's nanny family - for twenty years, the nanny aunt is her biggest support alone.

Because of her work, Liang Xiwei often travels on business. Since the son was two months old, he was taken care of by his aunt.

The aunt is the same age as Liang Xiwei's mother, likes children, and has a set of methods of taking care of children. There was a corner by the window of her kitchen where all the children sat on small stools and ate in a regular manner, with colorful vegetables and meat on plates. After eating, the children took the cups themselves to get the water. You can watch TV at the point, but also go to bed on time.

With her aunt taking care of the children, a large part of Liang Xiwei's parenting pressure was shared. She was able to work with peace of mind, starting with the average employee of the company and working her way to the top of the line. She often travels alone and also travels abroad with her children to broaden his horizons and mind.

Every time she buys her son a limited edition Lego, she also buys herself a bag. Therefore, children can know that mothers work to make money for themselves, and parents and children are independent individuals who deserve to have their own wonderful lives.

change

"I actually prefer Father's Day, and I'm more grandfatherly than many fathers to be able to sustain me and my son on this road." Liang Xiwei said.

But there are always people who hear that her first reaction after hearing that she is an unmarried mother is to think that she is pitiful. "Is it necessarily pitiful without a husband?" Does it have to be pathetic without a father? Every day, husbands beat their wives and fathers abuse their children. Liang Xiwei is very fortunate that she thought she had the ability to take on the responsibility of being a mother alone, and as always, she insisted, "Any profession has the dilemma caused by industry trends and market changes." No matter how difficult it is, whether the child is male or female, ugly or beautiful, the profession of mother is still a clear goal that you really yearn for and expect to put in for. ”

When my son is one to three years old, he likes to go to parks and amusement parks the most, and when he is tired of playing, he has to hug and refuse to take a cart. Liang Xiwei had to carry him home no matter how tired she was, because no one could take the handle. Later, she found a way to call a few friends who like children every time she went out to play, and she retained her physical strength to clean up the last mess.

In Liang Xiwei's view, education is to teach by example. She loves and works hard, and her son has great study habits – he knows to complete assignments at school from elementary school and receives a attendance award every semester. She draws, reads, plays chess, loves to watch movies, speaks fluent foreign languages, and her son participates together. The son began to teach japanese by himself in junior high school, his academic performance was always stable at 11, and he was admitted to the college of his choice in advance, and the college entrance examination scored a high score of 126 points in Japanese.

When I first started kindergarten, my son also asked his father. Liang Xiwei told her son that he was the closest person, but people's feelings were very uncertain, because some things could not come together. When she was fourteen or fifteen years old, her son told her that there were classmates at school who smoked and drank. Liang Xiwei did not warn him directly, but talked to him about the origin of tobacco and alcohol, how many types and which ingredients, and she hoped that her son could make his own judgment.

As her son approached adulthood, she initiated a formal family meeting with him on the issue of the birth father and the right to recover maintenance. She asked her son to think slowly about whether to file a legal action. More than 10 years ago, Liang Xiwei's lawyer repeatedly insisted that she file a lawsuit on behalf of her children, but she did not do so.

Liang Xiwei told her son that the reason for convening this meeting at this time was because the law stipulates that once the age of 18 has passed, the right can no longer be recovered. As an adult, the son has the right to know what rights he has as the subject of the lawsuit. She also expressed her views to her son on what might happen if she went after them. Whatever decision her son makes in the future, she will do her best to support it.

But in the end, Liang Xiwei and her son tacitly agreed to let this matter go unpunished. In their opinion, unsure of the person and those things, they don't care anymore.

"Endless tests are only to be faced, to cope with, and to bear. Only you can achieve yourself and your children through this series of baptisms. On social platforms, Liang Xiwei wrote.

Miaozi can also clearly feel the change in herself. She used to be like a "rioter", hating order, being very egotistical, and opposing everything organized. But since having Ah Chao, the change "occupies all her life as delicately as a climbing tiger".

The city pictorial reporter who interviewed her at the time remembers that in the beginning, like all expectant mothers, she fell in love with the software for pregnancy and baby. The first thing to do every morning when I wake up is to open the software, observe what changes in the baby in the belly, and imagine that the child in the belly has grown from a small grape to a small melon.

Accustomed to listening to psychedelic rock, she will also click on Pang Mailang's "Nocturne", hoping that Ah Chao in her belly can feel the gentleness of the moonlight falling in the music like her. Of course, in the end, she decided to "be herself" and listen to the music she used to like, because "I decided not to speculate on his ideas, and in the end it was my own thoughts."

She is willing to be Ah Chao's friend all the time, she not only wants to become a mother, but also continues to be a seedling. She believes that mom is not Iron Man, you don't have to bear all of it alone, mom's burden should be shared.

Yangyang handmade works, press the power supply can shine

Yangyang also made Cheng Suya soft. She has been able to go deeper into intimate relationships – she never accepted living with her boyfriend before, and now she can face chai rice oil and salt with her lover. In front of her parents, who have been son-oriented since childhood, many things she will not go to the truth anymore.

It's not that she's smoothed out her edges and corners, she's still the fierce photographer, doing what she loves, working in a male-dominated industry. No matter how often the business trip is, as long as the work is over, Cheng Suya must fly to her son's side for the first time. She flew one or two o'clock in the morning, and when she came home and saw her son sleeping, she felt that it was worth it. Before, when Yang Yang was in her hometown with her parents, she had to talk to her son on video phone every day. He must have been coaxed to sleep by her.

Now on the wall of the chengdu home, there are large-scale video works taken by Cheng Suya and paintings by Yangyang. One of them is a pasted painting, blue sky and green grass and flowers, two sheep made of cotton and buttons, one large and one small, one in front of the other and one in front of the other walking steadily.

(At the request of the interviewee, Cheng Suya and Yangyang are pseudonyms)

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