s and motherhood are the same the world over; today's guest puts that folk wisdom to the test in a new book chronicling the first year of motherhood for four women from four different countries.

She's Abigail Leonard, this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(lively thoughtful music) (lively thoughtful music continues) Hello and welcome to a "Story in the Public Square," where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller, also with Salve's Pell Center.

- And our guest this week is Abigail Leonard, an award-winning journalist whose new book is "Four Mothers: An Intimate Journey through the First Year of Parenthood in Four Countries."

She's joining us today from Washington, DC.

Abigail, thank you so much for being with us.

- Thank you so much for having me.

- And congratulations, "Four Mothers" is a compelling read; it's a timely read given Mother's Day.

Do you wanna tell us a little bit, give us a quick overview of the book, then we'll get into it in some depth?

- Sure.

So "Four Mothers" was inspired by my own experience.

It started out of that.

I had my own three children in Tokyo, Japan, and then I moved back to the US.

So I sort of got a sense of how different parenting was in those countries.

So I wanted to sort of further explore that.

So the book itself looks at four different women in four countries around the world, and it follows them for their first year of motherhood.

So there's a woman in Japan, a woman in the US, a woman in Finland, and a woman in Kenya.

And it looks at sort of both their own very personal experience and the narrative that takes shape sort of in that first year for them, and also the different policy and community supports that they have to support them through that year and just how profoundly that affects their experiences.

- You know, one of the questions that I had was whether or not the... You talk about the policy, you talk about the familial differences.

That interplay between culture and policy, and the supports that women have for parenthood are different in each of those places.

How much does culture play a factor across these different countries you're looking at?

- I think culture plays a huge factor.

I mean, a lot of the sort of ideas around parenthood are passed down through generations.

So gender roles, sort of how much a woman takes on versus her partner, all of those things are transmitted through culture.

Even, you know, when I was in Japan, it was interesting, like, whether or not you sleep with your baby and, you know, what you feed your baby.

All of that is cultural.

The interesting thing that I saw playing out with these women was also how there were these sort of long traditional beliefs around parenthood that had been refined over time.

But in the modern era, a lot of those were sort of breaking down.

So, you know, women who weren't as close to the community supports that maybe their mothers or their grandmothers had been, and they really missed out on a lot of those sort of cultural institutions or, you know, cultural helps that would've guided them through this.

But the other thing that I saw was just how much policy could guide culture.

So it was sort of interesting, like, which came first in some ways.

I mean, in Finland, you have these incredibly egalitarian gender roles, and some of that is actually led by the policy there.

So once you put the policy in place, then the culture follows.

So, if you have these traditional supports fading, the best thing I think that can happen is that you have good policy that comes in and sort of replaces some of what culture was doing before.

- Interesting.

So, let's get into the stories of these four women.

And let's start with Tsukasa, who is the Japanese woman that you profiled.

Tell us about her and the challenges that she faced.

- Mm-hmm.

Yeah, Tsukasa, she worked at a large Japanese company, and she actually had a lot of trouble getting pregnant and then sort of a difficult pregnancy.

And her doctor prescribed bedrest, and she actually left her job even ahead of her one-year maternity leave.

They already have a generous leave, so she was, you know, like, three months out from giving birth, she already was off work.

But in that time, she sort of grows increasingly nervous about the actual birth.

And a reason for that is that in Japan, for the most part, pain medication is not used during birth.

And that's partly because, you know, there's some distrust of opiates that actually dates back to the Opium Wars, but also because there's this Buddhist belief that pain will bond a mother and child.

And it's seen as sort of a virtue to experience pain.

It'll help the baby in some way for the mom to be, like, so committed that she would endure this pain, and that sort of persists through childhood.

And so, Tsukasa, like, understandably, was completely (laughs) freaked down and nervous about going to this experience, and she was having nightmares, and, you know, she had a childhood trauma that she was revisiting.

And so all of these things were coming up just around the birth.

And, you know, she wasn't wrong.

Her birth, I think, was sort of the most difficult of any of them.

Her husband couldn't be there.

It was during COVID.

But also, men are relatively recently allowed in birth rooms there.

So there's just this whole culture around birth, as you were talking about culture.

I mean, it completely determined that experience for her, and it was hard.

And then, after that, she was pretty much the primary caregiver.

Her husband is wonderful.

He's, you know, a musician who was very committed to being a father and to being sort of a more involved father than his own dad, who was a brain surgeon and, like, never around.

But he fell into these same patterns, and he wasn't there a lot.

And that's pretty typical.

In Japan, there's just this culture around work that makes it really, really difficult for fathers to spend, you know, time with their kids.

Even though a lot of them, according to polls and stuff, they want to.

They're entitled to a long paternity leave, and they just would like to be able to take it and they don't.

So, yeah, so she had a pretty...

I mean, she had a tough time in some ways; in other ways, you know, Japan has really great supports for moms, and she made a lot of mother friends through these great community centers, which I got to experience when I was there.

So I think her story really... Oh, and then I should just say at the end, when she goes back to work, I mean, she gets reassigned to a different job in a place 90 minutes away, and there's just sort of a lack of thought about working women and working mothers.

And so her story really speaks to that, that you can have all these, like, really generous benefits, but if you don't have the gender equality, I think a lot of them just they really fall flat.

- So, second woman would like to hear about is Chelsea, and she is a woman, mother living in Kenya.

Tell us about her.

- Right.

Chelsea.

And I should mention that all these women had babies within, like, days of each other.

So it's just sort of interesting to think, like.

So you have Tsukasa, and then Chelsea is in Nairobi.

She's the youngest woman that I profiled.

She was only 24 when she had her baby.

And she went into it in a pretty tough way.

I mean, she lost both of her parents just before she had her child.

And so, in some ways, this baby, she thought of it as sort of bringing a level of stability back to her life.

But there were a lot of, again, these sort of emotional things that were coming up ahead of the birth and sort of through the birth around that, around the loss of her parents, and sort of how she was gonna continue on her family in a different way now.

So she had a baby with a man she was not married to, and he begins to sort of recede from the picture, unfortunately, kind of even before she has the baby.

And she has a baby in a clinic that's sort of between a public clinic and a really sort of nice hospital.

Kenya's interesting 'cause it sort of has incorporated some of the American style.

Like, you have this just huge disparity in experience for birthing women.

So, she had a pretty good experience but did not have access to pain medication because she couldn't afford it.

So again, you know, it was tough.

And then afterwards, she's largely on her own; her boyfriend kind of leaves.

So she gets three months' paid parental leave, which is good, which is better than most women in the US get, and is pretty average for women around the world.

So she takes three months' paid leave and then goes back, and that is, again, just a difficult adjustment.

Like, there isn't a lot of support for working women.

She's looking for a place to pump; there's nowhere to pump.

She finds a file cabinet.

You know, she's in there by herself, someone walks in on her.

It's just really, really hard.

And this woman is, like, you know, doing her best.

She's trying to make it work for her and her child, and, just sort of, over and again, the system is failing her.

And eventually, yeah, she loses her job because her boss gets sort of frustrated that she's taking time to care for her child, and she ends up sort of falling into poverty.

And so you can really see how, without supports for mothers, and she didn't have the same sort of community support that her mom and her grandmother had, like, there's just not that much there for her.

And it just is a really, really hard experience.

- Yeah, Abigail, you've worked as an international reporter, and the book covers motherhood in Japan, Kenya, Finland, and the United States, in the state of Utah, in particular.

How do you find mothers, the subjects of this book, that are willing to talk to you?

And you mentioned that they all gave birth within a couple of days of each other.

How do you do that reporting when they're so geographically dispersed?

- Yeah, I mean, it was a challenge, and I wasn't sure at the beginning if it would happen, but I was like, (laughs) "I'm gonna see if I can do this 'cause it would just be so incredible to see how this plays out."

So I found the woman in Utah; that was the easiest.

You know, I actually posted on a bunch of mothers' boards and asked if anyone was interested in allowing a reporter to follow them.

And, surprisingly, there were people who were willing to do that.

(both laughing) Sarah was great.

I mean, she was totally like... She's so smart, and she's so open.

So she was just such an obvious choice for this.

And then the others, I actually worked with international reporters, sort of local reporters, you know, we used to call fixers, who help you find...

So they reached out to their sort of local community networks, and they were able to find exactly what I was looking for, which again was really incredible.

I mean, I wanted someone...

It wasn't only chronological.

Like, I wanted someone, you know, giving birth in January 2022 and also kind of middle class and in a city.

I wanted it to be really representative of mothers around the world.

So that's how I found them.

And then I visited them in-country, and I spent time with them.

And when I wasn't there, those local reporters also helped me follow them.

And they took videos, and they took photos.

And then I was just in very frequent touch with all the moms.

Like, at least once a month I had a really long, you know, like hour, hour-and-a-half conversation with them.

And we would go through what had happened.

And, yeah, I just really tried to get as much out of them with each conversation as I could.

And they were incredibly open.

And I think there was something in their heads about there were three other women around the world who they didn't know but who had also signed up for this, and they weren't gonna be the ones that sort of backed out.

And so, they were bought into the project too, and they were incredible.

So, yeah, I'm very grateful to them.

- So, as somebody who is a reporter and has written books involving research, I just wanna say your research here is exhaustive and highly commendable.

So that's a great job.

Let's hear about Anna, who is the woman who lives in Finland.

- Yeah, Anna's a concept designer.

She has a background as an artist, and that's sort of how she presents.

She's, like, (laughs) very cool.

She had this baby with a man who she was dating, but they hadn't been together very long.

And so they weren't married, which I think is, like, somewhat more typical there.

So, they were good sort of until the...

So, her birth was totally different than the other two I described.

I mean, she gave birth at a public clinic, like 99% of Finnish women, and midwives attending.

She was very happy with the whole thing.

She had access to pain medication.

You know, it was good, and it was free for her.

She left and, you know, paid nothing.

So all of those things you hear about the Finnish maternity system are, like, totally true.

I mean, it's a point of pride there.

She was happy to talk about it.

You know, I think this is something that the country really takes a lot of pride in, how well it treats birthing mothers.

And it does.

And then, you know, afterwards, she went back to the public clinic to get care for her child, and that's sort of how it works.

And their attitude was, you know, "Take care of yourself so you can take care of the baby," which was refreshing even for me as a mother to hear.

You know, it wasn't "Sacrifice everything," as Tsukasa was sort of getting the message in Japan.

Like, "Your pain is gonna help this baby."

It was completely different.

It was, you know, "As long as you are comfortable, you will be better at making the baby comfortable."

And I think that gave her a lot of freedom in the way she mothered.

And it also gave her freedom in her personal life, which was very rocky.

Like, after she had this baby, her relationship just sort of started to go south, and a lot of it revolved around gender roles.

So her partner wasn't Finish, and he had been raised by a single mom in Asia and sort of had this idea that women took care of the children, at least, as she described it, and sort of as he described it too.

And so I think that relationship couldn't survive.

But she was okay, you know?

As a single mom, because there were so many good, you know, public services, she didn't feel like she had to stay in this relationship that wasn't working.

So there was a lot of sort of ups and downs and drama between them.

But in the end, they sort of came out okay and she did as well.

And she really relied heavily on her community and on the public services to get her through.

And you could see how much freedom it gave her as compared to the other women.

Freedom in her own life, freedom in the way she mothered.

I thought that was really powerful.

- So you mentioned an American living in Utah, and that, of course, is Sarah.

Tell us about her.

A little bit more detail, please.

- Yeah, she's great.

As I said, she's very funny.

I love talking to her.

So she grew up in a Mormon household with six siblings, and she knew pretty early on that's not what she wanted for her own family.

When she had kids, she wanted to do something different.

A lot of it was around the gender roles and sort of, she didn't want to be, as she called it, the Holly housewife, like, just doing all the housework, and have a husband who worked, that was not for her.

So she left the Church, and she found Brian, who was totally bought in.

You know, I think she didn't expect him to be so okay with it, but he really was.

He was very open inded, even though he also came from a Mormon upbringing.

He's an Amazon delivery driver.

So, they sort of set out with this goal of having a very different life than the one in which they were raised.

But, you know, she works in a school.

She used to be a teacher, and she does technology now.

She gets pretty generous leave for an American, but still, it wasn't as good as any of the other women.

It was three months, but not fully paid.

And Brian got nothing as an Amazon delivery driver, which I think is really notable because when you look at sort of Amazon management level, and they have all sorts of benefits.

But, you know, as a delivery driver, he didn't get any.

So, she was pretty much alone, and she didn't have public help in a way that, you know, in Japan and Finland, those women did.

And she really struggled.

She didn't have the community her mom did, sort of like Chelsea in Kenya.

She didn't have that sort of Mormon Church to back her up.

So she ended up getting pretty stressed out by the whole thing.

She went to her doctor and she was prescribed antidepressants.

You know, I think she took a huge amount of joy in her baby, like all of them did.

And I think that really carried her through in a lot of ways.

But you could see how much difference it made just not to feel the support of the community, not to feel the support of public services behind you.

And she sort of recognized that, you know... She said at one point, like, "I decided to have this baby.

It's my responsibility to take care of it."

Which was just so American, you know?

(laughs) As if children aren't the responsibility of a full community, you know?

So, yeah, childcare was a huge burden for her.

She couldn't find anything affordable nearby.

So she asked her parents to care for her baby, but it added, like, two hours to our commute.

I mean, it was just a lot.

And she said, "Maybe I won't have any more kids because I can't imagine how I'm..." You know, "I can't ask them to care for another one."

So, this idea that we want women in the US to have more babies but provide no support for them to do it, I mean, it was just so evident in her story.

- Yeah.

Abigail, when you sit back in your quiet moments now, even after having published the book, and you think about these four women and the others that you talk to in the reporting and research for this, what lingers with you?

What do you take away from this that it just sort of emerges from the complex lives that you report on?

- Yeah.

I think when I, you know, became a mother, I approached it as if it was sort of my individual responsibility, and it was something I was gonna take on, me and my husband, you know, my family.

But what I learned from this reporting was there is sort of no way to disentangle yourself from the culture and the country, you know, you have your baby, which you give birth.

And motherhood is sort of inherently political.

We think of it as this, you know, very personal, almost sort of very soft, sort of behind closed doors kind of a thing.

But so much of it depends on the rights that mothers have, how much support they're given.

It is a completely impossible responsibility to take on as an individual, and that's what we ask of Americans.

And so this book, in some ways, was sort of an implicit comparison of the rest of the world to the US, and really asking the question, like, why is it so hard here?

And I think a lot of us sort of look for answers in the wrong places maybe.

You know, you look for these parenting hacks.

But, in fact, it's so much bigger than that.

I mean, it's the system, and if we want it to be different on an individual level, it has to be different on a systemic level.

- So, talk about that in a little more depth.

I mean, a big piece of your book, and of the issues we're talking about here, is healthcare.

Why can't this country, the richest in the history of civilization, do a better job of providing healthcare and support for its people, whether mothers, babies, fathers, whatever?

You know, we talked about that before we started taping, and I think we agreed that that's really one of the overriding issues here.

So I've been long-winded here, and if you can just talk about that a little.

- Yeah, it's absolutely true.

And it's so obvious when you, you know, put the countries side by side, like, how far behind the US is.

And, you know, there is a history that explains some of why these other countries have things we don't.

You know, post-World War II, they were sort of rebuilding, and so they use these social supports as ways to encourage people to have more babies.

They needed to increase their population, and they needed women to work.

There just weren't enough workers.

So, you know, that applies to Japan and Finland.

And the US had a different history, obviously, and it wasn't forced to make those decisions and provide that support.

So in some ways that's part of it.

But, you know, there's a bigger question about, like, what is it about the US that makes it so hard for us to support each other?

And the three themes that I sort of kept coming back to, where you could call them, like, our fatal flaws, you know, sexism, racism, and corporate greed, or sort of corporate interference in democracy.

And, you know, I looked at three things: it was, as you said, healthcare, and then it was paid leave, and it was childcare.

And in all of those, we have a history of sort of getting close, or there are these movements to try to expand services to people.

And it's those three things that keep coming up.

So, you know, just paid leave very briefly, there's been a movement for it for 100 years.

I mean, it's unbelievable.

And, you know, at the beginning it was, "Women shouldn't be working anyway."

There was this whole sexism.

And then it was, you know, we can't provide it to Black women and women of color who are working, 'cause, you know, there's just always been a problem with that, with sort of extending it to everyone.

I think, you know, that's part of the problem.

It's, like, thinking that people are undeserving of these services comes up a lot.

And then, you know, when it finally did seem in the '70s, like, really, this is needed.

There are women working, you know, we need paid leave.

Then the corporate lobby gets involved and says, like... You know, there was one group that said, "We don't wanna subsidize parenthood."

So this idea that, like, corporations would have to take on the burden.

And they influenced Congress, and that was sort of the end of that push for paid leave.

And so you can just see each time things come up and then it sort of gets killed in that way.

And I will just add one thing, which is so interesting, that now corporations have figured out that these benefits are actually something they wanna offer because it allows them to recruit more qualified employees.

So they're sort of using it as a competitive advantage.

I talked to one congressman who told me, like, he tried to get tech companies on board with expanding paid leave to everyone, and they said they didn't wanna do it; they wanted to use it for themselves.

So what we end up with is this completely unequal system.

You know, we have income inequality, but we also have this inequality in benefits.

Some people have great healthcare here, and some... Well.

(laughs) But you know, some people have really good benefits here, and a lot of people don't.

And that also makes it really hard for these movements to take off.

When you have some people who are very privileged, they need to sort of recognize that privilege, that privilege of benefits, and still work to make sure that everyone is treated equally.

It's just really important for the health of our democracy.

- Did this change your thinking?

You mentioned that when you had your kids, you thought, "Hey, this is my responsibility, my husband and I, our family, we're gonna take care of this ourselves."

I think you hinted at this, but did it change the way you think about motherhood in the course of reporting this book?

- It did.

I mean, it made me think about the big systems at play, and it also made me really recognize the importance of it.

It's so important, and that's why it's such a political issue, you know?

Like, the way we treat mothers, the way we raise the next generation is just, it's sort of everything, you know, (laughs) the way we treat families.

And I think a lot of the political turmoil we're seeing now is disgruntled families out there who, you know, it's sort of this anger about the state of affairs, but it gets misdirected in different ways.

So, yes, I do think about motherhood differently.

I feel like it's important.

I also feel like it's not all my responsibility, and that relieves me of some of the daily...

I mean, not entirely.

Like, it's hard to, you know, feel completely calm in these situations, but some of the daily stressors, I think, it's important, and I've found it helpful to recognize that it's not, like, my fault that it's so hard.

- Well, the book has just been published.

We don't wanna rush it, but what are you working on next?

- (laughs) Yeah, hopefully, something, you know, similarly about women, narrative nonfiction.

But honestly, right now, I just really wanna spend time with my own three kids.

They're a little jealous of all the time I've been spending doing this.

(laughs) - Fair enough.

Fair enough.

Abigail Leonard.

The book is "Four Mothers," and it's important.

Thank you so much for being with us.

That is all the time we have this week.

But if you wanna know more about "Story in the Public Square," you can find us on social media or visit PellCenter.org, where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

For G. Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes, asking you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

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