On maternity

Philip Dey Eastman’s classic story for “beginning readers”, Are You My Mother?, starts with a mother bird who realizes that her egg is about to hatch. Being a good, responsible mother, she flies off to get the hatchling something to eat when he emerges. In the meantime, the baby bird pops out of the egg, falls “down, down, down!” from the nest, and finds himself alone in the world, unable to fly or fend for himself. But he can walk, and he decides to look for his mother. Unfortunately, and comically, he does not know what she looks like. So he walks right past her, though the reader sees her, busily engaged on tugging up a nice fat worm. He encounters a series of animals and other objects, and asks each of them in turn, “Are you my mother?”. Finally, a huge power shovel – which, being the largest, seems like the most likely maternal candidate of all – lets out a scary-sounding “SNOOOORT!”, and lifts the baby “up, up, up!”. The illusion is shattered: the baby realizes, “You are not my mother! You are a big scary SNORT!”. But, in yet another thrilling reversal of fortune, the Snort drops the bird back into its own nest. Just then, the mother bird comes home. She asks, “Do you know who I am?”, and the baby bird says, “Yes!”. He knows she is his mother because she is not any of the other creatures he has encountered. He therefore knows that she is a bird, and she is his mother.

This brilliant little tale articulates many of the paradoxes inherent in the relationship of mothers and their children. On the one hand, motherhood seems to be a natural bond; the mother instinctively knows when her egg will hatch, understands what her child will need, and instantly wants to care for him. The child knows that he has a mother, even without having seen her. But the story also plays on the fact that motherhood is a cultural institution, created by behaviour and society as much as by nature. The baby bird’s final realization is that the word “mother” makes sense only once one knows a whole system of other terms and their meanings. Children can’t really know their mothers until they know something about the world in which they live.

A recent collection of essays on motherhood and mothering in antiquity, Mothering and Motherhood in Ancient Greece and Rome, reminds us that questions about what it means to be a mother were also present in ancient Greek and Roman societies, despite some significant differences. Motherhood marked a transition from the father’s house to the husband’s, and from childhood to adulthood; it is worth noting here that many women in antiquity became wives and mothers at an age when they would nowadays still be considered children (like twelve or thirteen – a fact which, as the authors of this collection note, must have done nothing to lower the rates of maternal mortality). Those who didn’t die were made stronger: motherhood was seen (at least in theory, and at least by men) as improving women’s social position. One of the most interesting pieces in this collection discusses the relationship of ancient prostitutes to their daughters – who, as the author (Anise Strong) rightly notes, must mostly have been wanted children, since the use of contraception, abortifacients and exposure were all widespread and perfectly acceptable, at least in many social groups in the ancient world. She emphasizes that prostitutes had not only emotional but also very solid economic reason for wanting daughters: as soon as they hit puberty, they could be sold either as wives or as prostitutes, just as the mother’s market value began to plummet.

The relationship between woman as mother, and woman as sex object in antiquity is also the subject of Genevieve Liveley’s essay, which draws an analogy between the “yummy mummies” and “MILF”s who are popular in contemporary British and American cultural imaginations, and the “sexy mothers” of Augustan Rome. She argues that the depiction of Venus on the Ara Pacis can be seen as an attempt to suggest that motherhood can be not only moral, but also erotic. Lively’s essay is the most explicit in its attempt to draw connections between ancient and modern preoccupations about motherhood. Unfortunately, the analogy is applied in a very haphazard way. Liveley moves from the question raised by a New York Times article in 2005, of whether modern mothers are getting enough sex, straight to the representation of “sexy mothers” in Roman sources – as if subjective and objective models of “sexiness” were entirely the same. Looking sexy is obviously not identical with feeling sexual desire or being sexually satisfied, and it never was, even in antiquity. These male-authored sources, and monuments built by men, cannot tell us much about what Roman women thought or felt about the relationship of sex to motherhood — so the NYT article is entirely irrelevant. They can, however, tell us a great deal about male desires and anxieties about the female body as both erotic and maternal.

Other essays in the collection are more perceptive about the limitations and strengths of the sources. Patricia Salzman-Mitchell’s account of breastfeeding mothers in Greek and Latin literature suggests that these texts articulate a deep fear about the woman’s breast as both nurturing and – incestuously, revoltingly, dangerously – desirable. Clytemnestra, in Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers, dreams that she has given birth to a snake, and that the creature is suckling at her breast; Orestes then kills her, as Salzman-Mitchell suggests, in an attempt to “repress the image … of his mother’s semi-naked body”.

She could have pushed rather further on this point: the dream surely shows Clytemnestra’s own fear as much as her son’s. Even male authors of antiquity were aware that motherhood was a very dangerous business, for women as well as for men and babies. Those who survived to adulthood must have been conscious that their mothers could have died giving birth to them; men must have been aware that fathering children on their wives could, and quite likely would, kill them. Orestes, who kills his mother in adulthood, is supposedly justified in his action, because he is avenging his father – and the Oresteia itself can be read as, among other things, an attempt to justify matricide and fatherhood (which are, revealingly, linked together). But the cultural background of the play includes the awareness that children very often “kill” their mothers, simply by being born; and husbands often “kill” their wives by making them pregnant.

Ancient mothers were also very likely to watch their babies die. One estimate, cited in this book, suggests that in the ancient Greek world no more than one in three infants survived. Of course, it often happened, then as now, that both mother and child died in a difficult birth. But in other cases, one lived and the other died – confirming a suspicion that the mother’s interests and the child’s might not always be aligned. The perceived tension between the needs of the mother and the needs of the child is well articulated in an essay by Yurie Hong on “discourses of maternity” in Greek medical writings. Hong suggests that, while some Hippocratic texts see a natural harmony between the body of a pregnant woman and that of her foetus, in others the foetus is described as an agent with the power to damage the mother, or kill her. This perception went well beyond medical writings: a funerary inscription from Paros in the second century speaks with the voices of a dead mother, who is made by the (presumably male) writer to blame her death on her (also dead) baby: “The unstoppable Fury of the newborn infant took me, bitter, from my happy life with a fatal hemorrhage. I did not bring the child to light by my labor pains, but it lies hiding in its mother’s womb among the dead”. The more one reads about motherhood in the ancient world, the more understandable Medea’s famous line becomes in Euripides’ play: “I would rather stand behind the shield three times, than give birth just once”.

If we fast-forward to Britain in the twentieth century, there are certain respects in which things look much the same. Women are still the ones who have primary responsibility for the care and raising of children; motherhood is still seen as both a source of pride, a potential asset for social status, a source of joy and satisfaction for women, and a threat to the mother’s own autonomy. Mothers are still pressured, by society at large, to fulfil certain, fairly rigid, social roles. Good mothers are still idealized; bad mothers (the Medeas or Clytemnestras) are still demonized. Both men and women, both mothers themselves and their children, as well as philosophers and social commentators, still wonder whether being a good mother is compatible with any other role. Both men and women still wonder whether motherhood necessarily spoils women’s looks, and whether there’s something a bit creepy about combining sex with motherhood.

There are important differences as well. One is that, in the course of the twentieth century, pregnancy and giving birth have become far safer. Presumably in no previous culture in history has such a high percentage of women and babies survived the process of childbirth. In that way at least, mothers never had it so good; more of them get through it alive. The second huge difference between ancient and modern mothers is that it is normal, in modern European and American societies, for women to work outside the home, including occupations other than temple-keeping and prostitution. This is clearly a change to which our culture has not yet fully adjusted; all the books under review here deal, in some way or another, with the tensions involved in combining motherhood with work.

From the historian’s perspective, there is a further big difference between the study of ancient and modern mothers, which is that we can get a far more detailed picture of the economic, social and personal experiences of women in the twentieth century. But the picture that emerges is sometimes not much more encouraging than that of Greek tragedy. Sinners? Scroungers? Saints?, Pat Thane and Tanya Evans’s account of single motherhood in twentieth-century England, provides a series of painful snapshots of how difficult life was in this period for many unmarried mothers and their children, both economically and socially – especially for the poor. Poverty, rather than motherhood per se, emerges as the real social evil here: as the authors acknowledge, there are some single mothers who are at no particular socio-economic disadvantage, while there are other two-parent households that struggle to get by.

Angela Davis’s Modern Motherhood overlaps in period and topic with Thane and Evans’s, but provides a very different picture. Davis focuses almost entirely on married mothers living in Oxfordshire (some of whom are divorced), and gives us individual mothers’ perceptions of their own lives. A great virtue of the book is that, although her evidence is almost all based on interviews, she is suitably sceptical about the actual reliability of oral testimony: she notes that the women’s own accounts of their past experiences are often deeply self-contradictory. For instance, one mother idealizes the 1960s as “a golden age for the family”, when everybody was together round the dinner table – and then admits that her husband abandoned her and she was left to raise her young children by herself, in those same lovely 1960s. The ideal and the reality of motherhood and family can co-exist in the mind, without ever speaking to one another. Davis challenges the idea that the latter part of the twentieth century showed pure progress, with ever greater social freedom for women who are mothers. Rather, many of her interviewees suggest that the best time to be a mother was in the 1970s – when it was socially acceptable for women either to work, or to stay at home with their babies.

Davis is much more interested in the institutional structures surrounding motherhood, and larger social pressures and deprivations felt by her subjects, than in the power relationships within the home itself. She has very little to say about whether the mothers in her study were able to share the chores and responsibilities of childcare with their partners, and apparently didn’t ask much about it. Rebecca Asher’s Shattered: Modern motherhood and the illusion of equality provides a clear vision of the big picture, as well as of the specificity and complexity of individual mothers and their children, and a nuanced but appropriately radical set of suggestions about how social and political change might be possible. Asher’s work is based both on published sociological research and a series of personal interviews with both mothers and fathers (which she cites rather repetitively). She argues that both the burdens and the satisfactions of raising children still fall far more heavily on women than men, in Britain (her main focus), and – in somewhat different ways – in the United States and much of Western Europe – except in the Scandanavian countries, which are (mostly) her ideal.

Asher rightly treats the opportunity to interact closely with one’s children as a privilege as well as a burden. Men, she suggests, are missing out in the current patriarchal system, in that most do not have the choice to work flexible hours in order to combine parenting with their careers; they are not given the option, or do not think to ask for it. They, too, should be given the opportunity to spend more time with their children, and experience the intimacy, laughter, boredom and rage that come with the territory. She argues that we must move from raising children by “mothering” them, to a far more equal reality of “parenting” – which must be created by government intervention (for instance in forcing more men to take paternity leave), by cultural changes (we need to all get in the habit of being more supportive of men who do childcare, and women who work – and not act surprised by either one); and also by changes within relationships and within the home (so, when both partners work, men need to do fully half of the housework and childcare, not just little bits here and there). All this ought not to need saying, but it demonstrably still does, and I’m glad Asher says it.

There is a deeply rooted idea in our culture that mothers, far more than fathers, are responsible not just for picking up the toys and changing the nappies, but also for how the child turns out in the end, for good or ill. The psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott was one of the most influential voices in articulating this position. He developed the idea of the “good enough” mother: the one who, whatever her imperfections, is able to create an environment in which the child’s “true self” can be recognized and protected. The good-enough mother looks her baby in the eye, and by mirroring the child’s face, shows the child that she is seen, known and safe. On one level, then, Winnicottian ideas might seem liberating for mothers; they need only be “good enough”, not perfect; and the most psychologically essential parenting function – eye contact, or “eye love” – can be performed by either parent, or any other caregiver. But in practice, Winnicott’s child-centric vision has often been taken as a platform from which to pressurize or blame mothers, for failing to be “good enough”.

Terri Apter’s Difficult Mothers does exactly that. It is a developed meditation on what it means not to be a “good enough” mother, and what these monsters do to their children. Apter, a psychologist and author of several earlier popular psychology books, acknowledges at the start that she may seem to be, yet again, blaming mothers for all society’s ills; that “difficult parents” could, in theory, include fathers as well as mothers; and that it is obviously wrong to assume that people who perceive their mother as difficult, or complain to their therapists about having a difficult mother, were necessarily raised by a woman who was, in any objective sense, not “good enough”. The “difficult mother” is supposed to be short-hand for “a difficult relationship with a mother”, or (perhaps?) other parent-figure. Despite these caveats, it’s hard not to read Apter’s book as a vehicle for her own revenge against her dead, angry, not-good-enough mother – and, more broadly, as an attack on the mothers who have supposedly failed their children.

Apter reckons that about 20 per cent of mothers are failures in this way, a number based on her own minuscule sample of patients. It would have been wonderful if Apter could have seen her way to analysing difficult fathers alongside difficult mothers, and if she could have avoided labelling women, yet again, as both the more powerful and the more damaging of the two parents. Why can’t Jason, just once, be blamed for killing some children? Apter comes up with five categories of Difficult Mother – Angry, Controlling, Narcissistic, Envious, and Emotionally Unavailable – and it’s hard not to believe that there are rather large numbers of fathers who could be fitted into some or all of these categories. The implicit misogyny mars what is otherwise a fairly useful, albeit very broad-brush, analysis of how adults can imagine their parents as stunting their emotional development, and how they can rethink these negative patterns.

Alison Bechdel’s brilliant diptych of graphic novel memoirs about her parents can be lined up fairly neatly next to Apter’s boxes, but those boxes look woefully thin next to the rich texture of Bechdel’s carefully considered, deeply thought writing and illustrations. The books are entirely personal, and rightly make no claim to generalize about mothers or fathers. But as Bechdel also says to her mother in the second book: “Don’t you think that … if you write minutely and rigorously enough about your own life … you can, you know, transcend your particular self?”. The mother is unconvinced (and comments that Wallace Stevens wrote transcendent poetry, but never used the word “I”). But Bechdel manages to make a pretty persuasive case, transforming her own, utterly odd and quirky personal experiences into a revelatory account of how parents and children shape and mirror one another.

Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? incorporates her own psychology into the fabric of the narrative. Psychology is the structural principle of the book, as novels and myth were for her first memoir Fun Home: A family tragicomic (2006). The seven sections of the narrative are titled with ideas from Winnicott (from “Ordinary Devoted Mother” to “The Use of an Object”). Bechdel’s central story is of her own struggle to accept the fact that her mother does not entirely accept her. The mother disapproves both of her homosexuality and the “narrow scope” of her work. Bechdel longs for a mother who will be, in Winnicott’s terms, a perfect mirror, who will enable the formation of her “true self” by accepting her as she is (“when I look I am seen, so I exist”). She wants an affectionate, fully present mother, who will cuddle her, as her girlfriends do, or who will tell her, as a therapist does, that she is “adorable”.

Are You My Mother? has no explicit allusions to Philip Dey Eastman’s story beyond the shared title, but traces a similar narrative arc. The mother, in the first sequence, seems to abandon the adult Bechdel by refusing to be supportive about her plan to write a memoir of her father (“I can’t help you. You’re on your own”). But the intervening chapters gradually show the child, in both adulthood and childhood, beginning to discover both her mother and herself, in the course of conversations and relationships with other people. The beautiful final sequence takes us back, for the last time, to Bechdel’s childhood. It is reminiscent of the very beginning of Fun Home, in which Bechdel’s father lifted her child-self up high on his legs, like Icarus – but neither she nor he seemed to have any way to get down; they were doomed to crash and burn. In a more-than-neat circular composition, Are You My Mother? ends with Bechdel’s child-self again down on the floor, but this time with her mother above her, who says, “Alison, get off the floor!”. The child replies, “I can’t! I’m crippled!” And the mother – in a game which Bechdel identifies as “the moment my mother taught me to write” – replies, “Oh. Do you need some leg braces?” She helps her up not with a hand, but with a way of developing her own imagination. Bechdel movingly acknowledges here how much more her mother gave her than her father. The mother, for Bechdel, is both the child’s mirror, and the one who makes it possible for her to enter and operate in the world: “she could see my invisible wounds”, she says, “because they were hers too”.

Motherhood can best be studied as Bechdel studies it, by probing examinations of particular, individual relationships. Mothers are all different, because they are all human. The good enough mother is one who gives her child what it needs to grow up. The good enough child is one who manages to grow up, and in doing so, is able to recognize her mother’s humanity.

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