Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace (2 page)

I feel enough of Spears’s pain to find myself wondering at the genesis of our current obsession with these varied archetypical manifestations of maternal evil. To a certain extent, of course, we’ve always been both terrified and titillated by the Bad Mother. Think Euripides’ Medea and Agave, think Jocasta, think Joan Crawford. But I can’t help but feel—and perhaps only because I’ve
been tried and convicted of the crime—that there is something especially sharpened and hysterical about contemporary Bad Mother vitriol. The frequency with which a new Bad Mother is unmasked, and the extent of our interest in each one, are, I believe, more than merely symptoms of the contemporary general degeneration of civility. While, granted, the human dum-dum bullets of message boards like UrbanBaby hardly exemplify the attitudes of the civil and decent core of American society, they do seem to distill to a vile essence what is a widespread societal preoccupation with Bad Mothers.

There is an appealing sociopolitical rationale for our preoccupation with Bad Mothers, one articulated to me by the feminist scholar and advocate Lynn Paltrow, founder and executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women. Getting us to focus on Bad Mothers, she says, is part of a larger political agenda to keep our attention off the truth—that it is not our mothers but our government that has failed us. The patriarchy and its political, media, and profit-making machines encourage us to scapegoat and vilify one bogeymama after another, because worrying about egregious freak-show moms like Wendy Cook and Britney Spears distracts us from the fact that, for example, President George W. Bush cheerfully vetoed a law that would have provided health insurance to four million uninsured children.

As persuasive as I find Paltrow’s argument, something in me rebels at the notion that we can attribute our communal obsession primarily to the patriarchy. I agree with her that we are just at the very beginning of accepting the notion of gender equality (it’s only been, as she says, “a microsecond in the course of history”). Still, the blare of condemnation that drowns out so much of civil discourse on the subject of mothering and child rearing originates not from some patriarchal grand inquisitor’s office but, in large
part, from individual women. And while women have always, historically, been the enforcers of acceptable social conduct, even when it was to their detriment (remember Abigail Williams, the lead accuser in the Salem witch trials?), an hour or two surfing the myriad of mommy blogs provides compelling support for the notion that, in this area at least, we women are the primary authors of our own subjugation. The Bad Mother cops with the most aggressive arrest records are women.

And why? Because the Andrea Yateses and Susan Smiths, the “crack hos” and the welfare moms, provide us with a profound personal service. By defining for us the kinds of mothers we’re not, they make it easier for us to stomach what we are.

When I polled an unscientific sampling of my friends and family, they had no trouble defining what it meant to be a Good Father. A Good Father is characterized quite simply by his presence. He shows up. In the delivery room, at dinnertime (when he can), to school recitals and ball games (whenever it’s reasonably possible). He’s a good provider who is not above changing a diaper or wearing a Baby Björn. He’s a strong shoulder to cry on and, at the same time, a constant example of how to roll with the punches. This definition seems to accommodate, without contradiction, both an older, sentimentalized
Father Knows Best
version of a dad and our post–
Free to Be You and Me
assumptions.

However, my polling sample had a difficult time describing a Good Mother without resorting to hyperbole, beneath which it’s possible to discern a hint of angry self-flagellation.

“Mary Poppins, but biologically related to you and she doesn’t leave at the end of the movie.”

“She lives only in the present and entirely for her kids.”

“She has infinite patience.”

“She remembers to serve fruit at breakfast, is always cheerful
and never yells, manages not to project her own neuroses and inadequacies onto her children, is an active and beloved community volunteer; she remembers to make playdates, her children’s clothes fit, and she does art projects with them and enjoys all their games. And she is never too tired for sex.”

“She’s everything that I’m not.”

These responses might be colored by the fact that my polling sample, despite containing a moderate amount of racial, religious, and socioeconomic diversity, was composed of women of approximately the same age (mid-thirties to early forties) and the same level of education (which can be described, succinctly, as “more than they use”). Nonetheless, the common elements in the responses make a compelling statement both about the pervasive power of the antiquated June Cleaver vision of motherhood and about how badly we fall short.

The single defining characteristic of iconic Good Motherhood is self-abnegation. Her children’s needs come first; their health and happiness are her primary concern. They occupy all her thoughts, her day is constructed around them, and anything and everything she does is for their sakes. Her own needs, ambitions, and desires are relevant only in relation to theirs. If a Good Mother takes care of herself, it is only to the extent that she doesn’t hurt her children. As one of my polling samples put it, “She is able to figure out how to carve out time for herself without detriment to her children’s feelings of self-worth.” If a Good Mother works, she does so only if it doesn’t harm her children, or if her failing to earn an income would make them worse off. More important, even the act of considering her own needs and desires is engaged in primarily to make her children into better people. As one woman told me, “A Good Mother is in shape and works outside of the home so she can be a good role model.”

Being a Good Father is a reasonable, attainable goal; you need only be present and supportive. Being a Good Mother, as defined by mothers themselves, is impossible. When asked for an example of a Good Mother, the women I polled came up with June Cleaver and Marmee, from
Little Women
. Both of whom are by necessity, not coincidence, fictional characters. The Good Mother does not exist, and she has never existed, not even in those halcyon bygone days to which the arbiters of maternal conduct never tire of harking back. If the producers of
Leave It to Beaver
had really wanted to give us an accurate depiction of late-1950s and early-1960s motherhood, June would have had a lipstick-stained cigarette clamped between her teeth, a gin and tonic in her hand, and a copy of
Peyton Place
on her nightstand. But still, this creature of fantasy is whom the mothers in my sample measured themselves against, and their failure to live up to her made them feel like Bad Mothers.

It’s as if the swimmer Tracy Caulkins, winner of three Olympic gold medals, setter of five world records, were to beat herself up for being slower than the Little Mermaid.

Without exception, the mothers I know feel like they have failed to measure up. As Judith Warner so eloquently wrote in her book
Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety
, “This widespread, choking cocktail of guilt and anxiety and resentment and regret … is poisoning motherhood.”

I have been pondering the reasons for this maternal anxiety ever since I first found myself suffering from it, sitting in a playground, my briefcase traded in for a diaper bag, my focus narrowed to my baby and myself, my ambition curdling into something I thought was anger but I now realize was closer to despair. I had always been hard-driving and ambitious, myopically fixated on my career. But I was working long hours, and after a day taking care of
desperately needy people who looked to me to keep them from spending years, decades, or even the rest of their lives in jail, I had nothing left for my baby. I was jealous of Michael, a work-at-home writer who got to spend long, languid hours with our daughter, dressing her up in her new outfits and shuttling her from Mommy & Me to the library. One day I simply packed up my desk, tossed my framed diplomas into the attic, and became a stay-at-home mom.

It was everything that I thought it would be. Mommy & Me, story time at the library, Gymboree, long stroller walks with my stay-at-home-mommy friends. And then the next day it was Mommy & Me, story time at the library, Gymboree, and long stroller walks with my stay-at-home-mommy friends. And the day after that, and the day after that, and the day after that.

Within a week I had gone mad.

I took a certain satisfaction in the fact that I was now the most important person in the day-to-day life of my child, but I was also bored and miserable. And the fact that I was bored and miserable terrified me. A Good Mother is never bored, is she? She is never miserable. A Good Mother doesn’t resent looking up from her novel to examine a child’s drawing. She doesn’t stare at the clock in music class, willing it along with all the power of a fourth grader waiting for recess. She doesn’t hide the finger paints because she can’t stand the mess. A Good Mother not only puts her children’s needs and interests above her own but enjoys doing it. If I wasn’t enjoying myself, then I wasn’t a Good Mother. On the contrary, I was a bad one.

The intense Bad Mother anxiety felt by me and by so many of the women I know has everything to do with what the journalist Peggy Orenstein, author of
Flux: Women on Sex, Work, Love, Kids
,
and Life in a Half-Changed World
, calls “making pre–Betty Friedan choices in a post–Betty Friedan universe.” When we were little girls—we daughters of the late 1960s and the 1970s—none of us said we wanted to be wives and mothers when we grew up. None of us said we wanted to run the nursery school committee or frost perfect cupcakes or spend our days ferrying children back and forth from hockey games to music classes. We all had ambitions that went beyond the confines of our own houses. We wanted to work, to have careers, to have professions. But for so many of us, the realities of the workplace and of family life have either defeated or drastically changed these expectations. When career advancement demands a sixty-or seventy-hour workweek, when the child-care bill approaches or exceeds your paycheck, or when simple survival requires a second job, juggling home and family suddenly shifts from the challenging to the impossible. Someone usually ends up sacrificing his or her career to some extent, and in a world where a woman still earns roughly seventy cents to a man’s dollar, and where a man’s identity is still almost exclusively defined by what he does, that someone is almost always the mother.

So here we are, either staying home or making serious professional compromises in order to be more available to our children or feeling like terrible mothers for having failed to make those sacrifices. I imagine there are some mothers who have without regret channeled all of their ambition and energy into making homemade Play-Doh, organizing the nursery school capital campaign, and directing the fifth-grade social committee, but I have never met one. Most of the women I know feel an underlying and corrosive sense of disappointment and anxiety. The women I know are, on some level, unfulfilled. And the women I know spend a lot of time trying to avoid wondering whether the sacrifice was worth it.

It’s that very wondering, it’s the being unfulfilled, that makes us feel the worst. That’s what triggers our most intense anxiety. Feeling dissatisfied, bored, and unhappy is unpleasant, yes, but what really scares us is the very
fact
of our dissatisfaction, boredom, and unhappiness. Because a mother who isn’t satisfied with being a mother, a mother who wants to do more than spend her days with her children, a mother who can imagine more, is selfish. And just as the Good Mother is defined by her self-abnegation, the single most important, defining characteristic of the Bad Mother is her selfishness.

Even if we sympathize with Andrea Yates’s postpartum depression, even if we’ve suffered from it ourselves, even if we are ready to acknowledge that homeschooling five children in a converted school bus would probably on its own be enough to drive us to homicide, we condemn Yates for having succumbed to her despair. She valued her own misery more than her children’s lives. We condemn the Bad Mother even when she is the primary victim of her own tragedy, like, for example, Carol Anne Gotbaum, the Upper West Side mother of three who, while on her way to an alcohol rehabilitation facility, died in police custody after an altercation in the Phoenix airport. “Yes, I’m sure she was mother of the year,” snapped an UrbanBaby mom-squad assassin, after someone wrote a sympathetic post about Gotbaum, “what with her severe alcoholism, suicide attempts, and tendency towards verbal abuse.” Another deemed the entire incident an example of “self-indulgent nonsense.”

When Susan Smith drove her two children into a lake, one of the most compelling facts about the case, one reported in the press over and over again, was that she had allegedly done so because the man she was dating didn’t like kids. Here was this woman who
was clearly insane, but the media narrative about her was that she valued the satisfaction she got from her lover, she valued his wealth and attention, more than she valued her children’s lives. Instead of getting a real analysis of the psychology of her crime, we were told that Susan Smith killed her children in order to be loved, and to be rich. Selfish bitch.

Even the maternal crimes of idiot starlets like Britney Spears amount essentially to selfishness. She’d rather go out to clubs than take care of her kids. She’d rather sleep in than report for her drug tests. She’s spoiled rotten, and a rotten mother because she’s so spoiled.

Not long ago I reread
Anna Karenina
, in Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s magnificent new translation. In the novel there is an achingly sad scene where Anna, who has abandoned her husband and beloved son to be with her lover, excoriates herself with the worst insult she can imagine—she’s an unnatural mother. A natural mother, one who understood the relative insignificance of her own happiness, would never have indulged it. Most of us are, obviously, not about to fling ourselves beneath the wheels of a locomotive, but the fear of being an unnatural mother, a Bad Mother, is all too familiar to us. We are supposed not only to sacrifice ourselves for our children but to do so willingly, cheerfully, and without ever feeling any seething resentment, and when we fail, as we must, we feel guilty and ashamed.