I promise to write some content of my own for my blog.. very soon. In the meantime, here’s another good read, and this time from The Australian newspaper. The article, Suburban Medeas is about the recent popularity in novels about bad mothers. Really bad mothers. Mothers who abuse their children, abandon their children and even kill their children. Cheerful escapism it is not. But even if you’re not in the mood for reading these novels, and of those mentioned I’ve only read We Need To Talk About Kevin (which I enjoyed, but then I have a cold, black heart), the analysis of their sudden emergence is quite fascinating.
Leslie Cannold, feminist, ethicist and author of books including What, No Baby? Why Women are Losing the Freedom to Mother, says because mothers are still largely responsible for the care of the young and vulnerable, “We can’t help but be fascinated and terrified at the same time by the idea of the mother who isn’t going to fulfil the standards of good motherhood.”
“I think these books are evidence of women pushing back against pat little definitions of who a good mother is and what a good mother does.”
Cannold notes that while motherhood has been re-idealised — think childbirth without pain relief or breastfeeding on demand — there has been no extra practical support for mothers at home with young children. (Noli’s book illustrates this graphically.) “Mothers at home are idealised and unsupported, which can be a fatal combination,” Cannold says. “I don’t think anybody could argue that that isn’t the case. What has changed?”
Cannold agrees that for all the reforms wrought by feminism, aberrant or cruel mothers still shock us far more than deviant fathers: “That will be the case so long as mothers are taking primary care of the youngest children. At the moment, a deviant father is sitting safely in his office for 10 hours a day, so he’s usually not so much of a threat.”
If I wasn’t so tired right now I’d have something to say about all this. Maybe even something smart. (Thanks Shelley for the article tip, next time maybe you can write the post? I’m only half kidding.)
One of the things we’ll probably never know is whether what a mother feels for her newborn baby has a significant instinct component over and above that of the father. I don’t think the long term bond has any direct connection to instinct (I’m sure adoptive mothers feel the same bond as genetic mothers), but I wonder whether such an instinct might drive some of the imbalance between men and women’s nurturing of very young babies.
Perhaps there is a chain along the lines of instinct -> slightly stronger drive to nurture them when they are tiny -> slightly lower tendency to fail to form a long term bond. Essentially such an instinct makes it less likely that a mother will fail to form a bond that prevents grossly bad mothering than the father, and so it seems more inconceivable to us that a mother could act in that way.
I don’t know whether I believe in such a thing. I was terribly surprised by my connection with my babies, despite academically really not liking babies. It felt to me like something primal, that I have no control over, but I obviously can’t speak for others. Nor am I discounting higher social aspects. Just a thought.
I actually can’t read this kind of stuff, I just can’t separate my self well enough. Something else that changed when I spawned…
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