The very bad mother

More people worrying about how tough the middle-class and upper-class mother has it these days. And we do, thanks for thinking of us. This new book, called The Monster Within: The Hidden Side of Motherhood by psychotherapist and psychoanalyst, Barbara Almond sounds really intriguing (like, what is vampyric mothering, you may ask).. and also a little bothersome – psychoanalysis with its penis-envy and mother-complexes can grate on me.

Even the best mothers among us will be or have been tormented from time to time by strong feelings of dread, fear, hatred and even revulsion at the whole process of motherhood, as well as experiencing downright murderous feelings toward our children.Right now, in life as we know it, in America, in the early part of the 21st century, this really is one of the last taboos. There is a consensus that at last we have figured out how to parent perfectly, and the corollary to this belief is that people who don’t parent perfectly — especially moms — are morally just one shade away from being serial killers. The worst thing you can call a woman who has given birth to a child is a bad mother. Those are fighting words. The very worst…

But in “The Monster Within,” Barbara Almond tells us that such maternal ambivalence is common in every culture. Perhaps only in this one (again, America, at this point in time, among upper- and upper-middle-class women) is the stigma of negative thoughts about parenting so heinous.

Here is a review of endorsement for the book at The Washington Post (the quote above came from there), and here is another more sceptical review at The New York Times (the quote below is from here).

But Almond’s book, while empathetic, offers little in the way of cheer­leading. Packed with jargon like “ego strength” and “object-relatedness,” Freudian case studies and postmodern readings of “Frankenstein” and “Rosemary’s Baby,” it swiftly transported me back to Gender and Sexuality Studies 111 (cross-listed, Semiotics 12), circa 1992. Almond is most sure-footed when she steers clear of social trend-spotting and literary parable, and concentrates on mothers’ enduring ambivalent feelings. Her psychoanalytic approach can be insightful, and Freud has passed so thoroughly out of vogue that certain of her dictums feel weirdly fresh. Other appraisals — including intimations that abortion constitutes some form of infanticide — uncomfortably evoke the “blame the mother” interpretations that Almond is otherwise eager to dispel.

I don’t mean to be mean to those of us in the more comfortable income brackets (- it might be that I have read one too many of these kinds of tedious articles recently), because usually I find it to be a pretty cheap shot when someone ridicules the introspection of the middle-class mother (like, have you seen my blog?)  .. but honestly, if you really want to know about being labelled ‘a bad mother’ you could forget ‘the cloth versus disposable nappy’ debate for a minute and take a look at mothers on the outside. As academic, Martha L. A. Fineman once described:

In large part it is the stigma of being poor. But more than poverty is at issue. The broad general target is unmarried women with children, and the attacks on these mothers are the opening salvo of a reactionary plan to discipline women who do not conform to the roles they are assigned with the traditional scheme of the family. This is why all women, whether they are mothers or not, should be concerned with the current debate about poverty. Although the welfare debate seemingly stigmatizes only one form of mothering as pathological, political rhetoric reinforces, recreates, and reiterates several fundamental premises about families that will be used against all women. Paramount among these is, of course, the strong preference for formally celebrated heterosexual marriage that functions as a reproductive unit and is thus the “core” upon which all else is founded… Motherhood outside this family unit will be punished and stigmatized. Nonmothers will also be disciplined, pressured and pitied. Attacks on birth control and abortion can be viewed as extolling the inevitability and naturalness of motherhood.

Maybe I am wrong. I could just be tired and grumpy. I am middle-class, you know, it is very tiring.