Bad Mothers?

I spend my professional life listening to young people talk about their parents. As we talk in therapy, we’re confidently critical of fathers, taking their many shortcomings for granted, whereas with mothers we hesitate, we qualify our criticisms, we’re inclined to be more protective, more forgiving.

Why? Is it because mothers are better people? Because they’re better at being parents? Or is something else going on?

It goes without saying that some fathers are abusive, useless, cowardly, disloyal, capable of all kinds of cruelty. Historically, many fathers have treated mothers appallingly and still do. That’s all true and there are no excuses. Yet it seems much harder to accept that, like fathers, mothers can also be vindictive, selfish, domineering, irresponsible, brutal…. The list goes on. And yet even saying this is hard. It feels like being a bad child: a nasty, disloyal, ungrateful child.

So why are we inclined to idealize mothers? Is it to balance them against the many blatantly bad fathers? Is it because of a cultural taboo rooted in Christianity, a taboo that elevates mothers to a place beyond reproach? And is that taboo perpetuated by mothers themselves who, in addition to loving their children, struggle to acknowledge their (partial) hatred and envy of their children, their wish to be freed of responsibilities, their nostalgia for a life before children? Do we idealize mothers because of what it implies about us if the person to whom we were once umbilically attached turns out to be less than wonderful? Might that imply that we ourselves were never entirely innocent or unspoiled, that we might have entered the world with some very unpleasant predispositions that might never have gone away?

What would it be like to acknowledge absolutely the suffering of women at the hands of men and yet be more appropriately critical of mothers? It might be more respectful of women and less patronizing. After all, how much does our sanctifying of mothers serve to enslave them? How much do we raise them up, only to make them feel like failures when they can’t live up to our idealization? Mothers are supposed to be good, good, good. Any mother who departs from this script, or who admits to anything other than undying love for her child, is demonized, deemed beyond our comprehension, ‘unnatural’ and ‘unworthy to be a mother’.

So what’s it really like to be pregnant for nine months, to give birth, to be sucked at, puked over, to be tired beyond tiredness, expected to absorb everything uncomplainingly - indeed, with joyous delight? And what’s it like to know that we, her children, caused all this? How much does our guilt fuel the myth of the unimpeachable, saintly mother?

One danger is that, in our struggles to perpetuate the myth, we blind ourselves to the realities of being a mother so that, in effect, we keep mothers at arm’s length, as mythical beings, and project our disappointments onto other people. Another danger is that the more we persist with our idealization, keeping mothers fixed in an exalted, unrealistic role, the more we deny them the possibility of other roles. We might deny them the role of political leader, for example, for fear that - as leaders - they’ll fail to live up to our hopes, proving inevitably to be fallible. Perhaps that’s what happened to Hillary Clinton? And perhaps that could happen to the mothers poised to succeed her?