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Key points
- The mother myths make it hard or impossible for women who are floundering with mothering to get help.
- The myths effectively act as a social barrier to seeing maternal neglect and verbal abuse.
- The mythology abets views of what it means to be a woman, which are often based on caretaking, not personhood.
I’ve been writing about mothers, specifically mothers and daughters, for 25 years and it still astonishes me how cultural myths about mothers impede our ability to have a real and salient dialogue about how mothering is hard work that entails self-sacrifice, may be immensely difficult for some, and how all of that is amplified in a society where child care is expensive and catch-as-catch-can.
This isn’t to say that there haven’t been some cultural breakthroughs that helped enrich the dialogue. One such moment, now 20 years ago, when Brooke Shields went public with her postpartum depression and effectively gave voice to women who had suffered in shame and silence. After all, if a famous, wealthy, and physically beautiful woman who once was the model for the perfect infant on the Ivory Snow box and who had just given birth to another gorgeous infant she had tried to conceive for two years could be so unhappy that:
“… I felt completely overwhelmed. This baby was a stranger to me. I didn't know what to do with her. I didn't feel at all joyful. I attributed feelings of doom to simple fatigue and figured that they would eventually go away. But they didn't; in fact, they got worse. I couldn't bear the sound of Rowan crying, and I dreaded the moments my husband would bring her to me. I wanted her to disappear. I wanted to disappear. At my lowest points, I thought of swallowing a bottle of pills or jumping out the window of my apartment.”
The mother myths don’t just affect women, of course. Men, too, are both consciously and unconsciously affected by them; they permeate the whole of society and its thinking about motherhood and parenting generally.
The Mother Myths and Their Effects
The myths have a very long history since, doubtless beginning with humanity’s observation that the female alone of every species was capable of giving birth; so the mythology evolved relatively seamlessly in agrarian pre-patriarchal societies in which goddesses were worshipped. (The ancients didn’t know about seahorses who are the only creatures where males and females give birth.) The superseding of the old pagan traditions by Christianity actually strengthened the mythology with the introduction of the cult of the Virgin Mary.
Among the key myths are these:
The idealization of motherhood: It’s pretty impossible to understate the influence Christianity and all the imagery and stories associated with the Virgin Mary had on solidifying the idealization. It’s a very short leap from images of the Virgin with the Infant Jesus in her arms to the paintings of Pierre-August Renoir and Mary Cassatt.
The idealization of motherhood, especially if it’s mixed with religiosity, also spurs on seeing motherhood as some kind of “calling,” rather than the job it is in real life.
Finally, the idealization of motherhood—especially when combined with the idea of a calling—makes the woman who doesn’t have children, for whatever reason, a second-class citizen. If you’ve ever worked at a place that finds itself suddenly short-handed, you will probably note that those women without children are always asked to man the lifeboats as if not having children means you don’t have a life (or an important one). This is another prevalent bias.
That mothering is instinctual in our species: Nope, nope, nope. It is actually learned behavior as it isn’t for elephants. This belief that human females are hardwired to know how to best care for their children has implications that are absolutely enormous and, of course, undercuts every mother who finds the tasks of parenting daunting or impossible. This belief hovers in courtrooms and lots of other places it shouldn’t and, of course, is the foundation of an unloving or neglectful mother’s insistence that she is the final authority on her child’s welfare. Yes, this myth is used to justify verbal abuse.
That all women are, by nature, “nurturing”: I guess if I had to pick one as the most damaging of the myths, I might choose this one. For one thing, it’s not true; some women are and some women aren’t. For another, the ancillary myth is that nurturance is the bailiwick of women and that men are somehow excluded; this isn’t true either. The idea that women are born to caretake affects judgments in all sorts of settings, including divorce courts. It’s not hard to see why it is that women who are forthright and speak their minds are often labeled “unfeminine” especially if their voices are critical or tough. This myth paints womanhood (and feminity) in pastel hues.
“Bonding” with your infant just happens instantaneously: The Brooke Shields story should give us all pause but you don’t need postpartum depression to explain why dysfunction in a family can start at birth and why “instantaneous bonding” is a myth that damages women. Yes, there is a process of bonding with your child and it takes place over time and is built through attunement which includes the mother’s eye contact with the baby, her responsiveness to his or her cries, feeding the infant, and more. And, yes, “some” women will feel that emotional bond immediately but many will not. Why? Being in pain, for one thing, or being disappointed in how the birth went, for another. Or being exhausted. But, again, the myth encourages the new mother to feel shame and, feeling shame, she’s less likely to ask for help or discuss it with anyone.
All mothers love unconditionally: This is the big kahuna of the myths, especially if you are a child and you hear it as unchallenged truth as I did. When I read it in the pages of a book, in Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving, as a young teen, I figured I was the only girl in the world afflicted in this way. Of course, that same mother did seem to love my brother.
I have an unproven theory about this myth. Given that love is hard to find and harder to hold onto in this world, I believe most people need to believe in one kind of love that is inviolable, and the best candidate is the maternal kind. That helps the appeal of this myth.
Do note that the mythology pertaining to motherhood has no equivalent in the society’s take on fatherhood. Just think about it.
Again, the myths of motherhood don’t just hurt mothers; they have a wide reach.
The ideas in this post are drawn from my books Mean Mothers and Daughter Detox.
Copyright 2024 by Peg Streep.
Facebook image: Monkey Business Images/Shutterstock
References
Brooke Shields. https://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/01/opinion/war-of-words.html
