What It Is To Be A Mother

Not Having It All

I am reading Siri Hustvedt’s Mothers, Fathers, And Others: New Essays, a series of essays in which she explores the family dynamic using memories of her own family members and looking at them through the lens of art, feminism and analysis.

The essay I read last night was an overview of the relationship Hustvedt had with her mother. In it, she reflects upon wider ideas of what the work of a mother is and how those impact individual realities. Like Rebecca May Johnson in Small Fires (which I talk about here), she discusses the burden placed upon women to not only do the work mandated to them, but to be seen to enjoy it in order to hide what it costs.

She talks about the pernicious effects of the Victorian ideal of womanhood which still underpins even the most modern ideas of what a woman should be. The Angel In The House by Coventry Patmore was a long form poem published in parts between 1854 and 1862, in which the poet idealises his marriage to his first wife. It became hugely popular and the ideas it laid out were frequently used as a yardstick by which women’s goodness and suitability for marriage and motherhood were measured. Hustvedt argues that those measures are still in play today as she dissects articles from magazines and social media about what motherhood should be.

Interestingly it is the articles that on the surface seem to be more supportive of mothers that are the most damaging, because they are the ones that hide the impossibility of what is being asked or suggested. She discusses an article in which mothers are told that the secret recipe for good mothering is to unconditionally love your child, remember to let your child be a child but also remember to take care of yourself. What Hustvedt points out, and which no mother needs reminding is that it is almost always impossible to do this, and even when you do, it is not sustainable. In order to do even one of these things, it is usually necessary to sacrifice one of the others. Inevitably it is the taking care of yourself that falls by the wayside.

Articles like this tell you what to do, but don’t tell you how. They can’t tell you how, because it is impossible. One of the greatest, most toxic myths of modern life is the idea that somewhere out there is a woman who has it all. In her book This Ragged Grace by Octavia Bright, (I write about it here) Bright talks about the problem of addiction being like having six dustbins but only five lids. You are constantly moving the lids to try and manage the rubbish, but no sooner is one bin contained than another becomes problematic. It’s also a great analogy for the work of a mother. You never have enough lids. The brutal truth is that there will never be enough lids.

When my son’s friend killed himself, my son’s life collapsed. He was torn apart by grief. He went from being a typical, fifteen-year-old boy who we saw infrequently as he passed through the kitchen like a swarm of locusts on his way out, to a bewildered man/child who needed his mother all the time. Three weeks after this, I started the first proper job I’d had since my son was born. The job was part-time. In between, the domestic life of the home was supposed to be largely my remit. The requirements of my life were already too big for the hours that held it.

My job, according to the article was to unconditionally love my son, to let him be a child and also to take care of myself. I’m sure the rest of the article went on to tell me how it was possible to weave my own bran muffins and get my whites whiter as well, Hustvedt doesn’t say.

It became immediately apparent that there were too many bins in this scenario. The easiest bit was unconditionally loving my child, but that takes its own kind of toll when your heart is breaking for them. Loving someone unconditionally while they are going through this is a tightrope walk over hell.

Letting him be a child in this scenario involved sitting up with him night after night, offering inadequate comfort, being unable to answer questions about the unthinkable and holding space for grief that was so vast it blotted out the sun.

The issue here was that my boy wasn’t really a child anymore but he wasn’t really a man and the terrible thing that had happened forced him to face things that even seasoned adults can’t deal with. He found himself adrift and apart in a no man’s land where he had not only lost his friend, he had lost himself. All I could do was try to maintain some semblance of normality for him in a world where everything was awry. I could bear witness. I could hold the line. Bearing witness is not a passive thing. It’s a gigantic, terrifying thing. It’s like having a black widow spider on your hand and remaining calm.

And that leaves us with taking time for myself, which was an absolute nonsense, of course. The impact of all this on me was significant. I mourned for my son’s friend but I also mourned for my son, who I lost too. That boy who existed before this happened? He’s never coming back. And what do I do with that grief, because I’m the lucky one in this scenario? I still have my son, to a degree and any degree is better than the alternative. My loss, my grief? There was no room for that then. There was no room for any of those feelings which might put me in the centre of things. This was not my problem, but by dint of being a mother, it was also all my problem. Nobody tells you how to manage that.

In Small Fires, Johnson talks about the psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott, who uses the analogy of cooking sausages to discuss ideas around creativity. He says that you are not a creative person if all you do is follow a recipe. Johnson replicates the experiment to prove him wrong. She argues that the act of cooking is very different from the act of thinking about cooking and the problem with Winnicott is that he thinks but does not do. This is one of the many issues I have with these instructions for what makes a good mother.

So often, the people who write this stuff are not actually required to do the things they write about. In theory you can snatch a pilates class to ‘nourish’ yourself while you’re mothering your kids. After all, it’s only an hour, right? Except that doesn’t take into account, school trips, head lice, teething, play dates, vomiting bugs, work, cooking, laundry, cleaning, trips to the vet…

When my children were small, I worked very hard to take time out for myself. In order to carve out an evening to go to the theatre, it would take at least a day of negotiations prior to that to put everything in place to manage in my absence. So many times, during that period of my life, I would miss the first half of the play entirely, because about five minutes after the lights had gone down, I’d be asleep. If it takes three working days to organise one hour of pilates, no matter how good for you it is, it’s not going to cover the cost of that self care in real terms.

How do you care for yourself when the care that you are required to have for other people is a priority? How do you find time for yourself when every moment of every day is not enough to do the things you have to do, let alone the things you want to do? How do you decide what gets sacrificed? And if it’s you that sacrifices, how do you manage the unruly feelings inside you that are angry and bitter and resentful and desperate? Particularly when you are constantly being drip fed the idea that if you do feel like that, you’re a monster, not an angel.

In his poem, Patmore refers to the wife as an angel. What is conveniently glossed over here is that an angel is a supernatural being. The best kind of woman, it transpires, is not actually a woman at all. The best kind of woman is a divine, winged warrior with all kinds of god-given powers and sketchy genitalia. It’s like saying the best kind of man is Spiderman. Except that nobody expects men to be Spiderman, at least not in relation to their family.

Later in the essay, Hustvedt says:

‘“Taking time for yourself” means that you have already given yourself over to the children, that your time is not your own, so you must snatch moments here and there for yourself.’

She compares it to an article on how to be a great dad in which the author says:

‘“Spend your spare time with them (the children).” Spare time is extra time. The father’s time belongs to him,’

The language of women and what makes a woman a woman in the eyes of society is rooted in the language of enslavement to others, whether it be other people or other ideas. Johnson explores the same ideas in relation to cooking, another role a woman is expected to fulfil. A woman is defined by what she does for and who she is to other people, not herself. The kicker is that not only is she told what to do, she is told how to do it, by people who don’t actually do those things.

The work expected of a woman, simply to be awarded the title of woman or mother cannot actually be done by a mere human being. The work of a woman is the work of a superhero.

The shame we feel if we cannot do the impossible. The silence around the unpalatable truths. The gratitude we are supposed to show. The lies we are supposed to be complicit with. These turn the key in the lock of this particular type of slavery. We need, like Johnson and Hustvedt, to speak up about the damage inflicted on us by these all pervasive ideas. We must point out the flaws. We must step out from the shadow of the angel and into our own humanity and we need to stop this pretence of having it all. Surely, just owning ourselves is enough?