Reckoning between the saintly and the monstrous
In the last several years, there has been a surge in writing by women pondering the metamorphosis into mothers. Motherhood is a strange passage that leaves many women wondering how their new, maternal identity sits with their other identities—as lover, maker, reader, athlete, friend, and, especially, writer. Most women at least some of the time experience these roles in tension with one another, and writing mothers have been probing that tension, asking what part of it speaks to the social conditions of motherhood in our world today and what part taps into something deeper and more intractable about motherhood.
The mystery of the tension is one aspect of the strangeness of the passage to motherhood. Another is coming to inhabit such an outsized figure in the cultural imagination—and one outsized in ways that are not always positive. There is a moment in season 2 of that font of earthly wisdom, The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, when Kimmy finally realizes that the cause of her anger is her mother’s neglect, and Tina Fey’s therapist confirms her realization, saying, “It’s always the parents.” And most of the time, it’s the mother.
The insight is comical because it speaks a cultural truth. In pop psychology, the mother is the monster behind every malady, the villain lurking in our subconscious. Hers is the reproachful voice that we are not good enough, pretty enough, or thin enough. Insecure attachments to the mother explain the inability to form healthy relationships throughout one’s life. Her emotional comportment puts us at-risk for anxiety, depression, self-harm, and other-harm. It’s always the mother.
When I first watched that episode of Kimmy Schmidt, I thought, somewhat improbably, of a story a teacher told me years ago in a class on ancient Greek theologians. Two monks hiked through the mountains. The older, an abbot, trotted across the craggy precipices with the agility of a mountain goat as the young novice followed behind him. Taught to bring every troubling thought before the abbot, the novice confessed to his mentor, “Father, I have just had the thought that I should push you off this cliff.” The abbot continued spryly along as he replied, “Oh, pay no attention to that thought. That’s just the devil.”
And yet, besides babies, is there any group more sentimentalized than mothers? As Mother’s Day approaches, that sentimentality is on full commercial display.
My teacher told the story as an event he had witnessed but one that evoked an older world in which vast cosmic forces suffuse even our most private moments. In this world, demons speak in the voice of temptation and angels arrive in dreams of warning and comfort. In the fourth-century book that is sometimes called the first autobiography of the West, Augustine looked into his memory and found the Lord God brooding over its depths—speaking to him, drawing him near, correcting his wanderings. But Augustine also found in his memory a deeply complex and opaque self. His desires were mystifying, sometimes conflicting, and often masked deeper desires behind the apparent ones. To interpret such desire requires skill not entirely dissimilar from the therapist’s skill, the very one that pop psychology represents in decoding our wounded desires as maternal damage. Instead of devils behind our sinister thoughts—and in addition to a complexly hidden self—we have mothers stalking our subconscious.
Sometimes we conceal the extent of our collective anxiety about mothers by focusing our negative feelings on horrific mothers. News stories of mothers who abandon babies, kill their children, or otherwise torment and control their kids are a powerful fixation in today’s media. Like most monsters, the mother-monsters of these narratives reflect something about our own social pathologies and deficiencies. They speak to our capitulation to a capitalist logic that makes no room for non-productive social members like children; to the way we privatize care and nourishment for the most vulnerable among us; to how we refuse collective responsibility for one another and especially for the least of these. We depend upon the mother to do so much social and emotional work for us, and the figure of the mother-monster stokes and expresses our fears about this suppressed social vulnerability.
And yet, besides babies, is there any group more sentimentalized than mothers? As Mother’s Day approaches, that sentimentality is on full commercial display. Our mail arrives, and I am awash in ads for those necklaces with child-shaped charms holding birthstones corresponding to one’s own children. Companies evoke that complicated mash-up of sentiment and guilt to leverage our pocketbooks, implying they can soothe our guilty, grateful love.
In his Confessions, Augustine offers a rather sentimental picture of his own mother Monica.
She tearfully pleads with bishops on her son’s behalf and continually points the way back to the Catholic Church during his ten-year stint with a heretical sect. When he is riven by conflicting desires, when he persistently betrays his own loves, she faithfully hopes for him. At a climactic moment in the story, when he has a vision “of the region of inexhaustible abundance,” Monica is there to share the vision with him.
Monica is a profound source of goodness in Augustine’s life. By her constancy, her son arrives at the book’s final image: a door that opens. The one who passes through that open door is reborn into new life. More than anyone else besides the Lord God, Monica is credited with his spiritual growth and transformation. She is Madonna-like in her selflessness, fidelity, and willingness to suffer for her son. Before there was an official Congregation to oversee canonizations, she was made a saint by popular acclaim.
There is something similarly Madonna-like about the figure of the mother invoked around Mother’s Day. The mother is a saint celebrated in hagiographic greeting cards and rituals of veneration. And yet at the same time, the mother in our contemporary cultural imagination is not only a saint. The mother is also a monster. She bears responsibility for our deformities, inadequacies, and damages. She gives us what we have; she withholds what we need.
The ambivalence evoked by the figure of the mother is rooted in these two characters, the saint and the monster. Both imagine the mother at a remove from ordinary life, like some kind of ancient deity. But in the fast-expanding literature of writers reflecting on their own motherhood, it is monstrosity, rather than saintliness that some have invoked to interpret themselves. Monstrosity, after all, is a tempting way to banish the saccharine, Hallmark version motherhood, and, besides, who wants read self-hagiography?
Monstrosity also identifies the feeling of guilt that writing mothers have, because writing requires isolation from one’s children and because there is a pleasure in both the writing and the isolation. And still even in those pleasures a longing for one’s children insinuates itself. The very naming of oneself as a monster speaks to a desire to be more, to give more to one’s children. In calling ourselves monsters, writing mothers discover the ways we are more interesting and complex than descriptions of “monstrosity” can capture. We elude these labels of monster and Madonna; we slip between them, carried by desires more vital than any caricature suggests.
We desire, and we betray our desires. We wonder if we are monsters, even as we at least sometimes strive after visions of saintliness. The negotiations of motherhood are more like Augustine’s own negotiations of conflicting desires than like the flattened characters of Madonnas and monsters. The split of the mother into these personas—like the more famous split of women into Madonnas and whores—speaks to an inability to keep the complexity of women in view, or a refusal to accept that complexity and the social conditions evoked by it. To be a mother is to be implicated in the classic ambivalence of wanting children near and wanting space from them, and to have that ambivalence magnified in a world that has not learned how to support caregivers, especially working mothers. To write oneself as a mother is to be haunted by these cultural images of Saint Mother and Mother Monster, and to refuse to be collapsed into them, to seek an opening, like Augustine’s door, and to find at that threshold the possibility of being opened, of giving birth to new life.
Excellent article, Thank you for spreading the words of the bible. Pray for us Saint Anne during these uncertain times. Ameen!
Posted by: laycistercians | June 3, 2020 at 01:53 AM