Mother of All Myths. Aminatta Forna
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href="#litres_trial_promo">6 Half asleep he asked the question he’d been saving all day: Mom, can we play now?’ In 1997 the BBC programme Panorama produced new ‘evidence’ showing how children fared badly when their mothers worked.7 All this time, the responsibility of fathers has gone unquestioned.
In the 1990s the accumulated result of the hailstorm of advice and threats is a hyperconsciousness about mothering, particularly among middle-class women, many of whom work and have children in their thirties. The current pressures on mothers mean that such women embark on motherhood with guilt built in from the start, and they approach the role with an enormous degree of anxiety, determined to do it right, determined not to be criticized. A lack of support from the wider polity means they are like trapeze artists, flying without a safety net, unable to afford the luxury of a single mistake. They become control freaks. Everything is sublimated to the needs and wishes of the child. There is a rigidity about the running of the household, which has become totally child-centred: the telephone is switched off during afternoon naps; bedtimes, bathtimes and mealtimes take precedence even over the appearance of visitors, and certainly over entertainment and other social events; there’s a baby intercom in every room and a planner on the kitchen wall with every activity from ‘Water Babies’ to music play carefully timetabled. Because the buck stops with her, the mother sees herself as absolutely indispensable and no one else, except perhaps a carefully-vetted nanny, is entirely trusted to take care of her child. To non-mothers she appears ridiculous, but she is driven by guilt and fear, and cannot see how excessive her own actions are. In this lie the makings of a tragedy.
On the flip side of the coin are those mothers society views as so wicked and unnatural that they have to be forced into taking responsibility. The rhyme about the little girl who had a little curl could just as well have been written for mothers, certainly in terms of the way they are seen by society. ‘When she was good she was very, very good and when she was bad she was horrid.’ In America women are being prosecuted and imprisoned for taking illegal drugs while they are pregnant; forced into having caesarean sections against their wishes; or hospitalized by court order for failing to follow a doctor’s orders. The notion of ‘foetal rights’, which underlies many of these convictions, is burgeoning and is rapidly being exported to the UK. In contrast to the over-anxious mother who is generally white and middle-class, these ‘unnatural’ mothers are usually poor. In Britain women are being charged and imprisoned for leaving their children at home alone. For those women who deliberately harm their children, society reserves a strength of hatred unequalled for any male killer.
Women, because of their ability to bear children and also because society assigns them the task of raising children, have a set of uniquely different responsibilities and therefore liabilities. For some women, who might find themselves accidentally pregnant, these responsibilities are not even asked for. There is a complicated set of moral and legal issues to be answered over how far a woman can be held accountable for what she does to her own body which also affects an unborn child. These are questions which are presently being dealt with through the entirely inappropriate medium of the criminal courts.
Recent events amount to nothing less than a legally sanctioned witch-hunt against mothers, an extraordinary vilification of women as mothers unparalleled at any time in history. It is no coincidence that such events, representing the extreme tip of a general contemporary culture of victimizing mothers, are taking place at this time. Society has always turned its critical eye upon mothers at key moments: in the nineteenth century during the Industrial Revolution, when women’s role as home-maker was born, and after the Second World War when women had to be encouraged back into domesticity to give men their factory jobs back. And so it is now. The prosecutions mentioned above come in an era of perceived instability and uncertainty, during which the placebo of family values has been placed at the top of the political and social agenda by politicians and lawmakers under pressure to provide solutions. Mothers in general, and mothers who are actually or perceived to be deviant in particular, are taking the brunt of our fear and despair over a collective failure towards the next generation. All this mother-blaming is a displacement activity for all the problems we can do nothing about, from corporation downsizing, to urban decay, to the emergence of new world economic powers which disrupt domestic economies and employment patterns.
Women are criticized for abandoning their traditional duties, while the truth is that women today carry a greater part of the burden of caring for children than ever before, with no corresponding policy changes to support them. Our urban, post-industrial lifestyles have removed grandchildren from the proximity of their grandparents, nieces and nephews from their uncles and aunts and cousins from each other. Divorce – 40 per cent of marriages – has frighteningly eroded the role of fathers in the lives of their children. In England and Wales alone in 1994, 164,834 children saw their parents divorce.8 The mother-centric philosophy of the motherhood myth has contributed to the growth in numbers of single mothers. Many children start off in life without any kind of paternal commitment at all.
What do women get instead of real solutions to coping with the dual role? Companies which market pagers so that children can reach their working mothers in an emergency, and surveillance specialists who offer to film the babysitter secretly to check whether she is abusing your child. ‘A woman’s place is in the house’, asserts an advertisement for Knorr stock cubes, which depicts a female MP rushing home to cook for her children. Women continue to be responsible for the domestic sphere. The child has merely substituted the husband as the person for whom she must continue to carry out those tasks. The work is the same, but now women do that work as mothers not as wives.
Nothing provokes the fear that motherhood, as we know it, is under threat more than the new reproductive technologies that have made mothers of older women, lesbians, even virgins. Such births, because they appear neither ‘natural’ nor ‘traditional’, are a blatant challenge to an accepted view of what motherhood should be. The policy-makers’ answer, which is to try to limit these women’s access to the science, says it all. Technology has dramatically challenged the most basic assumptions around mothering. Take the simple verbs ‘to mother’ and ‘to father’. How they are defined reveals an abundance of meaning. ‘To father’ just means to beget, an act of procreation; but ‘to mother’ means to nurture, to rear, to feed, to soothe and to protect. Today, techniques enabling human egg retrieval and donation mean that women, just like men, can be the biological parents of children they never see and to whom they do not give birth.
At the same time, growing numbers of women are rejecting motherhood altogether. Women individually now have fewer children and fertility levels are at an all-time low; women leave starting a family until as late as possible, often into their thirties; and many have opted not to have children at all. A 1993 survey published in the British Medical Journal stated that 12 per cent of a group of women now in their forties had remained childless.9 An OPCS survey put the figure of 20 per cent on women who are young now and will elect not to become mothers, compared to 1 per cent in 1976.10
Much has been read into such statistics by parties with a stake in the debate. Some feminists greet them with delight; other people are sceptical and smugly assert that young women who say they don’t want children will almost certainly change their minds; still others argue that these women are not childless out of choice but because they can’t find a suitable partner or have trouble conceiving. I say there’s a modicum of truth in all these points. After many conversations with mothers and non-mothers, I have found that most women are not rejecting babies as such (although some certainly are), they are repudiating motherhood as an institution and much of what goes with it. I have spoken to many women who, in conversation, will state that they don’t like children; but what they then go on to talk about in detail is in fact motherhood, the changes to their lives. the sacrifices, the compromises. They don’t talk about children. Essentially, some of these women may want children but not that much, and that in itself contradicts many popularly-held assumptions about women and biology. ‘In pain thou shalt bring forth children,’ says the Bible. Motherhood is supposed to be its own reward. Our society has always imagined that