This is Bad Mothers

A bit about how I found this topic and why it matters to me.

When I was eight, I kept a diary. It had a cheap plastic lock and I relished hiding it under my mattress, as if it held important secrets. In retrospect, I was writing stories more than I was recording my real life. I dramatized every little occurrence until it read like the plot of a soap opera. I wrote that my sisters drove me absolutely crazy, that my ‘boyfriend’ Rocky (a real boy with a ridiculous nickname) broke my heart, and that my frenemy Jasmine was ruining my life because she made fun of my new fishnet sweater, which I begged my parents to buy me precisely because it looked so cool on Jasmine. I wrote that I hated my mom, because every teenage girl I had ever seen on television hated her mother.

And then my mom read my diary.

It was the first time she had ever given me the cold shoulder, so I remember the confrontation vividly. I had spent most of the evening telling myself that her aloofness was in my imagination, but then she turned away from me when I hugged her goodnight. Even as I trudged toward my bedroom, I couldn’t bear the sick feeling in my stomach, the new anxiety that sunk to my toes. It is a blessing that I didn’t know then how familiar this feeling would become. I stopped and turned to face her. The table lamp cast a yellow cone over the dark room. She was sitting on the sofa, a cigarette burning between her fingers. I asked what was wrong.

In my memory, my diary suddenly appears in her hand. She waves it around, a smug look on her face indicating I was caught. But I was entirely disconnected from its content. It could have been a Harlequin romance novel: it was a made-up thing I hid for reasons I didn’t understand. It was not about her.

‘You hate me?’ she said.

‘What? No.’

‘That’s what it says here.’ She held the diary open. ‘“I hate my mom.”’

I wanted to sound grown-up, but my words echoed with foolishness in her mouth. ‘It’s not what I meant…It’s not real.’

‘It sounds pretty real to me. Rocky, Jasmine, the worm your sister put on your head. These are all true things, aren’t they?’

I was decades from learning about literary styles that marry experience and imagination. I didn’t yet know that the very reason fiction appealed to me was due to the absolute human truth it contains.

‘Yes, but…that’s not what I meant. I didn’t mean it.’

We went in circles for a while, my sobs becoming more and more uncontrolled.

‘After all I do for you? This is how you repay me?’

I couldn’t explain my writing practice to her, because I didn’t understand it myself. So eventually I gave up. ‘I was just mad. I didn’t mean it. I’m sorry.’

The humiliation kept my stories locked in my head – the only safe place I knew – for years to come. But I didn’t stop reading.

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Moms everywhere are plagued with guilt and paranoia. They’re afraid their kids aren’t happy enough, don’t feel safe enough, don’t have enough stuff. Mothers worry they aren’t doing enough, don’t care enough, aren’t around enough. They think they aren’t good enough.

They ask themselves, what if I’m a bad mother?

And (if she says it out loud) the answer is always, of course you’re not a bad mother. How could any person be a bad mother? Society and culture insist that we are destined for it. But the unpalatable truth is that while almost anyone is capable of looking after a child, some women are bad mothers, and my theory is that bad mothers are usually the ones who didn’t want to have children, but bowed to expectation and did it anyway.

When my mother found my first (and last) diary, I suspect it unearthed a deep and terrifying concern she had carried with her from the moment she knew she was pregnant with me: What if I’m no good at being a mom? What if my child hates me? What if I’m like my mother was to me?

But the part that sticks to me is her question: after all I do for you? She doesn’t ask why I might hate her, how I might have been hurt by her. She asks how I can possibly hate her, after all she has sacrificed for me. She is saying that I owe her, because she gave up something she didn’t want to – for me. 

My mother is a bad mother. She had four children, and she hasn’t spoken to any of them in decades. She is a bad mother, but she is not a bad person. She has done the kindest thing she could for us.

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More than anything, literature has shown me that motherhood is not for everyone. If you’re wondering which books tell this story, it’s true they are not easy to find, because it’s not a popular narrative. There’s no ready-made reading list for women who think they might want a less traditional path. Instead, I wished for these stories and clutched at them when I found even the slightest allusions on the pages of books. And later, I wanted evidence that my maternal ambivalence was not related to my relationship with my mother – a connection most people draw instinctively but one I know in my bones to be untrue. She didn’t make me ambivalent about motherhood; rather, we share the feeling.

Literary scholars will sometimes talk about books being ‘consciousness-raising’ – as in, it makes readers aware of an issue. They’ll also argue that particular narrative techniques teach readers to feel empathy for characters that represent people and places that might otherwise be unfamiliar. It didn’t take long for me to realize that there might be a genre of novel for ambivalent mothers. That, in fact, I had been unconsciously adding books to this category for most of my life.

I plan to talk about some of those stories here. I want to dive into the novels that are committed to realistic portrayals of mother-daughter relationships, that show that motherhood isn’t always wonderful (as I assume to be true), and that demonstrate why reproductive rights are so important. I also want to call out any books, headlines, films, etc., that do the opposite.

Until now, motherhood was portrayed as all butterflies and rainbows. It is only in recent years that a truer narrative of what it means to be a mother has surfaced, thanks to books like Mother Brain by Chelsea Conaboy, and Touched Out by Amanda Montei. Yet, despite the distance equal rights for women has come, motherhood is still a standard expectation. The job is impossible, but governments and cultures are still operating as if being a mother is something we just do, naturally.

My research and the stakes they hold are very personal. But more broadly, claims about maternal instinct and women’s ‘natural’ inclination to motherhood make the dangerous implication that all pregnancies should be prized.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett has argued that the possibility of adoption negates the need for reproductive rights, as if pregnancy and childbirth are simple, safe, and unproblematic occurrences in a woman’s life. Nations have despaired over the tumbling birth rate, and U.S. states are alarmed that abortion rights will result in lost tax revenue due to fewer people being born, prioritizing economics over what women desire. The lies propagated by the anti-choice movement paint women who terminate pregnancies as inhuman: Donald Trump said in 2019, in reference to so-called late-term abortions, that after babies are born, the mother and doctor “determine whether or not they will execute the baby.” The abortion debate raging in the U.S. is evidence that our culture still expects the so-called maternal instinct to trump all other desires. As long as this belief goes unchallenged, everything about a woman’s life and choices is at risk. The transition from non-mother to mother is dramatic and permanent, and must not be under-valued or underestimated.

Bad Mothers acknowledges the ambivalence many women feel toward motherhood and the repercussions of ignoring these feelings. I hope it finds its audience here.