Project Parenthood presents, a special audiobook excerpt from the upcoming book The Good Mother Myth, by Nancy Reddy. Timely and thought-provoking, Nancy Reddy unpacks and debunks the bad ideas that have for too long defined what it means to be a "good" mom.
Project Parenthood presents, a special audiobook excerpt from the upcoming book The Good Mother Myth, by Nancy Reddy.
Timely and thought-provoking, Nancy Reddy unpacks and debunks the bad ideas that have for too long defined what it means to be a "good" mom.
Pre-order the full audiobook no at Audible, Apple Books, the Libby App, or wherever else audiobooks are sold! Available January 21, 2025.
Project Parenthood is hosted by Chelsea Dorcich. A transcript is available as Simplecast.
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Excerpt from "The Good Mother Myth"...
Introduction. Love is a wondrous state. Before I had a baby, I was good at things. I was a graduate student in a competitive program, barreling on into a PhD in English after finishing an MFA in poetry. I raced through my coursework, completing the required classes in two years instead of the usual three.
I defended my doctoral exams at 36 weeks pregnant. Then, went home to paint the office turned nursery, wobbling on a step stool, as I reached to coat even the ceiling in the palest gray blue so that the tiny room was transformed into a jewel box of fresh color. I prepared for motherhood, with the same discipline I'd used for every other hard thing in my life.
I believed that I could handle any challenge if I worked hard enough, read the right books, consulted the experts, and followed their advice. This was one of the myths I had absorbed, from the mommy blogs and the parenting advice books I consumed alongside my prenatal vitamins and leafy greens throughout my pregnancy.
That motherhood was an individual pursuit at which I could excel, in the same way that I had excelled in school, in my chosen profession of academia, in the creation of a picture perfect life for myself. One in which I believed a child would fit perfectly by dint of my careful planning and preparation.
At the same time, there was another part of me that believed in some kind of magic, another myth. This one of a transformation beyond even the one that I could plan and study my way toward. My whole life, years before becoming a mother myself, I'd heard women talk about the automatic, selfless love of motherhood.
It's like seeing your heart walking around outside your body, more than one had told me, as earnestly as if they'd just discovered the cliché themselves. But as a poet, I'd been taught to distrust clichés. Were they saying it because that's what everyone else said? Had their babies turned their brains to mush?
And yet, I craved the simplicity of the sentiment, however sticky sweet. When you have your own, you'll understand, they told me, and I thought, maybe I would. The idea that I'd become a good mother through some mystical combination of hormones and instinct was so deeply embedded, I couldn't even recognize it as the myth it was.
I'd spent years looking at the women around me for models of what it meant to be a good mother. The women I saw around town, the mothers I had watched surreptitiously for years, made it look effortless. My husband and I had moved to Madison, Wisconsin, the archetypal college town with its array of cute cafes, wide bike lanes, and restaurants boasting more than 30 local beers on tap for my graduate program.
In our years there, I'd absorbed the message of attachment parenting, which seemed to hover in the very air above the kombucha and the quinoa at the co op. Natural is best. All around me, at the farmer's market, the sidewalk cafes that bloomed each spring when the lakes unfroze. On the bus, even, blissed out mothers strolled with peaceful babies cradled in carriers against their chests.
It was nearly always the mothers, though occasionally you'd see a bearded, baby wearing dad looking very proud of his progressive parenting. Those men always seemed somehow to wear the baby in the ergo in italics, like an ad for a good feminist dad. Their babies had whimsical cloth patterned diapers. The mothers had bright, silicone necklaces that doubled as teethers for their babies.
They talked intently about the bonding brought on by nursing, the benefits of co sleeping. When the babies whimpered or rustled, the mothers knew how to decode their complaints and calm them before they turned to cries. A third myth. Motherhood, when done right, could be easy. My own mother had been fierce, less hazy glow and more iron will, but still endlessly devoted.
I remember her, in her lean, single mother days, when she took the bus to her office downtown and cooked pot pies from recipes off the back of the Bisquick box, declaring, I would eat dog food for you. I'd taken that to mean that being a mother meant always putting your children first and never minding, never noticing that your dinner was the scraps from their plates.
Another core myth of motherhood, that you, that I, would love your kids so much that all your own desires would just fall away. I'd believed that love would be easy and natural. I knew that caring for a child would be work. But I expected that the overwhelming, instant love I'd surely feel would make it so all that caregiving didn't really feel like labor.
But then, I was a mother. And I did mind. I hadn't been made milder. Willing to give up sleep. Ambition. The time to finish writing a sentence because I loved the baby so much. I was a bleeding, leaking mammal, weeping in the produce section and fighting with my husband in the parking lot of Costco, but quietly, so as not to wake the baby who had finally, finally fallen asleep in the back seat.
I was a mother, and I was a beast. Before I had a baby, I believed goodness was the highest goal. I had been good at school, good at my job, surely I would be a good mother too. But when I had a baby, I found that, for the first time, goodness was slippery, out of reach, impossible even. This is it. This is a story about how I stopped being good.
This is also a story about the scientists and social scientists who made our myths about goodness. They're mostly men. Their own children, raised somewhere off stage. Their examples as parents, ones we mostly wouldn't want to follow. Some, like Dr. Spock, remain household names. While the fame of others, like the British psychoanalyst and psychologist John Bowlby and the Canadian American psychologist Mary Ainsworth.
Has faded a bit, even as their core ideas about what babies need and what it means to be a good mother haunt us still. I began my research with psychologist Harry Harlow, whose studies, beginning in the 1950s, of monkey infants raised by cloth surrogate mothers, seemed at first to provide a model of the perfect mother baby pair, locked together by love.
In his first presentation of that cloth mother research, Which begins with the proclamation that love is a wondrous state, deep, tender, and rewarding. Harlow sounds more like a poet than a scientist. He acknowledges in the sentence that follows that love is regarded by some as an improper topic for experimental research.
Harlow's research, which quickly spread beyond academic journals and dimly lit conference rooms and into newspapers, women's magazines, and television, captured the public imagination. In the first years of those studies, those baby monkeys and their constantly available, endlessly adoring cloth mothers seemed like the image of a good mother and her contented baby.
That image took on a particular urgency in the years following World War II, which had seen soldiers sent overseas, women participating in the war effort at home and abroad, and children attending state supported childcare while their mothers worked. In the United Kingdom, the evidence of trauma from war was everywhere.
Children who'd been evacuated from urban areas because of bombings struggled to readjust to life at home with their families. Children who'd stayed in cities and had to shelter underground during the Blitz earned the nickname tube sleepers after they lost the ability to sleep. European nations responded to wartime tragedies by eliminating the death penalty and expanding the social safety net.
In the United States, the trauma of war was perhaps less visible, but families still struggled with a return to peacetime. Women's work outside the home had been essential to the war effort, and the government subsidized childcare centers that had made that work possible were wildly popular with the mothers who used them.
But urgency around getting men back into the jobs women had worked in their absence, combined with growing red scare concerns about what might happen to children cared for by someone other than their mother, meant the speedy closure of those daycares. Women were shuttled back into the home. And the growing suburbanization of the time period meant that mothers were increasingly isolated, despite the revolutionary potential of that era.
A reactionary social agenda won out. It sometimes feels like every generation of mothers, from Betty Friedan and Audrey and Rich on, has been learning anew that the story we've been sold about the magical power of a mother's love is largely a way to draft us into an enormous amount of unpaid and undervalued labor.
This book largely tells the story of ideals for white mothers. The good mother has always been imagined as white, straight, married, and middle class, and the post war policies that helped create our modern image of the good mother at home with her children were aimed primarily at white families. Even policies that were racially neutral on their face, like the GI Bill's granting of educational benefits and VA home loans to veterans.
Disproportionately benefited white male veterans. Black veterans faced significant difficulty in using the benefits to which they were entitled because of ongoing racial segregation, quotas in higher education, and redlining, racial covenants, and other policies that made it exceptionally difficult for black families to buy homes.
A nostalgic, ahistorical view of our past posits the 50s as a moment when America was great, but the prosperity of that time was never equally shared. The narrow ideal of the good mother at home with her children, a bread winning husband off at work, everyone happy and well fed in a suburban home, was only ever accessible to a portion of the white middle class for a sliver of the middle of the last century.
Though this image has become encoded as the traditional family, it's a historical mirage. The cultural backlash of the 80s and 90s contributed to even more unrealistic expectations of mothers, as matricentric feminist scholar Andrea O'Reilly has observed. Our standards for mothers have always increased at just the moment when women were making gains in public life, as in the rise of intensive mothering in the 80s and 90s, when women were making inroads in the workforce, initiating divorce more often, and overtaking men in educational and professional accomplishments.
In other words, our expectations of The Good Mother have tended to expand right as women began to take up space formerly granted to men. The high intensity parenting practices of white middle class families have come to be seen as the best way to raise kids, even for families without the social capital or wealth to parent that way.
It's becoming ever harder to resist the individualistic, competitive way of parenting that insists that what kids need is constant supervision and stimulation provided by a small army of tutors, coaches, and extracurriculars. And this narrow, exclusionary vision of motherhood harms us all. Anyone who doesn't fit the impossible ideal mothers who are fat, poor, queer, black, or brown, people who've come to parenting through step parenting or adoption, trans or non binary people who've given birth but don't identify as moms finds themselves the subject of additional scrutiny, cast beyond the halo of societal approval that adorns the good mother.
But even if your demographics line up with the ideal, You'll soon find that you're more likely to get words of encouragement, or criticism depending on the day, than material support. The landscape of reproductive healthcare following the Supreme Court's 2022 Dobbs decision, which overruled Roe v. Wade, has made the stakes of our ideals around mothers even clearer.
People considering parenthood today now face, on one hand, wild eyed rhetoric from politicians and pundits about selfish young women choosing not to have children, and, on the other, a web of laws making even planned pregnancies potentially lethal. As anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hurdy has written, wherever women have both control over their reproductive opportunities and a chance to better themselves, women opt for well being and economic security over having more children.
The ability to choose when and how and with whom to have children has dramatically improved women's lives across the last two generations. And now, we live in a time when those choices are severely constricted. As cases from Ohio to Texas have demonstrated, the full force of the law will always fall more heavily on pregnant people who are black and brown.
But even being the blonde, married mother of two who's seeking an abortion after the diagnosis of a fatal fetal abnormality in a planned and wanted pregnancy won't save you. Exceptions for the life of the mother won't protect us if the powers that be believe a woman's life doesn't count for much. The underlying problem is that the good mother isn't really a person.
She's a subject of capitalism, charged with optimizing every aspect of her kid's childhood so she can produce good future workers and consumers. And this, too, the competitiveness and individualism that's baked into our image of the good mother sacrificing anything to get the best for her kids, is part of the trap.
If we're indoors, obsessing over whether our baby is meeting developmental milestones fast enough, or which private preschool to select for our toddler, if we're memorizing scripts that promise to fix tantrums and Googling lunchbox hacks. We're not out in our communities organizing for universal pre K or free school lunches.
The good mother thinks always of her own children first. Why is the ideal of the good mother so seductive? At the time that I gave birth to my oldest child, I was a Ph. D. student, well practiced in close reading, analytical thinking, and the questioning of received wisdom. The mythology of motherhood had seeped in so gradually, I couldn't even notice it happening.
I wrapped myself in an electric fence of my own expectations, feeling the sting of what felt like hundreds of mistakes I was making when my baby and I failed to immediately bond in a rosy cloud of maternal bliss. The more I uncover about the ways that our ideals about motherhood came to be, the more I understand how inescapable these ideals have become, even, or maybe especially, for the savviest among us.
Those of us so used to overachieving that motherhood has become one more race to win. It was practically in the air of the liberal, slightly crunchy Madison of the early 2000s. Where every coffee shop and park bench seemed dotted with good mothers who strolled, sipped, and chatted with peaceful babies cradled in soft fabric carriers against their chests.
Today it's on Instagram, where performing good motherhood has become a cottage industry. It's easy to dismiss this part of it as superficial, the good mother as an aesthetic. But scratch the surface of these images of organic cotton swaddles and ethically produced toys. And discover the ways that our expectations of mothers are part of the network of power, economics and morality that runs underneath society as a whole.
And that's the project of this book. To tell the history of our bad ideas about motherhood, so we can begin to untangle ourselves from their grip. I believe that looking to the past helps us see the present more clearly. Nothing about our current culture around motherhood is natural, or inevitable, or unchangeable.
When we understand how the structures and policies and culture that constrain us came to be, we can see our way into changing them. In the earliest weeks of motherhood, when I'd been cracked open by birth and breastfeeding and sleep deprivation, I'd sometimes see women walking with older kids, and have the crazed impulse to stop them and ask how they'd survived.
I was so desperate to follow the right rules or learn the right trick. Some of the best advice I read during that time came from an essay I read on my phone while the baby napped in his stroller, about a woman who'd joined the circus and learned to eat fire. The trick is There is no trick, she wrote, how you eat fire is you eat fire.
Caring for a newborn isn't quite like eating fire, but the point stands. There's no way to make it easy. But there are a lot of ways to make it harder. By worrying about what your friends or family or strangers on the internet will think about how you birth or feed or dress your baby. By spending hours scrolling social media for advice and expertise.
By trying to do it all yourself. I'll tell you how I survived. By asking for help and accepting it when it showed up. By being honest about how much I was struggling. By putting down the parenting advice manuals. By letting the baby cry it out so we could all finally get some sleep. By asking my husband to pitch in and letting him learn to parent in his own way.
By giving up on the dream of being the perfect, self sufficient, totally capable mother. By finally realizing that there's no way to actually be a good mother, and that that's not what my kids need anyway. My kids, like any kids, are their own weird, specific people. And what they need are parents who will love them and care for them as they are.
They don't need a good mother. They just need love. And occasionally, to be told, they really do have to put clean underwear on after the shower, and for the bajillionth time, to please go brush their teeth. In one way, Harlow was right about love. It is wondrous and rewarding. The love that I feel for my children has changed my life.
But love isn't instant or automatic. And it doesn't make the labor of caring for an infant easy or instinctive. Our love, like any, took time to grow. Before my first son was born, I believed both that I could read and research my way into motherhood, and that mother love would be instant and alchemical, transforming me into a sweeter, gentler, endlessly patient version of myself.
I believed motherhood was both the most natural thing in the world and something that could be done correctly. I can see now what an impossible knot I'd made myself. I couldn't see it then. But I know now that we can set aside our bad ideas and imagine something new.