Who You Callin' Mother


I also encourage my new-mother friends to call when they were at their worst, when they were depressed or angry, when they felt like shooting themselves...or someone else. I'd been taken aback and ashamed by how full of rage and hate I'd been at times with my first baby, and I sincerely wanted to help my friends.

The real me, then, was genuinely shocked when two different female friends remarked offhand, "You're such a passionate mother."

"I am?" I asked. "What makes you say that?" I felt delighted but bewildered, like I wanted to quiz them for the evidence of my maternal ardor.

I've several times in wonderment told my therapist how besotted my daughter seems to be with me, how she says, unbidden, that she prefers my company to all others, how she's gazed at me and murmured, "Mommy, I can't take my eyes off of you—you're so beautiful."

"You wouldn't believe how much Edie loves me," I told him once.

"Yes, I would," he replied evenly, meeting my eyes. "You're her mother."

"But still..."

"You're her mother," he repeated.

What de Marneffe did for me, then, is prod me to mine my own desire to be with my daughters. I worry and worry about the compromises I've had to make in my beloved work (I'm not being sarcastic); I'm acutely tuned in to my thoughts of wanting to escape (God, I can't act out another scene from Sleeping Beauty); but somehow I never envisioned the potential costs to me of reducing the time I spent with my children. Because thought I still consider myself a "working mother," I did start to work less once I had Edie. In the story I tell myself about myself, I cut back on work for the girls' sake, so they won't grow up doubting themselves, doubting their mother's love. But how much do I want of my girls, need of them? How much mothering makes me happy? I never thought to ask.

Because the amount of hands-on mothering women want to do is inextricably intertwined with what their children need to thrive, the first question usually is, How much separation is "damaging" to my kids? In a careful analysis of the massive day care literature, which de Marneffe notes we read like "modern-day tea leaves, providing inconclusive information that we over interpret in our anxious need to know something," she zeroes in on maternal-child attachment. The data suggests that "time spent apart from parents does not in itself appear to affect the security or insecurity of the mother-infant bond." What does make a difference is a mother's sensitivity to her child. For all those working mothers like me breathing a huge sigh of relief—Hey, I'm sensitive to my kid—it's not that simple; the good studies also say that mothers whose infants spend more than 30 hours per week in child care tend to be less attuned to their children than those who work less.

Yet de Marneffe doesn't want the reader to make too much of this. She wants each of us "to treat intimate knowledge of ourselves and our children as a reliable basis for action." "We all know mothers who work a lot and are connected to their kids," she writes. "And we know mothers who are around their children a lot and not attuned to what their children need."

In her heart, de Marneffe does believe that the more time mothers spend with their small children, the better for those children, but she's sufficiently in awe of the mysteries of each human being that she wouldn't presume to say how many hours anyone should or shouldn't work. "I mean, I look at my best friend, who has three kids and lives in New York and has this incredibly intense job," de Marneffe tells me, "and I think she's a great mother. She has a certain empathy and a comfort in herself that's really what I'm trying to describe, an awareness of what people need from each other and a capacity to give that." She also has enough money to hire and retain an excellent babysitter. In an obvious example of someone who should not cut back on work (perhaps too obvious to be useful for those yearning for the answer), she cites the "mother who truly feels she is sacrificing herself if she stays at home." This woman "may end up adopting a depressed self-abnegation or hyper-controlling demeanor with her children."

So, gals, what do you desire?

"If you knew working 10 hours a day was totally fine for your children," de Marneffe asks me, "you'd be happy doing that? And the only things keeping you from it are: (a) it's not fine for them, and (b) what's wrong with you that you don't want to be with your children more?"

Long pause. I'm thinking, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know...But do I know? "No," I venture. "No, I don't think I'd really be happy." But there's resignation in my voice, the resignation of self-knowledge? Of disappointment in myself that I can't be...tougher? Later, it dawns on me that my bad mothers are not who I really am; they're who I'm really not. They congregate in my mind, long cigarette holders in one hand, martini glasses in the other, as avatars of the ability to keep children from transforming one's interior life.

It seems I'm more like de Marneffe than I imagined. To mother the way she wants to mother, she tells me, " I need a certain amount of time with my children, a level of not being stressed out, to feel good. If I'd been put together differently, it might be different."

This Is A Developing Story

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