Mother of All Myths - Aminatta Forna

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And he set himself apart from other professionals who sought to tell mothers what to do and interfered with the natural process of mothering which, according to him, women knew best. Women warmed to him. At last it seemed, here was someone who thought about mothers and not just children.

      Winnicott was just as frequently patronizing, though, and the accolades came mixed with condescension. In his essay ‘A Man Looks at Motherhood’ he remarks: ‘you do not even have to be clever, and you don’t even have to think if you do not want to. You may have been hopeless at arithmetic at school, or perhaps all your friends got scholarships, but you didn’t like the sight of a history book and so failed and left school early.’14 The man who invented the notion of the ‘good enough mother’ concludes the paragraph with this observation intended to reassure his readers: ‘Isn’t it strange that such a tremendously important thing should depend so little on exceptional intelligence.’

      Being a ‘good enough mother’ on Winnicott’s terms wasn’t so easy. A woman needed a saint-like capacity for patience, devotion, self-sacrifice and the ability to find fulfilment in even the most mundane tasks of motherhood. She had to delight in every filled nappy, every burp or fart or night-time wakening. ‘All you need is love’ might have been Winnicott’s refrain, and that wasn’t asking much because, according to him, women were like that anyway, it was simply part of female nature. The role of fathers, who were otherwise never mentioned, was simply to make baby love his mother all the more by being ‘hard and strict and unrelenting, intransigent, indestructible’.15 Trying to help the mother out would just interfere with his proper function.

      In case any woman found her capacity to give waning, Winnicott backed up his sweet refrain with a few well-placed threats, promising stunted emotional development and psychological malfunction in the child if the mother failed. This is what happens when a mother doesn’t pay attention and picks her child up without supporting the infant’s head: ‘There are very subtle things here,’ listeners to the broadcast were warned:

      If you have got a child’s body and head in your hands and do not think of that as unity and reach for a handkerchief or something, then the head has gone back and the child is in two pieces – head and body; the child screams and never forgets it. The awful thing is that nothing is ever forgotten. Then the child goes around with an absence of confidence in things.16

      The Winnicott child was a fragile bloom who, without showers of love and constant nurturing, would wither and fail.

      Of course, everyone in Winnicott’s world was white, middle class and lived in a nuclear family. With his emphasis on raising children in the correct environment, in his extraordinarily prescriptive world there was no room (and, one presumes, no hope either) for children with different family arrangements.

      Winnicott also introduced the idea that, in addition to their mothers’ continual presence, what babies needed most of all was familiarity in their environment. In other words, once a routine had been established it should not be changed, nor should the child be moved from location to location. So the woman who put her faith in Winnicott could expect to spend her time isolated at home with her child, unable and unwilling to do much more than make a trip to the shops for fear of playing havoc with her child’s psyche. One wonders what he would have made of, say, Tuareg children who from the moment of their birth are on the move and do not see the same spot from year to year, whose tented homes are pitched in a different place week by week and who are cared for by several women and not just their mothers. Although Winnicott claimed that most mothers were ‘good enough’ mothers, the tone of his writing and lectures was every bit as rigid and moralistic as Truby King’s.

      In contrast, Dr Benjamin Spock’s Common Sense Book of Baby and Childcare was cleverly titled and almost certainly struck a chord with women who were tired of the perfectionism demanded of them by men who had never looked after a child for a day in their lives. Spock’s name became closely associated with 1960s’ ideas of freedom from constraints and tolerance and at one point he was held almost solely responsible for the student riots of that decade, which his critics maintained were provoked by youngsters raised according to his permissive ideas. Right or wrong, the accusation nevertheless shows the extent of his influence.

      Spock was himself raised on the standards of Emmett Holt (the American Truby King) but his own approach to childcare was just the opposite: sleep when the baby felt like it; potty training in her own time; feeding on demand and then as much or as little as the baby wanted; he didn’t even insist on breastfeeding. While earlier approaches to childcare insisted babies fit in with adult schedules, Spock had it the other way around, but his relaxed approach meant that mothers had to be on hand twenty-four hours a day while baby did things in his own time.

      The quantities of information from every quarter, the sea-changes in expert-led opinion, and most of all the apparently dire consequences of getting it wrong have placed mothers in a state of utter dependency on outside sources of information. Although Spock often urged women to trust their own instincts, as social historian Shari Thurer remarked in her historical account of motherhood: ‘If a mother knew which of her impulses to trust, why would she have cracked the cover of these books in the first place?’17

      Spock’s era was a time of changing ideas and Spock, perhaps a little unfairly since he was scarcely the worst offender, took the brunt of feminist ire. Spock’s assumption that parenting was women’s work, backed up with remarks such as, ‘Of course, I don’t mean that the father has to give just as many bottles or change just as many diapers as the mother. But it’s fine for him to do so occasionally’,18 inflamed the emerging ranks of sisterhood.

      Like all good Freudian-influence theorists, he was also unhappy about the idea of women leaving their children to work and countered his recognition that some women may need or want to work with the guilt-inducing words: ‘If a mother realizes clearly how vital this kind of care is to a small child, it may make it easier for her to decide that the extra money she might earn, or the satisfaction she might receive from an outside job, is not so important, after all.’19 That was in 1958, five years before Betty Friedan awakened the consciousness of millions of women with The Feminine Mystique in which she challenged Freudian ideas of gender. Her ‘problem with no name’ was the mind-numbing routine of home and family life in which women were expected to find contentment, but which buried women alive. This state of affairs, she argued, was good for neither women or children: ‘Strange new problems are being reported in the growing generations of children whose mothers were always there, driving them around, helping with their homework – an inability to endure pain or discipline or pursue any self-sustained goal of any sort, a devastating boredom with life.’20

      Adrienne Rich’s problem had a name and its name was motherhood. She wrote with extraordinary candour about her experience of motherhood and her feelings for her children whom she confessed, from time to time, she had the urge to kill. She made it clear that the problem for her was the ‘institution’ of motherhood, ‘the chaining of women in links of love and guilt’.21

      A poet and academic. Rich, for a while, tried to become the archetypal perfect wife and mother. When she wrote of the experience she lit a charge:

      I only knew that I had lived through something which was considered central to the lives of women, fulfilling even in its sorrows, a key to the meaning of life; and that I could remember little except anxiety, physical weariness, anger, self-blame, boredom, and division within myself; a division made more acute by the moments of passionate love, delight in my children’s spirited bodies and minds, amazement at how they went on loving me in spite of my failures to love them wholly and selflessly.22

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