The Problem of Maternal Desire, Part 3

Maternal Desire: On Children, Love, and the Inner Life
by Daphne DeMarneffe

(Page 3 of 4)

Our national discussion of child care, for example, understandably focuses on the reality that most parents need to work.

Because the discussion appears to deal with an immutable fact of life, it is sometimes viewed as impractical, even elitist, to raise questions concerning the feelings of the parents and children involved.

But progressive calls for universal affordable day care ignore a jumble of inconvenient emotions, including parents' desire to take care of their own children. Many mothers feel torn up inside being apart from their babies and children many hours a day, yet they feel realistic or mature when they are able to suppress those feelings. The terms of the discussion don't admit the possibility that pleasure is a reliable guide, or that desire tells us anything about truth.

Developmental psychology is one domain that studies the impact of pleasure on human growth. In the past two decades, it has undertaken an increasingly nuanced investigation of mother-child interaction, revealing the central role of shared emotional states and shared pleasure in healthy human development. The research on mother-infant interaction teaches us about the making of mutual meaning, and about the roots of emotional complexity and richness. Yet, for the most part, these findings remain marginal to our public debates about day care. Their perceived irrelevance hints at our difficulty in making the mutual parent-child relationship a focal point in our reflections on child care.

The importance of the mutual parent-child relationship and a mother's desire to participate in that relationship are masked by the rhetoric of children's "needs." When exasperated callers to talk-radio shows insist on children's "need" to be taken care of by their parents, they are making a statement not primarily about facts, but, rather, about values. Children are not all alike; one two-year-old may happily trot into day care while another desperately protests. Children survive, and some even thrive, in a range of circumstances, including circumstances they wouldn't choose for themselves if given a say in the matter. The emphasis on children's "needs" represents an attempt to create a socially sanctioned arena for children's "wants" and what we want for them. In a sense, "needs" are a post-Freudian way to talk about values, a way to demarcate and honor those things we consider of greatest importance to human well-being.

The oft-heard question about day care - "Does day care hurt children?" - turns children into the repository of our mutual desire for human connection. If the studies show that children do fine in day care, we independent adults are supposed to go about our business without remorse. On this view, mothers' feelings simply aren't relevant; the only issue is day care's effects on children. But what is good for parents and what is good for children are equally relevant in a moral evaluation of day care. And adults' desire to nurture their children is much more passionate and complex than the opposition of dependent child and independent adult would have us believe.

MOTHERHOOD CALLS FOR A TRANSFORMED individuality, an integration of a new relationship and a new role into one's sense of self. This is a practical and a psychological transformation. It is screamingly evident that as a society we are grudging and cramped about the practical adjustments required by motherhood, continually treating them as incidental and inconvenient. Like an irritated bus passenger who is asked to move over and make room, we appear affronted by the sheer existence of mothers' needs. The disheartening, thorough analyses of this problem by feminist economists cannot be improved upon and are there for all to read.

But these practical difficulties, not to mention the views that underlie them, also have far-reaching psychological implications. They affect how we appraise and experience the whole issue of inner maternal transformation, the "space" we will allow motherhood to occupy in our psyches. If everything around us seems designed to obstruct our integrating the full force of our maternal devotion into a life responsive to our prior commitments, our outlook and values about what we should "do" with our maternal desire can come to be subtly shaped.

This conflict is not lost on young women. Naomi Wolf's Yale student's "we can't have it all" response reflects one resolution among many to a question that confronts virtually every young woman at some point or another: namely, how she will integrate her maternal potential into her mature identity. The first stirrings of this question accompany a girl's sexual development in adolescence, for that is when she not only becomes capable of sexual and maternal expression but also meets up with cultural norms and ideals of successful adulthood. Cultural ideals about control, in particular, resonate with girls' psychological need for self-control at this stage, with both constructive and problematic effects. On the one hand, educated and upwardly mobile girls in contemporary society face a decade, perhaps two or even three, between their sexual maturation and childbearing, a span that gives them enormous opportunity for self-development and self-definition. Contemporary female adolescence is a time when a girl can optimally find a balanced perspective on the issue of self-control, one that will help her arrive at an integrated sense of herself as an individual woman and potential mother.

On the other hand, in our culture the very idea of control is laden with gender implications. Control, conceived as an aspect of adult autonomy, is at odds with our image of motherhood.

The whole arena of pregnancy, childbirth, and the daily activities of mothering involve decreased personal control, and loss of control is among the cultural and personal anxieties that maternal desire raises. For some young women struggling toward a sense of identity, it is not surprising that motherhood comes to symbolize everything antithetical to the independent life they want to pursue. And the pressure on women to aspire to a certain model of control as a signature of adulthood is one of the social factors that can riddle maternal wishes with conflict.

It is true that the satisfying, somewhat predictable march of "progress" in one's life without children is replaced, when children arrive, by a messier, more ambiguous process of "becoming."

In this sense, motherhood can seem an agitating distraction, even a threatening derailment. Yet the sense that motherhood robs us of individuality derives part of its power from a cultural definition of individuality that pits the "serving the species" script of procreation against the notion of giving birth to oneself. This definition asserts itself in adolescence, when girls observe the difficulty in integrating the desire to mother with the idea of a work life. It rears its head at the end of college, when it can be an embarrassment to admit that one would like children sooner rather than later. When women move into the workforce, they observe the correlation of motherhood with a loss of power, pay, and prestige. External conditions resonate with internal anxieties, making it difficult for many women to evaluate their own desires with respect to mothering.

The prevailing notion that motherhood and individuality are in pitched conflict may also play into what some women writers have described as their obliviousness to mothers and babies before they began considering motherhood themselves. In the old days, women lived out their years in dense webs of female relationships, presiding together over birth, nurture, and death; women couldn't avoid children even if they tried. But today, smaller families and freedom in charting our own course mean that women can choose to live in relative isolation from children.

There are plenty of women, of course, who simply aren't interested in children, for a host of reasons. A friend spent her youth raising her siblings; she'd seen all the "becoming" she could take and was liberated by the prospect of living her own life. Yet, I detect in the obliviousness described in these writings neither a simple response to changed social realities nor a lack of interest in motherhood, but rather a motivated sense that preserving one's selfhood depends on shutting out an interest in children. That outlook can foster a kind of self-development, but it can also contribute to a deferral of childbearing that later, if it contributes to infertility, can be tinged with almost unbearable regret.

The incompatibility between motherhood and individuality has perhaps nowhere been more reflexively presumed than in the pro-choice rhetoric surrounding the issue of abortion. There, it has been perceived as dangerous to emphasize either the moral ambiguity of abortion or women's desire to mother, for fear of fueling a politically regressive view of women's place.

The resulting approach has been to frame the issue almost solely in terms of a woman's right to govern her own body. But for many women, including many proponents of reproductive choice, the wrenching ambiguity of abortion has to do with how difficult it is to place in clear opposition one's interests as an individual and as a potential mother, or one's interests and a potential child's interests. Their intuition is closer to that which Gwendolyn Brooks captured in her poem about abortion, "the mother": "oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said? / You were born, you had body, you died. / It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried./ Believe me, I loved you all./ Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you /All."

Copyright © 2004 by Daphne de Marneffe

About the Author

I was born in Boston in 1959, the second of three children born within three years to a psychiatrist father and a housewife mother. The term housewife tends to conjure images of boredom in modern minds, but perhaps the most significant fact about my childhood was how much my mother enjoyed caring for us. My siblings and I benefited from her love of drama and creative spirit, spending hours learning the entire songbooks of the musicals of the day.