The Problem of Maternal Desire, Part 4

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

(Page 4 of 4)

The tension between motherhood and individuality also surfaces in the seeming split screen between our cultural fascination with babies and the less articulated desire to care for them.

Just as there are thousands of falling-in-love stories but many fewer tales of slogging to make a marriage work, there are countless media images of the miracle of pregnancy or the adorableness of babies but little that represents the day-to-day care of children. Perhaps it was ever thus. History provides a wealth of examples, from Cleopatra onward, of women who birthed babies, delegated caregiving, and emerged with their freedom of movement intact. And certainly from a psychological point of view, the desire to have a child and the desire to care for that child may coexist in the same person, but they are not the same thing. One woman captured the difference when she said, "My mother thinks I should try to spend more time with the children I already have, but I can't get the idea of having another one out of my mind."

Still, it is striking how the desire to have a child is today the object of such intense focus and, increasingly, extraordinary measures, whereas the desire to care for children is singularly unriveting, even a bit d?class?. A woman may believe that caring for children will express, rather than compromise, her individuality or her valued goals, but she regularly meets up with social and economic incentives that pull her in a different direction.

In the course of educated young women's lives, for instance, it is usual to acquire training and jobs before children. A couple marries, both members work, and without giving it much thought, they develop a lifestyle predicated on two salaries.

When they have a child, the mother may find that as her maternity leave draws to a close, she isn't itching to get back to work. Instead, she yearns to be with her child. Her change of heart presents the couple with the need to rethink their relationship and their decisions about lifestyle and money. They may conclude that it is going "backward" to give up one salary; and anyway, decisions made on the basis of two salaries, like buying a house, cannot be easily reversed. Rueful acceptance overrides her yearning: spending time caring for their children is a "luxury" they can't afford. Suddenly, like so many things in American life - health care, good schools, fresh air - motherhood has turned into something of a luxury. You have time for it only if you are very lucky.

Margaret, a lawyer, left a rewarding job at forty to stay home with her second son. She had worked fifty hours per week during her first son's infancy. Wisecracking by nature, she is uncharacteristically solemn when discussing her decisions:

I'll never get over the regret I feel at missing my first child's babyhood. What amazes me still - you'd think I'd get over it - is how completely taken off guard I was by wanting to be with him. Before you have kids, you have the almost swaggering attitude that you won't fall into the mommy trap. You don't believe that once you're there, you'll genuinely want to be with your kids.

Now whenever I'm in a position to counsel younger associates, I tell them, "Set up your marriage, finances and domestic life so that they don't depend on your continued wage earning, because hard as it is to imagine, once you have kids, you may not want to do what you're doing anymore."

Today's young women face a different social landscape from that of women a generation ago, and thanks to the struggle of the women who preceded them, they can take for granted access to work and public attention on work-family balance. The softening of rigid trade-offs has given younger women more latitude in assessing for themselves the relative satisfactions of work and family. To some older women, this can look like a regression to nonfeminist values. For others, it can lead to reflection on the choices they made and the social climate in which they made them. Elisa, a therapist with a college-age child, recounted that when she was a young mother, she left her child to go back to work with great sadness and trepidation, but she felt sure that it was the progressive thing to do. She and her friends "were looking at our own mothers as frustrated and depressed, and we had a clear sense of the importance of learning from their situation and making a life for ourselves. Now I look back with an incredible sense of longing; but I can't say I would do it differently, because that is who I was." Intergenerational discussions, potentially difficult as they are, can offer a rich opportunity for reflection to women at all stages of life.

I HAVE BEEN ARGUING THAT we do not know how to think about the desire to mother. We have trouble understanding it - within ourselves, in terms of our psychological and feminist theories, and in the public debates and institutions that structure our lives. The critical issue that has eluded theory and social debate is that caring for young children is something mothers often view as extraordinarily important both for their children and for themselves.

Reframing the mothering role in this way calls into question a number of views that hang in the cultural air. We are all familiar with these views: mothering is a sacrifice of the mother for the sake of the child; mothering will not be valued until it is paid work; careers enhance personal growth, while caring for children breeds stagnation; children disrupt, rather than foster, the realization of individual goals. Such views contribute to the emphasis some mothers place on "returning to normal" after children are born. They may also help to explain the surprise some women feel when they realize how much they want to spend time caring for their children.

In the popular American mind-set, there's always a second chance. So it comes as a shock to realize how fast children grow up, and how quickly they no longer crave your company or respond to your influence in the ways they once did. The time-limited nature of mothering small children, the very uniqueness of it, itself seems almost like an affront to women's opportunity, demanding as it does that mothers respond at a distinct, unrepeatable moment with decisions, often radical ones, about how to spend their time. Unfair as it may seem, the fleetingness is real. In that light, the fact that childbearing absorbs but a small portion of women's adult life span - often seen as a reason to "stay on track" - should point us toward prizing this brief period of our lives, and not just on a personal or individual level; as a culture, we need to express our recognition of its value through our laws, our policies concerning work and family, and our theories of psychological development.

Caring for one's children at home is sometimes dismissed as a choice open only to privileged women. But in fact, mothers at all socioeconomic levels face difficult decisions regarding the time they spend with their children. Moreover, the devaluation of mothering operates at various levels of social and economic reality and in many intersecting ways. If we open our eyes to the commonalities in mothers' experience, we might begin to develop some political consciousness, even solidarity, about the larger-scale problems that the devaluation of mothering inflicts upon everyone. It should not be acceptable to any of us, for instance, when politicians maintain both that middle-class children need their mothers at home and that welfare mothers should be joining the workforce when their children are four months old.

Economic necessity is always a fact of life, and economic privation affects those who suffer from it in every sphere of their lives. The mothers least likely to find fulfillment in their low-wage jobs are also those least likely to have time to enjoy being with their children. This group of mothers and children suffer a disproportionate negative burden. But for those people with some choice, an emphasis on economic necessity can itself be used to obscure the realm of feelings on which wise and satisfying choices draw. No one can banish economic need; but being aware of how we feel about time apart from our children, and being attuned to our children's feelings about it, are central to clarifying our priorities.

Why is this a book about mothers? Because caring for small children is compellingly central to many women's sense of themselves to a degree still not experienced by many men. If current research is correct, this may be changing, as more men place value on family time. From custody rights to employer policies, fathers are increasingly questioning the givens that have framed men's life courses in the past. But for the moment, the care of children remains a predominantly female occupation. Some argue that this is a problem in need of correction - that true equality of the sexes cannot be achieved until child rearing and work responsibilities are equally shared. But whatever position one takes on this matter, and whatever one's social ideal for the division of labor, the idea that equality between men and women - or fairness between any two partners - can come about only through similar life courses and a parallel allocation of labor may constitute an abstraction by which few people actually want to live.

We need to speak accurately about the character of maternal desire, resisting its caricature either as sentimental false consciousness or woman's nature. Teasing apart the psychological and ideological strands of maternal desire can help individual women consider its role in their lives and make choices based on a conscious awareness of their own conflicts and wishes.

Maternal desire is not, for any woman, all there is. But for many of us, it is an important part of who we are. And among such women, it is time to start a conversation.

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.