In actress Ingrid Bergman's autobiography, she describes an argument she had with director Ingmar Bergman while making Autumn Sonata, a film about a concert pianist who leaves her family to pursue a musical career and does not see her children for seven years. The actress explains that she did not understand how a mother could bear to be apart from her children for 'seven' years. This point of view, especially coming from a woman, would be totally unremarkable if we did not also know that Ms Bergman had herself left behind a very young daughter in Sweden to launch a career in Hollywood and she did not see the child for nearly five years. Is there then a magic number for how long a mother can stay away from a child without misgivings? And what would that be? One year, three, five, … seven? When does self fulfillment turn into selfishness and a necessary parting becomes abandonment? Or does it even matter?
Other than the existence of God, I doubt that there has been any other topic in human history that has generated more diverse opinions, heated debates, psychological examination, joy, guilt, pride and societal judgment than the role of a mother in child rearing. Women's status and role in the world have undergone drastic changes through the ages but the physical and emotional demands of motherhood remain almost unchanged. How women find the balance between the needs of a child and of their own, is a challenge as old as civilization. But the debate goes on – what makes a "good" or "bad" mother? I am not here to wax eloquent on the thorny question. Instead, I point you to this provocative article in Newsweek by Julia Baird which was published just before Mother's Day.
(painting by Padmakar Kappagantula)
When reporters told Doris Lessing she had won a Nobel Prize in Literature as she was hauling groceries out of a cab in 2007, she said: "I've won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one, so I am delighted. It's a royal flush." Few would dispute that she is a brilliant writer. Her work is lucid, inspiring, and provocative. But it would be hard to argue that she was a brilliant mother. When she fled to London to pursue her writing career and communist ideals, she left two toddlers with their father in South Africa (another, from her second marriage, went with her). She later said that at the time she thought she had no choice: "For a long time I felt I had done a very brave thing. There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children. I felt I wasn't the best person to bring them up. I would have ended up an alcoholic or a frustrated intellectual like my mother."
I like remembering women like Lessing on Mother's Day. They shock us now, those women who bucked convention and did things the way men have often done—just as selfishly and callously—denying maternity in a way that seems to defy nature. Take Dorothea Lange, the photographer who paid foster families to look after five of her children (and stepchildren) for months at a stretch while she traveled around California photographing migrant workers. Were these women bad mothers? Or talented, single-minded women who struggled to find ways to both create and give their children what they needed? They certainly make the rest of us seem outstanding—and put our ongoing, deafening, and dull debates about bad mothers in sharp relief. Today, women no longer need to escape their families to work or be happy—now they need to escape their own unrealistic expectations of what a good mother is. Guilt, judgment, and a distrust of female ambition are a hallmark of modern parenting, along with the literature about female fretting, which, over the past few years, has turned into a symphony of self-loathing. We spend more time with our children than women did in the 1950s, yet we consistently report higher levels of stress. Perplexingly, study after study has found that mothers are less happy than women without kids. And books about bad or uptight mothers are more anxious and defensive than defiant and liberating. Instead of giving the parenting police the bird on matters like food, sleep, work, and schools—or having a life—we write apologias. Haven't millions of years of evolution already determined that the vast bulk of mothers would sever their heads with an ax to protect their offspring? Enough. If you love your kids and are doing your best, if they are alive, safe, and sane, then your mind should simply be at ease.
There is more. But the funny thing is that when Baird speaks of her own mother to whom she turns for advice, her tone is considerably softer.
I recently asked my own mother—a woman of great grace and kindness—for one piece of advice about how to raise my children. She said we should love, accept, and forgive them—also teaching them, with luck, to love and accept us too. It's a calm model of parenting that has built into its core the idea of imperfection; theirs, ours, hers. Let's make 2010 the Year of Lowering the Bar. Or, perhaps, Going to the Bar. Happy Mother's Day.
Mmm'kay, Ms Baird. Point taken – we mothers don't have to be indefatigable heroes and martyrs. But one gentle reminder. Just because men do some things with impunity, doesn't make them either the best or the right choice.
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