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Demythologizing Motherhood
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19194 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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7 / 1991 |
2,233 Words |
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Beryl Lieff Benderly
Beryl Lieff Benderly is the author of Dancing Without Music:
Deafness in America, Thinking About Abortion, and The Myth of
Two Minds: What Gender Means and Doesn't Mean, which won
honorable mention in the 1988 National Psychology awards for
Excellence in the Media. |
THE MYTH OF THE BAD MOTHER
The Emotional Realities of Motherng
Jane Swigart
New York: Doubleday
260 pp., $19.95
In George V. Higgins' novel, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, a young man on the verge of marriage asks an older, long-married friend what he's letting himself in for. The husband muses for a moment, then replies (if memory serves me), "I'm not going to tell you. I didn't believe them when they told me and you wouldn't believe me if I told you."
I've always felt that this answer, though apt for matrimony, speaks even more tellingly of parenthood. What sensible person, before becoming a parent, could possibly credit, or even imagine, the experience of caring for, and caring deeply about, a growing child? What rational being could conjure up the years of thankless labor, the anxiety, the anger, the self-sacrifice in matters large and small, the self-blame, the uncertainty, the fatigue, the confusion, the never-ending, inescapable sense of responsibility that are every conscientious parent's lot? Or the pride, the affection, the joy, the fun, the tenderness, the satisfaction too deep for words, the unshakable sense of being deeply, ultimately, needed?
Voyage of discovery
The birth of a first child is nothing less than the most drastic transformation most of us will ever undergo. It rather resembles a moon landing; we step abruptly from the capsule of our ordinary lives onto an utterly unknown and inhospitable planet. But unlike astronauts, inexperienced new parents are immediately responsible, not only for reconnoitering this strange new landscape, but for establishing base camp and assuring the survival of a totally helpless young creature.
And in American culture, most of us set off on this journey alone, ill-equipped and misinformed. Not only do we lack an astronaut's freeze-dried food, a protective suit, mission control to get us out of scrapes, and a lunar lander to bear us back to the lives we know, but few of us even have a clear idea of what we're likely to encounter. We carry into parenthood a set of myths and notions misleading to the point of being positively harmful. And because of this, one of the world's most difficult jobs becomes even harder than it needs to
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