Mothering without a Map: The Search for the Good Mother

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– By Kathryn Black

The journey toward motherhood for any woman begins with conception. But whose? Did my maternal path begin when my first child was conceived? The casual answer to that question is yes. But the true answer, I think, is that the journey began long ago, with my conception, or my mother’s, or her mother’s or even further back in the chain of mothers before us. For me, as for every woman, all the incidents of my life, all that makes up my character and personality, my DNA, what I read and experience, where I’ve traveled from and to, all of it led me to motherhood. And all of it affects how I mother. Nothing, however, exerts an influence on how a woman raises a child as powerfully as does her own mother. For some women, the maternal route traces a clean trajectory from a childhood of being watched over by a loving and consistent mother to later parenthood whose foundation rests on Mother’s solid template.

For others of us, the maternal experience is far different. My mother disappeared into hospitals when I was four years old and died when I was six. From her I came to know the cavern of grief the absent mother creates. I also know what it is to be mothered by someone who can’t see you, who can’t recognize or respond to the needs of your deepest self. That was the kind of care I found in mother substitutes—stepmothers, but mainly my maternal grandmother—who held dominion over me after my mother’s death. These experiences, which underlay my identity, kept me from the
comfortable assumption that I would mother my children with ease, relying on the patterns, practices and confidences conveyed from mother to daughter. For a long time, my childhood privation kept me from motherhood altogether. My first marriage was to a man who wanted nothing to do with fatherhood, and that suited me just fine. I wanted a career and an arena of cities and adventure, not the stifling limits of a life I assumed would be bound by shopping malls and schoolyards. I feared the suffocation of motherhood. At age forty-one I married again, this time to a childless man who wanted children with the same fever that had by then overpowered my
fears. Together we created a family, with two sons born to us in quick succession.

Once a mother myself I began to search for assurance that I could nurture my children more joyfully, deliberately and lovingly than I had been reared. Long excluded from the hallowed covenant between mothers and daughters, I knew I had missed something essential, something mothers impart to daughters about becoming women and mothers, something women who have or had intimate mothers know and use to raise happy, well- adjusted children. I sought evidence that maternal care, though perhaps best or most easily acquired at the breast of one’s own mother, can be learned elsewhere.

Mothers are so vital to children that renowned pediatrician and psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott put it this way: “There is no such thing as a baby.” He meant that a baby must be considered not in isolation but in relationship to the someone nearby whose eyes and ears are “glued to it.” Infants cannot exist without the care of another; they are bound by biology to the adults responsible for them. Cornell University anthropologist Meredith Small says that evolution has arranged mothers and babies this way so that “the mother will feed and protect the infant and the infant will remain close by to be fed and protected.”

Parenthood, the intricate weave of biological, psychological and cultural resolve, extends further into the human offspring’s life than it does for any other animal. Intense parenting is, in fact, one of the most distinguishing features of the human species. The care parents provide their children, however, varies widely. It ranges from optimal—exactly what nature meant and the baby requires—all the way to destructive. For those of us who received nurturing that fell short of ideal, the knowledge that adult caregivers—usually but not exclusively mothers—are essential to
children is a two-edged sword. We live lives made more complex by having missed first-rate care in childhood, and we face the momentous task of mothering without a worthy model to follow.

My quest to understand what becomes of the under-mothered when they have children and to discover whether flawed mothering can be overcome in the next generation led me to the fields of psychiatric and psychoanalytic research, developmental psychology and social work as well as biology and anthropology. In the writings of experts in those fields I found answers to my questions about the purpose of mothers in the lives of children. There I also found explanations for why children cling, often far into adulthood, to inadequate mothers and why humans tend to repeat in
adulthood patterns experienced in childhood, even when those patterns of behavior and relatedness don’t bring them what they want or need. There, too, I learned what developmental psychologists have discovered about why some people are able to overcome troubled childhoods and lead satisfying lives, and others are not. I found answers and reassurance in the work of such experts, but comfort and wisdom have come from the women, ages twenty to seventy, who have told me their mother stories—in person, on the telephone, via e-mail and through questionnaires. I’ve heard from them of the many ways the path nature intends for us—being suckled, nurtured and
protected by a responsive caregiver—can go wrong. Mothers sometimes go crazy, desert us or die young. Others stay but are inept or cold, mean or wounded, distant or perpetually distracted, well intentioned but needy, possessive or overprotective, alcoholic or otherwise unpredictable. Whether these women are at fault or are victims of their fates, the result is girls who grow up without having been well mothered. The voices of many of the more than fifty women who participated in my research illustrate the experience of being under-mothered and of becoming mothers who strive to provide for their own children something different from what they
themselves received. Along the way, I’ve come to see that while scientists help us understand the past and its effects, it’s often other mothers who point the way as we walk into the future with our children.

BOOK EXCERPT: Mothering without a Map: The Search for the Good Mother Within – By Kathryn Black