Our children are just coming to the age when everything depends on my efforts. They are delicate in health, and nervous and excitable and need a mother’s whole attention. Can I lawfully divide my attention by literary efforts?
Harriet Beecher Stowe from a letter to her husband, 1841
Harriet Beecher Stowe is one for prescient quotes about motherhood and writing. Excerpts from her letters include such gems as describing the endless and varied interruptions that come with having children and running a house while trying to write anything (even a simple letter!). Her description of persevering in such circumstances as “rowing against wind and tide” is apt.
The excerpt from a letter to her husband above is another one that captures the friction of maternal life, feeling irreplaceable and yet spread too thin. Not getting into all the biographical details of Stowe’s particular circumstances, the sentiment is timeless and lends itself to many broadly applicable meditations. On the one hand, there is truth to the necessary and unique role of a mother in the life of her children. And yet, she is but finite and there are limits.
Once children reach a certain age, a mother’s “whole attention” can be a smothering experience. How often have you seen a child helpless in little floaties at the pool when mommy is around suddenly acquire the ability to launch himself from the diving board and swim safely to the side of the pool once mom is not around? No flotation device required.
Additionally, watching the influence of other adults, especially fathers, can yield similarly remarkable transformations. A timid child can scale monkey bars with agility and ease under a father’s gaze while the mother provokes sniveling fear.
In the current moment, with its emphasis on gentle parenting and positive parenting, it can be easy to be duped into overestimating the role of a mother in strange and unhelpful ways, all while we simultaneously ignore and undermine a mother’s legitimate role. If a child is acting out, we are told first to consider if mom is spending enough one-on-one time. It’s a valid concern, and diligent effort to cherish each child can result in a calmer home environment. But it’s not the whole story.
Sometimes children are just bored, restless, physically tired, undernourished from a bout of picky eating, or otherwise suffering from the general human condition. A mother who tortures herself with the conviction that her child’s every discomfort can be traced back to her attachment or lack thereof lives in a wholly unnecessary personal hell.
The needs of an infant are one thing; they are most often appropriately and necessarily fulfilled in the person of his mother. Yet, the mother cannot succumb to this intensity and surrender herself as a shriveled shell of her former self, a vacant slave to primitive wails. An essential element of the mother’s role, often encouraged and influenced by the father of the children, is to discipline the child. A three-week-old babe is incapable of anything but howling for what he wants. Thankfully, his stamina is such that his howling can only last so long if his desires are truly inscrutable.
A child of one or two, however, requires the invitation toward self-mastery. A slavish mother is a very poor teacher for the child who must master his own will. The devoted mother who rises throughout the night hourly to attend to a sleep-deprived two-year-old is fortunate if she has the sane type of husband who will put an end to this theater and find the most expedient and humane means of getting everyone in the house a more adequate night’s sleep.
As much as mothers like to gripe about the clinginess of babies, there is a striking and reassuring simplicity. Depending on whether the child has an innate docility, the mother can confidently decide most things for everyone for several years: what the child wears, what he eats, when he eats, when he goes to bed. But we are not raising dependent hangers-on but educating children to be fully independent, in command of themselves, free to make choices for themselves. Surrendering control—the most seductive vice for so many or the fairer sex—is a painful process, humiliating even.
Let us leave aside for now the complexity of Beecher Stowe’s position, compelled to write for pay by the circumstances of her family while also feeling the acute need to be involved in the minutia of her children’s lives. For us, now so often encouraged to homebirth, homestead, homeschool, and generally exist on an island of our own powers in the tireless struggle for the betterment of our children, understanding the limits of our maternal role, especially as our children grow is a wise word we should heed. It is often the emotionally ill women who remain intimately involved in their children’s lives into adulthood. There is great maturity—and sacrifice—in giving children the freedom to grow apart from mothers, to act beyond the locus of control she inhabits and discover strength that lies hidden in a mother’s sheltering embrace.
We can find a place in the muddy middle, carving out a “both-and.” We can affirm first that mothers are irreplaceable and necessary at every stage of a child’s development while also acknowledging that mothers must consciously separate from the child over time to allow the full growth and flourishing of her offspring. We need not see her decision to devote herself to the child as an effacement of her personhood or her decision to withdraw from her child as he grows as a selfish abandonment. There will for all of us be elements of these ugly facets of motherhood, but, like the archer, we aim high and make an attempt, however faltering.
I feel I must drag Ms. Brenda Ueland back onto the scene. After finally tracking down her 1938 book If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence, and Spirit, I admit it was a bit dull and wordy (perhaps a bit like reading the thoughts of yours truly). She has, however, a moment of brilliance that is worth repeating often. We have expounded at length on her exhortation to wives and mothers in the chapter “Why women who do too much housework should neglect it for their writing.”
Let us here add some of her additional thoughts on the subject. When writing about a harried wife and mother with young children, Ueland writes:
“Like many of the most talented and funniest people, she is too nice and unconceited to work from mere ambition, or the far-away hope of money, and she has not become convince (as I have) that there are other reasons for working, that a person like herself who cannot write a sentence that is not delightful and a circus, should give some time to it instead of always doily-carrying, recipe-experimenting, child-admonishing, husband-ministering, to the complete neglect of her Imagination and creative power.”
She identifies this neglect as the reason that so many women live lives that are “vaguely unsatisfactory.” She continues, “They [unsatisfied women] sense that if you are always doing something for others like a servant or a nurse, and never anything for yourself, you cannot do others any good. You make them physically more comfortable. But you cannot affect them spiritually in any way at all.”
Ueland, however much she may be mistaken in other areas of her “Imagination” and “Spirit” writing, is correct in identifying this discontent. There has been so much of an emphasis on oppression in motherhood that we do not notice the woman who neglects herself is most miserable and most incapable of nurturing others, and it is not her motherhood that oppresses her. A mother need not be selfish and self-absorbed to maintain friends, interest, and hobbies, read books, take walks alone, and occasionally take a trip without her children for a moment of solace. Sometimes such actions are only rational.
Ueland closes her chapter in musing, “But if women once learn to be something themselves, that the only way to teach is to be fine shining examples, we will have in one generation the most remarkable and glorious children.” Indeed, the passionate women are the mothers capable of encouraging “glorious children.” The glorious children who exasperate us can open up new vistas for interest and passion, all while constraining and impeding us in other areas. Children can, in the best of circumstances, make mothers more alive and whole, not less. The key is that she cannot live solely through them, but chart a path to greater virtue as their mother.
