Ordinary Insanity, page 27
I held her on my knees in bed, stared into her eyes, and shouted, “I HATE YOU!” Her tiny face was red and befuddled and her eyes focused on me for an instant. Then she resumed her grunts and squeaks. The statement seemed to have little effect on her, but it destroyed me like a capsule set to fizzing. All of my hate evaporated along with all of my self-respect, and my very sense of self. I have never felt such a profound and destructive failure. I confessed it to Jorge when he returned as if I were revealing the whereabouts of a buried body, I wrote pages and pages about it in my journal the following morning, I treated my baby’s body for days with extra care as if I had literally scalded her skin. Yet having released this most unmotherly of statements I also felt freed. I had been returned to the ideal state of endless maternal selflessness. The hate was a separate, evil creature I needed to exorcise and it was gone, dissolved in the acid of guilt.
But of course, it recurred. Of course, there were other incidents of rage, of hate. I did not act on them physically, but they were there nonetheless, pressing their way to the surface of a pond I tried to force into placidity. Gradually I learned to recognize them, to sit through them, and it took me a long time to understand that they made my love more palpable and precious. They left me feeling what I imagine many mothers feel when their children finally sleep at night: a mix of heartache, nostalgia, longing, relief, guilt, fear, and sheer wonder, tracing the tiny crook of the elbow, the filigreed eyelashes, the tender soles of the feet.
* * *
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Jaclyn gave in. Her husband went home to the baby; she went to one of the antepartum rooms in the hospital and got the best night of sleep she’d had in weeks. The next day, staff psychologists and a psychiatrist visited her. Everyone was nice and understanding and thoughtful; she was at Seattle’s top hospital. “Even in my sort of fog, I could definitely tell that this was not their first time dealing with this situation,” she told me. They reassured her that she would be fine, that she would get better and be the best mother she could be for her son. The OB she’d seen the day before came over to check on her. She felt supported and more settled. They announced that they’d secured her a bed and would be transferring her to the psychiatric ward at another hospital. Her husband could meet her there to say goodbye. She was put on a gurney and wheeled out to the ambulance. En route, she covered her face with her coat. She had never been so embarrassed in her life.
“My whole life,” she told me, “I’ve seen a psychiatric facility as…something that was just such a shonda.” This is a Yiddish word for an embarrassment. Only crazy people went there, people who tried to kill themselves.
She arrived at ten-thirty at night and had to turn over most of her belongings: shoelaces, power cord, razor. When they took her breast pump, Jaclyn was overcome with a sense of regret; clearly this had all been a mistake. She asked, “How long am I going to be here?” The night nurse stared back blankly and replied, “Well, you could be here for a couple of weeks!”
Oh my God, I’m going to die here, Jaclyn thought. I am fucked. She was taken to her room. Every hour, someone came by to check that she was still in her bed. Somehow, after several checks, she fell asleep.
Her first encounter the following day was with the occupational therapist, who took Jaclyn aside and quietly informed her that she was a member of Jaclyn’s synagogue and wouldn’t reveal anything about meeting Jaclyn in here. Jaclyn froze. She had no idea what to say. She was terrified, resistant, vulnerable, and this woman knew her.
There were nine beds in the facility. There were people who’d attempted suicide, people with schizophrenia, people who needed electroshock therapy, bipolar people, severely depressed people. There was one woman who came in talking about being pregnant, and for an instant Jaclyn thought, I can be friends with her! but it soon became clear that the woman was incoherent, rambling about having had an abortion, interrupting people to make inappropriate comments. There was a woman who would not leave her bed and who screamed randomly throughout the day.
There were no locks on the doors. Jaclyn was terrified; she was a mess. The staff acknowledged that this was not the ideal setting for her but insisted she play by their rules to get out. She had to be stabilized, and first that meant medication. The psychiatrist she saw was “the sweetest guy,” who kept apologizing for her being in there, saying things like I know this is not ideal. I know that this is really not where you should be. If we had a perfect world, you’d be in a place specifically for mothers with PPD, but we don’t have that. Thank you for being a trouper. I know you’re going to be okay. This was tremendously soothing for Jaclyn. Later, Swedish Hospital, where she delivered in Seattle, would open the Swedish Center for Perinatal Bonding and Support, in which women suffering from postpartum mood disorders could get treatment with their babies. Clearly, even with a lack of resources at that moment, there was an understanding and a recognition about what kind of care women in this particular situation needed. The psychiatrist took her from 10 to 40 milligrams of Prozac a day, which helped very quickly.
Jaclyn would wake up, pump, get breakfast, and then head to a workshop or a seminar on coping skills or anger management. The psychiatrist would come for one-on-one meetings. There would be art activities and movies. “It’s sort of like camp!” Her husband took two weeks off work and came to visit her every day. She quietly accepted her situation, settling into it. She found the staff friendly, understanding, even apologetic. She was reassured by this.
Near the end of a week, the doctors told her that she had stabilized enough to go. She was ecstatic at the prospect of finally seeing her son. It had taken this distance for her to realize how much she loved him. “I needed a time-out,” she says, matter-of-factly. Up to that point, she had felt no connection; she wasn’t sure she even liked him. By the end of those six days, the love that had been buried beneath stress began shining through. She wanted nothing more in the world than to see her baby.
Being released “was like getting out of prison.” She had only been outside once during her stay, and walking into the fresh air felt like starting her life over.
She returned home with her husband. Holding her son again, she cried and cried. “I promise,” she told him, “I’m going to work on getting better.” Avi was six weeks old. He was beginning to smile. At that moment, her life as a mother cleaved neatly in two; there was the first half, of fear and despair, kick counts, isolation, pumping all hours of the day and night, have to get it right, and then there was the second half, with the familiar markers of maternal exhaustion—the diapers, the sleep deprivation, the tantrums—but with Jaclyn done now with the fantasy, ready to be herself.
10
Maternalism and Momism
In Puritan New England, mothers were considered incidental at best. Fathers shaped their children, and they did so mostly with unsparing use of the rod. A child playing idly might be publicly whipped as an example to his peers. Puritan children had to have the innate tendency to sin beaten out of them, and God’s word driven in. Only a father had the perceived moral authority and education to do this; women were powerless not only in the civic and political spheres, but in the home as well. They were imagined as weak and vulnerable to “passions” and “indulgence” and “excessive fondness,” grave defects in a place that demanded a steely focus on survival. Women had little time for what we would understand as “child care”—cuddling, teaching, playing—as they went about carving a living from wilderness, making and cultivating the fundamentals of sustenance. Puritan child-rearing advice manuals were addressed to fathers. Fathers dressed children, fed them, taught them, rocked them, and decided when they were ready to begin school and leave home.
This was not the kind of emotionally involved relationship we might imagine now; it more closely resembled the meticulous social control of Gilead in The Handmaid’s Tale. It was a matter of God and survival. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a third of children died before the age of five. The fiery Puritan preacher Cotton Mather had fifteen children, thirteen of whom died before he did. These children were mourned to varying degrees: some writers of this era described inconsolable sadness at a child’s death, while others moved on quickly. The French writer and inventor of the essay Michel de Montaigne described the loss of a child as “not without regret, but without great sorrow.” Children were valued for economic contribution rather than for emotional rewards and often began work by the time a contemporary child would begin preschool.
Following the American Revolution, the home became increasingly divided from spaces of work. The lives of white fathers and mothers diverged, and children were seen less and less as tainted beings to be whipped into submission and more as innocent romantic babes born, as Wordsworth put it, “trailing clouds of glory.” The work of French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, which had reshaped European thinking about childhood, began to percolate to the United States several decades after it had taken hold on the Continent. Rousseau argued that childhood was precious, innocent, and sacred, a time of near-divine cavorting in the natural world. He advocated for breastfeeding, the core connection between a mother and child, at a time—the eighteenth century—when many European babies were farmed off to wet nurses for a year or two. He was sentimental and sweeping in his proclamations of the glory of youth, even though he abandoned his own five children to a foundling home. The innocence he glorified did not apply to black children in the United States, who were sent to work at preschool age or sold off under slavery. They were commodities, while white children were becoming priceless.
Moving into the Victorian era, the same “fondness” the Puritans had damned would now allow mothers to raise good, moral citizens. Culture became feminized: as white American men set out conquering and developing, white American women were expected to act as “agents of civilization.” Professions associated with this position, particularly schoolteaching and the care of libraries, became the domains of women. The mother, according to a magazine article from 1833 quoted by historian Jodi Vandenberg-Daves, “is forming the characters of the future defenders of our faith, the administrators of our laws, and the guardians of our civil liberties and lives.”
For white women, motherhood was a civic task, and gradually it became a political one. White women were offered what Vandenberg-Daves has called a “compromised maternal citizenship.” Their identity, work, and responsibility as mothers allowed them to claim a certain degree of power. Starting in the pre–Civil War era, white women imagined they taught men about justice and liberty, kept them free of vice in the commercial and moral realms, and enforced piety and goodness over male reason. Suffragettes also fought against slavery on the grounds that it violated a sacred mother-child bond. They fought for the right to vote with the argument that, as mothers, they had to defend the best interests of girls and women. They fought for access to education by insisting that in order to properly educate their children they had to be educated themselves. By the mid-nineteenth century, Vandenberg-Daves writes, women reformers had “[set] out to mother the world.”
In the Progressive era, mother activists fought to end child labor, provide mothers with pensions, and establish settlement houses for poor and immigrant women. Jane Addams, a Progressive reformer, a co-founder of the ACLU, the first American woman recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, and the “mother” of social work in the United States, asserted that giving a mother the right to vote “would fulfill her traditional responsibility to her children,” and she insisted that government needed the input of mothers because they understood better than anyone the conditions and demands of the home. Margaret Sanger, meanwhile, made her argument for birth control in part on the basis that it constituted more responsible, modern motherhood: “Our girls,” she wrote, “must be brought up to realize that Motherhood is the most sacred profession in the world, and that it is a profession that requires more preparation than any other open to women.”
White women had their own political sphere, using language that spoke to women’s experiences and roles. This period came to be defined alternately as “maternalism” or “moral motherhood” because of the way it took for granted a woman’s primary role as a mother and her moral clarity, civic duty, and responsibility for nurture arising from this role.
The paradox of maternalism, and the complex legacy it left for feminists, was that while it advocated for broader social reforms on the moral basis of women’s maternal roles, it never challenged the institution of motherhood itself, nor sought to liberate women from it. Whereas in Europe, women fought for reforms such as universal day care, which would make it easier for mothers to balance work and home life, in the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries women’s rights activists took as axiomatic the belief that mothers should be the primary caregivers of their children. Reforms that would make it easier for mothers to do work other than mothering, particularly work that did not involve caretaking or nurturing, would have challenged the moral foundation of maternalism.
Some of these early women’s activists were genuinely radical: the Quaker abolitionist Lucretia Mott confronted a pro-slavery mob that burned down Pennsylvania Hall. Angelina and Sarah Grimké, abolitionist sisters, toured the country giving anti-slavery lectures, arguing with the men who jeered at them in the audiences, declaring themselves and enslaved women “sisters” and insisting on white women’s obligation to work for black women’s freedom, arguing that women’s liberation and black liberation complemented each other. Many female abolitionists found their footing in this movement, learning fundraising, petitioning, protesting, and other political skills. Many men were less than thrilled: “If the vine,” wrote the General Association of Congregationalist Ministers of Massachusetts, “whose strength and beauty is to lean on the trelliswork…thinks to assume the independence and overshadowing nature of the elm, it will not only cease to bear fruit, but fall in shame and dishonor into the dust.”
The leaders who rose to power in the initial incarnation of the women’s movement in the mid-nineteenth century largely ignored the struggles of working-class and black women. They focused on enabling middle- and upper-class white women to access middle- and upper-class white men’s power. As Angela Davis points out, the Seneca Falls Convention, the event that marked the formation of the first women’s movement, made “not even a passing reference to black women,” nor featured a single black woman speaker or audience member. “Even the most radical white abolitionists…failed to understand that the rapidly developing capitalism of the North was also an oppressive system,” Davis wrote in Women, Race, and Class.
These activists leaned on their power as white women to earn benefits for themselves, feigning helplessness when it came to the struggles of women of color. As bell hooks put it, “The whole history of feminism can be justified as ‘let’s just get THIS done first.’ ” Much of the rhetoric women’s suffragists used relied on the superiority of white women to people of color. “I will cut off this right arm of mine before I will ever work for or demand the ballot for the Negro and not the woman,” Elizabeth Cady Stanton declared.
Susan B. Anthony, meanwhile, argued that in every state there were more literate women than men, more literate white women than “negro voters,” and more literate American women than foreign voters, so therefore if white women were given the vote, they’d essentially override the votes of all other inferior groups.
At the second state convention of the women’s rights movement in Akron, Ohio, white women in the audience tried to override Sojourner Truth’s speech by shouting, “Don’t let her speak! Don’t let her speak!” She spoke anyway; this was the famous speech in which, confronting a male heckler in the audience who declared that women couldn’t even jump over puddles or help themselves into carriages, Truth declared, “Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man—when I could get it—and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?”
For many white women activists of her era, the answer was no: or at least, not the right kind of woman. Other black women who ran their own feminist clubs were barred entry to the mainstream movement headed by white women. Lila Ruffin, an African American suffragist, journalist, and newspaper publisher, declared in a speech to her black women’s club that white women didn’t want to be associated with “black female immorality.”
In spite of many appeals from black women activists, Anthony and the turn-of-the-century maternalist reformers opted to seek the support of southern white supremacists over solidarity with black women. At the 1903 convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, Mississippi delegate Belle Kearney declared, “Just as surely as the North will be forced to turn to the South for the nation’s salvation, just so surely will the South be compelled to look to its Anglo-Saxon women as the medium through which to retain the supremacy of the white race over the African.” Kearney was the keynote speaker of the convention.
As bell hooks wrote, “The women’s rights movement had not drawn black and white women close together. Instead, it exposed the fact that white women were not willing to relinquish their support of white supremacy to support the interests of all women.”
Yet the work black women activists were doing at the turn of the century sounds uncannily prescient now. Black suffragists demanded the vote for women on the basis not of their identity as mothers—presented as innately good and moral—but rather on the grounds of the work they did as mothers, both in the home and outside of it. By the early twentieth century, 70 percent of black women were earning wages. Black activists organized kindergartens and day nurseries for mothers who had to work. As historian Eileen Boris writes, “Black women were usually fighting the state, rather than courting it.” Whereas white women could and did appeal to white men for support, black women found their support inside schools, churches, and civic organizations, particularly in the South, where the prevailing caste system would have made it virtually impossible for them to negotiate with any established institution. Black women built what anthropologist Nancy Naples calls a “community of other mothers,” who labored not only in the workforce but in public and civic spaces for their communities. Naples concludes that 50 percent of Latinas and 50 percent of the African Americans in her 1992 study were involved in community activities, including advocating for child care, fighting school officials to improve education, struggling with landlords and police officials to improve housing and safety, and interpreting for non–English speakers.
