When you ask women what they learned about gender as kids, and how their sense of what it meant to be female was shaped by their mothers, you don’t just hear black-and-white stories about muted maternal desire and the division of personality traits, mom as soft and self-sacrificing, dad as autonomous and strong. You also hear—and with much greater specificity—stories about divisions in value, stories about frustrated desire, dawning awarenesses about power and worth. You hear stories about conflicted mothers, depressed mothers, mothers perpetually tormented by the bathroom scale, mothers whose sense of competence emerged only in the kitchen or at Bloomingdale’s or in front of a vanity table, mothers who never had the time or opportunity to consider their own hungers or ambitions. You hear painful stories, too: phrases like “belittled by my father” and “cheated on.” You hear a woman talk about watching her mother lose her hair during chemotherapy, her mother weeping into the mirror and saying, “Who will love me now?” You hear a woman describe the first time she saw her father hit her mother, the mother pressed up against the kitchen wall, her face a portrait in terror. You hear about mothers like my own, whose passions were consistently minimized, buried under heaps of laundry and grocery lists, frustrated by unhappy marriages.
These are the images that seep into the bones, a slow accumulation of data about female value and power or lack of them. A mother is the all-nurturing center of the universe to a little girl, her power seemingly boundless; in the absence of a father figure to connect with deeply, an available model of hunger and striving, she is also a girl’s necessary fallback, the woman who will form the essence of her selfhood. So what happens if a girl grows aware that this figure is actually perceived in the household (by the father, the older siblings, the extended family) as a nag or a glorified maid or a powerless servant? What happens if she comes to understand that her mother is articulated quite differently than her father, that she’s seen not as active, desiring, and powerful but as voiceless, dependent, and submissive? Even if her own mother is a strong, respected, confident woman, what happens if she learns that this is an exception, that out in the rest of the world women are not nearly so powerfully defined, that violence, oppression, and poverty remain fixed parts of women’s lives across the globe, that true gender equality remains a stubbornly distant dream?
For the generation that came after me, women now in their teens and twenties who were raised in a more egalitarian and feminist climate, the images of motherhood may be different but not necessarily any less problematic. What happens, for instance, if your mother was a feminist powerhouse, a woman who marched for women’s rights, fought her way into a male-dominated career, had kids in the midst of it, and then spent the next two decades dancing the frenzied dance of the working mother, ten balls in the air at all times? This may be a more empowered picture than the one I grew up with, but it can be every bit as disconcerting and every bit as enlaced with questions about divisions in social value; a model of appetite is not necessarily the same as a model of satiety, and while a contemporary mother may have the freedom to hunger, she may not always have the resources to get fed. Most women still have primary responsibility over the domestic sphere; the struggle to find support (good subsidized day care, flexible schedules, partners willing to pick up fifty percent of the work at home, and workplaces willing to let them) remains epic; the image of thwarted ambition I grew up with has become an image of frayed nerves and sleep deprivation, which presents its own challenges to a daughter’s conception of appetite. A twenty-three-year-old woman I know, a consummate underachiever, grew up with a mother who ran a successful law practice, worked twelve-hour days, raised three kids, never had five minutes to herself, and made the world of hunger and striving look, in her daughter’s words, “like a constant battle, completely overwhelming.” Syndicated columnist Ellen Goodman writes about this phenomenon, observing the emergence of a generation of women in their teens and twenties who see in their mothers “the stressed-out, sometimes burned-out front line of the women’s movement” and who turn away with the disgusted refrain, “If that’s having it all, I don’t want it.” My young friend extends this argument—her mother’s high-achieving stance feels intimidating to her as well as exhausting, she doesn’t see how she could possibly measure up, and she’s not sure the personal costs would be worth the effort—but she agrees with the sentiment. As she puts it, “If that’s having it all, I’d rather be napping.”
Every generation measures itself against the one before; every daughter’s experience of hunger will be shaped to some extent by that of her mother: what she had or did not have, how much it cost her, how much she herself wants or can allow herself to want in contrast. It is this—this comparison between self and other, this data bank of images, these memories of unfulfilled or undervalued or strung-out mothers, this articulation of women as less entitled, less powerful, less sexual and ambitious, less supported and recognized in the wider world—that so complicates the matter of appetite for women, twists it into a hard knot. Feminist mothers or nonfeminist mothers, devalued mothers or burned-out mothers—a mother’s choices, her frustrations, her constellation of limits and constraints become for a daughter both paradigms of hunger and potential sources of difference and rebellion, and this can muddy the waters at the deepest level, it can make a girl’s feeling of identification and sameness with her mother feel both risky and at risk. It can also pair hunger with rage—rage at the mother who didn’t stand up for herself, or who didn’t teach you how to stand up for yourself; rage at the mother who tried to do too much, who never squeezed out pleasure for herself; rage at the mother who can’t quite see the person you’re trying to become, or the person you have become, or the person you don’t want to become; rage at mothers whose difference leaves you feeling confused and pained and disconnected. This is grueling stuff, it’s enough to make your stomach tighten into a knot when you talk to your mother on the phone, it’s enough to make you storm into a 7-Eleven and steal something.
For that matter, it’s enough to make you starve, and to tear off your sweatshirt in the kitchen in a blind attempt to make some agonizingly complicated statement. I was twenty-two at the time of that episode. I’d left my deadly-dull university job for a far more promising position as a newspaper reporter, a job that unleashed a lot of hope but also compounded the more wholesale anxiety I felt during that time. Despite my mounting obsession with food and my increasingly fragile appearance, I was ambitious and hell-bent on succeeding, and this required cultivating qualities that felt not only unfamiliar but also decidedly non-mom: autonomy, a certain fearlessness, a journalistic thick skin and sense of entitlement. My mother found this thrilling, her daughter the reporter; she read and clipped every last article I wrote, no matter how tiny or inconsequential; she got a vicarious charge every time I interviewed someone important; and she could not have fathomed how much strange, conflicted feeling her enthusiasm evoked. When we talked on the phone, she’d ask me about my work with an eagerness that always made me wince, always kicked up an impulse to minimize my efforts, always left me with the most uncomfortable, squirming sensation, a feeling I can only identify in retrospect as a shadowy blend of guilt and disconnection, something a kid might feel if she ran away from home and turned back to see her mother standing in the driveway, blindly cheering her on.
Identifying yourself in opposition to your mother can be such a secret and necessary torment. Several women I’ve spoken to have evoked the image of driving with blinders on, or navigating without a map, the excitement of charting an independent course compromised by a sense of imperative disidentification: You move on, you leave your mother behind, she can’t quite appreciate where you’re going or how you’ll get there, and all at once you’re terrified of the change, guilty about it, thrilled by it, and furious at her for letting you go off without any directions, for letting you go at all.
In The Hungry Self, Kim Chernin notes that as a daughter, a woman understands that her life will invariably reflect on th
e life of her mother. If her mother has been unfulfilled, powerless, robbed of an identity beyond her role as mother or wife, or leveled by stress or frustration, the daughter faces an intolerable conflict as she contemplates her own choices in a shifting world; she’s torn between loyalty to her mother on the one hand, and commitment to the “new female being” she is struggling to become on the other. “Suddenly,” Chernin writes, “in coming of age and entering the world, she is in danger of calling up [her mother’s] envy and resentment, and even worse, more painful and disturbing to consider, she is now in a position to remind her mother of her own failure and lack.” She sees this dilemma as central to eating disorders, a woman’s attack on her own body hiding “a bitter warfare against the mother: it’s the guilt we feel and the hidden anger we can’t express.”
Precisely. Behind that skeletal display in the kitchen that day, I suspect I was describing in flesh a pain I could not communicate in words, the malnourished form expressing a profound alignment with my mother (See? I’m as self-depriving and unfulfilled as you are, we are still the same) and also a hiss of fury, each protruding bone a visible rejection of that alignment, a rejection of all that food—and by association a mother—stands for: female caretaking, the (limited) sphere it represented, the female form, my mother herself.
Guilt is a powerful motivator, and also a sly one. It lacks the shrill, whirring insistence of anxiety; instead, it presses and weighs and whispers, it crops up in odd, indirect ways, and it almost always demands restitution. In a weird, symbolic way, I suspect this was at work that day in the kitchen, as well, the body offered as payment for a perceived betrayal, atonement scored on bone. I’ll leave you, I might have said, but I’ll starve, I’ll hurt, I won’t be able to get too far.
This is a more common phenomenon than I could have known at the time, a way of exchanging growth in one sphere for turmoil in another, and I’ve seen it expressed by dozens of women, both in and beyond the realm of food. A former compulsive shopper tells me she managed to distance herself from her mother and simultaneously cling by racking up $14,000 in debt within a year of landing a job at an ad agency, a profession her mother disapproved of and a sum that forced her to give up her apartment and move back home. “How’s that for a mixed message?” she says. “‘I’m completely different from you, I’m moving in.’” A former compulsive overeater describes her binges, not atypically, as a way of fending off sexuality in her twenties. “I think I could allow myself to be better educated than my mother, and more ambitious, and more independent,” she says, “but I could not for the life of me have all that and be sexual, too.” Between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-five, she acquired an MBA from Harvard, a high-paying job with a venture capital firm, a fabulous apartment, and an extra sixty-five pounds, atonement scored on flesh.
For Lisa, restitution has taken material form, manifest as an inability to indulge in things, a sense that pleasure-seeking and self-pampering are somehow illegitimate and undeserved. New clothes? Off limits. Lovely furniture? No. Vacations? Forget it. She describes this as an almost consumerist version of anorexia, as “some way of getting off on deprivation,” and the parallel is apt; she describes a similar compulsion to stamp out need, to prove to herself that she can outlast desire, transcend ordinary human wants, not cave in. But this brand of self-denial and restraint differs from the anxiety-fueled variety; it has a guilty edge, an undertone of penance. Lisa spent years, she says, “acting in ways that were not aligned with who I was” in order to placate her mother, attending a mom-approved college (Swarthmore) instead of the college she wanted to attend (University of Michigan), beginning a mom-approved career (teaching) before abandoning it for television. Her difficulty with indulgence emerged as the placating behavior began to ebb: the more respect and recognition she accumulated at work, the more she began to deprive herself of luxuries at home, as though her ambition required payment in some other realm, power at work in exchange for disempowerment in her personal life. The clearer she became about her professional identity and goals, the more fearful she became about money, as though to take charge of her finances—and by association her adult life—was impermissible. The more she freed herself from her mother’s grip on her choices, the more compelled she seemed to feel to offer compensation. The swaps: I can have success, but not material comfort. I can be independent and strong, but only if I cling to a piece of childhood dependency. I can seek the recognition and satisfaction that eluded my mother, but I must pay for it.
We grow, we leave people behind, we make restitution. One of the most common manifestations of this drama involves the smart woman and the man who mistreats her, a Women-Who-Love-Too-Much story line that tends to get explained away in simplistic, somewhat demeaning terms (women have bad judgment and low self-esteem), but that’s always struck me as more demonically purposeful, shades of penance in the plot, mothers lurking in the wings. I see it in a woman named Karen, who spent years bitterly obsessed with a very powerful, utterly withholding, not-quite-divorced lawyer, a man to whom she surrendered “every ounce of ego.” I see it in a woman named Sarah, who sold her apartment, quit her job, and moved halfway across the country to be with (or, at least, near) a man who made her feel worthless, needy, unattractive. And I see it in a woman named Elena, who threw an enormous, lavish wedding at which all of her friends stood and quietly murmured words of doom: He’s such a bastard. What does she see in him? It’ll never work.
All of these were—and are—smart, ambitious, strong women. Karen is a speechwriter whose work was capturing national attention during that time in her life. Sarah is a physicist, one of a handful of women at the top of her field. Elena is a professional chef, who’d opened a catering business the year before her wedding to uniformly positive reviews. In steering their lives in such directions, all of these women, too, have made serious departures from their pasts, particularly their feminine pasts. Karen’s mother was a housewife in New Jersey who’d grown up poor, married at twenty-two, and spent her adult life in the service of her husband and six children. “Don’t expect too much out of life,” she used to tell Karen. “That way, you won’t be let down.” Sarah’s mother admonished her about intellect: “Don’t be too brainy,” she’d tell her. “Always let the man think he’s smarter than you.” And Elena’s most vivid memories of her mother center around the kitchen of her home in Queens, New York: mom literally on hands and knees at the end of a full day of work, scrubbing the linoleum, scrubbing the oven, scrubbing the wainscotting.
This is restitution of the highest order; by day, each of these women constructed a kind of parallel universe, an almost covert realm created out of her own blood, sweat, and talent where she felt successful, autonomous, in charge. And each paid for this in her private life, inhabiting a separate realm of deprivation and belittlement that re-created a deeply unfamiliar unhappiness, a mother’s unhappiness, her powerlessness, her despair. Deal struck, penance made. I can have the independence and freedom that eluded you, but not the love. I can be sexual and ambitious, but not happy.
Psychiatrist Louise Kaplan describes this kind of bargain as a “pay-as-you-go plan,” a reaction to the barely conscious, whispering sense a woman may have that her hungers and strivings are impermissible, indulged at a high cost. “All the time she has been suffering,” she writes, “she has been making lots of money in her business, or becoming a successful MD, or preparing hundreds of paintings for an exhibition, or delivering lectures on microbiology. These powerful masterful activities would arouse massive conscious anxiety if she did not do something to appease the gods. . . . If the slave pays by surrendering her soul to her master, then she can continue with her forbidden occupations until the next bill comes. One forbidden occupation is her sexuality; the other is her intellectual ambition.”
This makes perfect sense to me; it explains the kind of cruel logic at work behind a destructive romance, misery invited in the door as a way of balancing the psychic budget, stamping the invoice PAID. If your own m
other slaved her life away in the kitchen, you surely aren’t supposed to march out into the world and make a name for yourself as a master chef. If your own mother kept her sanity by lowering her own ambitions, driving her creative or intellectual strivings underground, you are not supposed to emerge at the top of your craft, to become a highly regarded writer or a scientist. And if your own mother existed within the family as a desexualized servant or a case study in overburdened working motherhood, if every scrap of her being was channeled into her job and her children and husband, if she did not appear to actively desire pleasure for herself, then you are most certainly not supposed to become a picture of loving partnership or self-seeking indulgence or strong, assertive sexuality. Or, if you do, you’d better be prepared to pay for it.
I was blessed with a mother who wanted good things for me, who was unequivocal in her support for my work, who never tried to steer me toward any traditional model of femininity. No diets, ever. No nagging about wardrobe or appearances. Not a single suggestion that the path to self-definition lay solely in marriage or motherhood. She was eager on my behalf, and she delighted in my successes, and yet when I recall those images of her—mom abandoning her studio to fix us lunch, mom lugging in the groceries and making pâté, mom self-sacrificing and frustrated about it, and loving and angry, and full of passions that were never permitted to flower in full—I still feel a pang of the most intricate complexity: a blend of uncertainty and sorrow, some dark fear of betrayal, and a single, guilty question: How can I allow myself to have what she never had?
Each step away from a mother, no matter how deliberately taken or how roundly supported, can be bittersweet, painful in a barely discernible way, and I imagine this is true for many women, in many different circumstances: women who are torn between family and career, women who’ve chosen careers over children, women who are struggling to balance many competing hungers, their own and those of their families and friends and co-workers, women who are struggling to tease their own hungers out of a knot of need that may include the hungers of ten or fifteen other people. If your mother didn’t work outside the house, if she was always there for you, if family defined her core being, how can you help but feel a failure or a traitor if you’ve compromised family life by comparison, or ditched it entirely, or dared to want more? Alternately, if your mother worked twelve or fourteen hours a day at her career and also managed to run the household, help you with your homework, drive you to and from soccer games, and pay the bills, how can you help but feel selfish and inadequate if you want less, if you want something easier? No doubt one of the reasons that television dramas like Judging Amy and Providence have been so successful, and so cozily appealing, is that they depict women in high-powered careers (a judge, a doctor) who nonetheless live at home, their mothers, living or imagined, always at their elbows, always there to dish out love and ice cream and advice. To a generation of women trying to carve out new paths without a map, these are deeply reassuring pictures. Sure, they suggest, you can have ambition and power and beauty and acclaim, but you don’t have to pay too high a price; your youthful helplessness and your dependency and your femininity can remain intact and so, too, can your deep identification with mom. No betrayal necessary; she’ll be with you always.
Appetites Page 9
