by Sady Doyle
Both Searses are devout evangelical Christians, and have written in the past that allowing mothers to work violates God’s plan: “Babies in our culture are not being cared for in the way God designed, and we as a nation are paying the price,” they wrote in their 1997 book The Complete Book of Christian Parenting and Child Care.12 Though they’ve reportedly softened that assessment in recent years, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that they’ve created a theory of parenting that tells mothers they are committing child abuse if they have to work.
Yet attachment parenting is massively popular. I had two copies of The Baby Book by my second trimester; it is, as Judith Warner writes in her 2005 book Perfect Madness, “the practice that dominates, in watered-down form, among the middle and upper middle class today.”13 Followed faithfully, the theory leads to families like “Joanne and Daniel,” whose child-rearing practices resemble a cult where members are forbidden to communicate with the outside world. Not only can’t Joanne work, she can’t spend unaccompanied time with other adults, including her husband, under any circumstances: “There are no date nights,” the profile informs us. “Joanne doesn’t get away for afternoons to have lunch with her girlfriends. In fact, the only time Joanne has ever left either of her children in anyone else’s care was when she was in labor with her second child.”14
It’s easy to roll your eyes at the attachment-minded moms of the world, particularly since that Newsweek cover appears to show one of them breastfeeding a first grader. (The kid was three years old, supposedly. He looked big enough to play for the Knicks.) Yet the attachment norm also creates wrenching guilt in mothers who can’t or don’t follow it: “An hour given to writing was an hour stolen from my child’s future happiness,” Abel writes. “To even desire such an hour signified my detachment from her.”15
Women are taught not just that mothers are not really people, but that when they become mothers, they will not want to be people anymore. A good mother, a true mother, is someone who gives up all claim on her previous roles or interests, who lives entirely for and through her children, and who does so with a smile on her face. When women find that they remain themselves after giving birth, rather than achieving instant moral perfection via hormones or skin-to-skin bonding or “maternal instinct,” the shock can be tremendous.
If mothers so much as think about a life outside of motherhood, patriarchy tells us we are bad people. Worse, it tells us that we are raising bad people, ruining our children, burning holes in their brains with every second we let them cry or watch television. The only way to save them is to sacrifice ourselves—and if they are girls, they will presumably grow up and get sacrificed to someone else one day. We say that a mother is someone who “gives life.” We don’t mention that the life she’ll be giving is her own.
The Stolen Child
With stakes this high, and conditions this stressful, it is inevitable that maternal feeling sometimes curdles into something darker. This is how a child can become a threat; how a baby, the most purely loving and lovable creature there is, can begin to look like a monster.
In Ireland and what would become the United Kingdom, these children were called changelings, like Bridget Cleary; old, evil things that only looked like babies. As with Bridget, the rituals mothers used to get their children back often looked like convenient excuses for losing them. In one such ritual, detailed by historian Diane Purkiss, a mother would walk out into the woods with the baby, put the baby down, light a candle, and just…walk away. She would have to keep walking until she could no longer hear the child crying, and only return when the candle had burnt itself out.
“Sometimes the child dies in this rite,” Purkiss writes. “Sometimes a wolf comes from the forest and devours the child. Sometimes the fauns come and take back their own; sometimes, sometimes, they bring the stolen human child with them.”16
It’s difficult to know what kind of frame to put around these stories. Was this the inevitable result of a society without modern birth control or abortion? Were these children secretly unwanted from the beginning? Or was there actually something different about these particular babies? There are some records of nineteenth-century Irish parents killing disabled children in changeling rituals; because they could not speak, or walk, they were thought to be faulty duplicates of “real” children. In folk tales, changelings are said to be skinny, wrinkled, to look more like old men than babies, to die in their cribs; these myths could have been a way to explain phenomena like sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) or the dysfunctional growth patterns we now call “failure to thrive.”
If it wasn’t the children, the mothers themselves could have been ill. Postpartum psychosis (PPP) is a real and terrifying phenomenon, which has led many contemporary women to accidentally kill their children; the delusions set in fast, within days of giving birth, and unspeakable things can happen before the afflicted person realizes they need help. Women’s accounts of PPP tend to have a familiar ring. Parenting blogger Jennifer Kindhouse, for example, writes that she saw otherworldly imps attacking her baby: “It was a figure, a dwarfish figure—a dark, person-shaped creature that scurried toward the basinet, saw me, and darted away.”17 The baby itself, in those moments, seemed less than human: “He wasn’t even like a baby—he was always screaming, always red faced, he looked odd and foreign to me.”18 Another survivor, Catherine Carver, writes that, while recovering in the hospital after birth, she “had an ever-growing suspicion that my baby had been swapped.”19 Kindhouse believed that Satan was trying to steal her child; Carver suspected a plot by the hospital nurses. Maybe, in another place and time, both women would have blamed the fairies.
Contemporary thinking rests uneasily on these mothers; we cannot say, with certainty, who they were, or who we would have become if we’d lived in their world. Yet I suspect most mothers know, on some level, that they weren’t monsters. When my daughter was two months old, she forgot how to sleep. She went from lapsing easily into three-hour newborn naps—time for me to eat, to work, to sleep myself—to being unable to close her eyes during the day. She had to be nursed for two hours at a time so that she could doze off and on, or rocked for forty-five minutes until she slept for twenty. This is all perfectly normal, banal stuff. Babies don’t sleep; there are a thousand sleep guides for new parents on the market. But in my memory, it is surreal, endless, agonizing. I can recall standing in a hot, dark room, jiggling the baby and making sh sounds, aware that I had been repeating the exact same actions in the exact same spot for an hour. I can recall sobbing and telling the baby I was sorry that I didn’t know how to help her. I can recall thinking she’d be better off if I were gone—better off with anyone but me.
All those women who didn’t know what to do, who walked out into the woods with a baby and a candle and walked back out alone: I don’t know what haunted them, how far beyond their limits they’d been pushed, whether they were depressed, or delusional, or merely desperate. But I suspect that, then as now, it all came down to how much or how little support they were given. If changeling stories are reminiscent of postpartum psychosis, they also call to mind another common horror—teenagers, often from hyper-religious families or with next to no sex education, who keep their pregnancies secret and leave the babies to die. If you’ve ever heard of a baby found in a garbage can, you’ve heard a fairy tale: “In folktales,” Purkiss tells us, “changelings are most often the children of single parents.”20
Milk and Bruises
“How do we know what kinds of people—races, I mean—creatures different from us, have lived on this planet? In the past, you know?” asks Harriet Lovatt, the terrified mother at the center of Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child. “We don’t really know, do we? How do we know that dwarves or goblins or hobgoblins, that kind of thing, didn’t really live here?”21 Harriet and her husband, David, are worshippers at the cult of modern fertility. Though the book was published in 1988, the Lovatts follow, with depressing regularity, the sort of
“natural,” high-intensity parenting methods embraced by upwardly mobile parents today: home birth (“it goes without saying that the doctor had wanted Harriet in the hospital,” Lessing writes, but “she had been adamant”22), exclusive breastfeeding, taking Harriet out of the workforce rather than employing an outside caregiver. It’s all happily, perfectly controlled, right down to the (lack of) screen time: “This was a house—and this defined it for everyone, admiring what they could not achieve themselves—where television was not often watched.”23
Harriet and David also believe that good parenting involves having as many children as possible. Birth control is a modern abomination, which interferes with proper, “natural” domestic bliss. Harriet’s mother, Dorothy, expresses concern, pointing out that in a more “traditional” place and time, Harriet might well have ten children, but “half of them would die, and they wouldn’t be educated either…. We have to be careful about the children we have so we can look after them.”24 Nevertheless, Harriet and David just keep having the children, and having them, and having them, until they have one more child than they can comfortably care for—four was the magic number, as it turns out—and everything goes immediately to shit.
Knowing precisely what is wrong with Ben, the fifth Lovatt child, is beside the point. To his mother, he’s a “goblin,” a “troll,” an alien, a demon; even as a newborn, he seems violent, feeding constantly and biting her breasts out of frustration.25 He resists affection, wrestles his way out of being cuddled, until he has to be kept in a pen all day. As Ben grows up, he kills the family pets; he breaks a little girl’s arm on the playground; he bullies Harriet’s other children. The only way to control him is through fear.
Or—and this is crucial—this is how Ben seems to Harriet. Ben’s teachers call him a “good little chap” who “tries so hard.”26 The pediatrician insists he’s “physically normal.”27 He’s even popular with other children his age. To a contemporary reader, much of Ben’s behavior—he doesn’t express affection, he’s slow to start talking, he watches certain videotapes over and over but can’t describe the emotions of the characters on-screen—reads like autism, not inhumanity. We are never certain whether we’re reading the story of a demon or an abused child.
The turning point comes when David sends Ben away to an institution for disabled children. Children don’t leave the institution, and they don’t survive it; they’re tranquilized until they overdose or starve. Harriet is told not to visit. She’s encouraged to make an art of not knowing. But Harriet cannot manage it; as much as she admittedly hates Ben, she cannot make herself abandon her changeling in the woods. She finds that “her heart was hurting as it would for one of her own, real children” and brings him back home.28
It destroys their family. Harriet’s other children leave her. Her husband never forgives her. Even Ben himself doesn’t love her. So, while medical professionals lecture Harriet endlessly on her failings—“the problem is not with Ben, but with you,” one tells her point-blank; “you don’t like him very much”—it seems clear that the problem is not her, but the society that demands so much of her, that insists she shoulder every burden gladly, take the blame for every failure, whether it’s within her power to do so or not.29 It’s a problem that started from the beginning:
“A breast-fed baby shouldn’t get infections,” [the doctor] said.
“He’s not breast-fed.”
“That’s not like you, Harriet! How old is he?”
“Two months,” said Harriet. She opened her dress and showed her breasts, still making milk, as if they responded to Ben’s never appeased appetite. They were still bruised black all around the nipples.
Dr. Brett looked at the poor breasts in silence, and Harriet looked at him: his decent, concerned doctor’s face confronting a problem beyond him.
“Naughty baby,” he conceded, and Harriet laughed out loud in astonishment.30
What Harriet wants throughout The Fifth Child is for someone to say that Ben is more than a “naughty baby.” She wants someone to see that she hurts, and that she is not lazy or negligent or selfish because she’s hurting.
“What she wanted, she decided, was that at last someone would use the right words, share the burden,” Lessing writes. “No, she did not expect to be rescued, or even that anything much could change. She wanted to be acknowledged, her predicament given its value.”31
But she can’t be. In a patriarchal system, who she is or what she needs can never matter. So Harriet is lost, alone with her alien baby who doesn’t love her, condemned to solitude and shame. She was supposed to keep feeding through the bruises. She was supposed to keep giving until the milk ran dry. And she does. Without meaning to, without knowing it, without gratitude, Ben drains Harriet of everything she has.
Alienated Labor
The immersive, full-contact parenting of a Joanne or a Harriet Lovatt may strike the reader as claustrophobic—and it should. But it’s also likely to strike us, in some important ways, as ostentatious. Having as many children as you like without worrying about how to feed or clothe them, taking one parent completely out of the workforce without worrying about how to make rent—this kind of thing is exhausting, retrograde, crazy-making, but it is also breathtakingly expensive. It’s a kind of reproduction as conspicuous consumption, showing off how many years of your working life you can afford to burn playing house. Not every woman has the privilege of being Mama.
Women of color, in particular, have been reduced to mere wombs by their oppressors, who then deny them any relationship with the resulting children. This is a well-known part of history, as in the case of slave owners raping enslaved women and selling their children to enrich themselves. (To this day, just as black mothers are more likely to die in childbirth, black newborns are more likely to die of SIDS or other complications.)32 But it’s also a core part of patriarchal reproduction in the present day, with predatory adoption agencies or surrogacy services paying women of color in impoverished countries for the work of pregnancy and childbirth, then selling the babies to well-off families abroad.
Not all of those adoption agencies get consent from the mothers before taking the children. In 2018, the United States began forcibly stealing the children of asylum-seeking immigrants from their parents at the border and placing them in separate facilities, sometimes across the country from their parents. After widespread public outcry, the policy was halted, but within months, reports surfaced that children whose parents had already been deported were being quietly placed for adoption.33
In fact, the practice had been ongoing in the United States for years. In 2007, a woman named Encarnación Bail Romero lost her six-month-old son Carlos, whom she calls Carlitos, in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid. Carlitos was given to a white foster family, Seth and Melinda Moser, who adopted him and changed his name to Jamison. Five years later, Romero lost her final appeal to get her son back; the Mosers had refused to return him, claiming that since they were “the only parents the boy had ever known,” returning him to the custody of his actual mother would traumatize him.34 Carlitos Romero was gone; as far as the state was concerned, only Jamison Moser remained.
White women like Melinda Moser, in this system, obtain a sort of patriarch-ish power over less-privileged women’s reproductive capacity, using marginalized bodies to create the families they want. Also like patriarchs, women with money are able to commandeer mothering from those without. It’s not that women of color and poor women don’t “get” to do mother work—far from it. It’s just that they often have to do it under worse, more exploitative conditions, and for someone else’s child.
In the United States, childcare is unthinkably expensive; in many locations, it costs more than either rent or state college. Single mothers have gone bankrupt in the attempt to pay for daycare so they can keep their jobs.35 Yet that money does not go to actual childcare providers, who are an underpaid and almost entirely female workf
orce. As of 2016, over 91 percent of childcare workers were female, and the average wage for a woman working in the field was $15,389 per year—too little to live on in most major cities, and far too little for those women to afford childcare themselves.36 Black, Latina, and immigrant women are disproportionately likely to be the ones providing this care, meaning that the same women who are prohibited from mothering their own children are the ones being asked to mother the children of the ruling class.37
In its own warped way, this information is validating; we can see that mother work is oppressive because, the closer a woman gets to power, the less mother work she has to do, and the more ability she has to commandeer other women’s bodies and time. At the bottom of the ladder, the myth of Mama evaporates, leaving only work; birthing, raising, educating, and even loving children all become discrete jobs that one can do, and none of those jobs are seen as valuable or skilled enough to command a living wage. Once the fiction of love is stripped away, all that is left of Mama is the conviction that someone has got to do the dirty work, so the rest of us can focus on something more important.
Unnatural Goodness
If the story of Hinton Ampner seems familiar—the terrified nanny, the bad servant at the window, the hint of some dark sexual past threatening to bubble over and contaminate the now—that’s no coincidence. Mary Ricketts’s haunting is widely speculated to be the “true” ghost story that inspired Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw.
