All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion

by Lisa Appignanesi

  However, a difficulty arises when care is essentialized as feminine. The closeness to older thinking invoking the ‘maternal instinct’ boomerangs back on women, particularly when married to evolutionary premises. Held up as a moralizing ideal, the model of woman as naturally a maternal carer locks men out of the pleasures of the nursery while liberating them from the burdens of care. For mothers, who are cut from many different cloths, it can provoke anxiety, it can stigmatize, particularly when the individual woman may have few overriding maternal impulses, or if her initial feelings for her baby don’t coincide with the desirable norm.

  The last twenty years have seen something of a re-enshrinement of women in their motherly loving role. This has been abetted by the rise and rise of the new neuroscience, ever quick to leap to adventurous cultural pronouncements from the evidence of microscopic events in the brain translated by algorhithms into brightly appealing computer images. The difference between the genders has once more been essentialized to reinvigorate the kinds of hoary stereotypes John Stuart Mill objected to over a hundred and forty years ago. In The Essential Difference: Men, Women and the Extreme Male Brain, the leading Cambridge psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen writes: ‘The female brain is predominantly hard-wired for empathy. The male brain is predominantly hard-wired for understanding and building systems.’ This makes possessors of female brains pre-eminently suited for such tasks as caring, counselling and teaching primary school children. And, of course, mothering.

  In pop culture, the motherly role is now rendered covetable by its paradoxical twinning with sexiness, as if the latter in our hypersexualized culture conferred the ultimate value. Stars with rounded tums increasingly appear in glossy mags. Hollywood’s Demi Moore launched the trend in 1991 when, nude and seven months pregnant, she graced the cover of Vanity Fair. The pregnant sex symbol provoked controversy: some attacked this newly demeaning objectification of women; others hailed it as a sign of women’s empowerment.

  In the two decades since, babies have increasingly appeared with their celebrity mothers in the glossies, marking a new line both in fashion accessories and in marketing tools. But they also signal a return to the pre-eminent importance of maternity. To indicate her participation in the reborn faith of mother and baby which Madonna had already joined, a pregnant Britney Spears–once America’s most cheekily slutty virgin–featured pornographically semi-nude in Harper’s Bazaar in August 2006. The spread blatantly evoked the iconography of Virgin and Child. Loving motherhood now seemed to have once more become supremely important even to the most liberated and famous of women.

  Air-brushed pictures are pictures, and life is life. Few heavily pregnant women feel particularly sexy; mothers with newborns, even less so. But the circulation of these images in our public sphere turns these into a desirable, though rarely attainable, norm. They also simply advertise maternity, something our politicians, too, are now increasingly prone to do, trotting out their children for the cameras far more than they ever did. The pressure has been mounting, particularly on working women, to breed–ever more so because those who have sought a career first are constantly reminded of the ticking of that now media-noisy biological clock. Babies have emerged as both increasingly covetable and increasingly delayed, because the wanting of them is such a major enterprise.

  All this has taken place against a background of long-term falling birth-rates in most countries throughout Europe–until very recently when, particularly in Scandinavia, they have been rising. This is not surprising, given that Norway and Sweden have the best provision now for both partners on parental leave and on early childcare. The picture in America is slightly different. Though the secular middle class fails to reproduce itself altogether adequately, the religious and the poor make up the numbers.

  It seems that, given the choice, plus a liberated sexual ideology prioritizing the pleasures of youth, which makes men in particular loath to take on the responsibilities of commitment–women have over the last decades chosen work first–out of desire or financial need. In Britain, almost two-thirds of women with children work. Now, failing economies and unemployment or low wages, which generally induce women back into the home, are marking a swing. And the pressure is on from various sources, popular and ‘scientific’, for mothers to give up work for ever longer periods so that they can tend adequately to the important task of child-rearing. Mother-love has reasserted its cultural centrality–even if many women, judging from the statistics, are not particularly eager to take on motherhood, or to take it on too soon.

  Those who do may be caught up in a cult of idealized motherhood so assiduous and competitive that it might have disconcerted even their Victorian forebears. The toll in guilt and anxiety, which can easily percolate into their children’s lives, is great. If there is indeed no more important and wonderful task than making new lives, the weight of advice which now bears down on parents, the tick-lists that monitor good and bad parenting, can make love itself–never conducive to quantification and targets–a chore. Working at love, here, may be as joyless as it is in adult relationships.

  Indeed, mothering today can appear more challenging than running the World Bank–perhaps because so many of the women who undertake it once more or less did, or could have. It seems in any event to require equivalent investment, time and skill. The list of middle-class maternal tasks and duties in the name of love is formidable and calculated to rob mothering of its pleasures. There’s an onus on stimulating the child, on providing extra lessons, on keeping her ever busy with a schedule that would challenge executive diaries. There’s the added imperative of bolstering, at every possible instant, the child’s self-esteem–a notion rolled out from the delusional positive-thinking and well-being industries—so that children develop a false sense of life and themselves. There’s the task of precluding any possibility of boredom–a state which, arguably, feeds both imagination and thought. And so on and on, even before the worries about risk and danger–of unsafe streets and playgrounds, of poor schooling, of ‘unsuitable’ friends. Advice once acquired in the local park, in the nursery and in face-to-face chats between mothers now also comes from science (ever-changing in its recommendations) and from that global powerhouse, the World Wide Web. Sites such as Mumsnet and Netmums are just a click away, to provide guidance, support, online conversation and experience-sharing. Yet, however helpful they may be, the conflictual and competing voices on these sites, as Lucy Cavendish, a mother of four, attests, can induce more rows and anxiety than a coven of visiting mothers-in-law. In Britain, Mumsnet also functions as a lobbying site, hosting visits from leading political contenders. Women as mothers are now a powerful force, and not only in the home.

  One of the many areas of maternal contention is breast or bottle, and for how long. Ever a symbol–though never a fact–of instinctual mother-love, the flow, value and long-term attributes of mother’s milk have now even generated their own science wars.

  The French philosopher Élisabeth Badinter has argued that the rise and rise of the ‘breast is best’ movement has coincided with a modish evolutionary biology–which sees all animals’ primary task as that of reproducing the species–to promote women’s full-time return to the home. Biology with its reductive imperatives has once more emerged as the best destiny for women.

  Badinter charts a history of La Leche League to underline how ideology can, with some help from science, become the potent ally of ‘nature’ and thus influence our understanding of maternal love. La Leche began in a meeting of like-minded, breast-feeding mothers in a Chicago suburb in 1956–a time when 80 per cent of American babies were bottle-fed and the word ‘breast’ could not easily appear in newspapers. The initial seven members were Catholic and adherents of the militant Christian Family Movement. Making links with doctors propagating ‘natural’ childbirth, the League grew to become a worldwide movement with chapters in sixty-eight countries, its precepts gradually adopted by the medicoscientific establishment and eventually by Unicef and the World Health Or
ganization. The guiding tenets of the movement are:

  Mothering through breast-feeding is the most natural and effective way of understanding and satisfying the needs of the baby.

  Mother and baby need to be together early and often to establish a satisfying relationship and an adequate milk supply.

  In the early years the baby has an intense need to be with his mother which is as basic as his need for food.

  Breast milk is the superior infant food.

  For the healthy, full-term baby, breast milk is the only food necessary until the baby shows signs of needing solids, about the middle of the first year after birth.

  Ideally the breast-feeding relationship will continue until the baby outgrows the need.

  The fact that the League’s principles–with their subtle moral undertow of encouraging mothers back to the home and their sidelining of partners to the role of protective onlookers–now seem commonplace and are recommended by most doctors, is evidence of the distance the movement has travelled. In the early 1970s only 24 per cent of American mothers breast-fed; by 2010 this had risen to nearly 75 per cent. In the Scandinavian countries, from the same low, the percentage is now between 95 and 99 per cent, with Germany lagging only slightly behind; Britain comes in at about 70 per cent, while France and Ireland have proved most recalcitrant and have reached only 50 and 30 per cent respectively. Largely gone is the moment when co-parenting from a babe’s earliest days was heralded as an ideal. Gone, too, is any element of choice. Working mothers, who constitute the majority, are catapulted into a state of permanent guilt-ridden conflict, deemed somehow unnatural if they don’t continue breast-feeding for the recommended span of at least a year. Pump rooms (where mothers can express milk) in large workplaces in the US have been campaigned for and won.

  But must love flow mainly through milk?

  Major scientific claims have been made to underpin the ‘breast is best’ message. Some of these are indubitably proven. During the first few days after the child’s birth, mother’s milk is less milk than colostrum, a substance rich in antibodies which help develop immunities in the child as well as stabilizing his blood sugar and lining the gut. But that the child’s eventual psychological well-being as well as his or her intellectual accomplishments can be linked to the single fact of mother’s milk, as some of the claims contend, is very doubtful. In 2006 British scientists published the results of a longitudinal study of 5475 children, the offspring of 3161 mothers, compared siblings with the same DNA and conclusively showed that despite propaganda to the contrary, there were no links between a child’s IQ and his history of breast-feeding. If breast-fed middle-class children had better cognitive development, it was likely to be linked to a host of other factors.

  Loving may figure amongst these. Infants, of course, benefit hugely from touch, skin-to-skin cuddles and affection, but the breast is only part of a much wider environment. Those seven out of ten British mothers who give up the breast for a variety of factors after six weeks have not failed in their ‘natural’ duty or proved themselves less loving than those who carry on feeding for a year or three. Nor is breast-feeding for women as ‘natural’ as the eulogies make out; certainly, at the outset, many women experience difficulties. New mothers are not unnatural if the symbiotic plenitude with babe at breast is something they fail to live out in ideal fashion. Nor have they failed in parental love which feeds the child far beyond its first infancy.

  The natural paradigm, which in any case shifts its attributes through history, is rarely an altogether useful one for the cultural beings humans are. The animal life that evolutionary psychologists so like to compare us to provides a very distant template for human motherhood. There are continuities of course: all young animals need nurture, and in most species the female will provide it, though often both parents are implicated. Sometimes, too, as Darwin himself tells us, the instinct for self-preservation may take over from maternal care: the swift’s migratory instinct triumphs over her maternal instinct and she takes off in the appropriate season, whatever the age of her brood. That said, animals do not take a year of tending before they can get up on their hind legs, another before they can learn the basics of language, and some eighteen more years before they (may) leave home. So the long immaturity of humans–and their vast and malleable brains continually shaped and reshaped by childhood experience–calls upon capacities for loving which are great, complex, and subject to change through a child’s life.

  Expert Knowledge

  Before I got married I had six theories about bringing up children; now I have six children, and no theories.

  John Wilmot, (2nd Earl of Rochester)

  Until this recent wave of instinctual motherhood, middle-class babies were rarely breast-fed by their own mothers. Facts are not the easiest to come by in this area, but it is clear that until the twentieth century an infant’s proximity to mother was not understood as an indication of future happiness or accomplishment. Nor was it, necessarily. Jane Austen was farmed out from birth for some five years, as were her siblings, to a woman who lived miles away. Balzac, as custom then had it, was similarly sent to a wet-nurse and spent four years away from home. Historians will undoubtedly also discover that some lovingly breast-fed babes matured into unloving, murderous tyrants.

  One of the difficulties attending parental love in our cultural moment is that the child, and first of all, the baby, has become the focus of so much expert know-how alongside so many redemptive hopes. Bringing up children now often seems to require a concentration of programmatic activity and consumerist expenditure so intense that love can flip into frustration and disappointment, though this may have little to do with the child’s own individuality. The pleasures of love too often seem to have been displaced by a work and production ethic in which parental achievement is judged by effort and by the honed product at its ever receding terminus.

  Though the advice of the experts may be well meant, the generalized repertoire of dos and don’ts is difficult to abide by, since every child is so different–as are family constellation and circumstance. Nor is the effort particularly conducive to the ineffable appreciation of another that love also is.

  In The Child in Time (1987) Ian McEwan’s hero, a writer of children’s fiction and member of a government commission on childcare, humorously reflects that over three centuries, generations of experts–priests, moralists, social scientists and doctors–mostly men, have provided ever mutating instructions, dressed up as facts, for the benefit of mothers. Each generation, of course, has paraded its own as the apogee of common sense and scientific insight.

  He had read solemn pronouncements on the necessity of binding the newborn baby’s limbs to a board to prevent movement and self-inflicted damage; of the dangers of breastfeeding, or elsewhere, its physical necessity and moral superiority; how affection or stimulation corrupts a young child; the importance of purges and enemas, severe physical punishment, cold baths, and earlier in this century, of constant fresh air, however inconvenient; the desirability of scientifically controlled intervals between feeds, and conversely, of feeding the baby whenever it is hungry; the perils of picking a baby up whenever it cries–that makes it feel dangerously powerful–and of not picking it up when it cries–dangerously impotent; the importance of regular bowel movements, of potty training a child by three months, of constant mothering all day and night, all year, and elsewhere, the necessity of wet-nurses, nursery maids, twenty-four-hour state nurseries; the grave consequences of mouth-breathing, nose picking, thumb-sucking and maternal deprivation, of not having your child expertly delivered under bright lights, of lacking the courage to have it at home in the bath, of failing to have it circumcised or its tonsils removed; and later the contemptuous destruction of all these fashions; how children should be allowed to do whatever they want so that their divine natures can blossom, and how it is never too soon to break a child’s will; the dementia and blindness caused by masturbation, and the pleasure and comfort it affords the growing child; h
ow sex can be taught by reference to tadpoles, storks, flower fairies and acorns, or not mentioned at all, or only with lurid, painstaking frankness; the trauma imparted to the child who sees its parents naked, the chronic disturbance nourished by strange suspicions, if it only ever sees them clothed; how to give your nine-month-old baby a head-start by teaching it maths.

  Sifting through the welter of oft-conflicting advice, parents will inevitably follow dollops of what suits their needs best within the aegis of their own time’s cultural imperatives, and give their behaviour the name of love.

  Having somehow made my way through decades of motherhood with all its ups and downs, its rows and pleasures, the competing needs of children, partners, work and oneself, I now sometimes think that, basic care apart, children thrive best on imaginative understanding. Though it can’t be there at every minute of the day, and sometimes fails, regular applications of it will see them and you through. Love, after all, is more of an art than a rigorous production line with targets in place at each step of the way. And like art, it asks of us both form and freedom, attentiveness and its relaxed suspension.

  Because of his attempts to understand the child first rather than focus on a programme of care, D.W. Winnicott (1896–1971) remains interesting: one could say there’s a strong anti-expert expert in him. Winnicott’s ability to enter a small child’s very particular sphere is legendary. Play was Winnicott’s therapeutic tool. Play, here, is not a question of sophisticated toys bought to assuage parents’ guilts or a child’s often momentary and shifting demands–stand-ins for desires or lacks they can’t place (and are rarely given the quiet time, the necessary and creative boredom, in which they might). Play, for Winnicott, is serious activity. It exists within its own suspended time, engages the imagination and hones our ability to think symbolically. It helps to locate a child’s desires. A train or a ball or a rag doll can stand in for a host of emotionally charged events or people and situations. The writer John Berger, who had a small top-floor studio in Winnicott’s house during the late 1940s, told me that he has never forgotten the striking sight, on coming in, of Winnicott sprawled on the floor of his living room, which doubled as a consulting room. The door was always kept open and Winnicott could be seen absorbed in playing with his small clients. He was so imaginatively engrossed that he might himself have been a somewhat oversized child, or indeed a stand-in for his ideal of the good-enough mother.