All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion

by Lisa Appignanesi

  Parthenogenesis–women conceiving without the help of a male–is a symbolically freighted matter. Ever enraged at the philandering Zeus, who had given birth to wise Athena from his brow, the goddess Hera set out to match him. In Flora’s garden, one of the stories goes, she is shown a rare seed which, once swallowed, has her pregnant with Ares–god, of course, of war. Typhon, the monster with the savage jaws, father of Cerberus and the Gorgon, is another offspring conceived without the help of a male. Lame Hephaestus follows: Hera throws him down from the heavens. Breeding without a mate seems here to introduce rather unenviable progeny.

  But science, like miraculous religion, pays little heed to pagan precedent. As he did for Mary, the Holy Spirit, now in the figure of a lab-coated doctor, can intercede to give any of us the possibility of a miraculous child, with no intervention necessary from a really existing male. This extraordinary change has been naturalized within just a few decades. So highly prized are children today, so enshrined has the right to fertility (with a little help from medical science) become, that some young and emancipated women–whether gay or simply single–prefer to engender donor babies than have a child with a man. Others have surrogate babes or make use, with their partners, of the various other available forms of reproductive technology.

  It might be said that all this extends the simple continuum created by the invention of the contraceptive pill, which did so much to enable women to control reproduction: their children, whose unconscious was shaped in the homes of liberated mothers, find no great difficulty in taking the leap into assisted reproduction. Yet the shift is a remarkable one, and inevitably accompanied with some unease and residual apprehension. Its attendant anxieties can percolate through generations of siblings–in the way that old-fashioned arrangements did when secret loves brought children fathered outside into the family. Now children conceived with donor sperm, once they grow up, can and do seek out any number of donor kin and establish sometimes large horizontal kinship networks. New meanings of ‘father’, ‘mother’ and ‘sibling’ tug against the old, forcing conventional notions of family love and responsibility into frames that often don’t fit. Little wonder that the whole notion of ‘family’, already endangered and in question from both outside and in, renders traditionalists shrill in their attempts to sanctify it, while others live out its many permutations of gender and stepparenting.

  Unconditional Love

  Having a child always calls into being a host of fantasies and fears, many of which are barely conscious. Inside that swelling tum there’s a whole imagined future, a dreamed-of bond with another, a gift to one’s partner or parent, a transforming other who will fashion one anew or be a narcissistic replica of one’s best self. There’s also a terror that one’s life will be utterly out of control, that a partner will give up on this swelling and preoccupied maternal and therefore asexual self, that domineering parents (the ones we may yet replicate) will take over, that we’re ourselves babies and can’t cope with another, that we’ll be forever tied and tied down and that all of it may go drastically wrong.

  A few days before my son was born, I had a vivid dream that I had given birth to a nicely roasted chicken, complete with platter. My parents and husband oohed and ahhed and immediately sat down to consume it, though I didn’t, as I remember, partake. I woke in a nightmare sweat.

  Evidently a great many grandparental hopes rested on this forthcoming child, alongside my own terror of what kind of creature he might be and how we might treat him. There was also perhaps something of my own fear of becoming my mother, who at that time, I felt, was nothing if not carnivorous and would happily have eaten the chick I also was in the dream, my legs splayed in the way that those birthing images sometimes show. Most women worry about becoming their Mums, good or bad, and conduct a dance with the conflation through much of their lives.

  Looking back, I think I was also fearful of the term ‘unconditional love’ that attends all our motherhoods. It’s a Christian term, of course, and comes from the presumed love of God for all his creatures, whatever their acts or dispositions. The term is freighted, and being a sceptical sort–sceptical of my own powers, above all–I didn’t really think I could live up to it. What if I simply didn’t like the creature my child was?

  Of course, once he appeared, all such considerations vanished in the sheer trance-like ardour of tending to a new life. He was alive and kicking, he was ours, and he needed us, our reliable presence alongside all our hopes and worries. Roll on many years and another child later, and I’ve begun to think that what the unconditional in parental love means is not that you’ll engage in that over-zealous parenting so fashionable today; not that you’ll never say no, since you’ll often be saying no and sometimes loudly. Nor that you’ll never criticize or have rows, of which there’ll inevitably be and need to be a good number, since we hardly live in an unconflicted world and even our very special children have to learn to live with that, too. What unconditional love means, simply, is that you’ll be there when they need you, listen, pay attention and help them get through, because to you, whatever their failings, they’re special, and specially loved–even when they have no time for you. And in that love there is great and abiding pleasure, the very pleasure of an ongoing bond in another’s life. With luck, they’ll take pleasure in it, too.

  One of the things the tick-list advice books seem rarely to mention is that enjoying one’s children and taking time to enjoy them, to appreciate them, to laugh with them, to talk, is one of the cornerstones of parental love. Parenting may involve work, but the work ethic doesn’t underpin it: there are seldom any material rewards at the end. Children are in no sense smoothly honed products off the assembly line of parental labour. They’re ever a surprise and often a pleasure, though like all our loves, they also make us weep, just as we make them weep. For what feels like a long time to them–though to us not long enough–they think their parents are the most important people in the world; and they learn to love the world through us, step out into it, relish it, empathize with kin and friends, become social beings. Like A.A. Milne’s James James Morrison Morrison Weatherby George Dupree, they can be far more possessive than lovers, unwilling to allow mother to go to the ‘end of the town’ without ‘consulting me’. They’re also sometimes more entertaining than any lover, with their first babblings, their questions and insights and tales, their engrossing imaginative play, their fresh responses to the world. But their love will always ask more of one than we can ask of them.

  The baby grows up. Children have their own complicated lives. They go to school, come under the influence of teachers and peers. They provoke worry, instil in mothers in particular an abiding and easily triggered anxiety. Like all loved ones, they also make us suffer. Too quickly, from the parental vantage point, they become secretive, surly adolescents, inevitable rebels, not always easy to love. Though they need that secure flow as much as, arguably more than, babes, they now judge us. Fallen one-time gods that we are, they often do so harshly, lashing out at us since we’re closest to hand. It’s tough to have to take it, but our being there to understand and help sort out their emotional jumble if only by listening, to set limits which may be under siege but are nonetheless internalized, is a necessary part of love’s unconditionality.

  Then they leave home. Parents must needs be left behind. Gone are the days of the large traditional Victorian family in which the youngest daughter all too often took on the care of parents, particularly Daddy; though in these days of expensive housing, we may find a young adult making use of the parental home (and maternal servitude) well beyond the approved date. As Oscar Wilde has Mrs Arbuthnot quip in A Woman of No Importance, ‘Children love their parents. Eventually they come to judge them. Rarely do they forgive them.’ So our immoderate hopes of children, our unconditional love for them, are subject to a necessary betrayal through time, that greatest of betrayers. As E.M. Forster, in bittersweet mood, has a character remark in Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) ‘…a wonderful ph
ysical tie binds the parents to the children; and–by some sad, strange irony–it does not bind us children to our parents. For if it did, if we could answer their love not with gratitude but with equal love, life would lose much of its pathos and much of its squalor, and we might be wonderfully happy.’

  There is no single formula for mother-love. If there were, we’d all be clones of one another. And, just as with our partners, our love for our children needs frequent reinvention. They may in parents’ eyes always be adorable three-year-olds, but they’re also all the other ages they become, each with its own needs of separateness, of responsibility, and one hopes, too, of occasional re-engagement with that ‘home’ that parents provide. But, given our long lives, the nest is likely to be empty for several decades. This may be another good reason for holding the rhetoric of idealized full-time maternal love at arm’s length and for women to maintain at least some relation to the world of work.

  Undoubtedly, a measure of selflessness and service, of availability and, above all, understanding and tenderness are crucial to parental love. But maternal self-surrender beyond school age, a wholesale identification with a child’s wished-for achievements and a deep sense of failure if they don’t meet one’s desires for them are rarely wise attributes. Somewhere along the way, children also need to learn about conflict, about the fact that their loved ones are not ever-available servants, about absence which evokes a return but yet is not a constant presence.

  It was only some fifty years ago, after all, that America was caught up in a discourse about ‘momism’–an outpouring of vituperation against powerful and clinging mothers who undermined their sons’ and daughters’ lives, who sought to control, who identified their own ambitions too closely with those of their offspring–like Paul Morel’s archetypal cannibalizing mother, both loved and hated, in D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers. Needless to say, that form of mother-love was born out of a cultural imperative that women give themselves utterly to children and home: in some sense ‘jailed’ during their offspring’s childhoods, they repeated the favour by trying to jail them in later life. As in all our other loves, it’s as well to recognize and enjoy the child’s separateness from us, which also revivifies love far more emphatically than does smothering.

  Some psychologists have recently warned against the dangers of over-zealous mother-love and the limitations of the attachment-theory model, which allows no necessary separation between mother and child and engenders a fusion which can provoke its own anxieties. The child’s psyche becomes structured on a dualistic basis, permitting no entry into the world of others, an outside which the father, the third party, who traditionally demarcated a limit to blissful bodily plenitude, provided. When mother and child are one for too long or too intensely, the child can develop a sense of being overwhelmed from the inside: there is no regulation of his desires or fears, no safeguards, no learning to live with the lacks and limits that underpin life. Without a prohibiting third of whatever gender, we never grow up, or we remain children seeking an all-powerful state or saviour of whom salvation is expected and with whom we can merge.

  Erotic Intruders

  The arrival of that delicious Cupid of a babe in the familial nest with his demands for unconditional mother-love usually means that all other libidinal desires promptly fly out of the window. Passion may have ushered him in, but once he’s there, most mothers report that passion with their partner is one satisfaction too many. In that ‘maternal preoccupation’, in that vaunted early plenitude, all sensual satisfactions are spent. Father is displaced. And even if, for some, the babe’s skin, suck, wide eyes and coos don’t actually in fantasy altogether stand in for Sean Penn or husband, then exhaustion, sleepless nights, the round of nappy changes and health visitors, the juggling of time and responsibility that the new arrival demands, will rarely leave much imaginative space for those old desires.

  Women’s sexuality, Esther Perel notes, echoing the long line of analysts from Freud on, ‘is diffuse, not localized in the genitals, but distributed throughout the body, mind and senses. It is tactile and auditory, linked to smell, skin and contact; arousal is often more subjective than physical, and desire arises on a lattice of emotion.’ Babies, those ‘dangerous rivals’, can for a while displace the partner, even when that questionable new fashion for co-sleeping–which places his majesty the infant squarely in the family bed, supposed site according to our latest mother cult of all benefits: nurturing security, lowering stress, raising self-esteem and cognitive ability–isn’t part of the family pattern.

  Marginalized by the new erotic couple, the traditional father’s role here is ideally that of secure and understanding provider and occasional helpmate. Displaced, dispossessed of his one-time lover, it would not be surprising if he also sometimes felt a pang of jealousy. Perhaps more. We know that key moments of our adult lives can reawaken earlier, unconscious ones. If the new father was an older child in his own family constellation, his present jealousy might gain the added heft of an earlier displacement from his own Mum when a new sibling arrived. Fatherhood can kindle a cauldron of emotions, difficult to control.

  Two men amongst my informants had begun affairs while their children were babes at the breast. They simply couldn’t bear the advent of this latest rival. For one of them the situation was repeated in a second marriage, making it clear–whatever was actually said or rationalized–that it was hardly his choice of wife that was amiss. Plainly, the new arrival called up unresolved aspects of himself which kept him locked in an unbearable moment from infancy. His third, childless union was long-lasting, and once the children he had left behind had passed earliest infancy he proved himself a fond and loyal father.

  For other men–and they’re hardly few in number–once their lovers turn into mothers, they also take on the aura of their own mother. The old incest taboo looms into prominence: while they may still love their partners, and indeed be warm and caring, the very possibility of passion, which often has a rapacious edge, flees. This may suit the partner perfectly for the span of her love affair with her babe–or, indeed, if she’s fond of protective Daddies, for ever after. But rekindling that old sexual spark may prove a daunting challenge. Passion, ungovernable, unpredictable, often fanned by the illicit, is rarely altogether amenable to domesticity, which can provide other, more durable, satisfactions. It’s just as well for the children, you might say: they can suffer from the inattentiveness of parents who are erotically embroiled only with one another. This may also be why children can be so averse to the appearance of new partners, indeed downright nasty. After all, they have their own love affairs with their idolized parents to protect.

  Patterns of love lived in the family cascade through the generations, whether we like them or not, so it’s as well to be aware of these patterns rather than blindly repeat them. As for new fathers, if they allow themselves, or are allowed and encouraged, to engage with their silken babes, they may be just as good at passionate mother-love as working Mums.

  Father-love

  Once solidly authoritative in their position as head of the family, fathers were traditionally imagined as the dispensers of tough love. They had little to do with children until language and ‘reason’ came within their grasp. Enunciator of the prohibitive No, it is the father, in Lacanian discourse, who ushers the babe into the world of language and what Lacan calls the symbolic, the arena of religion, culture and the social.

  Up until the late 1970s, a middle-class male presence in the nursery was less than usual. Nor were men often seen playing with a small child, the occasional weekend foray apart. A friend of mine, born in the early 1920s to an upper-class German family, told me that at birth he had been presented to his father, who took one glance and promptly responded, ‘Good, now bring him back to me when he’s fifteen.’ If such an attitude was hardly universal and many look back with adoring fondness at their relationship with their fathers (perhaps because they were less present than mothers), the family division of labour saw mothers as mistr
esses of the nursery and fathers as interlopers or occasional visitors. ‘To be a successful father,’ Ernest Hemingway said, ‘there’s one absolute rule: when you have a kid, don’t look at it for the first two years.’ Perhaps unsurprisingly, two is the moment when language arrives.

  Though Mediterranean cultures sanctioned the hugging and kissing of small ones by males, children everywhere belonged primarily in the women’s and then the school’s domain, until adulthood beckoned. On the way, fathers were distantly omnipotent, often disciplinary figures, brought in when punishment was due or arguments needed settling; or in the case of girls, to admire their accomplishments. Indeed, in the various permutations of the family romance that Freud shaped out of observation and his patients’ accounts, it is the father’s approving gaze that moulds the little girl into the sexed creature she becomes. She interiorizes this gaze, to be transformed into the being who is always looked at, the object of desire or its lack.

  In her Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter Simone de Beauvoir recounts how, on being displaced from her mother’s lap by her baby sister, she found solace in wooing and winning her father’s and visiting males’ attention, sometimes dressing up to engage in a performance of femininity for their eyes. Mother, here, emerges as her rival in father-love; one who, it seems from the little girl’s vantage point, is less difficult to displace than she is to come to terms with as the bearer of a comparable femininity.