In the 1980s, attachment parenting (or pure parenting, as it is also known) was founded by fundamentalist Christians William and Martha Sears, with an increasing following in the US and UK today. In fact, the UK breastfeeding rate was recently reported as the lowest in the world, with less than half of women still breastfeeding two months after the birth of their babies (when interviewed, women most often cited embarrassment at doing so in public as the main reason).16 With a devotion to match LLL, attachment parenting recommends that breastfeeding be more or less non-stop. Mothers are instructed to devote themselves wholly to their babies, step off the career track, and as one journalist put it, ‘subjugate yourself to your baby or else.’17 The racial and class bias is glaring – such an option is hardly viable for a single Latina mother working in Walmart. As is the potential political manipulation – one member of the group suggested that the gay massacre carried out by Omar Mateen in Orlando in June 2016 was most likely attributable to negligent mothering when he was a child. ‘Breastfeed or your child might become a mass murderer’ – mothers once again answerable for just about everything (no mention of homophobia or gun control or the police as agents for the violence of the state).
Above all, whenever any aspect of mothering is vaunted as the emblem of health, love and devotion, you can be sure that a whole complex range of emotions, of what humans are capable of feeling, is being silenced or suppressed. Such injunctions wipe pleasure and pain, eros and death from the slate. Why, French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche once mused, are there no artistic representations, or any recognition in psychoanalytic writing, of the erotic pleasure that a mother gains in breastfeeding her child? As if to say, breastfeeding is okay (indeed obligatory), but not so okay is its attendant pleasure. Remember Lysias’ tale of the breastfeeding mother whose husband, if only he had clocked on to her sensuous enjoyment, would have known that she was bound to take a lover. I have known mothers who stopped breastfeeding simply because they felt they were liking it too much. I have also always thought that revulsion at such pleasure plays a huge part in campaigns to keep breastfeeding out of public spaces.
In award-winning poet Hollie McNish’s video ‘Embarrassed’ – seven million views on the web – nursing mothers sit on toilet lids feeding their babies: ‘For God’s sake, Jesus drank it, and Siddhartha, Mohammed and Moses and both of their fathers, Ganesh and Shiva and Brigit and Buddha. I’m sure they weren’t doing it sitting on shit, because their mothers sat embarrassed on cold toilet lids, in a country of billboards covered in tits.’ As the video also points out, kids die from bottled milk in towns and cities drowning in pollution and sewage: ‘and they [powder milk companies] know that they’re doing it.’ As McNish also makes clear, she is not instructing all mothers to breastfeed.18
For a counterexample to Laplanche’s observation that there are few, if any, representations of a mother’s pleasure, I would suggest the fifteenth-century Italian painter Liberale da Verona’s depiction ‘Sleeping Mother with a Child at Her Breast’, which I was delighted to come across at the Albertina Collection in Vienna. It portrays a nursing mother, head thrown back, eyes half-closed, in a paroxysm of delight. The etching surely rivals Bernini’s sculpture of St Teresa in Rome for the intensity with which it depicts the joy of female sexuality (St Teresa’s ecstasy being, no less scandalously, proffered to the gods). In fact, depictions of a mother’s erotic pleasure in breastfeeding are there to be found, but you have to go in search of them. This is a passage from Naomi Mitchison’s 1931 novel The Corn King and the Spring Queen, sent to me by feminist literary critic Jan Montefiore, one of a run of communications I received when I first suggested such representations were rare. The heroine, Erif Der, is nursing her baby son:
He began to give little panting, eager cries of desire for food and the warmth and tenderness that went with it. Erif’s breasts answered to the noise with a pleasant hardening, a faint ache waiting to be assuaged … For a moment she teased him, withholding herself; then, as she felt the milk in her springing towards him, she let him settle, thrusting her breast deep into the hollow of his mouth, that seized on her with a rhythmic throb of acceptance, deep sucking of lips and tongue and cheeks … He lay across her belly and thighs, heavy and utterly alive.19
Laplanche was right about the classical psychoanalytic literature that tends to make erotic desire, in the mother–baby pair, almost exclusively the province of the infant (desexualising the mother, like everyone else). One exception is the analyst Helene Deutsch, who, writing at about the same time as Mitchison and to a similar tune, describes birth and after as a more or less continuous erotic exchange of bodily organs and pleasures. ‘In coitus,’ she writes with unerring assurance, ‘the penis becomes the breast while in lactation the breast becomes the penis.’ The mind boggles (although the image of Erif’s hardening breasts comes close).20 For the most part, however, the pleasure a mother might experience from a baby at the breast is either unspeakable or it makes her accessory to a crime.
There is, of course, not the slightest trace of any such pleasure – heaven forbid – in LLL or pure parenting. No less conspicuous, although perhaps slightly more predictable, is their complete silence on breastfeeding as a potential source of anxiety or pain. Not all mothers breastfeed, whether out of choice, or because it does not work, or because it is too painful (pleasure is only the half of it). The complexity of breastfeeding is another aspect of mothering that is rarely talked about – one result of the impoverished alternatives on offer of being ‘for’ or ‘against’. ‘Naturalness, spontaneity are the mots d’ordre’ (marching orders, one might translate), Wilmers writes. ‘Which hardly takes into account the fury one may oneself feel at an infant who rages when he should be feeding, and indeed would like to be feeding if only he could stop raging.’21
On Mother’s Day 2014, Courtney Love opened her concert at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire in London with: ‘Happy Mother’s Day. I got flowers for mine with a note saying, “Thanks for not breastfeeding.”’ She is the high priestess of breastfeeding, not as pure nature but as sensuous, potentially harrowing art:
‘I’m eating you, I’m overfed
Your milk’s in my mouth, it makes me sick.’
‘And all your milk is sour
And I can only cry
And I can only cower
And I can only cry
You have all the power.’
‘I want my baby, where is the baby
I want my baby, where is the baby
There is no milk
There is no milk.’
Those last lines are taken from a song entitled ‘I Think That I Would Die’.22 In this distraught rendering, milk gluts, sours, sickens; the mother is not feeding but eating her baby. We could not be further from the conventional image of breastfeeding, where, it is safely assumed, all body fluids are flowing in the right direction and land in the right place. This might be dismissed as extreme. And yet the body in extremis – the body experiencing itself acutely as a body – is a human reality to which mothers cannot help but have access, although once again they are expected to put a lid on it, to make everything sweet and nice. They can, they must, love, hold, coddle their babies, but on condition of warding off the danger of any spillages – blood, guts, misery and lust. Their task is to prevent such intensities from going too far, to clean out the drains, on behalf of everyone.
* * *
So how to tell the tales of love of and for mothers? Or, how to listen to the tales that mothers choose to tell? We have seen how, on this matter, the dominant language of the Western world has a tendency to be prissy (moralistic, sentimental, coercive, blind), as if the best to be hoped for is wrapping a mother and her baby in emotional cling film. A killing prospect, since if you leach out of a mother any but the most anodyne, saccharine feelings, there will be nobody or nothing left. And if you take a mother sitting (not prone, not enraptured) with her baby at her breast, eyes demurely focused on her infant, as the supreme image of mothering then you shr
ink her pleasure, her anxiety, her world. Perhaps most important of all, if you ignore the more disturbing narratives that are there to be read, which must include the lengths a mother can be driven by love of her child, then you wipe whole histories from the map, shutting down – in the name of essence or nature or virtue – the complex tracks that can run across continents and time.
Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Beloved (1987) tells the story of a woman who kills her baby rather than let her be captured and grow up into a life of slavery from which the mother has barely escaped. Morrison has firmly stated that this is not the tale of Medea retold: ‘Sethe didn’t do what Medea did and kill her children because of some guy.’23 There could be no greater difference between killing your sons in a desperate rage and deciding, in an act of supreme care, that a daughter is better off dead than sold into the slavery that still haunts the mother. Although in one reading of Medea she does indeed kill her children to save them from a worse fate (in several others she does not kill them at all).
Sethe kills her daughter out of love. One of the most powerful aspects of this novel is the way it shows, again without sentimentality, how it can be an act of human responsibility for a mother to take the unspeakable action which historically she has to take – although she is crucially also her own agent – at the same time as she knows in every bone and beaten scar on her body that her action resolves nothing, that the after-effects of our choices stay with us for ever (Beloved returns as a ghost). Morrison is extending the scope of mothering across the broadest, and most incriminating, sweep of history. She is telling her white readers – she said she wrote the novel to lift the lid on America’s suppressed history of slavery – that in an inhuman world a mother can only be a mother in so far as history permits, which might mean killing your child. When Sethe first recognises the face of her returned dead daughter, she has to rush around the side of her house to empty her bladder, an ‘unmanageable’ emergency she had not experienced since she herself was a young girl. In this radical and brilliantly counter-intuitive moment, Morrison answers in one fell swoop the nursery dictators and fanatics of mothering from now and yesteryear for whom the only liquid that can acceptably pour out of a mother’s body is milk.24
Once again, the ultimate sin is pleasure, and how it is regulated is the surest measure of oppression: ‘Slaves not supposed to have pleasurable feelings on their own,’ Beloved’s sister Denver reflects, ‘their bodies not supposed to be like that, but they have to have as many children as they can to please whoever owned them. Still, they were not supposed to have pleasure deep down. [Grandma Suggs] said for me not to listen to all that. That I should always listen to my body and love it.’25 Obligatory childbearing, no bodily pleasure, no self-love (for which love of a child is so often decreed as the substitute) – this is the slave-owning version of motherhood. Morrison is drawing up to the surface a historical reality that hugely exceeds the true story of Margaret Garner, on which her novel was based.26 Scrape the surface of this history and you find that many slave women made the choice not to preserve the lives of their children (among whom the infant mortality rate was in any case high). Ally, the slave of one George Miller in Fairfax County, Virginia, in 1835, Polley in Buckingham County in 1818, and Kesiah in 1834 were all convicted for killing their infants, and each one was sentenced to hang for her crime. In 1815, at the trial of Hannah, a slave from Granville County, North Carolina, one witness testified that she had cut her child’s throat and then attempted to slit her own.
On occasion a slave woman would use infanticide as a threat. In one example, which achieved some notoriety, a mother, faced with the prospect of being separated from her infant for some petty offence, held the baby by its feet in the air as if to smash its head onto the ground (the slave owner relented). Like abortion, infanticide was the harshest way of asserting autonomy, an answer to the inhospitality of the world. But it was no less an act ‘taken in the interests of mothering’: ‘they made mothering decisions – decisions not to mother’ (the words of Stephanie Shaw, from whose essay on slave mothers in the antebellum South I take these examples).27 And, of course, breast milk was stolen. Slave women were often forced to feed the babies of their owners, their life – the life owing to their own children, whether alive or dead – mercilessly pumped into the suckled future of the oppressor (infants who as yet would have not the faintest idea of the disparity of their world from that of the nurturer at whose breast they were satiating themselves).
Some slave mothers tried to prepare their offspring for a life of freedom, but, for the most part, mothers whose children remained alive saw their main task as teaching them the skills of survival. Under such conditions, mother love, as it is understood in white Western culture, is a luxury – this high-risk version of motherhood has to be prescient and crafty rather than mollycoddled and safe. ‘Mothers may have ensured their daughters’ survival at the high cost of their emotional destruction,’ Patricia Hill Collins writes. ‘On the other hand,’ she continues, in words that have lost none of their pertinence today, ‘black daughters who offer serious challenges to oppressive situations may not physically survive.’28 She was writing in the 1990s, long before the increased racialised US state violence that precipitated Black Lives Matter, and way before the election of Donald Trump in November 2016 threatened to make the lives of blacks in America, and indeed the world over, so much less safe.
Another example, this time from South Africa, tells a different but not unrelated tale. In the first story of her 1991 collection, Living, Loving and Lying Awake at Night, Sindiwe Magona gives one of the most powerful renderings of what it means to abandon a child out of love in the conditions of rampant, violent racial inequality that prevailed under apartheid. She is the sole provider for her five children – each one conceived on her husband’s return from his eleven-month stints in the gold mines of Johannesburg, from where he no longer sends her money: ‘a dog that unsheathes itself onto a tuft of grass. He forgot the grass he’d peed on.’29 Five is the number of children who remain: ‘Had all her pregnancies come to fruition, and had none of her babies died in infancy, there would have been perhaps double that number.’30 Still nursing the youngest of her infants, she slips away in the night in search of work in a white ‘madam’s’ house where she knows – as the rest of the stories confirm – she will be insulted, abused, exploited. ‘The only way she could be a mother to her children would be to leave them’ (the free indirect tense places the reader right inside her mind, leaving no room for dissent).31
But it is the fraught sensuality and wretched lyricism of the writing that makes this story so compelling and haunting, giving her readers a type of distorted permission to savour the cruel experience – as if, by mothering the language, Magona could partly compensate for her character’s distress in leaving her children behind: ‘She rose and stood still and straight as a reed on her mat while her thoughts galloped away’; ‘The woman listened and imagined she heard: mmhh, psshh, mmhh-psshh; and could almost see the rise and fall of the baby’s heaving form’; ‘Light as dandelion seed adrift in April’s breeze she walked away from the hut where her children slept.’32 The climax comes when, bleeding from a thorn, imagining her six-month-old baby bursting her lungs for food, she stops to express the milk from her breasts:
Kneeling, she took out first the one, then the other breast. Plumped hard and veined, they were hot to her crying hand. Squirt-squirt; jets of white streamed to foam the ground. Squirt-squirt-squirt: the greedy soil quenched its thirst with her baby’s life while near her knees the woman’s eyes wet a spot.33
Not for one second does she hesitate on her path. ‘One last sigh for the children who sent her away’ – note it is the children sending her – ‘How she loved them.’ This is another kind of loving, stripped of any shred of sentimentality, witness to an injustice that it is now up to society to redress – the collection appeared three years before the end of apartheid. In these stories of mother love pushed to the limit, as t
old by Morrison and Magona, motherhood is not stranded on the far shore of history (as if a baby could suckle everything that she or he, and the whole wide world, needs from a mother’s breast). Nor, by any stretch of the imagination, could you possibly believe that the solution to the ills charted by these writers without apology could ever arise solely out of motherhood itself.
* * *
The mothers of the Western world are at once punished for being mothers and instructed to love without reserve. The hate, we could say, is perfectly proportionate to the love, the intensity of the demand matches the deluded expectation, the veneration a cover for reproach. It is not to the tales of historic violence and abandonment by writers like Morrison and Magona that we should, therefore, turn for testimonies of the perversion of mother love in modern times. Instead, in the last part of this chapter, we should look deep inside the Western literary canon, where we find, in relation to motherhood, the most profound and heart-wrenching diagnosis and lament. When I came across by chance Edith Wharton’s The Mother’s Recompense, it felt as if it had fallen into my lap through the sheer force with which it brandishes in the reader’s face a contemporary myth of motherhood as she takes to pieces the insanity that passes for normal in the world of white metropolitan elites of the last century, and still in many ways now.
The novel was published in 1925, nearly half a century before the feminism of the 1960s and 1970s made the impossible ideal of motherhood the target of critique. Little known today, yet it sold almost as many copies as The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth, for which Wharton is most famous, competing with The Great Gatsby as a bestseller, and making its author $55,000 within a matter of months. In the year it was published, Wharton became the first woman to be awarded the gold medal of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. She was apparently offended to have her novel unfavourably described as ‘old-fashioned’ compared with the ‘brilliant experimentalism’ of Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, which was published in the same year.34 It is true that The Mother’s Recompense is written in a more traditional prose style. Nonetheless, old-fashioned is a strange way to describe a novel in which a mother’s love for her daughter brings both their lives to the brink of ruin.
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