Bad Mothers? What Are We Talking About?

I read Sandra Tsing Loh's Atlantic article "On Being a Bad Mother" because, well, all of my WomanUp colleagues were doing it. Although I appreciate Loh's facility with language, humor and shimmering intelligence, her article and the response to it reinforced my concerns about the bad-mom conversation.

For one, this is a conversation of privilege. I agree with Melinda that Loh living in her car is an act of exhibitionist atonement while many Americans are doing so out of real economic necessity. I'm also concerned that the tone of Loh's confessional inhibits the kind of thinking needed to sort out the myriad post-feminist issues surrounding motherhood and work.

Loh claims that "few books today are truly helpful regarding the dilemma of modern women." Melinda's choice to turn to novelists including Fitzgerald and Austen in the wake of last week's gate-crasher discussion inspired me to serve up Tillie Olsen's "I Stand Here Ironing" for our conversation about motherhood. This short story is a bold and unsentimental confessional about an impoverished mother who had to make excruciating choices about her child's care. (Olsen herself did not write for 20 years because of the necessity of raising her children through "everyday jobs.")

Set in the pre-WPA world of the Depression, this interior monologue portrays a mother's response to a concerned call from a school guidance counselor about her daughter Emily. While ironing a dress, the unnamed mother character takes the rare moment to "to sift , to weigh, to estimate, to total" her thoughts about her daughter.

In simple prose, the narrator describes her beautiful breast-fed baby Emily, whose father jumped ship when the child was 8 months old. The narrator subsequently leaves Emily with a woman day-care provider "to whom she [Emily] was no miracle at all" and the kind of nursery school where "Even without knowing, I knew . . . that the teacher was evil." When things grow really tough, she sends Emily away to live with her father's family.

When the narrator remarries, she leaves the frightened Emily well before she could, as WomanUp's Lynn Hunter might say, "perform this task of human development." The night the narrator gives birth to her second child, Emily contracts the measles and is sent to a clinic where the following sign is posted: "Not to Be Contaminated by Parental Germs or Physical Affection." Emily returns from the clinic not wanting to be touched; yet the thin, asthmatic Emily never directly protests her mother's series of abandonments. The narrator asks: "What in me demanded that goodness in her?"

Why, then, am I so much more sympathetic to this mother than I am to the Bad Mommy confessors who steal wi-fi from outside their former homes ("tee-hee") or admit to loving their husbands more than their kids? Maybe it's because there is not a shred of narcissism to be found in Olsen's highly anthologized tale. Her story reveals this truth about mothering: We will all be "bad mothers," and we will do it in the moments when we are trying the hardest to get it right.

Unlike Loh, I'm not going to step out on my husband or force my children to live out of my car (I've lived out my car and, trust me, it's no picnic.) That said, as hard as I try to achieve the goal Lynn set forth for our generation to, "separate our adult need to be 'good' or 'competent' from the child's need for us to be present and attentive," I will periodically fail miserably.

My children have taken their biggest playground tumbles (physical and metaphorical) when I've been standing a few feet away. And I will commit the egregious crime of acting like a Professional Parent and stand in line in the dead of winter, cupping a Starbucks even though I swore I never would, because I want to register my child for a drama camp that makes her thrive.

Olsen's Emily becomes a brilliant comic, despite her mother's abandonment. As the narrator concludes: "Let her be. So all that is in her will not bloom -- but in how many does it? There is still enough left to live by. Only help her to know -- help make it so there is cause for her to know -- that she is more than this dress on the ironing board, helpless before the iron."

I weep every time I read this closing passage because Olsen draws me into this character's earnest struggle to meet the needs of her family. I want to be drawn in to such struggles, and I want to hear more stories that represent a broader sampling of women's experiences. I'd even read more Mommy lit if it displayed the honesty, reverence, humility and thought required of the job.