Nour Tormos | Staff Writer
Motherhood is the most misunderstood and sugarcoated experience. Reduced to buying pretty baby clothes and having a “cute” baby bump, motherhood can actually take a more violent and bloody form. The burden that comes with motherhood is heavily undermined. Women undergo physical bodily changes, an identity crisis due to sacrificing all their time and energy to a child without taking care of themselves, and a lot of imposter syndrome and post-partum depression. Many women go through the process of giving birth and raising a child with minimal help as everyone assumes that women are naturally supposed to know how to care for a child while maintaining a perfect life balance.
Even worse, a balance is not expected as motherhood is equated with being caring and giving to the point where putting time elsewhere makes you a bad mother. This is where the parenthood double standard comes into place: a father that gives one hour of his time to change a child’s diaper is praised for doing the bare minimum while a mother that takes a 3-minute break to use the bathroom is a monster.
The intense association of womanhood with motherhood pushes many women to refuse the idea of motherhood because it can be reductive. In many instances, the caring side of women, which they are socialized into, is attributed to a natural maternal instinct used to justify motherhood as a necessary “blessing” in every woman’s life. In an interview with Melinda Moyer, Chelsea Conaboy, author of “Mother Brain”, mentions how the “maternal” instinct is a basic characteristic of the specie and is observed in many animals including male ones. The idea that females are automatically and innately more caregiving is due to ideology, not science. These social norms and expectations affect how we become parents, and most importantly how mothers become mothers. The imposed ideologies around mothers leave no room for mistakes and do not normalize parenting challenges, leading to a lot of guilt and sometimes resentment towards the child from the mother’s side. The prevailing notion of motherhood is so gender-essentialist and rigid that a woman’s navigation of birthing and raising a child is completely dictated by her environment, and rarely by her personal preferences (which are labeled as wrong, and even non-existent in society)
We have this tendency to hate mothers, blame mothers, be so intensely vile and unforgiving towards them and hold them to an unrealistic standard. Patriarchy does not only create obstacles impeding women’s liberation, but it also creates an intense hatred towards women. Violence, harassment, backlash are all a result of this belief that women are inferior, the incarnation of sin and the reason of all evil – thus, worthy of hate. This hate intensifies and is more subconscious when that woman is a mother because it is easier to throw our problems on them and the way they raised us instead of holding ourselves accountable. Note that the inherent belief that all mothers are angels is also wrong. Mothers can be mistaken, can inflict trauma, and can be simply bad.
That hatred is more intense – and often reciprocated – when you are a daughter. Because a daughter not only reminds you of motherhood but also of womanhood. Motherhood takes a more complex turn when it involves daughters as they represent an extension of yourself and a reminder of your past life, especially the lost or unlived one.
“Mothers and daughters existing as wretched mirrors of each other: I am all you could have been, and you are all I might be” – Unknown
Mother-daughter relations can be very emotionally charged. In some instances, mothers are a source of inspiration to daughters and the relationship is all love and butterflies. But in most common cases, daughters can feel some resentment towards their mothers: for staying with a bad partner (their father), being silent and accepting, and most importantly, for not achieving as much… This is rooted in fear of being like them and results in bitterness and more blame towards the mothers because it indirectly affects the daughter’s life. A traumatized and limited mother will traumatize and limit her daughter especially if the mother did not heal properly. This is probably the core of every mother-daughter relation. Shame breeds shame, and cycle breaking is hard.
The mother becomes not only dehumanized and reduced to a womb by the men, but is also hated and judged by the woman, but not any woman: by her own daughter. Both are due to patriarchy: the first is classic misogyny and the second is internalized misogyny. The animosity is equally expressed by the mother, through anger and restriction as the daughter represents what the mother failed to be. Mothers can also get jealous too and make the relation competitive. They tend to compare their daughter’s experiences to their own: “when I was your age all I did was 123 instead of all the great things you are doing”.
Infantilization is also a common occurrence: sometimes daughters complain about their mothers not giving them freedom and not letting them grow up, and while we usually attribute it to the daughter being stupidly rebellious and the mother being wise and protective, it can be manifested more toxically. In “The Monstrous Feminine”, Barbara Creed describes the mother-child relation as one marked by conflict. She says that the child’s existence serves to authenticate the mother’s own existence, an “existence which needs validation because of her problematic relation to the symbolic realm”. According to Creed, “By refusing to relinquish her hold on her child, she prevents it from taking up its proper place in relation to the symbolic”. The mother refuses to allow her daughter to go from girlhood to womanhood. Because on one hand, that means the child is independent from her which will threaten her identity. The child is constructed as the center of her life, her only purpose, and her stable ground. On the other hand, the transition to womanhood could trigger in the mother memories of her own teenage transition, which was marked by hardships, more misogyny, and probably an unsupportive mother of her own. The mother hates seeing the daughter having bodily autonomy and tries to assert control, probably because she never had her own.
This relation can be manifested in Black Swan (2010) by Aronofsky. Nina’s mother is constantly controlling her through acts like cutting her nails, locking her in her room, and forcing her to show her any wounds on her body after ballet. She is punishing Nina for trying to reclaim her body, which is represented through Nina’s transition from white to black swan, as expanded more by Final Girl Studios in “The Madness of Feminine Perfection”. Another complex dynamic is manifested in Ladybird (2017), where Christine is constantly trying to create a new identity for herself, outside of the one her mother created for her. We see a mother projecting her hardships on a daughter unable to communicate and always striving for so much more. Christine only reaches acceptance after leaving for New York and being away from her mother. The distance not only brings guilt but regret. A daughter is the biggest damage to an unhealed mother, and an unhealed mother will create an open wound out of a daughter.
These are all manifestations of a patriarchal culture that makes monsters out of mothers and casts them away and perpetuates the cycle through mother-daughter relations. In many cases, the daughter also feels intense guilt for leaving and seeking a better life. Not only because of love, but also because she is doing what her own mother did not have the courage to do and actively breaking a toxic pattern. Motherhood can be an act of being reborn if done right, or an act of slaughter if done normally. After all, all we can do is hope that the apple does fall far from the tree.