All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion (42 page)

Freud’s first inklings of the power of the Oedipus story came out of his own self-analysis, conducted in the years after his father’s death. On 15 October 1897, he wrote to his friend Wilhelm Fliess:

Before I had a child of my own, I used to think that Freud’s Oedipal scenario was wild speculation, as tenuously grounded in the real as any other writer’s imaginative conjectures. The young adult I was certainly didn’t feel, or remember feeling, any particular desires for my balding Dad or any more than the usual antagonism towards Mum. As for the sexuality of children, it felt like a slightly repugnant theoretical trope. Enter my infant son, kicking and squalling, tender and smiling in turn, and as philosophical as any babe. He was garrulous, too, once language took hold.

One day when he was about four and I was driving him home from nursery, he adamantly demanded a pair of scissors. ‘What for?’ I asked him, from the front seat of the car. ‘I need them,’ he insisted, and when I probed once more, he announced he needed them for his Dad, eventually revealing, before he burst into peals of laughter, that he needed them to cut off his Dad’s willy. After a momentary sense of shock, I assured him that that was hardly a good idea, and of course, by the time we’d got home he’d forgotten all about it. He greeted his father in the ordinary way and went off merrily to dismantle some robotic monster instead.

The fact that children have ungovernable fantasy lives should, on reflection, hold little surprise. Why else should they be so attuned to the intrinsic savagery of fairy-tales, with their gobbling witches, vengeful stepmothers and abusive fathers–frightening narratives contained and mastered by the sheer fact of repetition? Why else, too, should past centuries have spent so much effort in disciplining their unruliness both at home and at school?

We now recognize the family as the hothouse in which children learn the whole repertoire of human emotions from love to hate and all the complex recombinations in between. The parents’ role in containing these, and negotiating their passage from rampant fantasy to some kind of recognition of the real and all the social forms it entails, is central. It’s in these early years, after all, that children learn about absence and presence, that all desires can’t be satisfied and certainly not instantly, that other people exist and have needs, wishes and minds of their own; that they may be loved, but that all their acts aren’t pleasing and some aren’t permissible, that conflict exists and compromise is no bad thing.

Mothers have ever played a dominant role here, and despite a century of struggles for independence and attempts in the last forty years or so to rebalance the equation of family and work for both sexes, it is still women who emerge as the child’s primary carers, the bearers of mother-love. Responsibility in this area has grown increasingly complex as we have learned more and more about a child’s early life–from psychologists, analysts and now neuro-and cognitive scientists. To a historically knowledgeable Martian it might even seem that the exponential growth in theories about early childhood is oddly coincident with the rise of feminism from the late nineteenth century on–with particular points of emphasis after each of the world wars and in periods when middle-class women have been seen as too prominent in the workplace. It is as if educated women needed to be convinced by science of the very real interests of their babies, and as if mother-love were not altogether or always that maternal instinct we would also like it to be.

Mother-love

I remember distinctly the night after my daughter was born listening to her soft snufflings at my side. A sense of what I can only call beatitude filled me: I felt blessed. When she opened her pink little mouth and let out a soft mewl, a sublime happiness flowed through me. The narrow, shadow-strewn bed where the street lights crept through greying blinds, the alien cacophony of hospital noises, vanished as she opened her eyes to stare up at me. I read deep knowledge there and beneficence, despite my everyday scepticism. This was definitely love at first sight.

The arrival of my equally gorgeous son, my first-born, initially roused different feelings. It had been such a long delivery, the pain so much more intense than any woman is led to expect or can imagine. The midwives–barking out their orders of ‘Push!’ while I was trying to remember the useless instructions I’d been given about types of breathing–had appeared to me in that half-conscious state of labour like Macbeth’s witches, their cauldron my vast tum in which trouble was bubbling and boiling. Afterwards, I was exhausted and I suspect my son was, too. His blindly flailing arms, his very helplessness, filled me with fear. Who was this tiny stranger? How would I and his father manage? Panic threatened. He didn’t speak and couldn’t be reasoned with, ever a shock to some of us. Then, too, his utter vulnerability seemed to awaken my own.

When the team of chief doctor and silent students, all male, all eyes cast downwards, made their way to my bed and issued more orders, this time about breast being best, no matter how sore, no matter how many hours it took, I baulked and said I’d never be able to manage. Of course, I would, I was told. Women in Africa did. (This was a long time ago, when ‘Breast is best’ was a newish mantra and my lead doctor had worked in Africa.) But we weren’t in Africa, I protested. And I would soon have to go back to work.

Well, it took some weeks of fuming and fussing and getting used to those breasts and this new being who was my son as well as this second new being who was myself as mother before I fell a little reluctantly in love and realized that of course my son too, now plump and pink, was, like so many other first-borns, most definitely a Messiah.

That new being, who was mother-me, by the way was decidedly different from the woman I had been before, and she coexisted alongside the old one. Films or television programmes about children instantly brought tears to my eyes–though I’d never been particularly sentimental. If they were endangered children, anxiety overwhelmed me; more than that, pain: I walked out or switched the television off. Even now that they’ve grown, I find such media content difficult and immediately have the impulse to ring the children just to make sure they’re still there and intact. As time passed I also developed a thick skin and would go to battle for them when necessary, though I had never before been either brave or forthright. I started to intervene when I saw children fighting on the street. I put on a convincing show of being a grown-up when talking to headmasters or mistresses, though they continued to frighten me, as they always had. I even learned to ring doctors, those other authority figures.

Parenthood does really change many of us, matures us, as the cliché goes, though our earlier selves continue to hover in the background, creating obstacles here and there along the way when they meet up with those parenting bits. If I recount these tales from my children’s first years it is simply because all births while similar, are also different, even to the same mother–as are all childhoods. A complexity of emotions comes into play with each new arrival. Mother-love may for some shine like a bright sun after the storms of labour. Milk and gladness may flow without a hitch and the babe seem as bonny as the best gift from heaven. Here, indeed, is that famed symbiotic plenitude.

For other women, depleted by the ordeal of labour, feeling as helpless as the newborn whom they are meant to tend, laid low by anxieties about how to cope with the alien, squalling being who gnaws at and enflames their breasts, side by side with the endless stream of advice from mothers, mothers-in-law, partners, experienced friends, nurses, doctors, guidebooks–the much vaunted maternal instinct may feel like another stick with which to beat their sense of inadequacy. So it’s as well to note that, as with other forms of falling in love, this one needn’t come all at once; and when it does, it too will have its ups and downs and bring in tow parts of ourselves we didn’t know we possessed. The baby will grow and develop even if maternal rapture isn’t instantaneous. Indeed, since they’re freed from anxiety and the often competing cares of work and babe, grandmothers may delight more ardently in the new arrival than new mothers.

Given that everywoman and indeed, man, knows much of this, how is it that we continue to believe in the cultural myth of an idealized mother-love and its accompanying maternal instinct?

In the biblical tradition, Eve’s punishment for allowing herself to be seduced by the serpent and for eating of the prohibited tree of knowledge was to bring forth in pain–an early admonition to women, one might say, to stay in their place, keep their eyes and ears fastened only on their husbands and leave knowledge to authorities higher than themselves.

Theologians tell us that the New Testament Mary redeemed Eve’s transgression. A faith based on love and human vulnerability, Christianity gave the world an ordinary woman as mother of an individualized, embodied God. No other religion in its foundational narrative confers such significance on a small family nucleus. No other turns us all into children of a merciful father and provides an embodied merciful mother, ‘meek and mild’ as the traditional hymn declares, who may intervene on any ordinary mortal’s behalf.

Through the narrative of Mary and baby Jesus, through repeated images and retold tales of the nativity and the holy family, our culture has underscored the value of mother-love as at once transfigurative and eternal. The tender, watchful Mother and her holy child are imbued with an authority which casts the really existing paternal figure into the background. Joseph is a mere adjunct to the miracle of the messianic birth.

The New Testament and the Church Fathers went to some lengths to make Mary exceptional by her virgin birth, untarnished by the sins of the flesh and wife only to the Holy Spirit. But the nativity story, alongside her countless images painted over and over again through the centuries, speaks of the domestic idyll of any ordinary mother and the miracle of her child. Leonardo’s gentle and graceful Madonna Litta gazes down at the buxom infant at her breast as attentively and tenderly as any enraptured Mum cradling her own child’s pudgy flesh. His Benois Madonna smiles lovingly at the playful creature in her arms, who clasps at her hand and stares at the flower she holds up to him.

These are familiar scenes of domestic love, reinvented in myriad chapels across Catholic Europe, and now the world, by local artists. Amidst gods gendered male, the Madonna emerges as an understanding receptacle for shared daily cares, a potent intermediary for women’s prayers. She also enjoins all ordinary mothers submissively to love their miraculous babies. If the Church Fathers had trained as propagandists, they couldn’t have found a more homely exemplum to popularize a faith based on love and simultaneously provide a model of woman’s most important task. Sublime maternal love emerges as woman’s path to redemption.

In
Alone of All Her Sex
(1976), the historian Marina Warner points out that the figure of Mary has served through time to entrench a set of desirable feminine characteristics: submissiveness, compliance, docility, virtuous purity, humility, obedience. All of these have abetted women’s confinement to a subsidiary sphere which supports patriarchal power. Simone de Beauvoir, in her energetic demystification of women’s condition,
The Second Sex
(1949), had already stressed that motherhood, unless freely chosen, was the primary cause of woman’s secondariness; a vehicle of her disempowerment, chaining her to her biology, to fecundity, to nature. Crucially, too, de Beauvoir underlined that a woman’s subservient state could pervert her love for her child and threaten its future, since the child became the vehicle through which she sought to compensate for all the frustrations of her trapped secondary state.

Young women in the liberation movement of the seventies criticized their mothers for a subservience which made them both overly controlling and over-identified with their children, given their frustrations in the confined sphere of the home. These new women simultaneously questioned and rebelled against the primacy attributed to their role as the reproductive sex. They set out to show that their vaunted ‘maternal’ traits were hardly innate, but rather the products of patriarchal wish and power. Freed by the pill which had given them control over reproduction and liberated their sexuality, they could now choose to have children if they so wished, and to do so in co-parenting arrangements with men which would equalize responsibility and free both members of the couple to work–to enter the sphere of knowledge and power. The characteristics that made up mother-love were not those which Mary ‘meek and mild’ enshrined: nor was the care of children women’s domain alone. It could be shared with men, newly liberated to express their softer, caring sides, long trapped in templates of conquering, dominant malehood.