On Mother’s Day, let’s celebrate mothers for the impossibilities they negotiate every day
A personal essay
One of the most controversial book releases of the year so far is Sarah Wynn-Williams’s Careless People, a memoir of her time at Facebook. In the US its publication was swiftly curtailed by an irate Meta team who quickly won an emergency arbitration ruling to prevent her from promoting and distributing the work. However, here in Australia the book is readily available, and although billionaire moralities are the core of the book, one of the strongest subtexts is how little has really changed in women’s lives when they aim to ‘have it all’ – i.e. do meaningful professional work while trying to raise a family at the same time.
Wynn-Williams recounts throughout her memoir that her bosses mostly wanted her life as a mother to remain off-limits and invisible to colleagues, clients, investors, partners – basically, everyone. She was expected to absorb challenging workloads while pregnant, prepare briefing notes while giving birth (I kid you not), and take trips overseas while recovering from a nightmarish birth and trying to breastfeed. And these were just some of the more outrageous demands. I’m sure many of the more mundane challenges to her work-mothering balance, and questions around her commitment to the team if she dared to prioritise family, were deemed too small and inconsequential to even make it into the book.
However, the truth is that all of it matters. The constant and impossible ‘double binds’ of mothering are well known to the majority of mothers – dare I say every mother – even if they are often too complex to articulate. A ‘double bind’ is the tussle of contradictory messages, and these kinds of exhausting and insolvable mothering experiences are portrayed all the time in our entertainment culture, both in fiction and non-fiction, because it’s very easy for us to recognise ourselves there. In fact, many of these dilemmas easily leap off the pages of books into every mother’s life and impossible choices. Some examples of the most severe double binds might be a mother trying to raise her children so they thrive to their fullest potential, whilst also preparing them for a society of prejudice, judgement and danger (which for adolescent girls includes the dangers of sexual violence). And in modern culture, mothers must also manage this whilst working around the holy mothering trinity of home life (children, partners, dependent family, and housework), paid work (and its unrelenting demands and expectations) and their own health, wellbeing and self-care (to which most mothers who can’t afford much support might ask, what IS that?). Oh – and all this while figuring out how to stay up to date with the dangers of social media because while we know it’s terrible, our kids’ peers demand constant attention and response – anything from sexting to snap streaks of photos of the ceiling. All too easy, right?
I’ve spent a long time studying the proliferation of absent mothers in fiction, and what this might mean for our culture if purportedly empowered young female heroines (and the readers who love them) see very few older maternal role models they can look up to – alongside a lot of negative stereotyping of older women as mad, bad, absent or disinterested. That is, if these mature women are lucky enough to still be alive, because many of them have a tendency to die prematurely for the sake of the story! And although more lately in our entertainment culture there’s been a resurgence of heroic mothers, it’s rare to see heroism that isn’t coupled with sacrifice. In the incredibly moving film Lee, Kate Winslet plays real-life World War Two photographer Lee Miller, and the story is framed around her troubled relationship with her son, who wasn’t fully aware of her bravery and heroics until after her death. In Natasha Lester’s recent historical bestseller The Mademoiselle Alliance, Lester introduces us to the legendary Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, whose work as the only woman to lead a French resistance network in World War Two meant she didn’t see her children for years. An article about her in the New York Post notes that ‘on one particular day, Fourcade asked a caretaker to walk her children past the house where she was hiding, as she watched tearfully from a window. “I had the feeling of being buried alive,” Fourcade later recalled.’ Lester often talks about how much Fourcade’s work has been forgotten: ‘She helped gather crucial intelligence that the Allies used to plan the D-Day invasion of France, she spent ten hours doubled over in a mailbag being smuggled into Spain during one of her attempts to pass information on to the British, she escaped from a prison cell by squeezing her body out through the bars on the window yet you’ll rarely find her mentioned in any non-fiction books about the war. It really makes you wonder exactly what a woman has to do to get herself remembered by history if all of those things aren’t enough!’
The themes recur all over popular fiction too. Jane Caro, who’s currently storming the Australian crime fiction bestseller charts with her latest thriller Lyrebird, wrote her first novel, The Mother, about a mother desperate to rescue her daughter from an abusive relationship, and the toll it takes on the older woman’s own life and sanity. It seems that whenever heroics are present around mothers, there is always some kind of sacrifice, and an enduring, agonising cost.
Such sacrifices are likely to be deemed necessary as long as mothers live in cultures that fail to support, recognise and validate maternal double-binds, and pursue wellbeing for women at all stages of their mothering journey. However, despite the ongoing challenges, there’s still plenty of hope to be found in the continual sharing of stories – and the ongoing work of truth-telling around the maternal experience. We can all benefit from discussing and acknowledging these double binds, even as we struggle to overcome them. As we develop more ways of exploring all the complexities, demands and diverse experiences of mothering, and see this further conveyed in popular entertainment, we might be able to turn our understanding into a better lived reality for mothers. One where maternal sacrifices are at the very least recognised and celebrated, rather than simply endured and then forgotten.