Really 'Bad Mothers'

More tidbits from my interview with Dr. Monica Cardenas.

Maggie: For women, there’s another added burden when we become estranged. We are socialized to be kin-keepers, to keep family ties strong, to buy gifts, call people on their birthdays, make sure get-togethers happen regularly, check in on sick relatives. This is all women's work. So, as a woman, when you say, “I am actually not in contact with these members of my family, so therefore I don't participate in that work,” there’s extra stigma compared with a man who also made the choice of estrangement, but maybe doesn't have all that baggage.

Monica: In the same way, you know, fathers who are estranged, as we were talking about before, versus mothers who are estranged. When a mother cuts off contact, it's like the worst thing a mother can do, right? But if a father is absent, people don't really think a lot of it.

In the 80s there were even cliches. Dad going out for cigarettes and never coming back. There was nothing like that about moms.

There was, a film several years ago called “The Escape” that I really loved, where there's a family: mother, father, and two children. The mother just has enough and leaves. They live in England, and she just gets on a train and goes to Paris and stays there. And it's really shocking. She leaves the kids in the care of their father. There are so many stories of men who leave and the family just sort of gets on with it. So I'm always fascinated to see stories of women who do the same thing and how people react to that. It's a horrible thing that the mother has done, but if a father does it, it doesn't really get much of a response. And you don't see those stories that often.

[N.B. The two of us went on to come up with a few more examples. Monica mentioned Ladder of Years by Anne Tyler. I came up with two books that have had a huge emotional effect on me over the last couple of years: Free Love by the British novelist Tessa Hadley and The Lost Daughter by Italian novelist Elena Ferrante.]

I also told you about Alice Neel, the artist, who left her first child in the care of the baby’s father in Cuba and returned to New York without her. She only every saw her a handful of times after that. Later, she had two more children, and allowed one of those children, a son, to suffer physical abuse—even broken bones—from her then-boyfriend. She was a great artist, no doubt. There are so many male artists that exactly fit this profile: a great artist, not a great human being. But it’s just so much more uncomfortable to know that about Alice Neel than it is to, say, know it about Jackson Pollock.

That's viewed as something really shocking. Not that I wish that sadness on the part of the children, I don’t. but it’s a reminder that women have needs or feelings or desires to do other things in their lives the same way men do. But we expect so much more from women than we do men.

The recent news articles we’ve discussed about estrangement, they all have this news hook: “Something is changing right now about estrangement.” They try to argue that estrangement is increasing in frequency, but they're not really able to argue that because there's not enough evidence. But they do this journalistic sleight of hand where they're like, “Well, OK, maybe it’s not more common but people are talking about it more. It’s less taboo.” I'm also not sure if that's true, either.

But I wonder if you have any sort of take, as a person who has lived with estrangement from your mother for more than 20 years. Do you think anything has changed recently?

I know throughout the history of my own family, there have been generations of estranged mothers and daughters, which is something I want to write about. So definitely, it's not a new thing.

But we get the same narrative in media with people deciding not to have kids. Everyone pretends that that’s new. “Why are women deciding not to have children?” I will add that I fully support all kinds of social safety net programs to support families and people who want to have kids a hundred percent. I'm totally supportive of that. We need a lot more of that, especially in the U.S. However, the majority of people who say they aren't having children say it's because they simply don't want to. But we get this constant news angle, “What are we going to do?”

I don't think people themselves are changing that much. I think it's just become more acceptable for women to opt out of having kids or even getting married. They can have full independent lives and they don't need a husband and kids to make a life. I think we see the same thing happening in this birth-rate coverage in the U.S. and other developed countries that we do in estrangement coverage. The claim that it's a new phenomenon and an assumption that we have to do something about it. When it's probably something that's been happening under our noses, but just not to the same degree.

That is such a good point about the erasure of previous generations of women who also didn't want to have kids. In previous generations, the society was even more in lockstep telling women that this is the only way you become a person of value is to reproduce and to care for babies. And there were still plenty of women whom we don’t want to erase, who rejected that. They existed.

And the other parallel you’re pointing out between discourse about estrangement and discourse about the falling birth rate is an inherent, huffy judgment. “Kids these days!” in the case of estrangement and “Women these days!” in the case of birthrate. Like, “they're so entitled, they don't know their place.”

In the case of estrangement, it’s: “They think they can just walk away from their parents, and they must be choosing petty reasons to do so, or at least pettier than before.” There's all this undertone in what at first might sound like a neutral observation, a claim that younger people are redefining trauma, so that anything is trauma.

But couldn’t it be the case that adult children are redefining trauma and expanding the definition to include actually traumatic things? Like maybe the definition was too narrow years ago. What’s wrong with the definition of trauma expanding over time with more knowledge and information of the impact?

I didn’t have perspective on my childhood trauma until I was an adult. Once I realized that and saw it for what it was, that's what took my guilt and shame away. I realized in being estranged that I was much better off. I think if adult children do know that what they’ve experienced exists under the umbrella of trauma, if they can identify it, that's great. That's so much better for them.

Thanks again to Monica Cardenas for the conversation.

What a fantastic mind! Subscribe to Bad Mothers.

A P.S. to our interview:

Since speaking to Monica, I’ve thought about this question she asked. Just what is wrong with widening the definition of trauma?

Eventually I found myself down a research rabbit hole where I found an Australian academic named Nick Haslam who has introduced an idea called “concept creep.” Concept creep “refers to the tendency of concepts having to do with harm—from trauma to depression—to broaden their meaning over time.”

I’m linking here to an interview that the podcast “The Art of Manliness did with Haslam. (I know, ugh.) I was fully expecting the interview to be full of more UGHs and yucks. But, although the host asked leading questions that seemed designed to get Haslam to tell us there is something inherently wrong with “concept creep,” Haslam pretty steadily based his responses on his research, rather than his armchair critique of a society full of namby-pamby snowflakes (or whatever).

In general, Haslam seems not so much concerned that “concept creep” happens, but more concerned that it happens without the wider society noticing or acknowledging it. I felt like that was a fair point, especially because he doesn’t argue that a wider definition of trauma or abuse is inherently bad.

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As for today…

if you accidentally find yourself scrolling social media, seeing images of familial smiles and warmth and feeling rotten, remember this advice I heard recently on Rachel Zucker’s podcast: “Don’t compare your insides to other people’s outsides.”

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