A Potent Spell: Mother Love and the Power of Fear - Hardcover

JANNA MALAMUD SMITH is author of two New York Times Notable books, A Potent Spell and Private Matters, which was a Barnes and Noble “Discover Great New Writers” pick. She has written for the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and the Threepenny Review, among other publications. A practicing psychotherapist, she lives with her husband and two children in Massachusetts.

Introduction
Growing up, I did not think a lot about becoming a mother. I played with
dolls sometimes, and remember two particularly. The first, a brown-skinned
boy infant, was my favorite. The other, a white, chestnut-haired creature
named Bella, appeared one year at Christmas complete with a shoebox of
outfits sewn by my grandmother. My best friend had a Barbie and Ken, who,
as we grew older, kept us busy planning scenes of their sexual undoing,
followed by guilt-exculpating marriage.
When doll play got boring, Kokie, our Siamese cat, could be
dressed in an old sleeveless undershirt and stuffed into a small carriage on
her back, her black legs jutting out of the blanket and visible above the
sides. She would protest but never bite, and usually allowed the ruse to
continue for a half minute before she bolted. I can still hear the strangulated
gargling sound she made attempting to meow as I squirted milk from the doll
bottle into her mouth. She was the infant stand-in on whom I practiced.
But in spite of a native instinct, and unlike many of my friends in
the small town in Oregon in which we lived in the 1950s, I did not dream
longingly of becoming a mother. In retrospect, this seems particularly odd
since mothering was the only adult possibility I could see for married
women. Looking back half a century later, it is difficult to convey the iron
curtain that surrounded women and blocked opportunity. In our small town a
widowed woman could work as a secretary; a single woman, newlywed, or
divorcée might teach elementary school, practice as a nurse, or can
vegetables in the local factory; but my mother"s friends, married with
children, stayed home. Except for one woman who taught college English, I
can remember none of them in an ambitious or lucrative job. If there were
other exceptions, the era"s sanctions made me snow-blind, and I did not
register what my eyes saw.
The grade-school library had a shelf of brown-covered biographies
of American heroes — among them Wild Bill Hickok, Abraham Lincoln, Davy
Crockett. Out of maybe thirty-five, two or three were about women — none of
whom had children. I dismissed Clara Barton and Florence Nightingale
because — portrayed in those days primarily as self-sacrificers
extraordinaire — they were unbearable. Only Annie Oakley did serviceable
duty. In retrospect, it seems somewhere between amusing and pathetic that
a stage performer with a rifle became my image of female autonomy, but so
it was. (I remember singing with a friend tunes from Annie Get Your Gun,
bellowing together with Ethel Merman the musical"s quintessential,
contradictory, Freudian chant for 1950s females, "No, ya can"t get a man
with a gunnnn!!") Overall, the outcome of my reading was to confirm an
impression that no biography paid attention to mothers, and, conversely, that
no woman with a public role had children.
Born a dozen years earlier, I might have glimpsed Eleanor
Roosevelt breaking "first lady" conventions, or a nation of mothers driving
rivets into destroyer hulls. But by the mid-1950s that reality had vanished,
erased and left as fl at and blank as our clean schoolroom chalkboards at
the end of the day. Women were to stay home with children. Mothering was
everything. In truth, mothering was devalued as often as honored, and
women were portrayed as beautiful fools.
It was still taken for granted in the 1950s and 1960s that women
were inferior. At the local college, girls were called "co-eds" and were
assumed to have come for husbands — though, strangely, the male
students were never said to be in search of wives. Biology was destiny.
Emotion kept females from thinking clearly. Irrationality cycled like fertility,
and peaked in the days leading up to menstruation. Meanwhile,
menstruation was not a word anyone mentioned. Scan the horizon as I
might, I could find no trace of a respected, assertive public woman, certainly
not one with children.
From my little-girl perspective, mothers in our small town lived as
mostly cheerful servants. I didn"t have those words then, but I think from
early on I had the feeling. Wherever I looked, I saw mothers putting their
husbands" dinners on the table and scraping their plates when they finished.
I saw them washing and ironing their husband"s shirts, picking up after them,
running their errands, turning to them for money or a night out . . . cleaning,
weeding, shopping, mending, and supervising children.
Between chores and chauffeuring duties, they spent long
afternoons talking. I listened as they recounted sorrows and complaints amid
the neighborhood news, but I also heard much that spoke of contentment.
Why not? After teen years in the Depression and early adulthoods worrying
about brothers and lovers fighting in World War II, this postwar world must
have seemed Edenic. Few among my parents" friends had money, but life
was good. The men had jobs. Families could afford to buy small houses and
secondhand cars. Neighbors helped pick one another"s fruit trees, and
afterward made plum jam, or apple butter, or ladled cooked pears and
cherries into Mason jars. The landscape — rolling fields surrounded by
stands of huge, dark green Douglas fir trees — was gorgeous; the town was
safe; the public schools orderly. The ghosts of immigrant forebears and war
dead looked on in awe.
Lacking perspective, I could not make sense of the mothers"
ways. No, that"s not true: I took them and their position for granted. They
were female reality. What perplexed me was my own reluctance to imagine
a future in which I would take my place among them. I dreamed of kissing
boys — and more — but had no interest in planning the obligatory wedding,
or choosing a bassinet. I wanted adventure. I wanted to get on a horse and
ride through the west, roping rogue cows and bad guys. At the end of a long
day"s work, I wanted to fall asleep on a bedroll under the stars. (A few years
later, when we moved east, I was filled with melancholy over the loss of
Oregon and the premature dismantling of my fantasy cowgirl world. The tame
New England landscape with its pathetic deciduous trees and aging hills
passed off as mountains, offended me. Not questioning my urgency, my
mother kindly drove me twenty-five miles to a town in the next state, where a
dingy store sold cowboy boots.)
Growing up, I did not think longingly about raising children
because I could not reconcile the circumscribed lives of the neighborhood
mothers with my eagerness to explore a larger world. I put away my
conscious maternal wishes; figuring where the baby would fit on the saddle
was too hard. We may grow to reject the limiting images in the old Dick and
Jane readers, or Walt Disney"s portrayal of the American family on 1950s
television, or any of the other distortions the young of my generation were
fed. But they remain in the mind, shading our sensibilities. In spite of
ourselves, we absorb the culture"s views.

Now the mother of two teenage boys, I think back and wonder how I could
have hesitated so to approach the best part of my life. Nothing in my worries
prepared me for the complete transforming joy of having children, nor for the
way that the experience would shake my universe and rearrange all
meanings so that the rest of life retreated into the background. And while
these are not fresh observations, oddly, one experiences them as such. I
think many women — but perhaps particularly ones who, like me, started
out uncertain about how to reconcile child-rearing with other wishes —
experience the pleasure, the anxiety, the enormous depth of feeling as an
original discovery, as something surprising. The strange infant is in your
arms. It breathes funny and your heart stops. Fear has become love"s best
friend. You are owned.
Once a mother attaches to an infant, whether before or after it is
born to her or adopted; once she experiences that surge of overwhelming
protective love and visceral affiliation, her life is transformed by the basic
imperative of the relationship: children require care. I remember feeling
puzzled lying in the hospital immediately after our first son was born.
Although doctors and visitors came and went, the scrunch-faced alien
stayed. Why did no one claim him? A quiet terror whispered, "You have
acted irrevocably. Now you"re stuck." As the exhaustion lifted, my feelings
changed; tenderness and awe stirred, then flooded in. If a nurse removed him
even briefly, I became uneasy. His life was in my hands; and my hands, my
arms, my lips, flexed by new nerves, rearranged themselves in his service.
The primary, intimate labor of protection across time and societies
has been assigned to mothers — with varying amounts of assistance
provided by older children, fathers, other kin, and caretakers. As a friend, a
neighbor, and in my work as a psychotherapist, I have spoken with many
women about the electric storm inside a new mother as she begins caring
for an infant — how tossed, twisted, ecstatic, and frightened, how
completely changed she feels, how much more vulnerable. She has brought
a new life into the world. Its well-being rests on every motion she makes, or
so it seems.
My husband and I still laugh about our older son"s first diaper
change. Overwhelmed by his fragility, we were sure if we touched him wrong,
he"d break. A hurried nurse had handed me a clean diaper and some wipes,
then left. We gingerly unwrapped the breathing bundle and gently, oh so
gently, started cleaning him up. We worked away with the exacting, nerve-
wracking attention of novice curators assigned to polish a Bernini sculpture.
Something priceless was in our care, and we could ruin it. What if we
snapped off a piece?
You probably remember that meconium quite resembles tar. You
no doubt know better than we did how newborns hate being unwrapped, and
tend to wail when they feel cold air. We began to sweat. Finally, perhaps
fifteen minutes later (it seemed like hours), we finished our labor. Our subject
was still breathing; in fact, he had stopped crying and fallen asleep. Perhaps
he"d simply gone into shock, having grasped the inept hands into which he"d
been delivered. Meanwhile, we were both emotionally wrung out. But proud.
A nurse came and wheeled our rediapered baby away. My husband headed
home. Maybe half an hour later the nurse stuck her head into the room,
cranky. "Next time you put on a new diaper," she barked, "you have to wipe
him clean first." I dissolved into helpless giggles. "But we did," I finally
gasped. She scowled and departed. I"d been a mother less than a day, and
already I was in trouble.
The worst clumsiness tends to pass. But a new, enlarged
vulnerability remains. In fact, it settles in like a great hawk perched on your
shoulders. Its talons grasp flesh whenever the sharp-eyed creature startles,
and much makes it uneasy. Whether you talk to the mother of a newborn, or
the mother of a twenty-five-year-old, she will tell you how her stomach knots
and worry descends whenever she senses that a child"s well-being is at risk.
If she believes she has made a serious mistake, she feels worse than awful.
Until you have children, one mother reflected when I interviewed her, "You
don"t think about what an impact you can make on someone else"s life."
This awareness translates into new feelings of responsibility.
What I do decides whether this baby lives or dies, whether it thrives or
suffers. Each choice I make matters. And the sum of my minute-by-minute
decisions determines — or so as mothers we are repeatedly told — how my
child fares in the world. Many moments are mundane: "No, you cannot
watch that television program." Yet, in truth, all mothers sense, without
dwelling on it, that they can make a life-and-death mistake of judgment at
any time. We can say, "Yes, you can walk alone to your friend"s house,"
when it will turn out that the correct answer was "No, cars run the stop sign
at that corner too frequently. Let me walk with you."
Small decisions can have large consequences. This disjunction,
paired with our intense sense of responsibility, puts us on edge. We
worry. "Did he remember his asthma inhaler on the overnight wilderness
hiking trip? I should have tried to phone the camp office again." Or, as one
mother put it when she described reluctantly allowing her thirteen-year-old
son to attend a rock concert with a friend because he so desperately wanted
to go, "If a terrorist bombs the [concert hall], or if he gets trampled, I will
spend the rest of my life hating myself for [my decision]." Each week is
packed with choices that likely will come out just fine, but . . .
Another mother tells me how frightened she felt, mistakenly
believing that her seventeen-year-old daughter was out with other teenagers
in a car on icy roads in the midst of an unexpected snowfall. The mother of
an eleven-year-old recalls how a week earlier she left him home alone one
day so she could go to her new job. (Her husband was unable to stay
home.) The boy, who appeared to have a cold, turned out to have
pneumonia. He recovered, but his mother felt miserable that she had not
appreciated how ill he was.
Since having children, and after almost twenty-five years working
as a clinical social worker and psychotherapist hearing about other mothers"
experiences, I have realized that not only can you not understand mothers,
but you cannot grasp the long, robust endurance of gender inequality without
exploring the ways mothering affects women, heightening their sensitivity to
varieties of threat, awakening new and more profound fears of loss,
intensifying focus, and inexorably drawing them toward personal choices and
accommodations that seem to enhance their children"s safety.
Mothers" passionate concern with keeping beloved children alive is
a central fact of life — so primary that it is taken for granted and mostly goes
unnamed — just as when we mention daylight, we assume the sun. Each
place and time, each society, jury-rigs ways of addressing and mediating
maternal fears about the survival and well-being of children — yet often at a
high price to mothers. And while this observation about maternal focus may
seem obvious, its consequences — its place in understanding how mothers
live in the world — has been largely overlooked, including by writers of
history and psychology.
Such neglect is startling only if one forgets that until about thirty
years ago, mothers and other women generally were considered irrelevant by
historians. I was "educated" in grade school to believe that the only woman
worthy of mention in the American Revolution was Betsy Ross, who sewed
the flag. As a college senior in 1973 I took the first course my school taught
in American women"s history. Brainwashed in spite of myself by the
university"s devaluing of women (it could find few to employ and none to
tenure), I remember feeling mildly incredulous that such a subject could
exist. Women had done laundry. What was there to study?
People have been writing and recording history for over five
thousand years, during which time the odd woman picked up a pen. A few
more women started publishing two or three hundred year...