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

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 brotheers 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 years ago, and at moments they proliferated enough to overrun parts of the market. But really, it’s been for only the past forty years that a generation of female scholars has begun to rewrite American history to include the stories of women. How then can people claim that feminism is passé, has achieved its aims, or is irrelevant?
I hear such dismissive comments partly as efforts to ward off anxieties about what will happen to children (and men) if mothers are free to live fuller lives. The idea of autonomous women with full citizenship remains frightening. Writing in 1762, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (whose mother died when he was born) captures some of the perennial anxiety and anger when he declares that She to whom nature has entrusted the care of the children must hold herself...