Mom blame festers in isolation

Mom guilt, mom blaming, mom shaming. These things are perpetually on my mind. I am a mom. I am guilty of blaming and shaming other moms. I often think about what kind of therapy my children might need because of my quirks, my parenting… my existence.

So, Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch has spoken to me the way that the author character Wanda White speaks to the mother in the book as she navigates her own shame and purpose. I dog-earred this passage in particular (among many): 

“If he gets sick, it’s on you, the husband whispered sharply. If other kids think he’s weird, that’s you.

Of course it is, Nightbitch said. It’s all on me. Every part of it.” (page 127) 

A popular show’s character recites a punchy line: “Boy, I love meeting people’s moms. It’s like reading an instruction manual as to why they’re nuts.”

In a long-running sitcom episode, the patriarch makes a remark in response to one of his children’s perceived downfalls. It goes something along the lines of “Don’t look at me, I was hardly ever around,” insinuating it was the mother who damaged their children, his absence with no consequence. I hope most viewers giggle at the absurdity.  

Some claim that we’re moving away from mother-blame.   

For instance, Marianne Littlejohn writes in How Emotions Shape Your Baby’s Brain,  “Luckily… many of these 20th–century mother-blaming theories were taught as mere artifacts of history, and contemporary psychological theories had left these ideas in the dust. The focus on the development of mental health problems had shifted to the interplay of biological, psychological, and environmental factors. The impact of parenting is included in these environmental factors, but the focus is not specifically on mothers per se.” 

I’m hopeful and encouraged that some find this the case. Still, the allegory remains embedded in popular culture suggesting that it is indeed pervasive. In fact, in my circle of mother friends, we all feel the immense weight of mom-blame, -guilt, and -shame throughout our waking (and sleeping) hours. Actually, I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to state that it dominates many of our lives.  

Victoria Bailey wrote an extraordinary poem titled All The Ways, Always – An Ode to Mother Blame in which she shares:

“…for me it started well 

before 

it began really

before i was a mother

when a boy 

once said to me 

i know your kind

you’ll be a single mum 

by the time you’re sixteen

this was said to me 

by an eighteen year old 

who carried a skateboard 

to look cool

but i never saw him 

ride it

so i was blamed 

and shamed 

as a potential probable possible 

but not promising mother

long before i ever stepped foot 

into the land of motherhood…” 

Myself, thirteen years into motherhood, I find myself reminding my teen, who often recoils in disgust when I try to hug or kiss her,  that there was a time in her life when all she wanted and needed was me.

In fact, when I was pregnant, this is the reason why I decided I would breastfeed. No one else could do this for her, produce milk tailored exactly to her needs, provide a space that offered security and regulation. That seemed incredibly empowering and important. I’d watched new moms handing off their babies to well-meaning, loving friends and family with a tinge of reluctance and anxiety in their faces. I wasn’t interested in sharing my baby quite as much. Selfish mother! 

In practice, exclusive breastfeeding proved rewarding, convenient, exhausting, irritating, fulfilling, daunting, etc., etc. I could simply offer a boob to my baby on cue, to nourish her, to settle and soothe her. It was a blessing and a massive responsibility. I sometimes daydreamed that my husband had lactating breasts. 

I attribute my decision to breastfeed mostly guided by intuition; I wasn’t fully aware– Uneducated mother! — of all of the cool science-y stuff that was happening in skin-to-skin contact and during breastfeeding.  

For instance, Bigelow and Power write in Mother–Infant Skin-to-Skin Contact: Short‐ and Long-Term Effects for Mothers and Their Children Born Full-Term: “In infancy, oxytocin, stimulated by SSC, may help set the mother–child relationship on a positive trajectory. However, oxytocin may do more than stimulate a nurturing effect at the beginning of the relationship. Repeated exposure to oxytocin through tactile contact and breastfeeding may induce long-term changes in stress reactivity, as has been shown in animal studies (Holst et al., 2002). Early effects of oxytocin may be conditioned to shape sustained benefits at both physiological and behavioral levels (Uvnäs-Moberg et al., 2005; Uvnäs-Moberg and Prime, 2013).” 

Vidya Rajagopalan, et al found in Breastfeeding duration and brain-body development in 9–10-year-olds: modulating effect of socioeconomic levels that  “Longer breastfeeding duration showed long-term associations with brain and body development for offspring.”

And Anushree Modak, et al conclude that “Breastfeeding represents a transformative journey that encompasses more than just nutrition – it represents a complex array of interconnected benefits that resonate throughout our lives,” in The Psychological Benefits of Breastfeeding: Fostering Maternal Well-Being and Child Development. 

I always feel it necessary to note the language used, because breastfeeding doesn’t offer benefits, really. Instead, there are risks associated with not breastfeeding. Judgemental mother! 

Littlejohn’s piece describes the way mothers continue to shape their babies’ brains after pregnancy. 

“Recent neuro-imaging studies show that when babies see a woman’s face, their right brain hemisphere ‘lights up’ and that a baby’s cry activates the right brain hemisphere of the mother. Most mothers tend to cradle their babies in their left arms (right brain hemisphere), possibly increasing reciprocal communication between mother and baby. The left ear and eye (right brain) of the mother are close to the baby, listening for sounds and watching the baby’s facial expressions. The mutual gaze between mother and baby also stimulates right-brain activity. More specifically, states Schore, the mutual gaze stimulates the opiate systems (pleasure) and the dopamine system (rewards), helping the relationship to be mutually gratifying, therefore setting the conditions for increasing neural connections in the baby’s brain. A mother’s warm and familiar facial expression and her soothing tone of voice help a baby regulate his own vagal nerve functions, laying the foundations for rich neural growth and development.

All of these findings are amazing, and the enormity of these effects might be a bit panic-inducing too. Could some of the science-y stuff be, in part, to blame for mother-blame and mother-guilt? These processes so influential, we should be making them easier for dyads  to accomplish.

Natasha VC of Radical Moms Union writes aptly, “…you shouldn’t blame your baby or motherhood for feeling lost after you have kids, blame all the systems that make being a mom so shitty.” 

What’s more, as Bonnie Zucker points out in  From A Psychologist: No, It’s Not All Mom’s Fault: 

“In heterosexual parenting relationships, studies have shown that mothers carry much more of the ‘emotional load’ or ‘mental labor’ of parenting. Even when the mother works full-time, she manages many aspects of the household that go beyond household chores. Often it is the mothers who are responsible for RSVP’ing to birthday parties and getting presents, arranging playdates, deciding what is for dinner on any given night, and scheduling their children’s doctors’ appointments. When a child has a disability or is in need of additional services, that burden also tends to fall on the mother. School room parent rosters are almost always composed of mothers, as are the memberships of PTAs and parent organizations. This is true even though 76.8% of mothers of children ages 6 to 17 are employed, and 80.3% of those are in full-time jobs, according to a 2019 Bureau of Labor Statistics report.” 

Bedraggled mother!

How do we battle mom-blame and shame? Free ourselves as individuals and as a culture? Surely, a complex and multifaceted problem will require a multifaceted solution, but I am inclined to share one with great potential. It’s summed up in an exchange on Elena Bridger’s instagram: 

… I don’t believe in advocating for extended maternity leave. Why? Because maternity leave is incredibly isolating and shoves the burden of care onto lone mothers. If we look to our evolutionary past as a model, maternity leave was short, but the return to work was gradual, flexible and child-friendly.  [Hyperlink added] 

I’ll never forget a book I read a few years ago. They asked women of a hunter gatherer group if breastfeeding on demand wasn’t too stressful because breastfeeding in industrialized societies often impacts mother’s mental health. They didn’t understand the question. Women answered, ‘What is breastfeeding keeping me from?’  And that’s when the researchers realized. Women in that culture were not kept apart from the rest of the group. They weren’t isolated. There was nothing breastfeeding kept them from doing. So breastfeeding so intensively for years was not a stress factor at all. 

Also check out Elena Bridgers’ thoughts on mom blame and communal care.

Another of Yoder’s passages fits well here. Though she writes in regard to the family unit, the ethos can be applied to all mothers, to all humanity just the same:

“This must be what it means to be an animal… Beneath the moon, we pile inside the warm cave, becoming one creature to save our warmth… This is how it has always been and how it will continue to be. We keep each other alive through an unbroken lineage of togetherness.” (p. 230-231)

In Bailey’s beautiful construction, she advises community too. 

“… and so what I hope you take away

from my poem

is testament to resistance

because here we all are

holding it together 

turning out whole

wonderful

amazing

compassionate

kind

loving

and, thank god, imperfect

humans all the same

and what a shame

what a crying

sighing

hands in the air throwing

foot stomping

spit on the ground

inside voice screaming

shame

all this fucking blame is

so don’t let it rob you of any joy any more

invest in lots of big fat fuck you’s

lots and lots and lots and lots of big loud spitting hot read-my-lips fuck you’s

share kudos with other moms

give them the props that you never got

make the space

reach out 

connect

isolation breeds contempt, not familiarity

familiarity generates 

relationships

sharing

acknowledgement

support

bonds

friendship

allies

community

in another word, love, for other mothers

which leads me to my last perhaps trite but just feels so right point

try to focus on and embrace the positive

that indescribable

thick

sticky

heart breaking

heart blooming

marvellously bloody messy

sloppy 

wonderful 

love

that being a mother can bring

easier said than done, i know

but remember it

feel it

perceive it

apply it

as a form of resistance to your own bombardment of blame…” 

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