Keeping Mum

The taboo of malignant mothers.

I knew this summer’s journey to England would be emotionally punishing. My father was paralysed by a stroke 6 months ago and was about to be unceremoniously booted from his NHS-funded rehab unit. My contribution would lend some male-Karen energy to prevent the authorities from stripping him of his remaining rights and dignity. The upheaval had activated my siblings’ complexes. The youngest was in mum/teacher/fixer overdrive as her caring complex was triggered. The oldest two had gone into lockdown for the entirety of the 6 months as their anxiety and closer proximity to the crime had paralyzed them. And my middle sister, a nurse by training, had rushed to the scene when it first happened, only to be traumatized by my mother, so she had kept at a safe distance ever since. But the worst offender by far was my mother. The spotlight had been wrestled from my father, the one person in a critical condition, and firmly placed onto the matriarch. Every conversation, concern, or argument seemed to be entirely based around her.

This was my second visit and I was determined to do better than my first. While I’d practiced patience, humility and grace on the plane home, the overwhelmingly oppressive panic of my mother had snuffed out all sense of perspective I’d had in the air. At my father’s bedside, his lopsided, sly remarks lightened the mood for a moment, but alone with my mother was a saturating hell I simply couldn’t tolerate or explain. Being silent was hell, and speaking up was even worse as it ignited yet more blame and agony.

The summer was never going to be easy, and I knew that this would be because of my mother. But I hadn’t known exactly how until now.

I already ache with guilt from having put these words on a page, and I’m not even started. Why is public discourse about bad mothers so rare? We have an embarrassment of riches with bad dads, from abuse to absence, or the Chevy Chase variety of comedically idiotic. In fact, culture has conditioned us to expect degrees of badness from dads. Mothers, however, are only beginning to be seen as fallible - with a ruthlessly narrow scope of identities available to them. This is unfair to mothers, who, for millennia, have been raised to be perfect, caring and superhuman - without any deviating (or deviant) role models to draw from. The scope is so limited that both mothers and their offspring find themselves gaslit by a monumental fairytale. To the point that an expression by the mother or the ‘mothered’ of an alternative reality is met by such shock that we’re thrown right back into our fiction.

But where are the other monstrous mothers? The profound urge I have to gag my feelings right now is a potential reason for societal silence. Speaking ill of the women who birthed, fed and raised us produces a deep, deep sense of shame. The ingratitude and the violence (especially from a grown man) are unforgivable and signs of immaturity. I share this view when I witness my older brother - now in his mid-fifties - uttering such unspeakable insults about her that I’m moved to judgment. A middle-aged man has no right to such sentiments when it concerns a frail old lady. Mother judgment is a dangerous space to enter into, even if malignant mums are rampant.

But it is in this dangerous space that I’d like to dwell. If we’re to evolve as humans, we must also discuss the painful, the taboo, and the complex. In the last few years, fallible mothers have crept into literature, media, and our consciousness. Olivia Coleman’s penetrating performance as a mother abandoning her child in Lost Daughter taught me that good humans can still be inept mothers. Hush - a novel by Kate Maxwell (who happens to be my ex) daringly broached the idea that mothers might wish they hadn’t given birth after all, but are silenced by shame. Then there’s Jennette McCurdy’s darkly honest account of her suffocating stage mother, ‘I'm Glad My Mom Died.’ This month, Arundati Roy launches ‘Mother Mary Comes to Me,’ which reveals an emotionally and physically abusive mother that Roy continues to refer to as Mrs Roy.

And Netflix’s recent top show is another cyberbullying/catfishing saga, but this time the bully is (sorry for the spoiler!) the 14-year-old victim’s own mother.

So culture is getting on board. Does this mean we can also cross this Rubicon? Can we admit that some mothers can be truly noxious? I have come to my own conclusion after an agonizing summer of family drama. Death and illness are very good at triggering buried family discord, and my family is no exception. Most children grow up unwittingly blaming themselves for wrongs committed in the family. And a poor parent will prey on that. As mammals, we are programmed to leave the nest at adulthood, but often remain behind psychologically - especially if a pernicious parent exerts too much influence.

In healthy family relationships, we essentially reacquaint with each other after individuation has occurred. This allows us to objectively assess parents without baggage. I can dispassionately acknowledge that another adult (in this case, my mother) isn’t suited to motherhood without speaking as a wronged child.

They fuck you up, your mum and dad

As adults, our job is to do what Philip Larkin suggested in his penultimate line:

“Get out as early as you can.”

I understand this line more deeply after this summer. Where once I would have brought blame, guilt, and shame back with me, this year I realize it’s my responsibility not to blame her for my father’s situation. And it’s everyone’s job to “get out” of victimhood, as that often leads to more bullying.

But it is the narrow and fictitious image of the mother that makes ultimate psychological extraction from the parental home so hard. This was painfully evident in Jennette McCurdy’s story. So deeply entrenched was she in the myth of ‘mom that sacrifices all for me’ that she couldn’t see the reality of selfishness and abuse, even years later, and from an objective and sensitive professional. But this trance can be broken with debate and conversation when we become comfortable discussing, not just lousy mothering, but new shapes of motherhood itself. The antidote to the fiction of the perfect mother is to write our own new ones to supplant it. To inject nuance and color that is so woefully absent.

After childhood, motherhood, and even ‘mother’ are essentially ideas that live in our psyche. And therefore can and are projected onto other carriers of this idea. From the moment we’re weaned, our siblings, friends, teachers, mentors, and therapists step in to assume some of the burden. Ultimately, we become our own mothers. If we can accept these more nuanced, disintermediated sources of mother, perhaps we can cut our own mums some slack and free ourselves from the need for perfection of one human. It’s okay if some mums suck. It’s okay if mums realize they didn’t want kids or were sold a lie as to how it would turn out. And now it should be okay to discuss the myriad of different mothering archetypes.

We need to add fallible mothers into the stories we tell each other. Over the years, in my day job, I’ve spoken to people about so many taboo topics - from drug abuse to STDs and mental health. Even mothers discussing their own loss of identity and fears of being bad, but almost nobody broaches the topic of having bad mothers.

So let’s open this conversation and let’s start it now. It’s okay. It’s human.

Disclaimer: If anyone is concerned about my mother reading this, do not fret. She’s not a huge follower of my work!