327. Uncovering the Good Mother Myth with Nancy Reddy

Professor and poet Nancy Reddy discusses "the good mother myth," how that can negatively impact your writing, and how moving away from these kinds of fallacies can make your characters and story more dynamic.

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Visit Nancy's website:
https://www.nancyreddy.com/

Find a copy of her books:
https://www.nancyreddy.com/books

Check out Nancy on social media:
https://www.instagram.com/nancy.o.reddy/
http://twitter.com/nancy_reddy

Transcript

Jennia: Hello, I'm Jennia D'Lima. Welcome to Writing and Editing, the author-focused podcast that takes a whole-person approach to everything related to both writing and editing. Societal beliefs and expectations influence our writing, how we portray our characters, and how readers feel about those characters and their choices. We're going to be looking at one of those beliefs today, and that's the myth of the good mother. Poet and writing professor Nancy Reddy is here to lead this very incredibly exciting and interesting conversation.

Jennia: First, thank you so much for being here! And I have to say that as someone who did graduate work in psychology, this book has completely changed my mind about so many things (Nancy laughs).

Nancy Reddy: Well, thank you and thank you for having me!

Jennia: So first, what is the good mother myth?

Nancy Reddy: I mean, it's the—At the center of the myth, I think, is the idea that once you become a mother, it totally transforms you into a new person who is capable of doing all the care all on your own and never minding. And that the best person to provide all of that care is the mother. And I think it's a very American myth in terms of the focus on the individual. And I think it's kind of a product of our culture that makes motherhood harder and lonelier than it really needs to be.

Jennia: Yeah. And it really is so pervasive because I had those same feelings each time I was pregnant and then one of my children was born where I thought, "This should all be so easy. It should come to me instantly. I should want to sacrifice. I shouldn't ever begrudgingly sacrifice."

Nancy Reddy: Yeah. I think that especially, right, the idea that you should want to sacrifice everything for your kid, I think that's such a source of guilt and shame for a lot of mothers. I know it was for me.

Jennia: Yes! I mean, just as a small little side note, one day we had one Ferrero Roche left and I badly wanted it and I thought, "No, I should give it to them. I should let them have it." And I did. But I can't say that I did it 100 percent with happiness (laughs).

Nancy Reddy: Yeah! I think those little things, right, where you're just expected to always give your kid the best of everything, even if it's a sacrifice for yourself.

Jennia: So how did this myth come about? And I realize that there are going to be a lot of answers that go into this, but maybe we'll just get on some of the key ones that we see still around today. that, well—

Nancy Reddy: Sure, I mean—

Jennia: —I'm thinking of one, but yeah (laughs).

Nancy Reddy: Yeah, I mean, you can tell me what you think because it's so interesting to hear how different people connect with it. I mean, the book is kind of half memoir, my own story of early motherhood, and then half research. And I really look at, in terms of the research strand of it, the history of these ideas. And I locate that largely in the post-war period and the science of that era, which—especially the psychology that was done by people like Harry Harlow and John Bowlby that seemed like it proved in a very scientific way that what a child needed most was the constant undivided attention of his mother.

Jennia: Mhm.

Nancy Reddy: And of course the science is a lot more complicated and not nearly as clear as all that. And conveniently that science served the kind of cultural and economic agenda of the time. The idea that women had been working during the war and they had been sending their children to state-supported childcare and then suddenly all these veterans came home and there was a lot of concern about getting them back into the workforce and getting women back out of the workforce and back home to raise all these children in the baby boom, so.

Jennia: And as you point out in the book, too, this wasn't always how we defined a good mother, that it really did come about at that time. And so we can't really say, "This has to be the way it is. This is the idea," because all those different historical situations and cultural expectations and even who we are looking at as a mother—So as you point out, too, it's mostly middle class white women and that's who we're putting into this subset and nobody else.

Nancy Reddy: Mhm. Yeah. I mean, one of the things that for me was fascinating and also really liberating was reading some of the longer history of ways that we've parented and then reading, like, Anthropology of Childhood to learn about how children are raised around the world. Because there are a lot of cultural variations in terms of how families are formed and how children are raised and the throughline really is shared care. Like, it's actually very weird in the United States that we had this idea that a family is, you know, two parents inside a home and no one else helping. Like, that's not either historically or culturally normal. And so it was really inspiring to read about all of these ways that children are raised differently and oftentimes with much more of an emphasis on community.

Jennia: Yeah, so I'm very keen on having you talk about the monkey terrycloth mother study as the first one. And that's because that is something that I saw over and over and over in school, and that was held up as some sort of gold standard. And we were told about that study all the time, but I'll let you

Nancy Reddy: Sure! I mean, this is fascinating research. I think that anyone who . . . I think it's still a cornerstone of intro psych and it really is interesting and important research. So Harry Harlow, who was a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin, did these studies with monkeys. And he used rhesus macaque monkeys, which are kind of small monkeys—they're easy to work with in a lab. And he was trying to learn about maternal attachment, like, "What do children need from their mothers?" basically. And so he set up this lab experiment with surrogate mothers. And there would be wire mothers that were just kind of like a wire tube and there would be a cloth mother, where they wrapped that wire tube in terrycloth, they put a kind of face on top of it, and they warmed it. And in some of the cages it was the wire mother that had, like, the food and so it'd feed the baby. And in some of the cages it was the cloth mother that had the food. And what they found is that it wasn't the food that mattered, it was the comfort that the babies derived from the warmth from the soft fabric. [And] you can find, for example, he was on CBS pretty early on. And so you can find video on YouTube of the babies that will, like, scoot over to the wire mother, if that's the one that has the food, and then they run right back and they just, like, hold on to this cloth mother. And I mean Harlow's argument, and it was an important one at the time—because this is an era where, like, children were sometimes raised in orphanages without a lot of care, where children were sent to hospitals. And if they were in—like, their parents weren't really allowed to stay with them or see them. So his argument was that babies need not just food, but they actually need love in order to grow. And that's important. But of course it's also more complicated than just one mother who's totally available all the time.

Jennia: Yeah. And I do think it's important to bring up too that the type of monkeys he used are adorable—

Nancy Reddy: They are!

Jennia: —because we anthropomorphize animals all the time. And I know they've done studies showing that animals that most resemble our own human infants are the ones that we ascribe more emotion to. So if you see this large-eyed, cute baby monkey, you are going to be giving it some of these feelings or emotions that you would think that a human infant might.

Nancy Reddy: Yeah, I mean it looks—like, it just looks so sweet. I mean, one of the things that I didn't realize until I really was in the research was that Harlow had started his primate research actually at the zoo, which was fascinating. And so he had started out working with baboons and orangutans, which are big, and kind of scary, and, like, a little bit unpredictable, and would not have been a good subject for these studies for all kinds of reasons. Which I think is interesting, but also is important because he was very quick to generalize and, like, journalists loved it. From this very cute rhesus monkey to what human infants needed.

Jennia: Yes.

Nancy Reddy: And he didn't pick that monkey because it was the best analog for humans. It wasn't like, "This is the monkey that can best tell us what human babies need." It was the one that was best suited to the conditions of a lab.

Jennia: Yeah, but also, too, you're almost priming that response by opening with that photograph of again, this super cute baby monkey. You're already conditioning your readers, or whoever it is, to respond the way that you want them to respond or to believe whatever it is you're selling them in your research.

Nancy Reddy: Yeah. I mean, Harlow was a serious scientist, right? Like, he really was very rigorous in his experimental design. He was trying to be really nuanced. But I think he was also smart in terms of how his research was going to be taken up by the press. And he loved doing interviews with, like, women's magazines and giving advice about human children. Based on his experience with monkeys.

Jennia: Right, which—

Nancy Reddy: And not based on his experience of raising his children, right? (Jennia laughs)

Jennia: Yeah!

Nancy Reddy: Because he was not doing much of that.

Jennia: That's where I wanted to go to—

Nancy Reddy: Yeah.

Jennia: That these men who are writing these articles or doing this research—and then I'm thinking also about attachment theory, which I think we should do next. Yeah, they were not involved in their own children's lives and so there was no real hands-on research happening here.

Nancy Reddy: On the one hand, it's not all that surprising that this dad in like the 30s, 40s and 50s was not a super engaged parent, right? Like, and I don't want to try to judge any of these men by the standards of our time, but it's worth knowing. And I'm not sure if it's irony or if it's just, like, kind of a shoddy dimension to the research that a lot of these men spent their lives telling women how to raise their children and they were not doing much childcare of their own. I don't know, it's just wild. And even by the standards of their own time—like, Harlow's first wife begged him to spend more time with their children. I mean, he was obsessed with his work. And he would be at the lab. He was the first person there in the morning, last person to leave at night. He was there on the weekends. And finally she was like, "You have to take a—You have to spend some time with our kids." And his answer was to take his son to the lab. And his children say the most heartbreaking things about him in adulthood. Kind of like, "I don't think he was very interested enough." So I think even by the standards of his time, he was a kind of exceptionally unengaged parent.

Jennia: Yes. And I realize this [is] anecdotal evidence to be using just the letters and such from their own children. But I think that in a way, at least, if you're looking at it in just that small little subset or this family dynamic, they're proving the research is wrong. And we see that a lot with a lot of these really famous psychologists—male psychologists, usually—and then their children . . . or I'm thinking like Skinner and that sort of person, we look at how their own children and their outcomes, and they're dismal. And (laughs) so really practicing whatever it was you were saying is the ideal, or let's say you did think it was, this is how you would have a child who, by whatever measure, is considered successful or to be a good person, well (laughs).

Nancy Reddy: Yeah. I mean, I'm kind of obsessed with the idea of expertise. And I feel like in the U.S. especially, parents and especially mothers really want an expert to tell us what to do. Because I think oftentimes we're trying to do it on our own. It's hard and it's scary, and we don't have the support that we need. So we end up oftentimes looking for someone who seems like an expert who has the answers. Like, if I do the thing that this lady on Instagram tells me to do, then it will be easy, it will be joyful, it'll be natural. All these things that I was kind of sold. And a) I think we probably all need community a lot more than we need experts.

Jennia: Yes!

Nancy Reddy: And. . . I don't know, once you actually look at a lot of the experts, like, maybe they've got some good ideas, but also, like, they don't know your kid, you know?

Jennia: Yes, exactly. And I think that's something you talk about in your book, too, that individuals are going to have individual needs. It's not that one size fits all. And I know you talked about the—I don't know if I should name it or not—that popular sleep-training method for infants. We tried that as well. Oldest had colic. It didn't work at all (Nancy laughs). But then there's that feeling of, "I have failed." Because you're hearing this is the expert advice. It works for everybody. And then it doesn't work for you.

Nancy Reddy: Yeah. I—That's the thing, right? I think it's when we try to—And this is my kind of whole thing about goodness and trying to be a good mom is that I feel like often it means that we're trying to fit ourselves into someone else's mold.

Jennia: Mhm.

Nancy Reddy: And we're kind of trying to produce a factory standard like Goodbaby. And that doesn't really work either. I mean, like, my kid did not want to be wrapped up in a little cozy wrap with me. He did not want it. That was what I thought I was supposed to do. That was literally, like, the image that I had of myself as a mother. I would be this kind of, like, blissed out, natural mother. And he was not into it. And it took me a really long time to get to know that about him as a person because I had this image of what it would look like to be a good mother with a good baby.

Jennia: Mhm. And we don't have that one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to people when they're even slightly older than infants. So it does seem a little backwards that we then say, but all infants are the same, or infants need to go through this sort of parenting process, or this type of sleep training, or this type of feeding, or this type of swaddling, or whatever it is (Nancy laughs).

Nancy Reddy: All of the things that I obsessed about. You just named all of them.

Jennia: I was also there, obsessing about them (both laugh). So moving into writing or the media. How have you seen this myth perpetuated in contemporary literature?

Nancy Reddy: Oh, that's such a good question! I mean, part of what I'm really interested in is how, like, scientific research is done and then how it kind of escapes out into pop culture. Because once it makes it out into even newspapers and then certainly the internet and social media, I think so often the nuance just gets lost. You know, there are other people who write much better about, like, Instagram mothering. I think of, like, Sarah Peterson and Kathryn Jezer-Morton, like, really do that kind of cultural criticism. That's not super my wheelhouse, but I do think about it. And I just think so often things get flattened. What is really interesting to me and a throughline that I see often is actually just, like, the visual imagery we have—

Jennia: Yes!

Nancy Reddy: —of what it means to be a good mother. And I think, like, there's a kind of spooky throughline from Harlow's, like, infant baby and that cloth mother to the imagery that we see online and also in, like, diaper commercials and other kinds of things where it's like a mother by herself with the baby in the nursery. And even that image, I think, sets us up to think, like, "That's who I'm gonna be. I'm gonna do it on my own, and we're gonna be this little kind of cocoon together."

Jennia: Everything's very soft and soothing and feels calm, and (laughs).

Nancy Reddy: That was not what early motherhood felt like for me. That's what I expected, but that is not how it felt.

Jennia: It's not the colicky baby with a trail of spit up down your back and the shirt you've worn for three days and (laughs).

Nancy Reddy: Yeah, exactly! Right? And, like, you laugh about it now, but a lot of that was not funny to me at the time—

Jennia: Oh yeah.

Nancy Reddy: —but I think that disconnect between the images that I had, and the images that I had picked up in all of these places, and then the actual lived experience of caring for a newborn. Like whoo!

Jennia: Yeah! Because we talked, too, about the media we consume and how even on some very small level, that influences our own beliefs about ourselves and others. And so if you see those depictions not just on Instagram, but even in books where people—

Nancy Reddy: Mhm!

Jennia: —just immediately take to motherhood. Or you skip to the epilogue and they have a baby and everything's wonderful and perfect—you're still just solidifying that idea that this is how it is meant to be.

Nancy Reddy: Yeah.

Jennia: So if it doesn't work for you, then there's something wrong with you.

Nancy Reddy: Yeah. One thing that I really had to learn to do in the year since having babies is, like, to try to read other people's stories and understand that it's okay if their experience is different than mine. Like, in some cases, I think, like, I read a lot of books about motherhood that maybe just weren't being fully honest about the actual challenges of the postpartum period in particular. But I also read some where, like, I do believe those writers were telling their own truth. And my experience was very different. And that doesn't mean that either one of us was wrong—

Jennia: Right!

Nancy Reddy: —but it's taken me a long time to think through that. And I think because we have this kind of normative idea of what early motherhood is supposed to be like, if your experience doesn't fit that it's hard. I mean, my older son is almost 12 now, and I do feel like in the time since I had him, we are having different conversations about motherhood. And I feel like I see a lot more conversation about maternal mental health, and that feels very encouraging to me. That I do think in some ways there's a little more—I keep saying nuance, yeah.

Jennia: I've noticed that too. So my children are 17 and 13, and—

Nancy Reddy: Oh yeah!

Jennia: —when my oldest was a baby, that most of the what felt like honest depictions to me, or at least honest compared to what I was also going through, they mostly came from mommy blogs.

Nancy Reddy: Oh, yeah! Oh, man. Yeah.

Jennia: Not so much fiction.

Nancy Reddy: Yeah.

Jennia: Fiction still had that now-normalized approach of, "It will be bliss, and, yes, you will be putting your baby in that soft little swaddle, and everything will be wonderful." But that wasn't—again, since, you know, she had colic until she was three months old—that wasn't my experience at all.

Nancy Reddy: Yeah. Oh, yeah. I read a lot of mommy blogs, like, for years before I had my kids.

Jennia: Yeah. So your book includes the line, "As a poet, I've been taught to distrust cliches," and I'd love to hear how this applies to using the good mother myth to create characters who are mothers.

Nancy Reddy: Yeah. Oh, man, that's—I love that question. Thank you for that.

Jennia: You're welcome (both laugh).

Nancy Reddy: I think we have so many really flat stereotypes about motherhood available to us that it can be kind of hard to not just lean into one of those, to be like, "I'm a fitness mom" or a crunchy mom or an art mom. And I think that's true in writing, for sure, but I think it's even true sometimes in how we connect with the moms around us—

Jennia: Ohh yeah.

Nancy Reddy: —in terms of, like, kind of slotting each other into little boxes. I mean, I can probably speak best for my own writing that I really feel like what I was trying to do with myself as a character in the book was just to be as kind of open and honest as I could. And that meant oftentimes, like, really not showing myself in my best light (laughs). You know, I do not look great in a lot of sections of the book. But I also think that's important. I mean, the memoirs that I love the most and the ones that mean the most to me are the ones where you can really see someone transform. And not in a sense of, like, moral improvement, but to start with one set of ideas and really fundamentally change their ideas. And that's what happens to me in my life, but also that's what happens to me in the book, right, is that I started out with one set of ideas and by the end was able to move to a different place. But I think you can only do that if you're willing to show up as your real, full, messy self in the beginning and trust that a reader will go with you on the whole journey.

Jennia: Mhm. Do you think there are ever times when it's acceptable to use this stereotypical representation? Such as maybe a certain genre or a certain kind of story?

Nancy Reddy: (laughs) A genre that I actually kind of love—and there are so many of them that kind of bleed together for me—is, like, the kind of mom thriller. Do you know what I'm talking about?

Jennia: Yes! Like the—

Nancy Reddy: Like, there's so many of them. Like, all the mothers, all the other mothers, a good enough mother. Like, I've read so many of them. And I think in some of those, like, because it is a genre, right? You're, like, trying to find out who killed the person's husband or, like, why she disappeared or whatever it was. It helps to flatten a little bit, right? Because you need characters to be kind of stock characters. I read one that was fascinating to me. It's a group of women in London, I want to say, definitely in England, who had all met doing the, like, UK childbirth class.

Jennia: Ahh okay.

Nancy Reddy: The National—Have you heard about this? The National Childbirth Trust? That's, like, charity class brings people together for, like, the prenatal class and then postpartum visits. And what I loved about this book was that it was these, in some ways, kind of stock characters. Like, here's the rich mom, here's the single mom, here's the messy mom. And then across the course of the book they all got more complicated. So it was fun to be like, "Oh, here are the cliches," and then here's how they become more complicated than that. What do you think? I mean, I feel like I struggle . . . I don't love, like, kind of flat stereotypical characters in books or movies. That's something that pretty quickly turns me off.

Jennia: No, I feel the same way. And I think, too, it just becomes—they're not going to be memorable and its going to feel like this book could be replaced by any other book.

Nancy Reddy: Yeah.

Jennia: So if you are going to write strictly in cliches, it's almost like you've given up on developing your own characters and you're just using, again, like you said, those stock people—

Nancy Reddy: Yeah.

Jennia: —So, like, when someone has the mafia boss (Nancy laughs) and they fit every single thing you've seen in The Godfather or something similar. There's nothing different about them. You haven't actually created something. You've just relied on other ideas that were already there ready for you to take from.

Nancy Reddy: Yeah. I mean, I think there's enough pressure for women to kind of become a certain kind of mom or a certain kind of woman or whatever that I'm not very interested in fiction that replicates that.

Jennia: No, I think it can work as a side character where it's something you don't really need to see more of. So that one perfect mom in school pickup or something who's like a contrast to the main character (Nancy laughs). We don't really have to see her develop, it's the fact that she's there to show, "Here's what I think I should be like"—

Nancy Reddy: Yeah.

Jennia: —"and here's what I'm not" (laughs)

Nancy Reddy: Yeah.

Jennia: I think this just goes to another deeper question which we won't be able to go into, but that need to label ourselves—

Nancy Reddy: Yeah.

Jennia: —into these certain categories, I feel like we don't really see that as often with men. You know, we don't really see, "What type of dad am I?" Or not nearly the same way. Like, we don't see, like, trad wife vs. girl boss in a male-centered area.

Nancy Reddy: Yeah. I was thinking recently of a conversation I had with one dad who I was talking about my book or something else and he said, "Well, I'm not really a sports dad. So." And I thought that was—

Jennia: Aww.

Nancy Reddy: I know! And he was talking about, like, what are the other ways that I connect with my kids? And I thought that was really, really thoughtful. But I think you're right. I don't think it's the same kind of, um.

Jennia: No. And I wonder if that's because so much of that image-based social media content is produced by women. And so therefore it's aimed at women.

Nancy Reddy: Yeah.

Jennia: Well, so how do you think the reception of a mother who doesn't fall into this myth based on identity changes when it's nonfiction as opposed to fiction?

Nancy Reddy: Oh, that's such a good question. I really had to think about with the book. I mean, I'm very—As a writer, I feel like my life kind of is my material. And it's not just a book about me, but it's like my story is the vehicle for the ideas that I wanted to think about. And I think—and based on the feedback that I've gotten for the most part—that people really respond to a certain amount of messiness and complication and nuance. And I think—I mean, I've had some really meaningful conversations with people who said, "I really see myself in this aspect of your story and it was so helpful to read that." And people who've said, "My experience was really different than "—

Jennia: Mhm.

Nancy Reddy: —"and this is how it helps me to think about mine." And I think there's a lot of value in that. I mean, I really, like, it's—I don't know, it sounds so cheesy, but I really believe that—I teach writing as well, and I'm teaching nonfiction at the moment—that the more that we share our own stories, the more space it makes for people to share their stories.

Jennia: Mhm.

Nancy Reddy: And I don't know, that's what I believe in terms of character in nonfiction and personal narrative in particular.

Jennia: No, I completely agree. And I think it goes back to that whole thing, too, about—and I think you mentioned this in your book—not being able to name something and so therefore you don't talk about it. And so when you see, for instance, that maybe what you're going through isn't this isolating event or this isolating experience, it also—and then you talked about community in the very beginning. It opens up the availability, even, of community. Because you know there is a community that exists even when beforehand you might not have realized that.

Nancy Reddy: Absolutely.

Jennia: Well, before we end, do you have any recommended resources for people who want to know more about this?

Nancy Reddy: Yeah! I mean, some of the books that I read very early on—I read a lot of Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, who's an anthropologist, who's written a lot about motherhood and primates in particular. And that really helped me to understand that even though Harry Harlow's monkeys get held up as the example, that primates actually parent in lots of different ways. She's also just a beautiful writer. Academics are not always beautiful writers, and she really is. Two books that I've read more recently that I really love, one fiction and nonfiction: Invisible Labor by Rachel Somerstein is a really wonderful book about the C-section, and it brings together Rachel's own experience of a pretty difficult—I think she would say traumatic C-section section with her first. And then also the history of the C-section, which is really just, like, a history of birth, which I'm obsessed with. So I think no matter how you've had your kids, it's a really interesting examination of cultural and health insurance pressures around birth. And then finally the novel The Garden by Clare Beams, which is so just, like, odd and immersive in a really wonderful way. She describes it as if pregnancy were a haunted house, which I think is a—

Jennia: Ohh, wow!

Nancy Reddy: —Exactly! Like, if that speaks to you (Jennia laughs), I'm gonna leave it at that. It's a really beautiful book.

Jennia: Well, thank you again! This has been fantastic. And it's also just been a joy to be able to talk about some of these things that (laughs) I've read about—

Nancy Reddy: The monkeys and all (laughs).

Jennia: and needed courage to talk about forever and having those little exclamation marks go off in my head about, "Hold on a minute" (both laugh).

Nancy Reddy: All right. Well, thank you so much for having me! This was really fun.

Jennia: Yeah! Thank you.

Jennia: And thank you for listening and be sure to check out this show notes for additional information, including all of Nancy's links. And then please join me next week when Janice Cantore will be here to share how she writes about cold cases and true crime in her fiction. Thanks again!