THE BIRTH OF A MOTHER:
How the Motherhood Experience Changes You Forever
By Dr. Daniel Stern and Dr. Nadia Bruschweiler-Stern, with Alison Freeland
Basic Books, 246 pages, $23
COMPOSING MYSELF:
A Journey Through Postpartum Depression
By Fiona Shaw
Steerforth Press, 210 pages, $24
THE LUNCH-BOX CHRONICLES:
Notes From the Parenting Underground
By Marion Winik
Pantheon, 229 pages, $22.95
Historically, literature on motherhood can be divided into two categories: manuals written by those with the professional credentials to issue instructions, and confessions written by those articulate and rebellious enough to explain why the instructions cannot be followed.
In other words, from the era more than two centuries ago when eminent philosophers like Locke and Rousseau addressed themselves to child-rearing, to the feminist revisionist works of the last three decades, the great underlying theme of most writing on motherhood has been the conflict between the prescribed ideals for the role and the great guilty consciousness of its daily enactment in our homes.
And while the confessors have always listened–perhaps too carefully for their own good–to the instructors, the good news is that the instructors may have finally begun listening back.
At least, you could get that impression from Dr. Daniel Stern’s new book, “The Birth of a Mother.” Stern, a psychiatrist whose previous child-care works include “The Diary of a Baby,” is very much a product of the instructional tradition. Yet even he notices that the traditional nature of the premise of this book–male psychiatrist defines for women what’s “normal” in the psychological transition to motherhood–will raise eyebrows in a post-feminist audience. So he’s careful to point out early on that he has enlisted the help of two female co-authors: his wife, who is a pediatrician and child psychologist, and a journalist who is also a mother.
The precaution fails, however, to prevent him from making the astounding assertion that he’s actually the first to discover that when a woman becomes a mother she “develops a mindset fundamentally different from the one she held before, and enters a realm of experience not known to non-mothers.” This is a claim that requires him to completely overlook three decades of feminist writing on precisely this subject (including works by Adrienne Rich, Ann Dally, Sheila Kitzinger and Joyce Block) and, apparently, to omit a bibliography that would have needed to credit either male or female predecessors in the field.
But if you can tolerate this bit of literary imperialism, and suppose more charitably that Stern has discovered this phenomenon on behalf of psychiatric experts who haven’t yet caught on, his work may still do new mothers the enormous favor of legitimizing in the expert establishment certain heresies that until now have circulated mainly in the confessional underground.
For example: that labor is often traumatic for women, and that the course it takes is usually outside the woman’s control; that despite appearing trivial, “It makes sense in a profound way that everything concerning (infant) feeding and weight gain is loaded with import and emotion”; that many new fathers have only “limited tolerance” for child-care duty; and that mothers who choose to stay home “have to fight not to feel devalued by certain of their colleagues, friends, and even family members.”
Much of Stern’s book examines fantasies women have about what their babies will be like, what they and their partners will be like as parents, and what they want and don’t want to duplicate from their own upbringing. The difficult thing about early motherhood, of course, is that it forces women into an unrelenting, 24-hours-a-day confrontation with all these fantasies.
Where Stern most radically departs from the expert instructional tradition is in his acknowledgment that although reconciling these fantasies with the reality of childbearing is the main psychological challenge of early motherhood, there aren’t any behavioral commandments that can make the process fail-safe. Each woman must create her own delicate balance out of her unique personal history, her particular child, the precise quality of support she receives from her partner, family and friends, and her professional and financial requirements.
It’s no big help that our culture emphatically tries to minimize, trivialize, sentimentalize or–as Stern suggests — completely ignore the existence of this process. Because while at best the process is emotionally and physically exhausting, at worst it becomes disabling. Recent estimates indicate that about 15 percent of all women fall into a serious depression after giving birth and that, because many never seek treatment and others go undiagnosed, the figure may actually be higher.
Despite a crop of new instructional books on this subject and a recent flurry of popular memoirs on clinical depression in
general, no American author has so far demonstrated an eagerness to become the confessional poster girl of postpartum depression. But then, as British writer Fiona Shaw admits toward the end of “Composing Myself,” her account of postpartum depression newly published in an American edition, “I am relieved that I have nearly finished this writing. I don’t think I could bear to do that work of remembering again.”
Shaw was already — apparently quite happily–more than two years into motherhood when, within days of the birth of her second child, an inexplicable sense of panic and despair simply immobilized her. She couldn’t make herself get out of the bed where she lay in the fetal position, like “some terrible parody of the baby I had given birth to,” overwhelmed with fear and self-hatred, and unable to eat or to care for her newborn.
Like William Styron’s “Darkness Visible,” her description of the depression itself is emotionally opaque. Perhaps because depression seems to involve the experience of great pain that had been disconnected by years of numbness or repression from the events that originally inspired it, it doesn’t make for coherent narrative.
Both Shaw and the reader are bewildered as, despite quick hospitalization and a course of antidepressants, she grows steadily worse. Soon she is trying to outwit the nurses assigned to observe her, so she can inflict as much physical pain on herself as possible. She scorches her flesh with a hot iron, scrapes her fingernails down her forearms till blood comes beading to the surface, bangs her head against the wall and tries to throw up any food she manages to eat.
Perhaps the most chilling aspect of Shaw’s memoir is her treatment at the hands of the psychiatric professions she deals with. Their obliviousness seems to confirms Daniel Stern’s suggestion of lack of sensitivity to a new mother’s emotional processes. While even Shaw suspects that big chunks of unexamined childhood pain are trying to float to the surface of her consciousness, her psychiatrists coolly recommend drugs and shock treatment, and shrug off her pleas for referral to a psychotherapist.
It is only when Shaw, released from the hospital but still in bad shape, finally engages a therapist on her own, that the narrative begins to make some kind of sense. If in Stern’s clinical expert language early motherhood forces a woman to “reevaluate your closest associations and redefine your role in your own family’s history,” then Shaw’s is the subjective, passionate experience of a woman forced to undergo that process at huge emotional expense and with little professional help. In the end, she understands, this book allows her to write her way into understanding and forgiveness.
The truth is that confessional writers are always talking to themselves as much as they are to you, the reader. You must remember that neither instructional nor confessional writers assume you, the reader, are normal. But instructional writers hope you want to be and claim to be able to show you how, whereas confessional writers hope to strike that chord of empathy deep inside you that will prove you’re as deviant as they are. Which will, paradoxically, reassure you and them that you’re both normal after all.
If the distance between the ideal and the reality of motherhood is near-tragic for Fiona Shaw, in the case of Marion Winik, a commentator for National Public Radio, it’s the stuff of standup comedy. Winik’s “The Lunch-Box Chronicles” invites us into her Texas home to observe her as she falls methodically short of every cherished Baby Boomer fantasy of proper parenting.
Winik loses her boys, Hayes (9) and Vince (7), in the supermarket. She falls asleep reading them “Goodnight Moon” for the umpteenth time, yells at them when she has PMS and frequently cooks them something called “the beloved Yellow Dinner,” consisting of Shake’N Bake pork chops, canned corn, bottled applesauce, boxed macaroni and cheese, and Poppin Fresh rolls (the grownup version of the Yellow Dinner is “a single glass of chardonnay”).
She broods about the parts of her identity that don’t square with our concept of nice moms: her sexuality (less avoidable to her children because she is a dating single mom), her wild past (fully documented in a previous memoir that her children may some day read), her own image of the fate of creative women (as role models she contemplates “Sylvia Plath, who died, and Anne Sexton, who died, and Zelda Fitzgerald and Amelia Earhart, who died. . . . To be a non-conforming woman of inner depth seemed to be a direct route to the funeral home. . . .”)
But Daniel Stern and his colleagues interested in claiming even more “new” territory for the experts might do well to note at this point that the balancing act involved in birthing a mother isn’t over after the first year, or even the first child. For Fiona Shaw, it only really began with the second child. And Marion Winik, heading into her second decade of motherhood, still confronts it anew practically every day.
“Good mommy, bad mommy, good mommy, bad mommy: Which am I?” Winik writes. “We all live with these mythical creatures in our heads, the effortless nurturer who derives nothing but joy from child rearing, and her evil twin, the bitch mother from hell, selfish, bored, using her children mostly to aggrandize herself. I know I am neither of these, but that’s not to say I’m not acquainted with them, that they don’t sometimes bat me back and forth like a little white ball on the Ping-Pong table of parenting.”
