What Makes a Good Mother?

It is only in the modern era that women’s own experience of pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering begins to be widely recorded, and here, too, there is an omnipresent sense of the contingency of maternal life. In seventeenth-century England, there was a vogue for books by pregnant women addressed to their unborn offspring, offering preëmptive guidance and moral instruction to stand in for the mother’s own wisdom, should she be untimely carried off. As recently as a century ago, the activist Sylvia Pankhurst, daughter of the suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst, bemoaned the high incidence of maternal mortality among the working poor in the mill towns of the North of England, where, Cleghorn notes, “many lying-in mothers washed their feet before the midwife visited, so she wouldn’t know they had left their beds to see to their homes and children.” For women like these, questions of how to be a good mother were beside the point. Being a mother was good enough.

As Alex Bollen, another British author, reminds us in her irascible, informative volume “Motherdom: Breaking Free from Bad Science and Good Mother Myths” (Verso), what it takes to be considered a good mother changes throughout history, so as to remain always just out of reach. The good mother is self-sacrificial; she is energetically proactive; she is free from ambivalence. “Good Mother myths find mothers at fault however they raise their children,” Bollen writes. The author is particularly impatient with the popular dissemination of the often limited findings of neuroscience, and with the way that vulnerable new mothers are bullied by headlines that seem contrived to prompt a sense of inadequacy in those who are most likely already overwhelmed. One example, from the Daily Mail, runs, “Why a mother’s love really does matter: Nurturing helps children’s brains grow at TWICE the rate of those who are ‘neglected.’ ” Bollen’s own professional background is in market research, and, being well versed in the ways in which popular credulity is leveraged, she is also equipped to cast skepticism upon research findings whose standards fall short. Claims for the benefits of co-sleeping, she writes, are in one instance based primarily upon the observation of rodent behavior rather than of human. Her grim summation: “There are always rat studies as I quickly came to learn when I started looking under the bonnet of neuroscience narratives.”

What of being a mom while also participating in the rat race of professional life? In February, 2021, almost a year into the COVID pandemic, Amil Niazi, a Canadian writer living in Toronto, wrote a spiky piece for The Cut about what it was like to work from home while also taking care of her two small children. The piece took the form of a typical daily timeline, beginning with a squalling baby, an action-figure-toting toddler, and a husband who has departed for what, not so long ago, was also Niazi’s office, “a place I once loathed, that now represents a kind of mystical, holy land free of pointy, plastic superheroes and sticky, screaming faces.”

Now Niazi has turned that cry for help into a book-length plaint, “Life After Ambition” (Atria/One Signal). Its argument is that millennial women like her were sold a bill of goods when it came to marrying work and motherhood, and that the pandemic exposed hidden fault lines—notably, the inadequate provision of early-childhood care and the structural inequities of even supposedly liberal workplaces. Readers who got their small-child parenting out of the way before that particular global crisis can sympathize with the exceptional stresses of pandemic mothering while also recalling that being home with a wailing, incomprehensible newborn was hardly a walk in the park, even when a walk in the park wasn’t fraught with social-distancing advisories. They may also wonder whether Niazi, with her account of periodically working from home in the pre-pandemic era, really intended to supply ammunition for H.R. departments that want their workers back in the office. “On days I had little work, it was lovely,” she notes. “When I had to take care of a toddler and answer emails and take calls from my boss, it was like my brain was on fire.”

Niazi’s book is subtitled “A ‘Good Enough’ Memoir”—apparently a nod, if an unacknowledged one, to Winnicott’s theories of motherhood. In her reframing, however, “good enough” is synonymous with “mediocre,” which is the achievement level to which she claims to aspire: neither excelling at work, as her generation was told that it must, nor winning at being a mother, at least within the paradigm of intensive, intentional parenting that surrounds her. “I have embraced the idea of mediocrity and let go of a compulsion for exceptionalism,” she writes. If the supermom thought she could have it all, and the Pinterest mom prided herself on doing it all, and the performative trad wife believed that she could be it all, Niazi offers a depleted maternal alternative: fuck it all.

When being a good mother represents a structurally unattainable standard, it’s no wonder there has been a countervailing embrace of the opposite identity, that of the self-declared “bad mother.” The novelist Ayelet Waldman was this territory’s pioneer, publishing an essay collection by that name in 2009. She offered confessions of small, even cute, parental ineptitudes, like unwittingly criticizing another mother in a reply-all to the recipients of a mommy-and-me e-mail chain. But she also broached more significant maternal taboos, including the recognition that there might be limits to the kind of mothering a woman is prepared to commit to, and to the kinds of sacrifices—both of her own freedom and of the integrity of her existing family—she might be willing to make. Waldman acknowledged aborting a pregnancy after a prenatal test revealed a genetic abnormality in what would have been her third baby, admitting to “being so inadequate a mother that I could not accept an imperfect child.” Waldman portrayed herself as a bad mom other mothers could relate to (who hasn’t screwed up on a reply-all?), and also one from whom other mothers could stake out a relieved sense of distance: Would you abort a possibly compromised fetus, and, if so, would you then write about it?

In the years since, we have seen variations on the bad-mother figure, filtered through memes and graphic tees—not least the wine mom, who sustains herself through the repetitive boredom of child care with a cheeky glass of Pinot Noir around bath time, and her cooler sister, the weed mom, who takes the edge off with half an edible. The sloppy-mom identity is invariably ironic; nobody wearing a “This Mom Runs on Coffee and Wine” T-shirt means to advertise what her friends and neighbors might take to be a deleterious dependency. As Ej Dickson writes in the opening pages of “One Bad Mother” (Simon & Schuster), the freedom to make transgressive admissions of maternal failure bespeaks a cultural privilege. “For middle-class white women like me, there are few long-term material consequences for calling yourself a ‘bad mom,’ other than possibly being yelled at by other middle-class white women on the internet,” she writes. Not so for poorer women and women of color; Black children are disproportionately likely to be reported to child-protective services, sometimes for minor maternal lapses.