Mothers Are Human

Of course it's okay to have some negative feelings about maternity. The fact that we apparently need a psychotherapist to tell us this is sad and revealing.

Photo by Xavier Mouton Photographie on Unsplash

Margo Lowy, a psychotherapist and mother of three, defines maternal ambivalence as “a mother’s inner, dynamic practice of owning and holding together her maternal feelings, many of which are contradictory, without throwing away the uncomfortable ones, those that confront and unsettle her.” In Maternal Ambivalence: The Loving Moments and Bitter Truths of Motherhood, Lowy argues that mothers’ feelings about motherhood, from love and connection to resentment and even hatred, should be expected aspects of the emotional experience of maternity. The happy feelings are the ones we see reflected in family posts on Instagram. Meanwhile, the dark ones go unspoken.

For Lowy, the failure to “shine[ ] a curious and nonjudgmental light on the underbelly, and mostly hidden side of mothering” contributes to maternal rigidity, disconnection, and humorlessness. By contrast, acknowledging and accepting that the “distasteful, dirty, messy experiences” of motherhood are real and universal “ironically empowers the mother and gives her agency as it consolidates the truth of her experience rather than questioning it.”

Drawing on her own maternal ambivalence as well as on the phenomenon itself as substantiated in her research, depicted in popular literature and television, and discussed among her friends and colleagues, Lowy makes an insightful and compelling case for a more capacious cultural understanding of mothers’ inner worlds. At bottom, Lowy contends, “We need to believe that all our feelings are normal, despite the anxiety that exists around the monstrous ones, and that they live in the context of our ever-sustaining love and have value.”

Lowy is a good writer, and maternal ambivalence is a well-articulated concept. Nevertheless, I confess that I am stupefied—and, frankly, somewhat horrified—by the very existence of this book and this field.

I have four children, and most of my friends are also mothers. To me, “maternal ambivalence” as Lowy defines it is sort of like “maternal respiration.” As in, a phenomenon so self-evident and so inextricable from the state of being alive that we don’t have a specific term for it and couldn’t fathom filling a book with examples of its existence.

Have we really reached a cultural moment where we need Lowy to tell us, in a nutshell, that mothers are, in fact, humans? And thus, like all other humans, capable of all kinds of intertwined feelings? I buy her premise that we have.

So, then, the question becomes: Why do we need to be convinced of such a rudimentary reality? I would place blame on two cultural trends, each of which has generated attention in today’s discourse and one of which Lowy addresses in part in Maternal Ambivalence: (1) our near-ubiquitous elevation of ephemeral feeling to synonymity with holistic well-being, for both children and adults; and (2) our broad unwillingness to recognize children, and by extension motherhood, as a civic contribution unto itself.

What Ever Happened to “This Too Shall Pass?”

In Bad Therapy (2024), Abigail Shrier argues that we make children weaker rather than stronger when we overfocus on their emotions. Instead of constantly asking children how they feel about a conflict on the playground, for example, Shrier contends that we should be asking them how they handled it. The assumption should be competence and resilience, rather than fragility and sensitivity. Then, in fact, they can better identify their feelings from a place of wholeness and agency.

The same is true for mothers.

As Lowy demonstrates, emotional and characterological strength is actually inculcated by refusing to pathologize negative maternal feelings and accepting them instead as an informative and valuable—but by no means definitive or conclusive—part of the maternal condition.

This contention raises the question of whether our cultural need for this book reflects a truly fundamental misunderstanding of maternal—and human—emotion. Lowy acknowledges, as she should, that postpartum depression is very real and distinct. But she also notes, quite insightfully, that this unique condition also “reminds us of everyday mothering thrown into its sharpest relief.” Women who have recounted experiences with postpartum depression, Lowy contends, “offer us a language that helps us to speak our own maternal anguish as part of our love” and “normalize our experiences of mothering, what we are all trying to survive every day.”

Indeed.

I have a friend who grew up in a third-world country, is married to an American, and lives in the US. Eight years ago, after she had her daughter, she showed up at her six-week postpartum checkup and recorded honest answers on the postpartum depression questionnaire, which asks new mothers to rate feelings of sadness, anger, and overwhelm. When the doctors looked at her replies and suggested that she seek psychiatric counseling, my friend was puzzled. She didn’t know, she told me later, that you’re supposed to be so easygoing and happy right after you have a baby. Of course, there are women with postpartum depression and postpartum psychosis, and they need help—probably more and sooner than maternal medicine in the US provides at baseline. But some anger, sadness, and overwhelm? Aren’t these natural aspects of childbirth and infant care, and of life more broadly? After all, these maternal feelings usually subside as things get easier, though they may return at other times over the course of the maternal lifespan.

And, really, any lifespan, maternal or not. One need not be a mother to benefit from Lowy’s constructive reframing of our cultural overfocus on feelings to the exclusion of deeper truths.

From the perspective of most of the major religions (as in our popular culture until quite recently), spiritual and characterological growth for most people (mothers included) is achieved, at least in part, through faith and strength in the face of suffering. So, those of us raised in traditional homes and/or cultures—where people assume that feelings, including dark ones, are part of normal life and rarely a reason for medical intervention—come into maternity, as into life, already steeped in the reality that Lowy terms maternal ambivalence.

This attitude is long overdue for a comeback.

The “Good Enough Mother” Is a Civic Servant

Part of the impetus for many women’s embodiment of a curated “cheerful mom” persona, which never admits any negative thoughts or feelings, is our broad cultural failure to recognize the essential nature of motherhood.

Outside “trad” circles that fetishize maximal fertility (and, like the secular mainstream against which they are reacting, make no room for maternal ambivalence because, in their view, anything short of unmitigated maternal bliss smacks of feminist indoctrination), we have forgotten the universal value of mothers. As a result, the women who perform this role in the absence of societal regard for its intrinsic importance often quietly hold themselves to impossible, self-contradictory standards.

If a woman is having a rough week in college or at work and voices her sadness, hatred, or overwhelm, she expects sympathy. She knows that whoever she’s talking to is likely to see education and employment as good things that are worth doing even if they’re difficult and make you not as happy, in a given moment, as you might be lying on the beach.

Today, though, motherhood does not enjoy such universal acclaim. Instead, among many young women, maternity is seen as an individual lifestyle choice to which others should be indifferent at best. From this dominant perspective, choosing to be a mother is like choosing to buy a designer handbag; it comes with a heavy price tag, and it’s yours alone to carry. While “mom rage” and “wine mom” culture are normalized as coping mechanisms for mothers themselves, tanking birth rates and the number of young women who report wanting zero children indicate that Gen Z singer Chappell Roan, who recently sparked controversy with her comment that her friends with children under five are “in hell,” has a lot of company.

If you live in a culture where the prevailing view of parenthood is that it’s a mere lifestyle choice that makes people uniformly miserable, but you are ultimately glad to be a mother anyway, are you ever going to admit that sometimes it does indeed feel like you are in hell? Of course not.

Maternal ambivalence, once a normal and expected reality (think Meg March of Little Women deeply resenting the loss of her freedom as a new mother of twins), now stays hidden because motherhood, unlike professional work, is now considered essentially a private hobby rather than a civic service. If you don’t enjoy softball, if you don’t want to win, well then, why did you sign up for the team?

The cultural attitude that would get maternal ambivalence out of the shadows and back into the common parlance where it belongs (such that Lowy’s term itself would become obsolete) is one that valorizes the “good enough mother.”

In Playing and Reality (1971), pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott argued that children are able to develop a mature sense of external reality when mothers are “imperfect” in that they allow their toddlers to experience frustration—that is, to sometimes cry or wait before receiving maternal attention. Lowy calls Winnicott’s good enough mother simply the “enough mother.” In her case against maternal perfectionism, she channels Winnicott’s compassion and understanding about the negative feelings associated with aspects of motherhood. For Winnicott, when a mother attempts to be perfect rather than good enough—a “machine” rather than “someone who is going on being herself”—she actually damages her child’s ability to distinguish between illusion and reality.

Today’s mothers, Lowy points out, have a hard time accepting that “enough” is in fact the goal. They want to be what they perceive as perfect mothers—not just externally (in how they relate to their children), but internally (in how they feel as mothers, moment by moment). One result of this drive for perfection is the creepily gentle, narratively scripted parenting lingo that we now hear all too often on the playground. Check out the mental health statistics for today’s kids or read Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation (2024) to see how that’s going. (Hint: exactly as Winnicott said it would).

But even more interesting and relevant to Lowy’s project than the outcomes of this maternal perfectionism is its cause. The conviction with which many mothers today believe that the “enough” mother is not in fact enough comes in part from a widespread sense in today’s secular mainstream that the choice to become a mother at all is valid only if one is a perfect mother. The presumptive privatization and resultant commodification of parenthood—an individual lifestyle choice, nothing more—lends itself to a framework in which motherhood is worthy of respect only when it is relentlessly positive and impeccably curated. No wonder increasing numbers of women do not feel “ready” to be mothers until after they reach advanced maternal age.

In a quest to eradicate this pernicious cycle of maternal perfectionism (and resultant child fragility), listening to Lowy is a good start. Enough is good. Better, in fact, than perfect—for mothers and children alike.

But any attempt to rehumanize maternity on a deeper level needs to go further than that. It needs to comprehend the reality that “good enough” motherhood is not, in fact, a morally neutral individual endeavor, but a civic service to the nation and the world.

As Stephanie H. Murray has pointed out, when even our pronatal discourse (let alone the more indifferent wider culture) largely fails to acknowledge that mothers are not just making a personal lifestyle choice but providing an essential societal service, we are missing something very basic: We all, including those who do not personally produce and raise them, need children. Thus, we should all be invested in the project of maternity. Mother’s Day, for example, should not be a private, familial celebration that we ignore if we have no children or lost our mothers. Rather, it should be a universal civic holiday celebrating and validating the crucial role of motherhood writ large.

Lowy does us all a great and long overdue service in reminding us that mothers are in fact human beings. For her book, as for the women who most need to read it, that’s more than good enough.

Editor’s Note: This piece was originally published at Law and Liberty.