Are We Still Blaming Mothers for Messed-Up Ideas of Motherhood?
For many grown kids, standing in front of the Mother’s Day cards at the store this month is an exercise in mixed feelings – hope, sadness, love, guilt, fear, denial, and confusion. Finding that one card that says exactly how you feel without giving in to Hallmark-induced fantasies about the perfect mother is a challenge as difficult as any we might face. An English professor friend claims that there are, in fact, no good poems about mothers in all of English literature. They all end up like those sentimental greeting card rhymes. Yet, our mothers have generally done the best they could with what they’ve been given about motherhood from a culture that’s filled with messages that extol motherhood while taking away as much from mothers as possible. And all the conservatives’ high-minded blather about valuing motherhood is suspiciously empty to mothers who suspect that something else is really going on around them, but are supposed to blame themselves for whatever i