The Most Exquisite Suffering

 If you are a mother, you have certainly experienced that moment when you felt like you had reached your breaking point… the kids are screaming at the top of their lungs in unison, the six year old is running  from window to window, slicing at the curtains with his sabre light sword, the four year old has just broken a glass on the floor and is about to pick it up with her bare hands, the baby, who wreaks of a recently soiled diaper, has just tossed his dinner all over the freshly painted wall and ‘their’ father is nowhere to be found.  You have worked all day at your paying job, rushed to pick the kids up from day care before they assessed you a fine for being late, came home and began to do your best to throw something together to eat and now this.  Not to mention the fact that you have about 8 loads of laundry to do and the baby is out of Pampers.  Suddenly, you smell the distinct odor of burning food.  Geez, what next?  Do you feel it?  Your life, at that point, is more than you can possible endure, yet there is no way out.

Most women have experienced this loss of control, whether it be caused by the absence of another caregiver to provide relief from the constant attention needed by children or the disheartening feeling that any life you had before children has disappeared, any skill or talent you possessed will never again lift your spirit… you are, after all, a Mother!

For the majority of mothers, this frustrating experience is just that, frustrating!  They make it through the tough days, often manifested with anger toward their children, but they still love them with all their hearts and would never do them any harm.  But for other women, their emotions do not allow them to overcome the pain, the feeling that they are imprisoned, that their children are the source of their burdens, and they are consumed with uncontrollable anger, guilt and even violence. 

A young Radcliffe educated poet, Adrienne Rich, began to document her painful journey through motherhood in 1960, reflecting upon her guilt, expectations and anger.  In the 60s, women were expected to be loving stay at home moms, with their entire world encased by their children.  Rich explains, “the modern image of the good mother – the full-time, stay-at-home mother, isolated in the private sphere and financially dependent on her husband-came about as a result of industrialization that took work out of the home and repositioned the domestic space, at least among the middle class, as an exclusively nonproductive and private realm, separate from the public sphere of work.  In the Victorian period that followed industrialization, the ideology of moral motherhood that saw mothers as naturally pure, pious and chaste emerged as the dominate discourse of motherhood.  This ideology, however, was race-and class-specific; only white, middle-class women would wear the halo of Madonna and transform the world through their moral influence and social housekeeping.”

At a time when women were supposed to be quiet, abiding and obedient, Rich broke the mold and began to express her frustration with society’s expectations of mothers as well as the agony and isolation she experienced, tied all alone in her world of solitude with her 3 children.  Her overflowing emotions spill into her words, “My children cause me the most exquisite suffering of which I have any experience.  It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness.”  Wow, while I certain remember feeling the raw-edged nerves as well as the bliss, I could never mention the word children in the same sentence as murderous.  I was stunned by Rich’s revelation and quite frankly thought she was a selfish, spoiled brat. 

She continued to anger me as she wrote,”In a living room in 1975, I spend an evening with a group of women poets, some of whom had children.  One had brought hers along, and they slept or played in adjoining rooms.  We talked of poetry, and also of infanticide, of the case of a local woman, the mother of eight, who had been in severe depression since the birth of her third child, and who had recently murdered and decapitated her two youngest, on the suburban front lawn.  Several women in the group, feeling a direct connection with her desperation, had signed a letter to the local newspaper protesting the way her act was perceived by the press and handled by the community health system.  Every woman in that room who had children, every poet, could identify with her.  We spoke of the wells of anger that her story cleft open in us.  We spoke of our moments of murderous anger at our children, because there was no one and nothing else on which to discharge anger.  We spoke in the sometimes tentative, sometimes rising sometimes bitterly witty, unrhetorical tones and language of women who had met together over our common work, poetry, and who found another common ground in the unacceptable, but undeniable anger.  The words are being spoken now, are being written down; the taboos are being broken, the masks of motherhood are cracking through.”

As I continued to read Rich’s prose, there was no doubt that she deeply loved her children, yet she was stuck in a world that stifled her every thought, her actions and her ability to life her life.  While Rich only expounded upon her feelings and never acted upon them, other women have been unable to contain the depression and mental instability.  Consider Andrea Yates, a mother of five who methodically drowned all of her children in a bathtub then calmly called police.  Most of us will recall South Carolina mother Susan Smith who initially reported to police in 1994 that she had been carjacked by a black man who drove away with her sons still in the car. Smith made tearful pleas on television for the rescue and return of her children.  Nine days later, following an intensive, heavily publicized investigation and a nationwide search, Smith eventually confessed to letting her 1990 Mazda Protegé roll into nearby John D. Long Lake, drowning her children inside. 

According to the American Anthropological Association, more than 200 women kill their children in the United States each year. Three to five children a day are killed by their parents. Homicide is one of the leading causes of death of children under age four, yet we continue to "persist with the unrealistic view that this is rare behavior," says Jill Korbin, expert on child abuse, who has studied mothers who killed their children.

“We should detach from the idea of universal motherhood as natural and see it as a social response," Nancy Scheper-Hughes, medical anthropologist says. Women in jail reported that no-one believed them when they said they wanted to kill their children. "There's a collective denial even when mothers come right out and say, "I really shouldn't be trusted with my kids."

I must admit, these statistics shocked me.  My children are the most wonderful part of my life; why I feel as if my only mission here on this earth was to give life to them.  So, I ask, what depth of sorrow, what dark depression, what lack of moral and physical support for the act of mothering could possibly cause this tragic outcome?   I have discovered that a mother’s violence toward her children is more prevalent than most of us realize.  While it was difficult for me to understand Adrienne Rich, to be sympathetic to her anger-filled emotions, alas, she is not alone.  We as a society need to support mothers of small children.  Women need relief from the constant demands of children, and quite frankly, we as Americans don’t do a good job of assisting our most precious resource possessing the key to molding our future: Mothers.

 

Have you ever felt this mothering anger?

Did your wife, mother or friend experience this anger?

How did you deal with it?

What is your perception of women who harm their children?