Balancing act

How much time should you spend with your kids? The author of a provocative new book, "Maternal Desire," argues that motherhood is an essential part of female identity.

By Laurie Abraham

March 22, 2004 | Midway through "Maternal Desire: On Children, Love, and the Inner Life," psychologist Daphne de Marneffe's provocative but thoughtful new book about motherhood as a cornerstone of female identity, she mentions that a friend told her that "every time she sees a new book about mothers, she feels mingled dread and hope as a question instantly pops into her mind: Is it for me or against me?"

De Marneffe's book is singular in that it isn't polarizing. While she took about five years off from her therapy practice to raise her three children, and a chunk of her book is devoted to discussing the authentic, oft-ignored pleasures of primary caretaking, she doesn't order her working-mother readers to go home and enjoy it, like she did. Rather, in a discussion that is part sophisticated self-help and part scholarly analysis of our culture's attitudes toward mothers, de Marneffe urges each woman to think hard about how much time she wants to spend caring for her children vs. working, about whether she's struck anything close to the right balance in her life.

De Marneffe is well aware that women are constantly told how they should or shouldn't feel about mothering, how they should or shouldn't do it -- and that we tend to imbibe these dictums and imperceptibly make them our own, whether or not they truly reflect our values or circumstances. To help us clear some brain space, she dissects everything from what the research shows about the impact of day care on maternal-child attachment (negligible) to how feminism and psychoanalysis have tended to write off child rearing as regressive, monotonous, and crushing to women's autonomy.

But de Marneffe is no Dr. Laura: She doesn't rant about this state of affairs as much as sympathetically critique how feminists, in their understandable effort to open up roles for women other than mothers, struggle to account for a maternal desire that might spring from within rather than imposed by the, uh, patriarchy.

De Marneffe's ideal reader has a job that is rewarding enough for her to seriously ponder how to divide her time between child rearing and pursuing her profession. In other words, she's privileged enough to have a real choice to make -- unlike those women who, as de Marneffe pointed out, quoting "The Price of Motherhood," the recent, acclaimed book by economics journalist Ann Crittenden, "calculate, quite correctly, that as long as there is one breadwinner in their family, their presence at home can create more value, and be more satisfying, than much of the [under]paid work they could find."

De Marneffe recently spoke to Salon from her San Francisco Bay Area home about other differences -- and commonalities -- in women's experiences of mothering.

Why did you write this book?

I say at the beginning of the feminism chapter that every woman's feminism is a love letter to her mother, and in a way this book is mine. I don't think my mother felt fully satisfied with her work life, but being a mother was something she really enjoyed. I want women to feel that [being with their children] is an important part of themselves. They shouldn't feel badly that they want to take time off from other things to do it.

Do you really believe a lot of women feel bad about the desire to devote themselves to mothering? I felt bad because I didn't want to do that.

I was writing very much out of my own particular psychology. For me, [being a mother] was consuming in a way that made it very hard to imagine having a consuming work life at the same time. So I was coming at it from the question of, Can I feel OK about staying home?

There's so much talk about the wonders of motherhood -- but you don't take the gushing at face value, do you?

There is always ambivalence, whether you choose to stay at home with your children full time or work full time or somewhere in between. People "solve" their ambivalence by idealizing a choice, or an approach to being a mother, and it becomes this rigidified, This is the way to do it; I'm better because I do it this way. I wanted to step back and critique the tendency toward polarization, with people shoring up their self-esteem by identifying with their mothering choices. The truth is, you've never made the perfect choice; there are always trade-offs.

That said, you don't view sentimentality about motherhood as some nefarious right-wing plot to keep women in their places.

I think it needs to be explained why these idealizations hold power for people. I don't subscribe to a model where cultural images can straightforwardly impose ideas on us. It's incredibly important to many people to feel like they're good parents, to raise their children well, so all these sentimental images are like dreams, paths for visualizing, Oh, that's the way to do it.

And you think there's a lot of stuff out there about how unrewarding motherhood is that's gone unchallenged.

Freedom and self-determination have been more closely allied with the idea that you might choose not to be a mother. I wanted to open up the idea that women do this out of desire. They don't only do it because they're biologically equipped to do it, or society has insisted that they do it, or that they've lacked birth control for most of human history. There's something that's self-fulfilling, that's wanted.

I buy that, but you also say maternal desire has replaced sexual desire as the new taboo for women. I still think it's taboo for women to desire sex, to really want it.

Well, it's kind of a flashy way of saying whatever women are desiring is suspect. The things that are most basic to being a woman -- the desire to have sex, the desire to have a child -- we often feel apologetic about. It used to be there was something wrong with being sexual, now it's being maternal.

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