Mommy Always Sat in the Dark: On Being the Daughter of a Mother
*Article from Lexington Line Spring/Summer 2024 Issue, pages 64-66
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Cezanne Maragni, 20 years old, recalls a Walt Whitman poem she read two years ago: “The mother with mild words…clean her cap and gown…a wholesome oder falling off her person and clothes as she walks by…”
I became aware that my mom’s life had simply become a landscape in my childhood; her ‘cap and gown,’ or remnants of her girlhood, flew over my head,” Maragni says. “Each year I grow older, I learn a new story from my mom and question if society was trying to hide those from me.”
Maragni’s mother, Peggy Feudi, felt strongly about her stories and the value they held in the woman she became before her children. In a society filled with men wanting children, parents wanting grandchildren, and naturally, women with different timelines than you—the choice can feel out of your control.
“The underlying assumption seems to be that mothers exist for the sole purpose of supporting their children’s healthy development,” Dr. Naomi Ruth Lowinsky writes in The Motherline, a collection of essays. “What is forgotten is that mothers are people with their own lives, who are profoundly affected by the experience of having children.”
These days, it feels like the idea of motherhood is sinking into a patriarchal underworld where our bodies are subjected to headlines about the economic effects of the decreased fertility rate, and people still wonder why some women no longer want to be mothers.
Our individuality is threatened by the same world that praises fathers for minimal sacrifices like missing poker night. And there is no incentive to become a mother when what you receive is possible postpartum depression and a false promise of divine fulfillment that men convince us can only stem from mothering.
Even before we are physically capable of having children, ideas about motherhood infiltrate our lives. You hear subtle assumptions throughout girlhood in conversation with family and friends.
“One day when you have children,” they all say, completely ruling out the if. Young girls are spoken to like motherhood is what they are supposed to want—a destination all girls will presumably reach.
Grandparents sometimes tell these young girls that they will change their minds. Your grandmother might reminisce about her old friend who “swore she wouldn’t have kids” but now has four.
Feudi felt pressured by her mother and sisters to have children in her early 20s, saying it was something she would regret not doing. Regardless of pressure, she didn’t have her first of two children until her 40s.
“I wanted to have a career and then became busy when I opened my own business,” says Feudi, founder of Foodies Catering in New Jersey. “I had already run Foodies for nine years when my first was born, and in that environment, I taught my kids a lot about work ethic and creativity with what I was able to gather before becoming a mother.”
Even when a woman wants a child, there are signs of hostility that pose questions for her. She may want to be a stay-at-home mom, not to be told to be one. She may also have a career that she is passionate about. She may go into motherhood with confidence that her stories will be told to her daughter, but that does not mean they will be easy to voice. Lowinsky describes this as “being ripped apart by this ambivalence about the feminine,” or in other words, the contradictory feelings about children.
In The Motherline, Lowinsky reflects on the shift in society’s perspective of a daughter who becomes a mother.
“Her insights, her wisdom, her experience, and her voice, disappear from the world of literature,” Lowinsky writes. “She becomes a bad joke in popular culture. She descends into the shadows and, indeed, becomes a shadow. And her daughters rail against her because she is filled with darkness.”
Ariel Limpert, 22, is unsure if she will have children for several reasons ranging from finances to career and travel.
“[Women] embark on incredible journeys and reach these remarkable milestones: go to school, study abroad, get their first ‘big girl job,’ start businesses, move across the country, buy their first car,” Limpert says. “But the complex, interesting, and unique stories about themselves go away day by day because once you are a mother, that is the main role society sees you in.”
Daughters, spouses, fathers, grandparents, and others entirely forget that mothers are individual women first who simply were born with the ability to have children—not the sole purpose of doing so. Before you, she was a daughter of her own; a girlfriend before a wife; a best friend before an aunt; a woman before a mother.
After childbearing, she is seen as the curator of a child's well-being, often more so than the father, and what she was before, who she may be after, must be fought for to hold a respectable place in the patriarchy.
My mother opened a yoga studio in 2015, leaving behind 15 years as a pharmaceutical representative. She tells me she feels guilt for not being with my sisters and me enough during the transition. I had never thought this and was curious how something that taught me so much about my mother and the woman I wanted to be like could ever be accompanied by guilt.
My mother’s pharmaceutical representative job was a “resource” for raising children. It wasn’t a passion but allowed her to be in a place to mother us. But that was never meant to be her only purpose in life.
She experienced firsthand the double standard for fathers and mothers when it was her turn to follow a passion. Growing up, my father was a marathon runner, and his passion for it took him to places like Tokyo, Berlin, and London.
I never saw family or friends question the way our family, and my mom in particular, worked around my dad’s passion. I was shown the individual side of him outside of fatherhood. When it was my mom’s turn, she did not receive that space to pursue her business.
Lowinsky writes about how the world has turned away from the beauty of motherhood as an extension of womanhood, not its source. In literature, Lowinsky found a lot “written from the viewpoint of the daughter who, if she was not actively angry with her mother, was not much impressed with her mother’s life experience.”
And while the world whispered words of discouragement around my mother, I, for the first time, knew what it meant to be in awe of her. Society tries to take this experience away from daughters, encouraging them to follow the beat of the patriarchy’s incessant “mother blame.”
In the 1985 New York Times article titled “Mothers Who Take the Blame,” Maggie Scarf analyzes Lynn Caine’s “What Did I Do Wrong? Mothers, Children, Guilt.”
“For while the mother is vital to her helpless infant and toddler, she is a figure who commands little respect in the culture at large—she is powerful and without much power at all,” Scarf writes. “If, moreover, her child is having problems, the ‘cause’ of the difficulty is usually easy for relatives, friends, school authorities, and other interested bystanders to explain.”
When a baby cries in the arms of a relative, they are passed to the mother. When a child passes a cold in preschool, it is the mom who carries the blame. “Refrigerator mothers” were said to cause autism in children and their poor toilet training abilities were to blame for obsessive-compulsive disorder.
“Lauren,” who wishes to remain anonymous, first noticed “mother blame” when her father moved from her home state of New Jersey to Arizona after cheating on her mom.
“I remember my brother treated my mom terribly, cringing whenever she would hug him or anything,” she says. “Friends and family judged my mom after the incident, and my dad’s parents acted like my mom was the perpetrator; I can’t imagine how alone she felt.”
Indeed.
Women risk their lives to have children; they put their bodies on the line. And yet, motherhood is treated as both a rote expectation and a measure of value by older generations that simply do not have the same concerns we do about raising children on a burning planet.