'Bad' and 'Good' Mothers on Mother's Day

For Mother's Day, the nation will celebrate motherhood with floral bouquets and restaurants full of dutiful children honoring moms. Of course, in fiction, especially mystery writing, the "bad" mother is usually more significant to plot and character development. Start with Euripides' Medea, who punishes husband Jason's betrayal by murdering their children. Examples of other famous bad moms in literature range from Shakespeare's shallow sensualist Queen Gertrude in Hamlet to Philip Roth's overbearing Sophie Portnoy in Portnoy's Complaint, V.C. Andrews' cruel Corinne Dollanganger in Flowers in the Attic, Stephen King's fanatic Margaret White in Carrie, William Faulkner's rejecting Addie Bundren in As I Lay Dying, and Jane Austen's foolish Mrs. Bennett in Pride and Prejudice. Probably the most heinous crime in our culture is a mother's murder or torture of her own children. But most fictional bad mothers commit emotional crimes rather than physical violence. Their toxic mothering patterns have been helpfully categorized by Peg Streep, author of Mean Mothers: dismissive (ignoring and rejecting), controlling (micromanaging), unavailable (emotional withdrawal or actual abandonment), enmeshed ("stage" moms), combative (hypercritical and competitive), self-involved (superficial narcissists), unreliable (behavioral swings), and role-reversed (dependent moms, such as those with alcoholism or depression). No wonder bad moms are such good fodder for writers! But even if you see a mother's failings reflected in fiction's bad moms, my advice is to cut motherhood some slack this Mother's Day. Definitely don't expect mothers to live up to our culture's myths of the "good" mother, with her instinctive, unconditional and instant mother love! Maternal behavior is not instinctive; human behavior is more complex, individual and cultural than that. Maternal love is not unconditional and without preference; good parenting actually sets boundaries and recognizes differences. And maternal attachment is hardly instant; a mother-child relationship takes time and hard work. Just being a "good enough" mom is an achievement! For a good article about harmful motherhood myths, see https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/tech-support/201502/mothers-love-myths-misconceptions-and-truths

Strange Cultures Offer Common Mythic Truths

Recently, I read three books about worlds outside my cultural experience: The Round House by Louise Erdrich, a novel with a Native American cast of characters; King Peggy by Peggielene Bartels and Eleanor Herman, the story of an American secretary made "king"  in Ghana; and Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya, describing the Chicano world of his childhood. It was sometimes a struggle to relate to the mythical devices in these books, from a female buffalo savior in The Round House, to stools imbued by spirits in King Peggy, to a giant gold carp-king in Bless Me, Ultima. The alien symbols and cultural assumptions initially seemed just dashes of authentic "color" and quaint folklore; it took effort to find the deeper spiritual meanings. It required abandoning the metaphors of a 21st century white American for the universal poetry of myth. Joseph Campbell, the famed mythologist, once likened myths to a kangaroo pouch for the human mind and spirit, a sort of "womb with a view." So how do you jump from your own cozy pouch into a strange one? It's not always a comfortable or easy leap. But I have found that the reward of a different view is worth it. “Mythology is composed by poets out of their insights and realizations. Mythologies are not invented; they are found....Myths come from the mystical region of essential experience,” Campbell wrote, and thus myth "goes past your mind and into your very being, into your very gut." When we can connect with that essential human experience--ignoring its setting in a strange place, its expression in a strange language and its conflict with our own accepted myths--we can learn something valuable about being human, about ourselves, which is the ultimate reward for a reader. For a quick introduction to Campbell on myth, see the interview http://www.context.org/iclib/ic12/campbell/