This episode builds on our recent conversations with Dr. Moira Mikolajczak on
Parental Burnout and with Dr. Susan Pollak on
Self-Compassion. Today we talk with Dr. Sarah LaChance Adams, Florida Blue Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies and the Director of the Florida Blue Center for Ethics at the University of North Florida, on the topic of maternal ambivalence. This is the idea that we love our children dearly but we can also feel very torn between our love for them, and our role as their parents which may make us feel as though we have to constantly put our own needs on the back burner in favor of theirs. We may even feel like we lose our own sense of self and our own ability to understand and meet our needs in this process.
Why do we feel maternal ambivalence? What are the different forms that this experience can take? And what should we do about it if we feel it? We discuss societal-scale issues, as well as things we can do locally and personally to navigate this tension we feel related to our children.
Some key points from the interview:
- (05:03) Maternal ambivalence is, having extreme emotional conflict in one's feelings towards my [one’s] children. Dealing with intense love and sometimes intense hate, the needs to be very intimate and close to one's children or one's child, but also to have a sense that one needs to get distance to have strong feelings.
- (08:34) I'm thinking about Bell Hooks' work, and she had said, “but had Black women voiced their own views on motherhood, it would not have been named a serious obstacle to our freedom as women, racism, availability of jobs, lack of skills, or education would have been top of the list, but not motherhood.” I'm wondering, is maternal ambivalence a middle-class, White phenomenon? Or do you see it in other places as well?
- (11:27) If a woman lives in a culture where there's an intense romanticization of the mother-child relationship, and she feels that she can't express any kind of conflicted emotion at all. And then when you have these things piling on top of each other, then you start to see it gets more and more and more intensified. The more these things compound, the less a woman is able to reflect on these emotions, think about them, share them get relief, get that kind of distance that the feelings are telling her.
- (15:41) The idea that maybe, just maybe, this whole guilt thing and the whole ambivalence thing is a product of our culture, where, on one hand, women are required to be these productive citizens who contribute to the capitalist economy, and on the other hand, were supposed to give our all to our child and mother intensively.
- (18:35) One thing I want to really draw out here is the idea that women ourselves are very often the ones that police this. It's sort of like patriarchy, it's not just men saying, well, this is your role, and this is what you're going to do. Women are just as responsible for the socialization of this idea.
- (20:54) "How could you say that you don't love being a mother at every moment?" And I think I mean, you're already stating the solution, you know, we have these brave women coming forward, saying that they don't always love it.
- (29:18) She [Simone de Beauvoir] writes about devotion and the devotion of the mother, and how this can be a very twisted thing and how, oftentimes, mother's devotion is really something that can be very awful for herself and her child because it can be a replacement for her having anything else in her life. And it can become a sort of twisted obligation for both of them. And, you know, a sort of martyrdom...
Dr. Sarah LaChance Adams' faculty page
Dr. LaChance Adams' books:
Mad Mothers, Bad Mothers, and What a 'Good' Mother Would Do: The Ethics of Ambivalence
The Maternal Tug: Ambivalence, Identity and Agency
Links to resources and ideas discussed in this episode:
[accordion]
[accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"]
Jen 00:03
Hi, I'm Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo Podcast. We all want our children to lead fulfilling lives, but it can be so hard to keep up with the latest scientific research on child development and figure out whether and how to incorporate it into our own approach to parenting. Here at Your Parenting Mojo, I do the work for you by critically examining strategies and tools related to parenting and child development that are grounded in scientific research and principles of respectful parenting. If you'd like to be notified when new episodes are released and get a FREE Guide to 7 Parenting Myths That We Can Safely Leave Behind, seven fewer things to worry about, subscribe to the show at YourParentingMojo.com. You can also continue the conversation about the show with other listeners in the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group. I do hope you'll join us.
Jen 01:01
Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo Podcast. I've had today's topic on my mind for a while and it came out of seeing posts in online parenting groups where mothers just seemed like they had had it with being a mother and the seemingly endless tantrums and battles over eating and negotiations over everything. And part of this line of thought took us to the Parental Burnout episode, but then I kept chewing it over and I thinking there must be more to it than this because not everyone experiences full on parental burnout but plenty of parents go through periods where they just wish parenting was different and maybe even that they hadn't had children even though at the very same time they know that they love their children.
Jen 01:40
So here with us today to discuss this topic of what's called maternal ambivalence is Dr. Sarah LaChance Adams who's Florida Blue Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and religious studies, as well as the director of the Florida Blue Centre for ethics at the University of North Florida. She earned her BA in Critical Social thought at Mount Holyoke College, her Masters in Psychology from Seattle University, and her PhD in Philosophy from the University of Oregon. She's an internationally recognized scholar and author of the book Mad Mothers, sorry, Mad Mothers, Bad Mothers, and What a "Good" Mother Would Do: The Ethics of Ambivalence, and co-editor also with a very recent book with Dr. Tanya Cassidy and Dr. Susan Hogan, the brand new book The Maternal Tug: Ambivalence, Identity and Agency.
Jen 02:23
So welcome Dr. LaChance Adams.
Dr. LaChance Adams 02:25
Thank you very much.
Jen 02:26
And I also just want to give you an additional credit here, I know that you're the editor of the journal, Hypatia, which is a journal of feminist philosophy. And I've been getting some negative reviews on Apple podcasts lately. Because of my explorations of topics like this, I want to give a special shout out to Jeff2013 who says, I love the data and continue to watch, I assume he means listen, because I can draw my own conclusions from the data. However, be careful because in some episodes, there is a clear liberal or feminist bias. So, Jeff, if you are watching or listening, you might want to skip to another episode today. We're going to dig into that topic more deeply in a few weeks. But yes, today you're going to hear some liberal, some feminist bias, if you want to call it that. And I'm going to be crystal clear about that and upfront. And I think the real problem here is in thinking that data itself is unbiased, because actually, scientific research has this kind of cloak of objectivity. We're actually biases are baked into every step of the research processes, just that we don't always see them. So, with that said, let's go ahead and discuss maternal ambivalence. And I feel like I'm talking a lot already. But there's a passage that I really love that you opened your book with. And that I also opened Adrienne Rich's book of Women Born, and you quote it in the Maternal Tug, and it's a passage from her diary that was written in 1960, and I'd love to get from that passage to a definition of what maternal ambivalence is just to kind of set the scene. And so, Adrienne Rich says, "My children caused 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 edge nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness. Sometimes I seem to myself in my feelings towards these tiny, guiltless beings, a monster of selfishness and intolerance, that voices wear away at my nerves, their constant needs, above all the need for simplicity and patience, fill me with despair at my own failures, despair too at my fate, which is to serve a function for which I was not fitted. And I'm weak sometimes from held in rage. There are times when I feel only death will free us from one another, when I envy the barren woman who has the luxury of her regrets but lives a life of privacy and freedom. And yet other times I melted with a sense of their helplessness, charming and quite irresistible beauty, their ability to go and loving and trusting their staunchness and decency and unself-consciousness. I love them, but it's in the enormity and inevitability of this love that the sufferings lie." Oh, gosh, that reminds me so much of Glennon Doyle kind of anticipates it so can you please help us from there? Understand how do you see maternal ambivalence? What is it
Dr. LaChance Adams 05:03
I think the most straightforward initial way to understand what maternal ambivalence is, as Adrienne Rich describes it, so heartbreakingly beautifully, is having extreme emotional conflict in one's feelings towards my children dealing with intense love and sometimes intense hate, the needs to be very intimate and close to one's children or one's child, but also to have a sense that one needs to get distance to have strong feelings of desire [inaudible] than child away or to run away. Get far as one can from one's child or children. But part of what makes this experience so beguiling is that it's not as though one's child is just the separate being. There's also the sense that of self-estrangement, because mothers who feel maternal ambivalence, also feel very integral with who their children are, is very integral to who the mother is the self, she identifies with the child, the child is a part of her. So, in this sense of struggle, she's also in a struggle with herself and who she feels she is most intimately and most deeply. And so, it's not as though it's just this other person who I love this other person who I want to push away. It's also within her own self that she struggles.
Jen 06:22
Yeah, and I think a lot of parents who are listening are going to be like, "Yes! I hadn't, that hadn't even occurred to me before. And now I hear that." It's like, "Yes, that is what it is." I'm just thinking about some words that came up in a study by Dr. Aleksandra Stavenva, she interviewed a series of women about their experiences with this, and one of these women kind of contrasted these pairs of feelings - this feeling of extreme loneliness, but also having the baby as her secret friend of having concern for the baby in the middle of the night when they wake up, and yet also having violent urges towards them at the same time, and then adding on this also this additional layer of struggle with yourself. I mean, it almost seems as though it's all just one big story.
Dr. LaChance Adams 07:07
Indeed. Yeah
Jen 07:08
And so, I'm wondering about the different ways that different people experience maternal ambivalence. And we call it maternal ambivalence, because I think it's primarily studied related to people who identify as women having children, but what about gender nonconforming people and lesbian couples and parents of differently abled children [who] I think go through this, too. And what about fathers? How did the various different roles fit into this?
Dr. LaChance Adams 07:33
Yeah, there's definitely diversity in terms of people who experience ambivalence. There isn't as much research yet and this is something that I really love to see more of in gender non-conforming people. However, there is plenty of research with regard to people who are differently situated socially with regards to socioeconomic status, racial status, same sex couples, even paternal ambivalence, adoptive mothers, there is a commonality among people who are differently, socially-situated. Their experiences are diverse, but there does seem to be this core experience of ambivalence at the same time. And the central feature, really is this, all the while there is this extreme vulnerability in the person that one is taking care of. And so that that seems to be part of what unites all of these different experiences is that you have the child who is extremely vulnerable. And there's a tremendous responsibility that accompanies this.
Jen 08:34
Okay. And I'm thinking about Bell Hooks' work, and she had said, but had Black women voiced their own views on motherhood, it would not have been named a serious obstacle to our freedom as women, racism, availability of jobs, lack of skills, or education would have been top of the list, but not motherhood. I'm wondering, is maternal ambivalence a middle-class, White phenomenon? Or do you see it in other places as well?
Dr. LaChance Adams 08:57
Yes, you definitely see it in other places as well. And since that writing, many Black women, American women have written about this phenomenon. Actually, just recently, LaKesha Williams, who also lives in Jacksonville, where I live, has written an article for helpline on COVID-19 and the childcare crisis. And she's written about the conflict of sending one's child back to, or sending one child into childcare during this time where it feels like it's a dangerous thing to do, but and loving one's child and not wanting to put them in that position. But at the same time feeling does need to be able to work and to have that time to oneself. And so, I think the way that I would not disagree with Bell Hooks, but add to what she is saying is that the issues of poverty and the issues of racism really exacerbate the conflicts of maternal ambivalence. That these are from what I've seen these issues are not it's not one over the other, which tends to be it's not that one is more in conflict than the other. It's that one tends to exacerbate the other. So, the problems of poverty and racism really add to the problems with maternal ambivalence.
Jen 10:11
Okay. And so, one of the key thesis of your work, I think, is around whether maternal ambivalence is necessarily a bad thing.
Dr. LaChance Adams 10:20
Right.
Jen 10:21
And I was really interested to read your stance on this. I wonder if you can tell us a little bit about that, and whether... are there any conditions under which maternal ambivalence is a bad thing? And if not, why not?
Dr. LaChance Adams 10:33
Yeah, absolutely. There are circumstances in which maternal ambivalence is a bad thing. The way that I think of it is that there are extremes of it where it becomes intolerable. So, the things that exacerbated it, there are many things I talked about poverty, I talked about racism, social isolation is a real problem. When there's extreme financial vulnerability, when there is no ability to have any sort of break or any sort of social support, it can be exacerbated by gender inequality. Sometimes when couples, heterosexual couples, especially, they have a child, any sort of gender inequality that had existed, or maybe there didn't exist any sometimes when a child comes along, now you see a dramatic change in terms of how the couple relates to each other. If there's dramatic change in lifestyle, for a woman, after a child comes along, that can exacerbate it.
Dr. LaChance Adams 11:27
If a woman lives in a culture where there's an intense romanticization of the mother-child relationship, and she feels that she can't express any kind of conflicted emotion at all. And then when you have these things piling on top of each other, then you start to see it gets more and more and more intensified. The more these things compound, the less a woman is able to reflect on these emotions, think about them, share them get relief, get that kind of distance that the feelings are telling her. Maybe she needs. And then and the ability to process, this kind of emotion, this kind of intense emotion, that's where women and children are in a dangerous position where that ambivalence can't be dealt with it where it can't be processed. And that's where you end up in situations where child...
