Opinion | The Lies Mothers Tell Themselves and Their Children

The truth is that motherhood is as beautiful as it looks on the congratulations cards, but it can also be a mess. It’s important to be honest about this. No real change is possible until working mothers stop trying to be all things to all people—perfect at work, perfect as partners, and perfect as mothers, with each role kept entirely separate. Rat

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Mothers, often caricatured, come off differently in such tropes. From Portnoy’s Complaint to Lady Bird, from Everybody Loves Raymond to Gilmore Girls, the mother must be overcome because her suffocating embrace is the means of her manipulation. Her presence swells and overwhelms and inhales all the oxygen an independent self needs to breathe. She d

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Mothers have martyred themselves in their children’s names since the beginning of time. We have lived as if she who disappears the most, loves the most. We have been conditioned to prove our love by slowly ceasing to exist... What a terrible burden for children to bear—to know that they are the reason their mother stopped living. What a terrible bu... See more

Seeking reassurance during that first year of parenting two, I turned to the work of the pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott. He is perhaps best known for his concept of the “good-enough mother,” the caregiver who, through sometimes failing and frustrating their child, ultimately facilitates the development of the child’s ability to co

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But I love being a mom. I’m not always great at it—let’s be very clear about that. Sometimes I yell. I don’t enjoy playing make-believe, and I mostly leave the work of crawling on the floor and pushing Hot Wheels around the rug to Ken and the grandparents. Sometimes, I can get very caught up in my work and have a hard time focusing on what my son i... See more

But just as surely, another part of me wanted to manage the threat of  his  potential independence by subsuming him into myself. It was tempting to treat the baby as a prop for my own narratives of motherhood rather than as an independent person in his own right. But babies give no quarter to our preconceived ideas of what mothering them

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