Angry Mother Syndrome

You may not be aware of it-- I certainly wasn’t-- but American mothers are being consumed by rage. That’s right, by raw anger. They are incensed because of-- you guessed it-- the patriarchy.

You see, if there were no patriarchy, their husbands would change more diapers, do more breast feeding, supervise more homework and play more dodgeball. Patriarchal oppression has enraged American mothers, to the point where many of them believe that the only solution is the violent overthrow of the government. Down with patriarchy. Down with capitalism. No more angry mothers.

Fair enough, we are not dealing with intellectual heavyweights here. What were you expecting from ideologues?

I probably do not need to tell you, but certain countries spent much of the twentieth century trying to overthrow the patriarchy and capitalism. As a result, over a hundred million people starved to death.

It takes a special sort of feminist debility to insist that we need to keep repeating the experiment. Then again, what good is all that rage if it does not blind you to reality.

The issue today is not that one another dopey feminist, this time named Minna Dubin, has written a screed about how much she hates being a mother, but that The New Yorker has published a long and detailed analysis by one Maeve Emre, wherein she concludes that Dubin is profoundly stupid.

The story begins with Dubin’s three year old son. He was out of control. Emre describes the situation:

Her son would not get into the car, or eat the foods that she wanted him to eat, or let her brush his teeth. He bit other children. He ignored her. She yelled at him, threatened him, squeezed his arms, threw him in his crib, and wanted badly to hit him. 

Mother Dubin knew that she could not do what she wanted to do-- punish her boy violently-- so she allowed her rage to consume her. Therefore, as Blake once opined, she became what she beheld.

The point was to unleash the primal scream of a mother who had regressed—spectacularly, obscenely—into a tantrumming child, not unlike the three-year-old who had spurred her rage in the first place.

But, Dubin does not want to think that she is the only angry mother out there. If such were the case, the cause might be her inability to care for her child. So, she declares that Mom rage is the norm. All women who live under patriarchal oppression feel it. So, she descends into a rant about the patriarchy.

Emre summarizes Dubin’s argument:

The anger of mothers is overdetermined by the “white supremacist, homophobic, classist, ableist, xenophobic, transphobic, misogynistic, capitalist patriarchy,” Dubin writes. The capitalist patriarchy props up the ideology of “capital-M Motherhood,” which “tells mothers we must throw ourselves full throttle into our mothering job—researching, planning, contacting, scheduling, overseeing, washing, tidying, folding, driving, thanking, inviting, hosting, cooking, preparing, and sharing.” Rage is simultaneously “a natural reaction to being systematically stripped of one’s power” and a source of “power in its potential for individual and cultural change.” The remedies Dubin proposes range from state-subsidized child care to communal parenting, art-making (“I recommend the transformative power of creative practice,” she writes), and non-normative sexual arrangements (“I also recommend queerness”).

Of course, this is drivel, offered by someone who took too many Women’s Studies courses. 

To my surprise, Emre sees this clearly:

Reading paraphrases of paraphrases of paraphrases, one starts to feel as if there is something a little hollow and shiftless about the ease with which phrases such as “white supremacist, homophobic, classist, ableist, xenophobic, transphobic, misogynistic, capitalist patriarchy” are trotted out. We get the right words, strung together like marquee lights, but not the structural analysis that puts them in relation to one another.

Emre identifies the problem:

Dubin does not appear to have interviewed any mothers who do not claim to suffer from mom rage. Nor has she interviewed fathers, rageful or otherwise, a renegade pack of mansplaining, gaslighting, happy-go-lucky ne’er-do-wells. 

When you get blinded by your rage, you cannot think coherently.

The argument, such as it is, says that motherhood reduces your freedom. Being responsible for another human being-- especially a helpless human--  means that you cannot do what you please, when you please, with whom you please.

Worse yet, if you are a feminist, you have chosen to become a mother. You could have chosen to abort the whole process. So, if Dubin has become consumed by rage, one reason is that she cannot blame anyone but herself for her free decision.No one forced her to get pregnant or to give birth.

Naturally, being a feminist means blinding yourself to your decisions and believing that your ideology, your membership in the vanguard of a revolution, requires you to live in a constant state of rage.

Emre writes:

If, like Dubin, you are relatively privileged, you know that you have chosen your unfreedom. Yet you may still feel that you did not choose to bind yourself to these people, these intimate strangers, or to this whole life. By this logic, the entire atmosphere of parenthood, no matter how privileged it may appear from the outside, can come to feel like “a scam,” as Dubin puts it. And the decision not to make lunch can seem like the ultimate horizon of liberty.

Dare I say, Emre has exposed this Berkeley feminist for intellectual incoherence. Liberation reduces to being unfree. If she did not understand that, the fault does not lie with her child or even with the patriarchy.

In fact, as long as the decision was hers, undertaken freely, she should feel ashamed at her infantile attitude toward her adult responsibilities.

Unfortunately, our culture has been at war with shame. It has told people that they need not feel ashamed of failing to uphold their responsibilities or even to keep their pants on. 

Thus, we are led to imagine that Dubin believes that the patriarchy has caused her to feel ashamed of herself for being a less than adequate mother. A Tiger Mom she isn’t.

Worse yet, we eventually discover, three quarters of the way through Emre’s article, that Dubin’s boy suffers from autism, among other neurological defects:

Dubin introduces him through his diagnoses: a sensory-processing disorder, fine and gross motor delays, food rigidity, and autism-spectrum disorder. Once we learn this, her mom rage reads differently, as the reaction of a parent facing more than run-of-the-mill challenges. 

Perhaps this makes the situation easier to understand, but clearly Dubin is doing the best in a situation that she did not wish on her child. She did not fail as a mother. Her child has problems, problems that require specialized care. It has nothing to do with the patriarchy or even with capitalism. Dare we say, we cannot universalize her child’s condition and her own mothering challenges. 

Then again, feminist ideology does not allow such a rational approach to her mothering problems. She must grind her personal experience into an affirmation of feminist beliefs. She is not a lousy mother; she is not a mother who is doing her best under difficult circumstances; she is leading the feminist revolution.

One hopes that that will make her feel better.