A couple notes on the origins of the idea of mothers being paragons of angelic, selfless love (hint: it was a backlash against women's increasing independence.)

1/x thread

BTW this is from my book, NURTURE THE WOW. ( https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781250116949)

Our culture has long been invested in the notion of a mother's love being untainted, virtuous—a redemptive light that shines w/maximum sentimentality. Victorians referred to mothers as the angels of the house. The mother was selfless, embodying morality and unceaseless giving.

The "angel in the house" notion came as a response to 18th century urbanization and anxieties about the ways that city living would foster women's independence—so it was a way of keeping her in her place.

EG the philosopher/judge Lord Kames, worried, “Who in the future would bear the children, now that so many women were intent on enjoying themselves outside the home?”

As Virginia Woolf later put it, the "angel in the house" mother "…was intensely sympathetic.. utterly unselfish. She sacrificed daily. If there was a chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught she sat in it ... Above all, she was pure."

She was pure, and her love was pure. (She was also white and wealthy--needless to say, most poor white women and women of color didn't get to be seen as saintly, delicate flowers).

This Victorian ideal of uncomplicated selflessness became, on so many levels, the defining standard against which mothers were judged into, through, and beyond the 20th century.

In fact, the myth of mommy's perfect love persists today: a perusal of any online greeting card site will offer cards that say, "Mothers are angels" and "Moms know love by heart." ETC ETC

The idea that maternal love is full of this unsullied magic doesn't leave a lot of room for moms to be angry, resentful, frustrated, exhausted, at the end of their ropes, and hiding in the bathroom while the toddler rages outside because she just needs one. second. alone.

And how is a woman who radiates a saintly, selfless mother's love supposed to also be a savvy negotiator, a cunning businessperson, a driven intellectual doggedly pursuing her research?

This myth of mom's perfect love also belies a lot of people's lived experience. Plenty of people have suffered tremendously at the hands of mothers who were capricious or cruel, who discounted their child's needs, who were withdrawn or abusive—or all of these things.

Do all mothers love their children well? Of course not. Is parental love somehow better, more pure, more moral, more redeemed than the love siblings feel? Than that of lovers? Friends? Are non-parents simply never capable of reaching the depths of emotion that parents experience?

No no no, nope, I'm not saying that. But I am saying that I have experienced my love for my own children as utterly metamorphic, with implications I couldn't have anticipated. For a lot of parents—of whatever gender—the experience seems to be similar.

This love, it's big. It changes us. It's messy and it's complicated and it swirls around all the exhaustion and frustration and irritation and ambivalence and desperate desire for a grown-up conversation.

Parenting isn't an extended frolic in a sunny meadow as butterflies cavort nearby. It's gross and it's gooey and it's hard as hell. But inside all of it, there is this feral, fierce love for our children that drives us & changes us & takes us to the brink & back again & again.