The Good Mother Myth

GINA CROSLEY-CORCORAN

i NEVER WANTED CHILDREN. Based on my experiences growing up, I truly believed that all mothers hated their kids and that pregnancies were an ugly punishment bestowed upon any woman stupid enough to get caught without a condom. I speculated that every woman who had ever had a baby had merely done so to trap whatever man she was with at the time. It never occurred to me that a person would have a baby on purpose. The women around me certainly never seemed to.

You can understand, then, my reaction to news reports of kidnappings, where distraught mothers and fathers pleaded for the safe return of their child on the evening news. As a child, I honestly could not understand why the parents seemed so distressed. I thought to myself, Aren’t they glad to be rid of the kid? Don’t all parents hate their offspring?

Who were these mothers? Were they faking it for the cameras? My own mother appeared to have nothing in common with them, and neither did I, it seemed. I believed that I had no chance of being that breed of caring, concerned mother that I saw tearfully longing for her missing child. It was a given that I would fail at motherhood, so I never wanted to try. Not on purpose, anyway.

Growing up, my family environment was anything but functional. I was born to teen parents—my father was only fourteen years old, and my mother just seventeen. My father, barely pubescent and without so much as a driver’s license to visit me when he wanted, was not expected to step up and take care of his baby. My mother simply did not want to.

My parents broke up while my mother was still pregnant, so my father wasn’t around to help. Once I was born, my mother left it up to my fourteen-year-old aunt and grandparents to look after me. She would not even get out of bed to feed me. She forced my young aunt to tend to my feedings and diaper changes and to babysit me while she continued enjoying her teenage years. My mother paraded me around when it was convenient, but she had a habit of leaving me places when she got bored. My grandmother would often receive calls from relatives and friends asking her to come pick me up because my mother had deposited me somewhere before taking off again.

At some point, it was decided that my maternal grandparents would raise me. I became like their daughter, and I referred to them collectively as my parents. My mother, now eighteen and living with the man who became my stepfather, no longer took part in raising me. It was for the best. My mother was a violent person who treated me as a nuisance and beat me whenever I got in her way. When I was four years old, she stabbed my stepfather in the stomach with a paring knife right in front of me. He survived with a five-inch scar across his navel, but somehow, my mother wasn’t charged and the whole incident was swept under the rug.

There was no formal adoption, but my grandparents were not formal people. They were poor, uneducated, and constantly on the move. There were periods of time, however, where my grandparents and I lived with my mother for a few weeks or months because she had an apartment and we were homeless. But even then, I still was not regarded as my mother’s responsibility. When it was time for my grandparents to pick up and leave, there was no question that I would be going with them. Often, we left because my mother started a new cycle of physically and verbally abusing me. She was acting out what she had learned. Her father—my grandfather—physically abused me as well, but he didn’t like it when my mother did it. Perhaps he did not like to have his own behavior mirrored back at him through his daughter.

It wasn’t until my freshman year of high school, when I went to live with my aunt, that any sort of formal court hearing regarding my living arrangements took place. Since the school district required my aunt to have guardianship of me in order to enroll, my mother signed the papers and officially named my aunt as my legal guardian. It only made sense. My aunt had been like a mother to me since birth, and she was the only person in the family who yearned to provide a stable household for me. Not only was she my aunt, but she felt like my mother, my sister, and my friend. Unfortunately, she had her own problems. After ten years of suffering at the hands of a physically abusive husband, she finally divorced my uncle just six months after I moved in. He left us with the mobile home, and we suddenly found ourselves trying to survive on just the few dollars per hour she made working at the small-town grocery store.

During my sophomore year of school, my aunt could not afford to have the heat turned on. We spent a frigid Illinois winter burning old boxes in the fireplace to keep warm. During that same period, while visiting my mother, we were in a major car accident and my hand was injured. When my money from the insurance settlement came, my mother forced me to write my check over to her. I cried and begged her to give my aunt enough money from the settlement to get our heat turned on. She reluctantly agreed, handing over just a tiny fraction of what the insurance company had sent me, all the while berating me for wanting anything at all. Meanwhile, my aunt still could not afford to feed me, so most days I went without breakfast and lunch.

Around that time, my mother taught me how to smoke pot out of a bowl. I had no real interest in getting high with my mother, but being invited into her bedroom to do drugs was the only time I ever remember her giving me any attention. I wanted so badly for her to like me, and saw getting high as a way to bond with her. I did it because I thought she would think I was cool. For the few minutes I spent toking a bowl on her bed, I felt like she actually cared about me.

By my junior year of high school, I was back to living with my grandparents while my mother had moved her family to Florida, hoping to escape creditors. Though I was taller than my grandfather at this point, he still couldn’t stop the habit of beating me when I upset him. Late one night, after coming home exhausted from working a second shift, with homework left to do for the next morning, my grandfather ordered me to the store for popcorn. I was tired and wasn’t thinking straight. I came back with the wrong kind of popcorn, so he held me over the stove and punched me in the face repeatedly until I escaped to call the police. I couldn’t think of anything else to do after that, so I ran away to my mother’s new home in Florida, unable to anticipate how badly that would turn out.

After just a few months of living with her, my mother began abusing me again. I ran away to live with a cousin and her boyfriend, but my mother had me picked up by the police and dragged home. Within a few hours, neighbors were phoning police while my mother held me on the ground in front of her home in broad daylight, kicking me in the face. When the case worker arrived, I was taken to a halfway house for troubled youths. Within a few days, my remorseful grandparents had me on a plane back home to Illinois.

As I moved through puberty and into my sexually active teens, my lack of parenting role models became a form of birth control in itself. I learned all I needed to know about the pitfalls of motherhood by the way my own mother rejected the job. Once, she even told me in front of mixed company, “You are the abortion I should have had.”

In stark contrast to the ever-deteriorating relationship I had with my mother, my father and I became close around the time that I graduated high school. He was in his early thirties by then and a bit more stable in his own life. He helped me buy a car and we started seeing more of each other. My dad knew he couldn’t turn back the clock on the years he missed, so he committed himself to being a part of my life moving forward. We developed a strong relationship and tried to heal the effects of his eighteen-year absence from my life.

I arrived at adulthood saddled with the excessive emotional baggage of a stressful childhood, but I told myself that my destiny was mine to make. I forced myself to believe that anything that had ever been done to me was now a thing of the past and had no bearing on what kind of person I could become. I sold myself this lie for years, until one day I began experiencing unexplained panic attacks. I began seeing a therapist who asked me to sort out my experiences as a child. I tried calling my mother, hoping to see if she could explain to me why she treated me the way she did. She denied it all, and to hear her talk, she was Mother of the Year. The abuse, the abandonment, my damaged psyche—it meant nothing to her. There was no remorse.

A few short years later, I found myself in love with a man who wanted to marry me. He dreamed of being a parent, but I told him in no uncertain terms that I wasn’t cut out for that job. Motherhood seemed like a one-way ticket to a life of regret and disappointment. I had no business burdening a child with my inherited parental failings. What had been done to me didn’t need to be done to anyone else. My fiancé understood my misgivings about motherhood and agreed to take children off the table.

And then I got pregnant.

My knee-jerk reaction was to terminate the pregnancy. I felt terrified I’d continue the cycle of abuse. But I was not my mother. My pregnancy was not intentional, but the father of my baby was someone I loved deeply. He knew my history and he’d even met—and survived—my mother and grandparents. He believed in me and he believed in my capacity to be a loving mother. With his faith bolstering me, I decided to continue the pregnancy, and tentatively, I began to look forward to mothering.

But just before the wedding, my mother found one last way to break me down. We planned our wedding as an intimate affair, one that my mother was not invited to. When she got wind of my plans to exclude her, she wrote me several angry emails saying she wished I had never been born. She insisted that my father’s family never loved me and had wanted her to abort me. She shared details of how my father’s family had raised money for the procedure, and how she was sorry that she had not gone through with it. I was twelve weeks into my own pregnancy when she unleashed that bombshell on me.

After that day, I never spoke to my mother again. I spent my pregnancy wondering how I could possibly be a healthy, stable mother to a child when I had no examples to draw from. I resented the fetus inside me and often told my husband that he should probably raise the baby without me. I didn’t believe I could pull it together for our child.

But then I gave birth and heard my baby cry for the first time. My world was instantaneously shattered and reborn anew. Any doubt that I could love my baby was erased on contact. As soon as I laid eyes on him, I knew that I wanted to spend my life being his mom. I could not believe how lucky I was to be given this person to love and cherish. I finally understood why parents would be distraught if their child went missing. It was nothing less than an epiphany: normal parents do love their children, not hate them.

Once I wrapped my arms around my son, I could not imagine letting him go. He was bound to my very soul and I could not fathom treating him the way my mother treated me. As I stared at him while he slept, I told myself I would never let him feel unloved or unsafe.

Now, seven years and three children later, I’m still unable to understand how or why my mother denied love and affection to her child. When I nurse my daughter to sleep, kissing the top of her head and pulling her heart closer to mine, I feel the pain of my own childhood all over again. When I cuddle with my children, my heart breaks to think about how my mother never cuddled with me. When I drag myself out of bed in the middle of the night to tend to a child’s cries, it pains me to think about the way my mother refused to respond to my cries. My mother never rocked me against her breast in the wee hours of the morning. She deprived me of that love; a love that no one else in the world can ever offer me.

So every day, I strive to do better than she did. I am battling my own demons and I am not a perfect mother. Sometimes I yell. Sometimes I don’t listen. Sometimes I catch myself saying or doing things that my own mother did. But I consistently work to be the mother that my children deserve. I have broken the cycle of abuse. I never thought it was possible, but sometimes even a bad mother can produce a good one.