Mothers

A mother is a woman whose sexual being must be invisible. She must save the world from her desire – thereby allowing the world to conceal the unmanageable nature of all human sexuality, and its own voraciousness, from itself (as if sexuality never exists outside the bounds of married life).

A mother is a woman whose sexual being must be invisible. She must save the world from her desire – thereby allowing the world to conceal the unmanageable nature of all human sexuality, and its own voraciousness, from itself (as if sexuality never exists outside the bounds of married life).

Today the relationship between white mothers and mothers of colour is repeating an age-old history, especially in the US, as undocumented migrants take care of the children of white middle-class mothers, relieving them of the burden of childcare so they can parade the seamless
compatibility of their professional and domestic lives.

if genuine neediness – being, or having once been, the baby of a mother – is what Conservative rhetoric hates most. Perhaps when right-wing politicians screw up their noses at scroungers, asylum seekers and refugees, it is their own vaguely remembered years of utter dependency that they are trying, and instructing us, to repudiate

Mothers always fail. It will be central to my argument that such failure should not be viewed as catastrophic but as normal, that failure should be seen as part of the task. But because mothers are seen as our point of entry into the world, there is nothing easier than to make social deterioration look like something that it is the sacred duty of mothers to prevent – a type of socially upgraded version of the tendency in modern families to blame mothers for everything.

‘There is much to suggest,’ she continues, ‘that the male mind has always been haunted by the force of the idea of dependence on a woman for life itself.’

More simply, being born – each time testimony to the monumental physical and mental strength of all mothers – also alerts us to the irreducible frailty of life.

With the suffering of the whole world etched on her face, she carries and assuages the burden of human misery on behalf of everyone. What the pain of mothers must never expose is a viciously unjust world in a complete mess.

In modern-day Western culture, mothers are almost invariably the object, either of too much attention or not enough.

Mothers cannot help but be in touch with the most difficult aspects of any fully lived life. Along with the passion and pleasure, it is the secret knowledge they share. Why on earth should it fall to them to paint things bright and innocent and safe?