Judgments about mothers reveal the ideology from which they depart – 08/21/2023 – Vera Iaconelli

The expression “there’s only one mother” was used since the times of the Empire to differentiate the white mother —mother and relative— from the black caregiver. The milk mothers and nursemaids were slaves (the future nannies) who took care of the kids who would later be their owners or bosses. The maxim served to deny a fact considered embarrassing: there were always many “mothers”, not always of the same ethnicity.

But “there’s only one mother” is also a current way of pretending that the mother category is homogeneous and brings together the cream of offspring care. Mother would be not only the woman who had children but a kind of pokémon evolved from the woman. Upon becoming a mother, the woman would change from Pikachu to Raichu, automatically erasing the part of her biography in which sexuada rhymed with ballad.

The long history of how we arrived at the idealization of the mother figure goes from the bonfire where witches were burned to the burnout where professionals and housewives are burned. To sum up, it is about having pushed the task of taking care —of the home, of the family and of society— to women, in an attempt to relieve men, companies and the State in exchange for the seal of beauty, demure and the home. . The conviction was carried out by the physical threat, carrying the vexatious scarlet letter, of the social death that led to suicides in the figures of Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary. Now, the watchful eye of the media works to praise mothers or to cancel them altogether.

Legend has it, since the end of the 19th century, that women are instinctively providers of care and that men are financial providers. But there is no denying that the absolute majority of women have always accumulated both roles. From the sexual division of labor, women are left with the “flex” function, while men do not even play their part in supporting most households.

(In time: the law that regularizes paternity leave is about to be voted)

Feminine obligations multiplied to the same extent that expectations became surreal.

Let us think of the media judgment of the case of actress Larissa Manoela, whose parents would have prevented her from having access to her own fortune, claiming that it was to protect her from exploiters. Brazilian law is very clear about who belongs to whom in child labor situations, and the argument for protecting the daughter against the greed of strangers becomes laughable when it is known that the “little daughter” is 22 years old. Psychoanalysis does not forgive the coincidence of the date on which this bomb was dropped. Here’s a Father’s Day gift that leaves the recipient in no doubt.

As bad as having an envious, selfish and greedy father/mother is having a father/mother who is silent in the face of arbitrariness committed against the child. However, since then, we only hear about the actress’s mother, as if her father were a beauty flower.

In a world where “mother is everything”, the interpretation oscillates between being everything good —idealized— and everything bad —execrated. If she is everything, it is the father who is out of account.

The question that persists, and that reveals the ideological bias, is how a mother would be able to envy, hate, compete or harm a child. The answer is that there are as many types of mothers (and fathers) as there are types of women (and men) and that in this group there are neurotics, psychotics, perverts, psychopaths, annoying, inconvenient, good people, weird people, in short, everything that we can put in the basket of humanity.

In each child, a myriad of expectations, fantasies, resentments, fears are projected that will only be revealed in the day to day of the relationship, in action. What is revealed is not always nice and sometimes it is clearly criminal. For the latter, there is the law. For the others, the eternal reflection on what led them to be fathers/mothers.

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