MATERNAL AMBIVALENCE AND THE GENDER OF MOTHERS

Abstract

Maternal ambivalence is the experience of intense, contradictory emotional responses of mothers toward their children—love and hate, anger and tenderness, pity and cruelty, joy and rage. It gives rise to clashing impulses—on the one hand, to abandonment, violence, and neglect; and on the other hand, to embodied and psychic intertwining and to tremendous feats of courage, patience, and generosity. Motherhood is an intensely gendered role, and women have long had their self-care, development, and expression positioned at odds with that of children. Children are dependent on concentrated investment in them. Childcare can be relentless, tedious, and demoralizing; yet it can also induce incomparable varieties of joyful, embodied mutuality. Understandably, when mothers find themselves without support, this puts both them and their charges in a precarious position. In a society that alternately romanticizes and condemns mothers, it is a brave overcoming of cultural denial to recognize the duality of maternal experience. The acknowledgement of ambivalence makes possible the separate development of both mother and child through genuine discovery of the relationship as it unfolds.