![]() This book addresses the subject underlying the young mother’s reaction to her parenting class and the two articles, maternal ambivalence-that mixture of loving and hating feelings that all mothers experience toward their children and the anxiety, shame, and guilt that the negative feelings engender in them. The article was followed by Anna Quindlen’s Last Word column, titled “Playing God on No Sleep,” in which Quindlen admitted frankly that as horrified as she and others were by the murders, some part of her understood all too well how it could happen. On July 2, 2001, ten months before the publication of the New York Times article, the cover of Newsweek carried the shocking headline, “‘I Killed My Children’: What Made Andrea Yates Snap?” Andrea Yates was a depressed nurse, the mother of five children under the age of seven, who one morning, in the grip of severe postpartum psychosis, became desperate, lost control, and drowned all of them. I suspect that the majority of women taking that class shared her feelings. As this woman is both educated and emotionally sensitive, the degree of her relief was impressive. Although she had taken the class to learn more about child development, especially during toddlerhood, her most intense reaction was one of vast relief on discovering that other parents could feel exhausted, lonely, bored, and short of temper with their children. Two days before reading this article I had talked with a young woman in her mid-thirties, the mother of two small children, about a parenting class she had attended. Here was one expression of the current groundswell of revolt against the idealization of motherhood in the 1980s and 1990s resulting from the enthusiasm and perfectionism of the baby boomers as they took on the “job” of parenting. “Admitting to Mixed Feelings about Motherhood,” by Elizabeth Hayt, appeared as the lead article in the Styles section of the Sunday New York Times on May 12, 2002-Mother’s Day. Maternal ambivalence is a normal phenomenon. The Monster Within: The Hidden Side Of Motherhood By Barbara AlmondĪmbivalence is a combination of the loving and hating feelings we experience toward those who are important to us.
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