A CANDLE FOR MOM

Talk by Ret Davis, May 9, 1993, before the Unitarian Fellowship of South 
Florida, 1912 Roosevelt Street, Hollywood, Florida.

Tom Lehrer, back in the 1960's, had a song about Oedipus Rex, in which he said 
in effect: that although old Oedipus committed incest with his own mother, 
murdered his own father, and almost single-handedly brought about the
destruction of the culture and city of Thebes, yet Americans liked him, because 
that was one boy who "loved his mother!'

We are a culture with radically ambivalent feelings toward the concept of 
motherhood.

On the one hand is all the sentimental brouhaha about the subject, as 
exemplified by the "holiday" today. We have an entire Sunday set aside to honor 
mothers. And well we might, mothers are --all in all -- a hard-working bunch. 
But the mythos goes far beyond reality.

Mothers are not only hard-working people, they are also perfect, gentle, sweet, 
self -sacrificing, godly (or saintly) pillars of the universe, according to the 
current mythologies. Just consider such elements of the contemporary cultural
religion as:

The hand that rocks the cradle rules the nation. I want a girl just like the 
girl who married dear old dad. She makes apple pies just like mother used to 
make.

Grown men -- given the proper amount of alcoholic lubricant -- can blubber in 
public, and shed real tears, about "dear old mom," even the most macho of 
rednecks (or, perhaps, especially the most macho of rednecks) Moms are placed on 
a pedestal far above the ken of mortal men.

But there's the other, perhaps more real, side to the issue.

Item 1: Let mom go out into the working world, and she will get paid about 57 
cents for every dollar old dad gets out there.

Item 2: Put the average person (male or female) into a therapy group and get 
that person in touch with anger, and the first person brought to mind will be 
that same dear old mom.

Item 3: Despite their exalted position on that pedestal, moms seem to receive 
virtually universal abuse from their families --fights with teenage children, 
hassles with pre-teens and put-downs from dad --not to mention an alarming
amount of actual physical abuse in this country. Spouse-beating in some parts of 
the nation seems to be a national sport.

Why? Why do we elevate moms to such heights in our fantasies and provide moms 
with a reality which often is so brutally opposite of the myth?

There are probably several reasons.

One is simply that the myth itself creates the abuse that follows. Look at it 
this way: In the job market, women get paid much less than men for the same 
work. How can we, you might ask, justify paying dear old mom so much less than 
dad -- if we hold her in such high esteem?

Easy. If mom is always so altruistically devoted to her children (as the mythos 
implies) --if she is so self –sacrificing and giving -- then obviously she ought 
to be willing to work for nothing -- or practically nothing. Many business –
persons actually function as if any salary they pay a woman ought to be enough -
-and they are shocked and hurt when a woman complains, because, after all, look 
at the favor they did her by giving her a job!

In the marketplace, the biggest threat to equality is the myth of the self -
sacrificing mom. But the same thing applies in the home. Husbands expect their 
wives to live up the mythological characteristics of their own mothers. It's 
been shown that most --if not all --men unconsciously look for a wife who 
resembles, in some way, their own mother. And when she doesn't live up to the 
mythos -- to the fantasy about mom as someone who does everything f or the man
without question or complaint -- then she is put down or, in the extreme case, 
beaten.

Because of the myth of the Perfect Mom -- most men at some unaware level, expect 
their wives to cook the meals, clean the house, take care of the children, run 
the errands, provide ideal sex on demand and never to complain, make demands, be 
assertive, or act like a real human being.

Is it any wonder that the divorce rate right now in South Florida is running 
somewhere around 75% of the marriage rate?

It's really hard to be perfect. It's harder to try to be perfect and at the same 
time live up to some universal fantasy about what a mother is supposed to be. 
Moms, you see, don't have it so easy.

What about the therapy thing? That the average persons seems to harbor a lot of 
repressed anger toward dear old mom? Well, the mythos of the Perfect Mom helps 
bring that about too. In two ways.

First of all, it's hard to be angry at a perfect person, especially one who is 
also a National Myth. I mean, you aren't supposed to be angry at a saint, are 
you? So when mother happens to be acting like a royal pain in the etc., children 
feel a natural sense of anger --but feel guilty about feeling it --so they 
repress it, push it back on the back burners of the mind to smolder (and to come 
out somewhere else) And second, there are the expectations we have of mothers,
expectations that can't really be lived up to. People ask me all the time: but 
aren't mothers supposed to be nurturing? Don't all mothers do things for their 
kids? Aren't children supposed to love their mothers and aren't mothers supposed
to love their kids?

No. No. No. Not all women are nurturing; why would you expect all mothers to be. 
Mothers are not supposed to be anything special except be mothers. But the 
expectations of children (learned from books, from dad and from other children--
as well as from mom herself) lead them to be angry at and disappointed in mom a 
lot -- as she fails to live up to their images of her.

And, of course, the expectations are not one-sided. Mom has a lot of the same 
expectations herself. The role that women perceive themselves in when they 
become mothers is essentially the same role that men and children and society
at large assigns to them. And this self -image is a constant put -down, in the 
real world, of the mother. Never doing anything for herself, never able to 
express her real feelings, never feeling free to make a mistake. And this
self -expectation is the source of a great deal of anger and guilt on the part 
of the mother -- which will come out some way, of ten in the form of put-downs, 
manipulations and guilt -trips.

And that's another reason for the disparity between what we say we feel about 
mothers and what we actually do to mothers in this country: guilt. Which, as you 
all know, is really nothing but resentment. We resent the hell out of having to 
accept an imperfect mother as perfect, and mom resents the hell out of having to 
act perfect, so we both repress that resentment (remember, it's hard to be angry
about perfection) and feel a great deal of guilt instead.

The guilt leads to a lot of things: to a lot of mothers not acting the genetic 
role of mother --not even providing the basic emotional needs of the infant --
and to a lot of children doing all they can to put down and "punish" the mother.

It's a vicious cycle. The more put-down that mom feels, the less able she is to 
provide emotional support for her children, and the less emotional support the 
children receive, the more put-downs they give their mother. All thanks, in
part, to the stupid mythology we've built up about motherhood.

So how do we get around this? How to we get to a place where a mother can do her 
mothering and not feel resentment or resented?

First of all, we must accept the fact that the process of being a mother is a 
biological role and nothing else. The act of becoming a mother does not alter a 
woman's identity (except in terms of the role and for the nonce) and does not 
make her any less, or more, than a person. We must see motherhood for what it 
really is, a vitally necessary role in the perpetuation of the species but not -
-in these modern times, at least -- a self -destructive or all-consuming life
activity.

Second, we must begin to destroy the myth of the perfect mother (and that of the 
submissive woman and the dominant male). These myths keep us from being complete 
human beings and keep us from being able to relate to others as complete 
persons. This, in turn, robs us of the opportunity for completely fulfilling 
relationships with others. For we cannot fully be in that necessary state of 
loving-being loved unless we completely accept ourselves and the other without
adjectives, without definitions, without the barrier of words. Such stereotypes 
as that of the perfect mother keep us in other words, from being fully alive.

And last, we must learn to recognize the angers deep inside ourselves, learn to 
identify the real threat behind the anger (which in most cases is childish fear 
of threats which were only real when we were infants), and learn to rid 
ourselves of the threats by taking heavy daily doses of reality. The reality 
that mothers are not perfect and that they have needs and feelings like everyone 
else.

The reality that we all need to love and to be loved and such affirmation is not 
possible completely as long as we stereotype each other in mythological roles. 
And the reality that each of us is responsible ultimately for meeting our own
needs and that the statute of limitations ran out long ago on our parents' 
guilt. Mom is no longer responsible for what happens in your life. Only you are 
responsible.

Then Mothers' Day can become a time of the joy in being and having a mother --
not a time of inane blubbering, repressed anger and deep guilt.

And then, perhaps, a lot fewer children would accidentally forget mothers day 
every year.

And we would all look forward to it as a time of joy.

We need to replace the current mythology of the perfect human mother with the 
far older mythology of the woman as archetype of earth and nature herself.

We need to look on women not as work -horses and house-slaves, but as 
representatives of the nurturing aspects of nature -- as real people in a real 
world.

Taking care of mother is a many-fold task. It means taking care of your real 
mother (if she still lives). It means taking care that all women are treated as 
equals in a patriarchal society. It means taking care of the women inside each 
of us --male and female alike. And it means taking care of the earth -- our 
original mother.

Tonight, light a candle for mom -- for all your moms. For mothers everywhere, 
for the planet that gave us birth, and for yourself.

Blessed Be!