1999: The New Motherhood
Melissa Levine

Checked in with your cultural paradigms lately? The times, they are a’changin,’ I’m thrilled and relieved to report, and perhaps nowhere is the (albeit geologically slow) shift away from the traditional model of the family and toward a more fluid and open model evident than in the New Motherhood. Just look around. I mean, okay, don’t look around: The East Bay has long been a roomy, unevenly stitched, radically open pocket of acceptance in this straightjacket of Puritanism that we call the United States. (This is, I assure you, a purely objective article.)

But look, say, at the media: What’s Madonna been doing lately? Or Rosie? Or Jodie? Even the viper-tongued Sandra Bernhard just saw fit to reproduce, although her little one lives on an entirely separate floor of her vast apartment, far from the silk chintz and Louis XVI chairs necessary to cradle Bernhard’s own (I say this lovingly) rather infantile personality. Cultural icons normally associated with glamour and sex are now doing the formerly unglamorous and unsexy and expecting to expect. If you’re famous and female, pregnant is hip. Motherhood is on a glittery ascent.

But 1999’s version of the Family Way is not your mother's motherhood. It’s a New Motherhood, replete with all of the manuals, attitude and fashion advice surrounding any paradigm shift. It’s grittier, grungier and, thank God, a hell of a lot funnier than its predecessors. (Admittedly, this claim is less than staggering. Eve, Mary, Joan Crawford and June Cleaver leave a bit to be desired in the levity department. For that matter, so does Hillary Clinton. The self-righteousness is so ’92.)

The new motherhood is smart. It’s sassy. It’s sexual. It can say, a la the increasingly visible Anne Lamott, I love my kid more than life itself, but sometimes he bores me to tears. Or, a la Noelle Oxenhandler, I love my kid in many different ways, and sometimes it’s romantic and sometimes—guess what?—it’s even erotic. (One might hazard to guess, based on related experience, that nursing would be erotic. But who had the guts to say it—in The New Yorker, no less—until Oxenhandler came along?) The New Motherhood throws up its hands in happy confusion, unafraid to admit bafflement or concede defeat: So it was a bad idea to try to force the hamster and the boa constrictor to be friends. So sue me.

And you know what else? The new motherhood, more often than not, is single. Madonna, who purportedly would have had the utterly unmarriagable Dennis Rodman’s child, if he’d been willing, won’t soon be getting hitched to Lourdes’s father. (Although one could argue that, as her personal trainer, he’s more present in her life than a lot of fathers.) Sandra Bernhard doesn’t seem interested in committed love from anyone other than her audience, and Rosie O’Donnell and Jodie Foster are, at least publicly, flying solo. (I won’t propagate the salacious rumors about these perpetually single women. Just because Jodie is smart, powerful, rich, stunningly attractive and has apparently never dated doesn’t mean anything.)

So. How did it happen? It wasn’t so long ago—1992!—that the fictional Murphy Brown took no small amount of heat from Dan Quayle for pursuing motherhood sans mate. (Although, why anyone should have taken that remark seriously when everything else he said was mocked still eludes me. Maybe nobody did take it seriously. Did you?) Now, we have the openly single Anne Lamott (whose hilarious book Operating Instructions, about her son’s first year, might be considered a pioneer in this genre) publishing weekly personal essays in Salon’s “Mothers Who Think” department. We have Oakland’s Ariel Gore, once a teenaged single mom, publishing hip Mama magazine. We have The Amazing “True” Adventures of a Single Mom, the new comic strip book by Katherine Arnoldi. And oh, the Web sites. If you can name it, it’s wired: Single Moms, Divorced Moms, Lesbian Moms, Manic Moms, Pierced Moms, Fetish Moms, and (my personal dream Mom) Moms Who Can Deconstruct Lacan and Remain Sane.

Suddenly, moms are people too. (Sorry, Marlo Thomas—it took this long. For a brief moment in my upbringing, my parents tried to honor the happy egalitarian practices of Free To Be You and Me. What can I say? It didn’t work. The record scratched, we stopped singing, and my mother went back to doing all of the housework.) Before the New Motherhood, “mothers” (and by this I mean the public image of the mother) were defined by their children. They lacked personalities, hopes and desires of their own. They existed merely for the good of their families. They weren’t, in short, human.

How did they get that way? If you’ve read enough Victorian literature, you’ve no doubt noticed the lack of mothers. In Eliot, Brontë, Dickens, et. al., mothers are always either dead, crazy or ineffectual; heroines are orphaned or poor, left to their own devices. One of the reasons for this dearth is apparently that, for anything dramatic to happen to a young woman in Victorian England, she had to be alone and single. But what was the one dramatic thing that could happen to a young woman in Victorian England? Courtship. Or, I guess, consumption.

(In my opinion, the fact that most Victorian novels with female protagonists end with either marriage or death is evidence that, a) those were the only two plots available for Victorian women, and b) they amounted to the same thing. For until George Eliot began Middlemarch, rather radically, with a marriage, what English novelist selected a married woman for a protagonist? And even Dorothea’s great plot gets transposed from a story of personal awakening to one of courtship.)

Of course, as Eliot knew, for many young girls and women, marriage marks not the end but the beginning of drama. But this idea doesn’t seem to have caught on. In the 20th century, mothers have been portrayed, but they’ve generally been portrayed either as sacrificial saints or meddling, controlling bitches—almost never as complex, varied, sexual human beings with thoughts and ideas having nothing to do with their children. It seems as though their motherhood cancels everything else out; they become defined by their children and their relationship to them. That Salon has to qualify the word “Mothers” with the clause “Who Think”—and even that Gore prefixes “Mama” with “hip”—says more than a little about the weight that “mother” carries.

It may just be time to give Madonna some hearty thanks. “Dan Quayle was right about one thing when he went off on Murphy Brown,” Ariel Gore wrote in a recent email. “The image of family is extremely important, because celebrity life isn’t just a reflection of the culture but a purveyor of culture.” It might be dangerous to speculate how much progress Madonna has made in making anything socially acceptable, but the exposure can’t be hurting the cause. Rosie O’Donnell, much loved by the more traditional, struggling-a-bit-to-make-the-bridge-to-the-21st Century-set, is serving up the New Motherhood in an easily digestible casserole. (If only she would reveal a little more about her personal life. Not that that would have sociopolitical ramifications. Nope. None at all.)

Of course, celebrities are a rarified minority; in the most literal sense, their experience has very little to do with yours or mine. Perhaps the reason that the Sandras and Rosies can be single mothers, maintain their complex images as people, and retain their audience’s respect and admiration is that they’re rich and famous. Their wealth and popularity (insofar as these qualities are materially non-transferable) don’t make motherhood any easier for most women. But their presence—and the presence of writers such as Anne Lamott, Marion Winik and Katherine Arnoldi, with whose mistakes and misfortunes we are more likely to identify—is more than a first step toward that open, fluid image of the family that, if we could only embrace it, would serve the people of this country so well. (Like I said, nothing but purely objective reporting from this writer.)

I can’t quite close this argument without a nod to (purely speculative) psychology: Maybe one of the real problems with images of motherhood is that we’ve always viewed mothers from the point of view of children. After all, isn’t it difficult to imagine your own mother caring about something or somebody more than she cares about you? I mean, sure, it’s great that she’s taken up opera singing, it’s really great, I hope she does well, in local markets, but nothing can compare to her all-encompassing love for me, right?

One of the reasons that Madonna-as-mother (ha!) can remain sexy and complex is that we knew her before she was a mother, long before. We knew her as a material girl! Ditto Sandra, Jodie and Rosie. But we didn’t know Lamott before—that is, most of us didn’t—nor did we know Roseanne, a raucous precursor to the New Motherhood. And, what’s more, the significant shift here is that the late-‘90s celebrities are remaining in the public eye after they become mothers, forcing the public to reconcile their motherhood with everything else we already know about them. This reluctance to retire to the back of the collective public consciousness is what may very well turn the Stepford Mother trend around for good. Or at least until the year 2000.