fearing (the myth of?) the maternal – scary to have, scary to lack

Yesterday over lunch, I was going on with some new UK friends/colleagues about the idea of maternal instinct. The concept disturbs me, both because I loathe the idea of being trapped by hormones in my body and because I guess I want to be “maternal” on some level and I fear and already grieve the potential of disconnection from my offspring. Do we have these instinct things? Are they parental? Or uniquely maternal? Age-old feminist question. Most of us post-structuralists in the conversation were simply preoccupied with the very word maternal. Gender Trouble (Butler), false binary, tie of gender to sex, slippage of femininity into motherhood, etc. Maternal - we hate the word. Instinct was a whole other issue. One of our colleagues (NOT a post-structuralist), a humanities prof in the US, insists there is a maternal instinct, one that she found when she had her first child. For her, the bond to her child was so severe that she felt fear for the first time in her life – fear of that child in a dark world without her care. This did not allay either component of my own fear. What will it mean for my life that one day I might be overcome with fear for my child’s safety? What if I’m not? WHAT’S WORSE?

The aforementioned maternal colleague gave a paper on representations of femininity and motherhood in Ian McEwan’s critically acclaimed, “The Road.” She slammed McEwan’s mother-blaming techniques for the creation of his post-apocalyptic world (there is so much unchecked mother-blaming in fiction, I like when people point it out). I actually think his notion of the absence of the feminine symbolic under capitalism as apocalyptic worked well for the novel, but that's beside her point I guess. I don’t think her argument held together well (and I told her that), but I at least liked the confidence and certainty with which she spoke of the pain of an absent mother. This theme doesn’t get a lot of play in academia anymore. Rightfully so, I’d say (let’s open queer kinship), but still, good for her for revealing her deepest convictions, if they are essentialist to me.

Small tangential aside: in The Road, the dad pours cold water on the boy’s head, demonstrating his lack of maternal instinct. What kind of human being doesn’t assume their son isn’t going to like having freezing cold water dumped on his head? Weak representation, Ian. If the dad couldn’t find his breast to breast feed, well alright then. I can get on board with that.