We Are All Bad Mothers Now: Chirlane McCray and the New York Post
You have, then, a story of a woman who had always worked, and assumed she would when she had children. Minus a time machine, that means being away from them sometimes. She wanted to do both, to have days at the office and days of obsessive photographing of two-month birthdays, but then decided that “taking care of kids” meant that she would stop working full time “for several years.” The Post’s translation: “She was unable to embrace motherhood and initially neglected Chiara.” Apparently, even a mother who quits her job risks being called a bad mother—one who neglected her child—if she hesitates a second too long. What would the Post’s ideal have been—if McCray had lost all desire to spend any time in the office, or anywhere but with Chiara, the day her daughter was born? Maybe, by the Post’s lights, being a working mother is permissible only if one ritually expresses the wish that one’s life was different. To be anything other than a “bad mom,” must one despise work?
Perhaps, then, the key to being a good mother is self-flagellation. But not quite: any expression of regret or doubt might count as a “confession” of one’s failure to “embrace motherhood.” So maybe the Post is suggesting that, to be a good mother, one must be smug—or maybe it isn’t leaving women any good option at all.
When McCray says that she and her husband will “feel guilt forever more,” she is not admitting to something dark and awful. She is just telling a truth of parenting. One always tears oneself apart over what could have gone better—over not getting a photo of the six-week birthday, or just not being the wonder that the small person in front of you is. (There is a line in D. H. Lawrence’s “The Rainbow” that, as a parent, I’ve thought of often. It comes after Ursula, a small child, has tripped while running to meet her father, and cut her lip: “He could never bear to think of it, he always wanted to cry, even when he was an old man and she had become a stranger to him.”)
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