The Fixed Stars by Molly Wizenberg

Author:Molly Wizenberg
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Abrams
Published: 2020-08-04T00:00:00+00:00

What is a mother? To a newborn baby, its primary caregiver—usually its mother—is everything. She is food, shelter, life. A mother is so fully adapted to her infant’s needs, explains British pediatrician and psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott, that the child imagines its mother’s breast to be a part of itself. This is an illusion, of course, and it can’t last. It also should not last, according to Winnicott. A child’s sense of self depends not upon it having a perfect mother but a “good-enough mother.”21 Winnicott’s good-enough mother is one who slowly retreats, who adapts less and less completely to her infant as the child matures and becomes able to handle frustration and disappointment. Our mothers’ failure to meet our every need teaches us a crucial lesson: that our mother is a separate, finite entity, and that there’s a difference between me and not-me. From her “failure,” Winnicott argues, we form our first sense of self.

Winnicott articulated this idea more than half a century ago, but we’re still wrestling with the image of the perfect mother—as though she existed, as though she should exist. I want to be a perfect mother to June, though my sense of what that means changes almost constantly, as my child changes. If not a perfect mother, I want at least to be good. I want more than to do no harm; I want to know that I have been a good mother by some codified, seal-of-approval standard, even though I know that the good mother June needs almost certainly looks different from someone else’s. I want to be a good mother, though probably not even my child and I could agree on what that means.

I keep coming back to one thing: June belongs to me, in the sense that her body came from my body, in the sense that her care is my responsibility. But I do not own her. She’s always been herself, only June, from her first cries and grunts. My work is to love her, guide her, and support her—no more and no less—as she becomes ever more real, more June. In this sense, I too belong to her. But she does not own me. I too am real. Surely I cannot be her mother if I am not also myself.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.