"Goodness was the trap"
Nancy Reddy on rethinking what it means to be a good mom
Surely there’s a German word for the delightful serendipity of stumbling across the exact right book for a particular season of one’s life? I felt that very specific bliss recently when I dove into Nancy Reddy’s The Good Mother Myth. Get this: it’s (in part) a memoir of pregnancy and early parenthood set in Madison, WI, where Reddy attended grad school. (There should also be a German word for the satisfaction of recognizing specific places mentioned in books - this one is filled with IYKYK references to Madisonian landmarks and hidden gems.)
The Good Mother Myth is also a critique of the cultural pressures that make so many moms—and even pre-moms, like myself—paranoid we will mess up our children by, say, failing to form a secure attachment or being imperfectly attuned to their every cue. Reddy examines the origins of pop psychology parenting advice circulating on social media these days and finds that much of it is based on shaky research conducted by (mostly) men whose parenting bonafides are…a bit dubious.
When Reddy visited Madison earlier this month for a series of book events, she was gracious enough to sit down with me for an interview. As always, I’ve lightly edited and condensed our conversation to make it reader-friendly!
Allison: I'm curious about how you decided how much of yourself and your family to put into the book. You've got this historical stuff, you've got this cultural criticism, and then it also follows your story. And you talk about some big challenges, like navigating your relationship with your husband and dealing with postpartum mental health challenges. Was that always the plan?
Nancy Reddy: From the beginning, I imagined and kind of understood that the book that I wanted to write needed to be equal parts memoir and research. In part because, before I started writing this book, I spent most of a summer reading all the motherhood memoirs I could find. And as much as I really loved a lot of them, I felt like memoir on its own was kind of insufficient for the questions that I had. I really needed the research to help me understand the context. Individual stories can be incredibly powerful. But then I was like, Well, what's under that? Like, where did that come from?
My story is not, it's not a memoir in the sense that it's a remarkable story. I think it's a very ordinary story, which is part of why I hope it's useful. And it felt really important to share a lot of the really hard and difficult parts alongside a lot of joy and beauty and meaning.
The hardest thing to think about, in terms of how much and what details to share, was the stuff having to do with my marriage. When we went out on submission [looking for a publisher], my husband was really not in the proposal very much. And I had a call with the person who's now my editor and her boss and they were like, where's the husband? And I was like, well, that's a great question. Because at the time, I really did feel very alone in a lot of ways. It's not that he's the villain of the story, you know, but that absence I felt [in early motherhood] showed up in the book proposal. So then I had to really think, you know, what are the moments that I want to include, and how can I be fair to him?
I was very anxious when I was finishing it up, because I was like, ‘Oh no. What if he hates it?’ I printed it all out and wrote a letter about it to him and what it meant to me, and marked all the sections where he appears. And I was really, just nauseous about, you know, what if I've done this horrible thing, and he thinks I'm a monster for putting our family in this book in this way? I gave it to him, and he read it and then came back to me later. He was like, ‘Yeah, that seems about right.’ I think he understands what writing means to me, and also that when you write, even when you write a memoir, it is a selection. It's crafted. It's not the definitive truth. There's a lot about our lives that is not in the book.
AD: Alongside the personal memoir part, there are juicy stories about the marriages and family lives of a lot of these researchers who are towering figures in the fields of psychology and child development. It turns out many of them were men who don't come across as particularly good fathers or husbands. Some of them even seemed to have an ax to grind about their own mothers. And so I'm curious about how you think about the relevance of their family lives to our evaluation of their work. It reminds me of the conversations we've been collectively having about whether you can separate the art from the artist. Can you separate the science from the scientist? And should you?
NR: Those aspects of the research didn't come in until fairly late, because I wasn't looking for it. I wasn't trying to be like, ‘Oh, let me prove that these guys were terrible fathers,’ right? There's a really wonderful biography of Harry Harlow, written by Deborah Blum, and I read that book probably four times before I was like, ‘Hey, wait, what happened with his wives?’ Because I really was so focused on the research and the research findings and what was happening there. But then, once I started looking, I was like, ‘Oh, this is fascinating. These men are writing about mothers, and they're researching mothers, and they're telling mothers what to do, and they are not involved in the raising of their own children.’
And their wives turned out to be mostly these fascinating, really ambitious for their time people whose lives were just kind of ruined in a lot of ways through marrying them. That's probably an overstatement, but they, in some cases, had to give up their professional careers [e.g., due to nepotism policies that prevented both spouses from being employed at a university].
I also come from a discipline and a research tradition that understands that the subjectivity of the researcher is always part of the research, even in something that is ostensibly objective—as, certainly, comparative psychology wanted to think of itself at the time. The way that they designed those studies, even though there's quantitative evidence and charts and graphs, the design of those studies was shaped by the biases and the life experiences of those researchers. And so I think it's worth kind of trying to understand what that is.
AD: In my initial email to you, I wrote about my conflicted feelings about attachment theory, which I think many of us are so steeped in. It can be really comforting to learn about attachment styles and think, ‘Oh, I understand myself better. I’m this way because of my early relationships.’ But then I’m like, ‘Wait, what does that mean for how I parent?’ It’s a lot of pressure to put on these early years.
NR: It's the problem of how things get flattened online. Some of the conversations that I've had [about attachment] with people who are school psychologists or reproductive psychiatrists, people who do really have training in this, are so much more nuanced than what you see on Instagram, or even in pop parenting books. It’s like, maybe you did not have the birth that you dreamed of, and you feel like you didn't get a chance to bond with your baby right away. What's gonna happen? What's gonna happen is that you will go home and continue to connect with your child and have that relationship ongoing, right? Like, I think just taking the pressure off of that.
The messages that do best online and also, honestly, in trade non-fiction oftentimes, are the ones that are very flashy and absolutist. ‘Here are the five steps.’ ‘This is how you raise a securely attached child.’ The nuance doesn't sell and circulate, but I think the nuance is really what matters.
AD: There was one moment in the book where I found myself so angry on your behalf. You were talking with your husband about wanting a second kid, and he was sort of like, ‘Okay, but you have to be more relaxed [postpartum] next time.’ That really resonated with me personally, because I'm not a very relaxed person, that's not really my MO. But I also felt like this was a microcosm of a much broader social phenomenon where women are told to calm down, lower your standards, it’s fine, what are you worried about? So I'm just curious about how you reflect back on that goal of trying to be ‘more relaxed’ now.
NR: I know! And at the time my response was like, ‘Yes, I will work so hard at being more relaxed.’ He wasn't wrong to want that. But I remember my editor leaving me a comment in that section where she said, ‘So what conversations did you have about how you would share the work differently and support each other better?’ And I was like, oh, good joke! I was not in a place where I could think about those things, right? I still really felt like, ‘Okay, this is my job. It's my job to carry the baby, it's my job to nurse the baby. It's my job to, you know, do most of the of the other stuff, and now it is also my job to be more relaxed about it.’
And I also really felt like I had been a problem in the postpartum period, like I had struggled and I felt bad, and then I felt bad because I felt bad. There's a limit to how helpful our terminology around maternal mental health broadly is, but if someone had been able to say to me, or if I had heard somewhere, like, ‘Wow, that sounds like postpartum anxiety! You could get some medication, you could go to therapy, you could, you know, even just share what is happening.’ But I just didn't even have a schema for that. I didn't have language for talking about the mental load or for talking about those things, which is so wild. I do look back on that now and think, like, oh man!
But I think the thing for me that gives me hope and hopefully is hopeful for other people, too, is that our relationship and our co-parenting have evolved so much since then. And I think that's true in the lives of just about everyone I know, that there are all of these opportunities to kind of rethink things and shift the balance, and we have shifted a lot since then.
AD: When I was preparing my questions for you, I was originally going to end with, ‘how do you define being a good mother?’ But I sort of think that's missing the point. You have this line in the coda that reads, “Before I had a baby, I was good. For a long time as a new mother, I was certain I was bad. I can see now that goodness was the trap.” How do you think about goodness now?
NR: I think for me—and I think this is true for a lot of people, maybe women especially—the times when I have tried to be ‘good’ at various things, whether it was being a good mother, being a good student, was really about a social role, and my idea of what someone else thought I should be doing. And I really think that goodness, and especially being a good mother, it takes us outside of ourselves.
The stuff that I really stressed about in early motherhood, and it still sometimes comes up for me, is oftentimes about, ‘Well, should I be doing X, Y, Z?’ And that stuff is usually not what actually matters for me or for my kid. What I have really tried to do is to shift away from trying to be good to instead trying to think of mothering as a relationship. Like, here are my particular kids. Here's who I am as a parent, and also just as a person, and getting to know what they need from me.
I really learned that from the women in my life who are not my kids’ parents, and watching them interact and engage with my kids, and being able to see like, ‘One thing that's really cool about your kid is XYZ.’ Or like, ‘I noticed that he responded in this way.’ That really particular form of attention and relationship is really complicated, but it's also really beautiful. It is a source of meaning and joy in a way that, like, trying to be a good mom just will never be.
You can learn more about Nancy Reddy and The Good Mother Myth here or sign up for Nancy’s excellent newsletter here.
This is my last “live” post for awhile as I head into my own parenting journey. Eek! But while I’m working on channeling Nancy’s relationship-oriented approach to motherhood, I’ve still aiming to have a few newsletters cued up for your enjoyment in my absence. See you on the other side (a.k.a. May)!
Looks like a great book! Susan Harding and Karen Barad write about scientific research, being to an extent, performative in that we are trying to construct narratives about human and natural phenomena through rigidly controlled experiments--this will always introduce a level of bias.
thank you so much for this conversation, Allison! (and for cleaning up a bit my many tangents and digressions!)