Mitali Saran: A mother's love

To pretend that parents don't have doubts, face negative feelings about their kids undermines the struggle they go through

Maternal love: the infinite, unconditional, body-temperature ambrosia that creates and nurtures life. It makes a woman sacrifice herself at the altar of her child; it spurs a child to ever-greater heights of duty and accomplishment; it is the bedrock of family, and thus of nation; it is the survival mechanism of the species, much relied on, much eulogised, and much culturally valorised.

That’s the story.

In the public imagination there is nothing more symbolic of unswerving devotion than motherhood, and therefore no greater betrayal than a mother who pokes large holes in this expectation by harming her child. In fact, it doesn’t even matter whether she actually did or didn’t; the very suspicion of it is anathema to society. Businesswoman Indrani Mukerjea — currently in custody and being questioned in connection with the disappearance of her daughter Sheena Bora — has already been convicted by television studios and opinion pieces, which aren’t even pretending to use the word “alleged”. Dentist Nupur Talwar, who actually was tried and convicted by a court of law, on the charge of killing her daughter Aarushi, was convicted by public opinion long before that. (Q: What kind of mother does not cry on television over the loss of her daughter? A: The kind that must have murdered her child.)

I’m not interested, here, in these specific cases and the guilt or innocence of either of these women. Guilt and innocence is for investigators and the judicial process to determine, based on evidence. My point is only that the mother who can even fall under suspicion of such a thing is seen as a hideous perversion of humanity, a betrayer of the trust placed in her by society, a trust taken to be as sure a bet as biology. Because after all, maternal love is that perfect, Teflon-coated thing that floats above all the other complicated muck that we think of as human.

That is, if you’ll pardon the expression, a load of bollocks.

Yes, there is something primal and biologically determined about being responsible for a tiny squalling creature that is wholly dependent on you. Yes, most parents would move heaven and earth to protect their children. But to pretend that this is because of some biologically bestowed gift, rather than because of excruciatingly difficult resolve, constantly tested, is to gloss over some of the most intriguing and complex emotional states we experience.

Author Lionel Shriver wrote a novel called We Need to Talk About Kevin, which dissects a mother-son relationship that is the opposite of the Hallmark version of motherhood. Ms Shriver summarised it best herself in a piece in The Guardian: “Kevin is a dark book, and many of those initial rejections [from publishers] objected that its narrator, Eva, is ‘unattractive’: a woman uneasy about pregnancy, who feels alarmingly blank after childbirth, and fails to form the bond with her boy that we like to imagine is as instinctive as closing the epiglottis when we swallow.”

There was significant reader backlash over this portrait of motherhood as a relationship like any other, filled with dislike and suspicion. And yet, the novel also won Ms Shriver an Orange Prize, and became a bestseller. It looked awfully like a case of literature speaking uncomfortable truths.

We probably sanitise the parent-child relationship so assiduously because we are so acutely aware of how messy it is. We’re even socialised to think of the womb as the safest place in the world, where a baby can lie around passively for nine months, being loved, nourished and protected by its mother — when in fact, science shows the maternal-foetal relationship to be a great deal more adversarial and competitive than that.

A large number of mothers I’ve known have eventually articulated, out of earshot of the children, feelings we do not typically associate with maternal love. The truth is that as much as it is normal for mothers to love their children to distraction, it is equally normal for them to sometimes, or more than sometimes, actively dislike their children; to wish they had never had them; to compete with them; to want them out of the way; to think them ugly or stupid; to harbour nostalgia for life before them and look forward to life after they leave home; to feel contempt for them; to be unforgiving of their shortcomings; to feel alienated from their essential otherness; to be bored by them; to want them dead; to lash out at them verbally, emotionally and physically; and to feel miserable and trapped in the jobs and routines that sustain family life.

Parents power through these feelings to continue to care for their children, and that is a form of heroism. Some cannot, and that is their tragedy. But to pretend that those feelings do not exist, to paint maternal love with candy stripes and unicorns, is to dumb down, and defang, a wild and fascinating human process.