Pope Francis and the Mommy Trap

The Holy Father is all about mothers. In Ecuador, he warned of a “mother wound,” which threatens to leave children too emotionally crippled to give and receive love. According to the pope, everyone emerges from childhood with a mother wound, since no mother is perfect, but the children of harsh or negligent mothers sustain an even deeper one. To help the family realize its potential as a “hospital” and a “domestic Church,” Francis proposed a “mama ministry” and a “mama miracle.”

Francis is right that mothers are important, but I would argue that the world needs no reminders on that point. Glancing around the room today, you’ll see tiger moms and fit moms and helicopter moms. Every one of them has her followers and emulators, as well as her detractors and outright haters. Mothering and motherhood continue to obsess us no less than when Thackeray wrote “Mother is the name of God in the lips and heart of small children.”

Maybe Ecuadorian women get to hang their kids on hooks while they shoot pool, but among us Yanquis, no group has to live with so many daily reminders of just how badly they’re doing it wrong. In 1942, with the publication of Generation of Vipers, Philip Wylie launched the trend. In a style reminiscent of Mencken’s, if Mencken had ever tried shrooms, he indicts the nation for affirming the self-regard of busybody women and creating a cult of “Megaloid momworship.” Through this, writes Wylie, “The women of America raped the men, not sexually, unfortunately, but morally, since neuters come hard by morals.”

That’s what she said. But before American mothers had begun to live down Wylie’s accusations, Betty Friedan, attempting to dispel the feminine mystique, told them all to get the hell out of the house and into law school. And then someone else wrote something else, and along came attachment parenting. And then Elisabeth Badinter showed up to inform mothers that they were turning their children into kings and themselves into slaves.

From this distance, it looks as though the only way to get mothers to quit trying so hard is to tell them they’re stupid or wicked for trying so hard – and then, to order them to try something even harder. It’s a no-brainer that a mother’s work is never done, what with all the self-assessing society obliges her to engage in. That it ever gets started should count as a miracle.

How can I, not being a mother, speak so glibly about maternal guilt and anxiety? That’s easy – I have a mother. Even now that I’m well grown, she continues to ask herself, “Where did I go wrong?” Even on a good day, she’ll come up with an answer. On a bad day, she’ll come up with about 17.

Ever since I can remember, she’s been comparing her mothering style with her friends’ mothering styles, and she never calls it for herself. Sometimes I tell her, “Look, the next time your cronies start in with their my-kid-bought-a-brownstone stories, just tell them I write for The National Review. They’d rather die than read it, so they’ll never know the truth.” She insists that’s not the point, which is a very selfless, motherly-type answer.

Pope Francis, who, after all, had a mother of his own, has tried from time to time to lighten the maternal burden. To a woman who asked how she could encourage her grown son to marry, the pontiff answered, “Quit ironing his shirts.” In a recent general audience, he divided the responsibility for childhood trauma between both parents as fairly as Philip Larkin did. But in his latest address, he fell into the trap of laying both the problem and the solutions at mom’s feet.

But then Francis did something both innovative and helpful – he offered earthly mothers a labor-saver in the form of the Blessed Mother. As Fr. Dwight Longenecker interprets his message: “Through a devotional relationship with the Blessed Virgin Mary we find a mother’s love that is complete, and this love fulfills what was lacking in our own family dynamic.” He adds that “This healing is available at both the individual and corporate level, and it comes to us most effectively within the dynamic of the family.”

Reading between the lines, one detects something refreshing here: Perfect maternal love can’t be found here on earth. Mothers are human, just like everyone else. Moms, quit beating yourselves up. Kids, give the old girl a break. If you haven’t gotten your fill of mothering even after she’s fixed your favorite organic chicken fingers for the third time in two weeks, pray to Mary and meditate on her life. And if that doesn’t work, wait till you grow up and go through a phase where you date older women.

But to preclude the risk of holding Mary up to mothers as a depressingly inaccessible role model, the pope might have added that she had a pretty easy time in some ways. She was blessed with a perfect kid. Yes, her heart was pierced with a sword – but only once. Plus, she lived in a society where a child could wander off and turn up days later in a temple without neighbors stoning the parents to death.