The Mother is a Pawn and a Consequence
Are messy monstrous moms in or out?
In the first episode of HBO’s new comedy-horror series, The Baby, a young woman named Natasha finds herself stuck with an infant who literally falls out of the sky and into her arms. Unlike her friends and sister, Natasha doesn’t want kids, and she is understandably bewildered, frustrated, and totally disconnected from the cute but needy stranger baby—even more so when other characters in the show treat Natasha like the baby's mother without questioning where the baby came from. When Natasha begins to fall apart, everyone paints her as mad, assuming she is struggling with her “postpartum” mental health.
Natasha’s bizarre coercion into motherhood—and the non-choice between pathology and acquiescence with which she is presented in the show—makes The Baby a timely enough allegory of our current moment all on its own. As we await a Supreme Court ruling that will likely strip abortion rights in America, so much in The Baby feels terrifyingly recognizable.
To boot, the baby in The Baby mysteriously causes the deaths of anyone who gets in the way of his budding connection with Natasha. The child’s uncanny, all-consuming presence quickly upends Natasha’s life, luring her into the cult of motherhood, from which she can locate no exit, and forcing her to make an impossible decision: Natasha must decide whether to kill the baby or to care for it.
The show’s creators couldn’t have known that the series would drop right as the Supreme Court is threatening to codify these two limited paths, but Natasha’s terrifying inability to refuse the mother role without rendering herself a killer has made the show particularly haunting to watch over the past few weeks. For me, the show has often felt too close, and not close enough.
And yet, the duality Natasha faces in The Baby—mother or monster—is not a new one. Women face the non-choice of motherhood in America, to varying degrees, largely based on racial and economic privilege, every day in America, and they have for a long time. The Baby just dramatizes the inner workings of a culture that pressures women into motherhood by telling stories of those who refuse motherhood in grim and violent terms.
The show, however, takes a playful hand with the material. In a recent piece, Amanda Hess calls The Baby “a not-quite-sendup of a genre that imbues the trials of motherhood with a paranormal charge.” In spots, the show is funny and cheeky about the eerie quality of mom culture.
Hess argues that other narratives in this maternal horror genre overlap with the culture of maternal overwork and bedragglement that has sprung up around American motherhood, intensified by the pandemic. Of those narratives, the ones that individualize the supposed terrors of motherhood, Hess writes, can be frustrating: “Though the lack of support for mothers is a structural problem, it is reframed as a personal one,” Hess writes. “Mothers are made to suffer, and then they are flattened into a long-suffering mother persona.”
Monster moms have been having a revival since the pandemic began, but it’s hard to tell if they are in or out. Lydia Kiesling wrote beautifully in December about how much Hollywood loves the monstrous mommy, even though they usually don’t do her justice. Kiesling opens her essay with an image of the mess of being a mom working at home—her daughter bops her on the head with a stuffed seal as she writes—but does so to highlight the tradition into which such images play. “Harried moms are enshrined in paper-towel commercials,” Kiesling writes, “while our political institutions show a Teflon-like resistance to addressing their material needs.”
In early 2021, I wrote about the hot mess mom, that unkempt, overworked mother we have come to know so well in recent years, who is just a few steps away from full-on monsterization. Underneath the hot mess mom’s dark circles and food-stained shirts and heavy drinking is her perpetual over-extension caused by a disgruntled compliance with the demands of a seemingly natural state—this thing we call, usually without much socioeconomic context, just motherhood. Humorously disastrous moms help naturalize the hustle culture of intensive parenting, postpartum and parental alienation, the unequal gendered distribution of labor, the devaluation of care in American policy, and all the other historically specific (and often horrific) aspects of raising children in America today.
I was also frustrated, in other words, when I wrote that essay, with how frequently we frame what Pooja Lakshmin calls betrayal as a natural part of caring for children: the hot mess mom is a product of economic policy, though of course that’s rarely how we view her. The messy mom of early 2021, however, now pales in comparison to the horror show of what it feels like to be a mother, and a woman, in America today, as this popular little flowchart demonstrates:
The pandemic really thrust the hot mess mom, and all of us, into the underworld. So has the stacked Supreme Court attack on abortion rights (and likely birth control next), efforts to reverse the modest gains of MeToo, and the desperate cling to guns and policing and other institutions of empire. We live in an era in which women are being forced into motherhood while there is a formula shortage, no universally affordable healthcare or childcare, minimal tampons, and so on, you know the drill, see above, etc. Really, it often does feel like we’re living in a horror movie.
But of course, there’s a weird rub in all this, and with messy moms especially, who are mostly a feature of white motherhood, protected from turning totally monstrous or derelict by their racial privilege. The performance of maternal suffering, online and as an aspect of one’s identity, also complicates so many of our maternal archetypes.
There’s a thin line, for instance, between playing into a culture of disaster and merely refusing to hide the total chaos of parenting today as a fact of one’s life when posting about said life online (i.e. who isn’t a “mess” or a “monster” at turns/all the time, and by hiding it, do we only reinforce the idea that parents in this country can fix parenting in this country by themselves?).
How we present ourselves publicly is also wrapped up in other factors, such as how we make money online, why mothers turn to certain forms of work in a capitalist system that doesn’t pay them for their work at home, what hot-mess-ish appeals and outrage attract the average mom consumer through an economics of recognition, and what all this has to do with the broader representation of (white) motherhood.
How we represent motherhood in art, however, and what we go looking for in representations of mothers in art—especially in this political and cultural moment—are for me quite different questions, even if identity in the age of social media has become a kind of public art practice that often feels inseparable from art making itself.
And the monstrous mother, as an aesthetic trope, is not a product of the pandemic or even modern or American motherhood. She’s has been around for centuries and has inspired all sorts of foundational cultural narratives and conversations. Female monsters have been reviled and loved by both misogynists and feminists since antiquity. And Barbara Creed argued in her canonical book on the subject, The Monstrous-Feminine, that while there are many iterations of monstrous women, they are all stand-ins for fears of the reproductive body.
The monstrous woman is a figment of the male imagination, which is not to say that only men enjoy her, but rather that she is an embodiment of the patriarchal fear of castration, for the psychoanalytically minded, or more simply, the fear that someone (a woman) will come take all the power from the guys. Monstrous women usually make maternal power and birthing bodies particularly scary and gross.
Monstrous mommies are having a little pandemic moment because so much of the current political discourse is tied to the question of what a mother and a woman is—and underneath that, what America could be if its institutions and policies did not only serve white men and did not rely on “Woman” to do all the caring.
While I feel mostly annoyed by messy motherhood as it manifests online, I get pleasure from the consumption of narratives and images of mothers so overrun by the hauntingly draining work of motherhood that they are driven to violent extremes. For me, they underline, at a safe and entertaining distance, the pain I have felt in my own life, the experience of nearly losing control, of snapping, of looking/feeling #dark, of standing on that threshold. I like revenge narratives, especially, for the catharsis and the dream.
The larger dream, of course, is moving past a culture of monsterization, because so much of that culture hammers at one point: a world set against care makes monsters of us all.
I find myself constantly trying to locate the institutional critiques in art about monstrous women. In The Baby, before Natasha is faced with the choice between murderer or mother, she’s just a messy mom who can’t get it together. But by the end of the season, she’s far down the other side of the spectrum. Characters in the show evoke the term “monster” several times in the final episodes. Who is the monster, they are all asking: the baby? the mother? the father? the world?
The crazy baby’s cursed violence is ultimately tied to his birth mother’s forced pregnancy and the cruelty of a heteronormative, male-dominated world. Learning this, Natasha decides the only way to cure the baby of its impulse to kill is to love it. In this story, as in our current political moment, the baby is both a pawn and a consequence, as is the mother’s suffering.
This is one reason we are destined to revisit mother-monsters, whether mothers themselves feel over them or not: they are a condition of the ways in which mothers are used, culturally. And they won’t go away until the still-strong cultural desire for women’s subjugation goes away.
In The Baby, curing the baby through mother love also doesn’t pan out. Though Natasha convinces herself for a time that caring for the baby could be her “reason” for living, one takeaway of the show ends up being that the baby can’t be a reason/ you are reason enough, which falls a bit flat against the baby’s abusive family origin story.
Still, I’m a fan of what The Baby is trying to do. As I’ve written in this newsletter, other mother-monster narratives tend to rely on deep-seated fears of caring too much: mother-love taken to the point of deadly suffocation, rendering either the mother or the child a psychopath, men and power curiously hiding off stage or somehow afflicted.
Americans love the idea that mothers have a frightening power to take life because they have the power to give it. Such stories secure a vague, collective distrust of mothers, stoke an unbroken patriarchal fear of maternal power, and excuse the violent control of women’s bodies.
But the horror stories I have been most drawn to lately literalize our most disturbing political rhetoric, while poking holes in the institutions (like white motherhood) that codify these ideas. I’ve spent some time thinking about this lately: Am I just a lover, then, of art-as-propaganda in these hard times? Is that all I can take? Have I fallen into seeking out only the stories that confirm what I already perceive to be true about the world?
No, I just like a mother-monster made for a gaze that cares, rather than one meant for the hungry eyes of relentless misogynistic tradition.
Wow! What an incredible write up. I'm watching the show now and am marveling at it and your helpful commentary. Thank you.
I have so many scary poems and difficult?/threatening?) paintings I’ve done that I have had to put away, delete, file for someday that will never come b/c they’re not bowls of flowers or fruit or from “The Catalog of Acceptable Dessert Cart of Art.” Paintings done by the stranger within (like a call from inside the house) by the one who risks the truth in a lie loving world. Makes one sad to always feel the need to wallpaper over one’s windows with the usual Stepford Wallpaper rather than tear down broken, non-serviceable, bland walls for the incredible vista of tolerance & human equity!