Trying to be Good Enough: Exploring Enculturative Intensive Motherhood Discourse

Abstract

Intensive motherhood is a pervasive discourse that enables and constrains mothers’ choices. However, intensive motherhood does not only affect mothers; it teaches each of us how we should judge a mother’s goodness. In this essay, I use autoethnographic moments of my life to explore how good mothers enact intensive motherhood discourse, highlighting how difficult it will be to undo the material effects of a discourse like intensive motherhood. Still, I argue that identifying how mothers have been made facilitates how to make mothers differently, offering hope that these hurtful discourses can be altered toward something better, however slowly.

“Would you say that you’re a better parent than most?” my male student asked.

My students and I are discussing the day’s assigned reading about parenting styles related to education. In their assignment for the day, a few students asked how I would classify how I raise my own children. Students in previous semesters hadn’t asked me about myself in this sense, so I’m unsettled by the question.

“No,” I answered honestly, if quickly.

“Really?” He pushed. “You study this stuff. I would think that would make you a better parent than most other people.”

I fumbled my way through some version of, “I research parenting discourses like intensive motherhood (Hays, 1996) to try to better understand them, but I also know I’ve been affected by them, so no, I don’t think I’m a better parent than others.”

“I bet you are,” another student—a mother herself—interjected, “I bet you are a good mom because you try to understand this,” meaning parenting discourses.

“Well, thank you, I appreciate that,” I say, trying to steer us in another direction.

I found myself reluctant to talk about my parenting and/or my kids as it felt somehow extra vulnerable in this moment, and I realize that while I mention my family occasionally in class, I don’t disclose all that much about my parenting choices. As a result, I felt on display discussing my parenting with my students, something they don’t know me well enough to judge, I’d presume. Despite deflecting the compliment, I replayed this moment after class, treasuring that my students were trying to note that my research may underscore my life while also being pulled up short by my own reluctance to further engage in the conversation.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I wasn’t sure how I got to this point, how I learned to be a (good) mother. I came across this quote that sparked my thinking, “We communicate to tell the world who we are, and our communication with others helps to create, solidify, and reconstruct who we are to ourselves” (Rittenour et al., 2014, p. 228, emphasis original). Perhaps it’s through my research that I’m trying to figure out how I came to be the parent and person I am. What are some of the influences and discourses that have shaped my understanding of parenting now?

As I continued to reflect on this moment with my students, what I’ve come to is this: “Good” mothers are made. Culturally in the United States, we learn intensive motherhood through an enculturative process of the impossible standards of good motherhood and use those standards to judge the mothers we encounter. Hays (1996) explains intensive motherhood as “child-centered, expert-guided, emotionally absorbing, labor-intensive, and financially expensive” (p. 8, emphasis original). The ideal standard for intensive motherhood is white, straight, married, middle-class, cis, able-bodied women (Wiant Cummins & Brannon, 2022). Thus, intensive motherhood upholds white supremacy and capitalist, neoliberal ideologies (hooks, 2015). Despite this ideal, mothers across the spectrum of identity categories are judged based on intensive motherhood norms (Bell, 2004; Green, 2015).

Intensive motherhood is a disciplining discourse in which mothers share the “responsibility” for policing themselves with each “audience” with which they interact. Whether mothers discipline themselves, certainly those around them will offer judgments. Because I fit the intensive motherhood ideal in many ways, interrogating the insidious nature of discourses like intensive motherhood is critical to undermining the unquestioned privilege inherent in the ideal. In this essay, I use autoethnographic moments to discuss how I learned to enact “good mother” and how we might learn to be “good enough” mothers who are supportive of one another instead.

I use autoethnography to position my experiences of being made into a “good” mother as the research data. Autoethnography requires researchers to investigate the experiences of the self as they connect to larger cultural experiences (Ellis et al., 2011) with the central purpose of creating “meaningful, critical discourse” about the world (Denzin, 1997, p. 227). As Ellis (2013) explains, autoethnography has become a way of engaging the world that asks autoethnographers to consider “how and why we think, act, and feel as we do” (p. 10). Autoethnography makes the stories of our lives matter by humanizing how we experience the world (Adams et al., 2017). Fundamentally, this means that autoethnographic stories are embodied, that our embodied experiences are relational and pedagogical (Alexander, 2020; Pelias, 2013); that is, sharing our stories is both instructive and generative in ways that might make others feel a little less alone. While my stories are individually mine, I aim to show how they connect to a larger enculturative process that hurts mothers and ultimately creates an inequitable society.

Learning to be (a) Good (Girl)

Clearly, I learned to be (a) good (mother) somewhere. It’s certainly not an inherent quality, even if intensive motherhood maintains that mothering is natural (O’Reilly, 2016). Coll et al. (2018) argue children are “inundated” by the enculturation process as soon as they enter the world (p. 2), as enculturation affects “behavior, values, knowledge, and cultural identity” (p. 1). Thus, enculturation influences much of who we understand ourselves to be in the world.

One way we are enculturated into our societies is through discourses, like intensive motherhood, that permeate culture. Frankenberg (1993) describes discourses as “historically constituted bodies of ideas providing conceptual frameworks for individuals, made material in design and creation of institutions and shaping daily practices, interpersonal interactions, and social relations” (p. 266). In her study about good (white) girls, Moon (1998) builds on Frankenberg’s definition to say that cultural practices are the material effects of discourses, which then reinscribe one another. Moon (1998) claims much of the enculturative process begins in the home because home is where we form the bulk of our identities. After all, the people who raise us are often our first teachers and we learn societal discourses from them.

Intensive motherhood, as one example, is a pervasive discourse affecting how society judges mothers while the discourse is also reproduced by mothers. Chrisler (2013) calls this the motherhood mystique which

defines good mothers as always patient, kind, nurturing, receptive, gentle, and soft-spoken. Any mother who is annoyed, angry, impatient, loud, frustrated, bored, turned inward, or otherwise unapproachable is considered to be a “bad” mother, as is anyone who violates the motherhood mystique’s expectation of easy competence—a mother who always knows just what to do for her children. To be labeled a “bad” mother is one of the worst things that can be said about a woman; it is a clear loss of status, an indication that she is not a “real” woman. (p. 118)

In other words, to be a mother who has feelings about motherhood that are outside of a falsified natural, easy, and pleasurable fairy tale experience is a failure (Chrisler, 2013). Wall (2010) even argues that things like the marketing of educational enrichment toys for children upholds intensive motherhood, demonstrating that mothers have the ability and “duty” to shape their children’s lives, and that to not do it well or correctly reflects poorly on the mother (p. 255).

So, I learned to be a good girl, which made it easy for me to accept the intensive motherhood discourse—that to be a good mother meant to be agreeable and self-sacrificing, especially on behalf of my child(ren). And all of this was before I even became a mother. I turn next to how intensive motherhood played out in pregnancy before considering motherhood itself.

Learning to be a Good Mother

When I found out I was pregnant with my first child, I did what any good academic would do: I researched relentlessly. I took it as a personal mission to read everything I could. I learned about pregnancy—what was normal and what was not—and I researched birth. I figured out what I thought I wanted out of a birth, and I flagged ideas in books to share with my partner. Somewhere along the way, I was starting to feel panic at the sheer number of flags I had sticking out of the thickest book and wondering when my partner would finally read them.

“Um, are you ever going to read these flagged sections of the baby book?” I ask, probably not particularly kindly.

“What are they?” my partner responds.

“They’re stuff about the baby,” I retort, incredulous at his audacity to ask. What else would they be? We’re approximately 2 months out from being parents to a newborn and it still feels like there’s an enormous task list to accomplish.

“Why do I need to read them?” My partner ponders, noting that I had read them, and wondering what I need him to read that I could not relay.

“Because you need to know this stuff too!” Now I am frustrated.

My partner takes the flagged book, flips through some of it, and looks at me. “Some of this stuff is about hypothetical things our baby might have when they’re two. Maybe we can wait to read that until, or if, this becomes a particular concern.”

I gape, like a fish, searching for an adequate response. I don’t have one. “But . . . but . . .” I stammer.

My partner calmly puts the book down, places his hands on my arms lovingly, and says, “If you’re feeling this overwhelmed, maybe it’s time to stop researching. You’ve been researching nonstop for months and you’re going to stress yourself out if you don’t slow down and try to relax.”

As frustrated as I am that my partner wouldn’t just read the damn flags, I had to admit that letting go of the sheer amount of labor I dedicated to seeking and parsing out expert guidance felt good. I could look things up as needed, but I also had gathered enough information to understand what questions I had that still required answers. Unfortunately, all the information in the world couldn’t adequately prepare me for the experience of doing life in a pregnant body, especially because pregnancy, as Crawford (2006) notes, is a “powerful stimuli for the behavior of others” (p. 277).

Performing Good Mother

Much like pregnancy, good motherhood is performed. For Neiterman (2012), doing pregnancy is a process that includes,

(1) the process of learning to be pregnant (by reading relevant literature and listening to the advice of others): [sic] (2) the process of adapting to pregnancy through mastering the daily routines of self-care (such as eating, drinking, exercising, walking, sleeping); and (3) constant performing of pregnancy (ensuring that the process of “doing” pregnancy is acknowledged and approved by others). (p. 373)

Thus, whether the performance is successful is based on the audience’s perception for which the pregnancy is performed (Neiterman, 2012). The judgments about whether someone is a good mother are based on the audience’s perception, even when that’s a mythical audience in the mother’s mind. Mothers conjur audiences for themselves, disciplining themselves according to the particular intensive motherhood vision of good mother they have in their own minds. More often than not, mothers do not live up to their ideal, leaving them with increased guilt (Collins, 2021), a guilt that is so commonplace as to be considered a normal part of motherhood (Sutherland, 2010), but which O’Reilly (2016) believes is one way intensive motherhood works to maintain mothers’ self-discipline. Still, mothers continue performing for audiences similarly enculturated within the discourse to garner and maintain their good mother status which offers a kind of security (Ennis, 2014), all the while relegating mothers’ questions, concerns, and experiences to the private sphere to be faced alone. For many mothers, intensive motherhood undermines the choices they make, causing mothers to question if they know enough to be good, reinforcing the intensive motherhood dictum that expert advice matters more than experience or community wisdom.

***

“And the baby is nursing every two to three hours?” the pediatrician asks, writing my answers in my baby’s chart.

“Yes,” I respond, noting the assumption that I am exclusively breastfeeding, even if that happens to be true at the moment. “But it still really hurts, and I’m not sure what else to do,” I add.

“Some discomfort is to be expected,” the doctor says as she investigates my baby’s range of motion. “Have you met with a lactation consultant yet?”

I recall the visit with the lactation consultant who had come to our house the week prior. After explaining to the midwife who had helped in my baby’s delivery that I was still experiencing quite a bit of pain when my baby nursed, she had checked my baby’s latch to make sure there were no visual, physical issues impacting breastfeeding before then recommending the lactation consultant. The lactation consultant conveniently came to the house, then asked me to nurse the baby so she could observe and recommend changes. The consultant showed me different ways to hold the baby that might alleviate discomfort (they did not, or they added different pressures on my arms or body that were unhelpful) as well as showing me different ways to help the baby latch for nursing. Ultimately, her visit gave me a few tricks to try, but nothing that fully eliminated my concerns.

I explain a bit of the experience to the pediatrician, saying I had mentioned to both the midwife and the lactation consultant that I was concerned my baby had a lip tie that might be impeding our nursing experience with unnecessary pain to me. Perhaps the medical experts each considered that 70% of first-time nursing mothers experience nipple pain even before being discharged from the hospital (Buck et al., 2014), and that the baby and I would eventually figure out what worked for us. Although we did figure out a way together, I relied on those experts to tell me that the experience was normal, that I could change only certain factors. In hindsight, I wish I had fought harder, that I had trusted my gut that more could be done to alleviate the pain, that I had at least explored the possibility more that a lip tie revision might have meant I did not have to slowly get used to the discomfort. Instead, I relied on the expert guidance I had in front of me and my own lack of experience could not overcome the strong urge to be a good mother who listened and labored, despite pain, for the benefit of my child.

***

For me, one of the most insidious ways I experience intensive motherhood is as a small, pernicious voice in the back of my mind that reminds me that it is imperative I get every choice correct or I risk long-term damage to my children. This voice is loudest as I navigate my way through being a working mother. Trying to be a good mother, according to intensive motherhood, results for me in a lack of balance, a preoccupation with time, and, of course, guilt.

***

“Okay, Mom can play for 20 minutes and then she has to go work,” I tell my children, setting a timer on my phone. I set the timer so I can try to be present with them, to let go of the incessant call of my academic work. When I am home with my children, I try to ignore my phone and my to-do list and focus on the imaginative play. Yet, when I am with them, I find all I can think about is work—the presentations that need grading, the lessons that need planning, and the research that needs doing. I wonder if they think I set the timer because I’m counting down the minutes until I can escape them. I worry, all the time, that they do not see me engaging in work because I like it or feel I have to but because they think I want to not be with them. I knew that as a working mother, it would be important for my children to see me be passionate about my job, but I don’t want my kids to think it’s at their cost.

“We have twelve minutes left,” I tell my children, reminding them that the timer will eventually be going off, hoping to avoid frustration and disagreements when our time is done. My children continue teaching me the rules of the game they have asked to play, setting the scene we will then enact. As I try to find my way in the story, constantly messing up, it seems, I wonder how much time has gone by. The to-do list revs up in my mind, ready to replay on loop. I check the phone again. “Two minutes,” I casually drop into the conversation. I know when my children go to bed and I am sitting at my computer trying to work, all I will focus on is how I could have or should have done more with the kids. I will think about the adventures I want to take them on and what fun events we might explore, and I will worry that I am not a good mother.

“Oh, there’s the timer. Mom’s going to go work now,” I brace myself for the disappointment. I think about the card my youngest recently brought home where she answered that her mom’s favorite thing to do was work. I said to her, “You know Mom plays with you, too, right? I don’t work all the time.”

“I know,” she said, “but you do like to work.”

“I like to play with you too,” I say, hoping she believes it, knowing, yet again, that I must struggle with the balance. I cannot seem to be fully present in either scenario, feeling the pull of the good mother and the good worker as a dialectic (Christopher, 2012). I am stuck between competing worlds. I want to be child-centered, to focus on my kids and be a good mother, but I don’t feel like I’m even good enough. My kids deserve better, and I’m scared that isn’t me. As I seek balance, I spend many nights replaying my day, worrying and making grandiose promises about how I’ll figure it all out tomorrow.

Like Sutherland (2010) suggests, guilt is a constant in my experience of motherhood. Guilt underscores every decision I make, wondering if I am teaching my kids the lessons I hope I am, or if my choices unwittingly teach them something else entirely. I worry more than I should about whether I am a good mother, knowing my standards for myself are flawed by intensive motherhood. I understand, study, and know that intensive motherhood is an impossible standard, but I find myself still aiming to somehow fulfill dictates with which I do not even agree. I cannot yet report that I have found some magical answer, some way of engaging in a balancing act where mothers can have it all (e.g., Kornfield, 2014). Instead, I keep trying to disentangle the layers of discourse in which I find myself.

Good Mother Implications

It’s a hot, summer day, the sun high in the sky. I sit in the clear, cool water, tinted aqua from the pool’s bottom. With my arms resting on the side of the pool, I watch my legs float gently in front of me, noticing the way the water holds me up, surrounds me, makes it hard to move against. I actively work to pull my toes up, breaking the surface of the water, only to allow them to be pulled back under. I feel the waves lap up the sides of my swimsuit, enjoying the temperature and believing I have control of how much of me ends up wet. This is what it’s like for me to contend with intensive motherhood, to feel supported, buoyant in it and yet to know how quickly it can pull me down, hold my head under while I thrash against it. I move and live in the discourse, even as I try to name and resist it. I can pull myself out of the water, but the water droplets continue to make rivulets down my body. I can never fully escape the discourse that surrounds me, even as I want to resist or change intensive motherhood.

So, when my students ask me if I’m a better parent because I study intensive motherhood, I suddenly become aware of all the ways I still enact the discourse. I think about the ways I perform good mothering for audiences. For instance, I was recently sitting in a waiting room with my youngest child next to me. She played on her tablet with her headphones on while we waited for the oldest to finish her appointment. There were two other adults in the waiting room and they unknowingly became an audience for me to perform good mother. It wasn’t exactly intentional; I didn’t think to myself, “Hm, how can I ensure these people know I am a good mother, one who doesn’t let her child play incessantly on their tablet against expert advice?” Yet, I caught myself performing attentive mother while we waited: checking-in frequently, reminding my child about her verbal volume with the headphones on, offering her snacks and water. Although these are genuinely things I would do for my child without an audience, I wondered why it was suddenly so important for these strangers to understand that I was a good mother. I wanted to show that I deserved the status they could confer, and I was enacting the performance to achieve their approval. Reflecting on my student’s question, I don’t think this makes me a better parent; I merely have a label to attach to the feeling.

Enculturation in intensive motherhood certainly means I use the discourse to judge others as well. The research I did while preparing to have children means I have strong opinions about how some things should be done. When I come across another mother who does not follow what I consider safety regulations for car seats, for example, I find myself judging them. I do not pause to consider what other research or expert guidance they may have sought, if any. I find myself judging their (perceived) inability to keep their children safe. While I do not verbalize these thoughts, I do keep that knowledge forefront in my mind if my children play at those mothers’ homes. Steeped in the discourse of intensive motherhood requires vigilant reflexivity of how I might enact the discourse, how it enables me to make certain choices and judgments and how those choices preclude community with others.

When I find myself in a frustrating parenting moment, the intensive motherhood voice in my head gets so loud, perniciously whispering, “This is what a ‘good mom’ would do,” while detailing all the ways I am failing. On my best days, I can speak back to it, argue that the discourse is lonely, hurtful, and shaming, and that none of those feelings is a good place from which to parent. On my worst days, I wear the shame like a mantle, beating myself up for not measuring up to the learned ideal in my head. All the ways I don’t measure up hinders my ability to see outside of myself, to see ways to mother that don’t include intensive motherhood standards, that might allow me to find solace in being “good enough.”

Good motherhood is alluring precisely because there is a kind of belonging and self-worth found in it (Ennis, 2014). However, it is a false sense of security; intensive motherhood persists because mothers perform for public audiences. From my admittedly limited vantage point, there are important ways mothers can resist intensive motherhood. To me, the most important point is that we must first notice when and how the discourse is affecting us. It may be impossible to fully ascertain all the ways we experience intensive motherhood, but seeking to introspectively, reflexively notice its effects is a powerful first step. Second, mothers must discuss with one another their experiences of motherhood, particularly the ways we feel we do not measure up as mothers. Despite the intense vulnerability required of this sharing, it is imperative to break down the isolating, individualizing private sphere to which most of these experiences are relegated. Dismantling these barriers is precisely the key to working toward collective action which might benefit all parents. We must build coalitions around changing intensive motherhood to something more akin to “good enough” mothering, to understand that some mothers, such as some mothers of color, experience parenting as more affirming than intensive motherhood could ever allow (e.g., Hill Collins, 1991; hooks, 2015).

Good mothers are made. They are made through inundation with intensive motherhood discourses, through the disciplining and performances of good motherhood. In this essay, I’ve used autoethnographic reflections of my own life to identify how I enact “good motherhood” performances. But, if good mothers are made, it means they can be made differently. It means that every resistance to intensive motherhood matters, that noticing and communicating about our experiences moves us toward collective change in community. It means recognizing that the audience of our children might be the most important audience of all so that they can see how the world might be created differently and that none of us are alone as we navigate parenting in community. When our children see us do parenting differently, especially regarding gender norms, it affects children’s attitudes about how to interact with a variety of people (Rittenour et al., 2014). Our performances of mothering, of parenting in general, can help reframe for our children how to do parenting in ways that do not privilege white supremacy, sacrifice, and burnout at the expense of community and selfhood. Moreover, returning to the Rittenour et al. (2014) quote from the beginning, our performances of mothering help us communicate who we are and want to be to the world and to ourselves. Learning to be some version of a “good enough” mother in community and embodying that model for our children is one way we can rectify some of the damage the pervasive intensive motherhood discourse has wrought in Western cultures.