The Truly Feminine Mother
by ANNA MARY WELLS
1
MRS. COWAN had for a long time felt a strong affinity to the family’s female cat, but it did not become clear and explicit until she read Modern Woman: The Lost Sex by Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia F. Farnham, M.D. Reading books about psychiatry and psychology was one of Mrs. Cowan’s weaknesses; it, had been responsible for a great many errors in the upbringing of her two children born during the 1930’s. .John B. Watson had dominated the field then, and Jane, born in 1933, had been brought up according to the theories of behavioristic psychology. She had been fed on a rigid schedule, never picked up when she cried, trained for the toilet before she was a year old, required to eat everything that was set before her, and told all the facts of life with which her parents were then conversant by the time she was three. Mrs. Cowan simply refused to contemplate what she had done to Jane by the standards of the 1940 psychiatrists; it didn’t bear thinking of.
Hilda, coming along in 1936, had had an easier time of it, not because the psychiatrists had got around to changing their minds, but because the workout with Jane had loft both Mr. and .Mrs. Cowan a little tired. Ceorge, in 1940, was late enough to get the benefit of the pendulpm swing. Having allowed him to develop more naturally, Mrs. Cowan hoped she was on the right track at last but was compelled to admit that at seven he was not so easy a child to live with as Jane had been.
On the whole Dr. Farnham approved of Mrs. Cowan because she was a home woman and had fulfilled herself by bearing and personally rearing three children. The jacket of the book said that the doctor herself had two. Her collaborator was a man, and the number of his offspring was not mentioned. The surprising thing was that the doctor would not have approved of the cat if she could have observed her as intimately as Mrs. Cowan did. The cat’s adjustment to the demands civilization, or even life, made of a female was definitely neurotic.
It began with the fit of restlessness which always made Mr. or Mrs. Cowan say, “Oh, dear, we should have sent her to the vet.” So they should, but he said the operation held more risks for a cat who had been several times a mother than for a female kitten, and the children could not endure the thought of allowing her to undergo any risks. And each time Mr. and Mrs. Cowan thought perhaps they could persuade the children to keep one of the kittens and give the cat away. And it was so much simpler to open the door and let her out than to make arrangements with the veterinarian.
To this part of the process at least the cat was well adjusted; she went out and she did not come back until she was ready to curl up in the patch of sun behind the radio and sleep for three days straight. The only complication was that the black tom from down the street sat on the window sill outside glaring at her, alternately switching his tail and howling in rage.
The unwed mother is usually a mess psychologically even before her child is born, Dr. Farnham said. She has failed in her primary duty to provide social and financial security for her child. Well, the cat Avas certainly a failure by that standard; neighbor children and school friends in droves would offer to take the kittens and then the next day would report that their mothers wouldn’t, let them. The chances were better than even, that most of the litter would eventually have to go to the Humane Society. The black cat was in exactly the position that Jean Jacques Rousseau had found so painful.
But the Cowans’ cat did not. seem like a mess psychologically. Not yet. She lay in the patch of sun, yawning and stretching at intervals, coming out only to eat or to allow herself to be petted. She Avas calm, self-contained, thoroughly feminine and feline.
“She even has that holior-than-lhou look a pregnant woman gels,”Mr. Cowan said.
In the later stages of pregnancy, however, she resented her discomfort; she would lie stretched out aAvkwardlv, her tail never quite ceasing to twitch, and Avould start awake glaring at her overburdened abdomen. It was impossible to explain to her that she was fulfilling her nature and that these should be the happiest days of her life.
2
THE choice of a place for the accouchement was always a battle between Mrs. Cowan and the cat. The animal would have to be dragged out from the linen closet, from any drawer inadvertently left open, from the dark recesses of the children’s clothes closets. The children sided with her and concealed her latest hiding place whenever they could. She always had the kittens in the comfortable box Mrs. Cowan had fitted up in the basement, but never without the preliminary battle that left them both exhausted.
She loved her kittens. But, from the first, Mrs. Cowan wondered whether Dr. Farnham would not classify her as either an oversolicit,ous mother whose entire activity represents a conscious denial of her unconscious rejection, or the overaffectionate mother who makes up for her essentially libidinal disappointments through her children. Whenever she was away from them for even ten minutes she returned at a gallop, making litlle moaning sounds of maternal solicitude; she appeared to enjoy feeding them as much as they enjoyed eating, and interrupted the process only to Avash them A’igorously and often.
She gave them plenty of affection and security, but she never relinquished her ambition to raise them on the second floor. Every time anyone left the basement door open she would slip through sooner or later with a wriggling, howling burden in her jaws and a fanatical gleam in her eyes. Occasionally she Avould get all five of them onto one of the children’s beds before she was discovored, and then again the children would join the battle on her side. More often she would leave one or two in a clothes closet, another under the bathtub, one in the middle of the hall, and the last one in the comfortable box in the basement, and dash neurotically from one group to the other, moaning, licking, lying doivn to offer nourishment, and then leaping up to go to the assistance of the one that was howling loudest.
The truly feminine mother, Dr. Farnham asserted, could tell without reading books on child care what to do for the children by waiting for them to indicate their need., “This method is infallible,” she said flatly and without qualification. Mrs. Cowan, reading it, felt defensive about all the fallible vaccinations, diphtheria, whooping cough, and typhoid serums, vegetables, vitamins, music lessons, and baths she had inflicted on her children without their having indicated a need.
But the cat, although in many Avays she seemed truly feminine, grew increasingly uncert ain of what to do for her kittens. As long as it was physically possible for her to carry them she never gave up trying to bring them upstairs. When they were four weeks old and able to run all over the basement, Mrs. Cowan would meet her staggering groggily through the front hall with one clamped in her teeth, its rump dragging along the floor. It reminded Mrs. Cowan almost unbearably of the days when she had dragged herself and a Taylor-Tot out to the park for the afternoon although a morning of washing diapers and sterilizing bottles had left her with no wish in the world but to curl up on the couch with a good book on child psychology.
By the time the kittens learned to crawl over the edge of the box and to drink warm milk from a pie tin, the cat was beginning to change from an unconsciously rejecting (oversolicitous) mother to a frankly rejecting one. Milk in pie tins belonged to her, and it annoyed her to have them walk in it, sneeze in it, and drink it. It annoyed her to have them run away when she wanted to wash them, to have them scattered instead of assembled in one readily accessible and completely dependent heap. She precisely fitted Dr. Farnham’s description of the overprotective mother.
“Overconcerned about the rale of the child s development, she retards him by oversolicitous concern. . . . As he exhibits more and more interest in independent activities she tries to restrain him.
. . . She is prone to develop in her child a prolonged dependency. . . . She does not encourage his personality development or his mastery over himself or environment.”
That described the cat to a T.
But having learned, like King Canute, that she could not hold back the forces of nature, did the cat adapt, herself to the inevitable? She did not. As bitterly and as futilely as she had fought the human prohibition against bringing them upstairs she fought the normal development, of her kittens.
The climax came when they were about six weeks old and began to play with her tail. This was an indignity she could not endure. She would sit down and wrap it tightly around her, frowning at them, but she never had quite enough self-control to keep the tip from twitching. One of them would catch sight of it, watch for a minute or two with rapt attention, and then pounce. She would snarl, slap the kitten, and jerk her tail violently to the other side, where all four of the remaining ones would at once seize it joyfully. And later would come the inevitable day when they could mount the basement stairs and eat from her own sacred dish in the kitchen. This was too much; she could neither ignore them nor share with them, but would sit behind the dish all day long on guard, growling whenever she saw one, and too upset emotionally to eat what she so treasured.
This stage perturbed the whole family. Mr. Cowan would say each evening: “ Tomorrow those kittens go to the Humane Society,” and the children would say that Edith and Mary Lou and Jack and Murphy were almost sure they could persuade their mothers to let them have the kittens and please wait just one more day. Only Mrs. Cowan in deepest secrecy enjoyed what was happening. She derived from the cat the only moral support she had ever found for herself in her most shameful secret. She had a sentimental passion for babies, but over the years the conviction had grown on her that she did not like children. She loved her own, of course (and what dark horrors the psychoanalysts would turn up beneath that “of course”), but children as a class bored or irritated her. She could not find a single heroine in literature of whom this was true, and very few villainesses were so depraved. Psychiatry would find behind the simple fact, bad enough in itself, causes which were much worse. The cat was her only consolation. Mrs. Cowan would watch the cat snarling and spilling, and from wellsprings deep within her soul pure fount ains of healing sympathy would burst.
It always ended badly, Jack and Murphy and Edith and Mary Lou among them might take one kitten or even two; the rest would go to the Humane Society, each time with a larger bribe to assuage Mrs. Cowan’s conscience. The next day the cat would sit in her favorite patch of sunshine, calm, serene, thoroughly feline and feminine, and wash her face.
“But you haven’t solved anything,” Mrs. Cowan said. “You’ve just left someone else to deal with the results of your own errors.”
The cat looked at her with inscrutable green eyes and purred.