No interests of her own. Aboriginal women, subjectivity and maternal ambivalence

Cate Osborn

The ideas in this paper have come about through my experiences with two mothers  groups that I ran for Aboriginal women and children at Gunawirra, an early intervention service in Sydney. The groups were long-term, psychoanalytically  informed and aimed at developing a space where pain and trauma could be held and  explored, relationships developed, and mothering capacity supported. The first group  began shortly after the women had their babies, and ran for seven years. The second  group started while the women were pregnant and then into the first year of the  babies’ lives.  

The life circumstances of the women are such that they face enormous obstacles, both  structural and internal, in their roles as mothers. Disadvantage across most areas of  daily life (e.g., housing, income security, education, access to health services), racism,  the fracturing of families, the loss of loved ones, the ongoing impact of colonization  and State policies of child removal, all impinge on their current lives and parenting  capacities. I want to note at this point that, during the course of the groups, all of the  children were safely in their mothers’ care and weren’t subject to child protection  concerns. However, a small number of women had older children who had been  removed. I’ll be exploring the issue of child protection and its impact on the women  later in the paper. 

I will be discussing the importance of maternal ambivalence and its use in the  development of the mother-child relationship. In general, a woman’s subjective  experience of motherhood receives little attention or credence. This phenomenon is  particularly poignant for Aboriginal women. It is my argument that the impacts of  colonial history, wider societal views of Aboriginal mothers and current child  protection practices all place an inordinately heavy and unrealistic burden on the  women to ‘do better’ as mothers and to right historical wrongs. These pressures and  strictures represent a form of psychic violence perpetrated on the identity, authority  and autonomy of the women, and on the relationship between mother and child. 

We see the mother-infant relationship as primary and central to our understanding of  early psychic life and to how a child goes on to develop. On the whole, the mother is  seen from the point of view of the baby and his or her need for holding, containment  and general care. In ‘good’ or even ‘good enough’ mothering (Winnicott, 1965), there is assumed to be a symmetry between the baby’s needs and the mother’s devotion to  meeting those needs. It is expected that the mother’s subjectivity is muted in the  service of caring for the baby. This view, and the assumptions connected to it, have the effect of ‘flattening out’ the woman – reducing her to a role or a function that is  two-dimensional. The ways that mothers move through their own developments and  transitions, in their own right, tends to be ignored. There is much in our culture to  reinforce the myth that mothers should be, and are, endless fonts of goodness and  nurturing, and that mothering is instinctive to women. The belief in instinctive and  innate mothering introduces a misleading homogeneity to maternal identity and the  standards by which a ‘good’ mother is judged. And yet, the day-to-day work of  raising children and how the woman feels about her maternal self are very much  contingent on external factors such as race, class and socio-economic position. There  is a pervasive belief that motherhood is the culmination of feminine identity, as if,  with the birth of the baby, something has been completed within the woman’s sense of  self. It is as if she has arrived at a final destination, rather than that she has reached  the first stage in an endlessly unfolding series of challenges and transformations. 

Traditionally, in psychoanalytic theory, pregnancy, childbirth and the early weeks and  months of motherhood are seen as psychically regressive processes for the mother. It  is a time when she ‘reworks’ her earliest conflicts and fantasies in relation to her baby  self and her own mother (Bibring, 1959; Deutsch, 1925). While valid and important,  this formulation focuses on what happens and less on how the mother feels going  through this process and the meaning/s that she makes of it. These meanings are  unique to each woman and to each pregnancy. They are developed within a current  family and social context. In order to expand this understanding, Rosado and Marques  (2016) suggest that pregnancy can be seen not just for its regressive elements, but also as a catastrophic change in Bion’s (1965) sense. That is, something new and different  must be found and developed in the woman’s mind to deal with the surge of physical  changes, the emotional turmoil, the sometimes bizarre fantasies and, critically for our  understanding here, the impact of external forces on the mother. 

It can be hard for us to believe and face that a mother might have aggressive, angry or  hateful feelings toward her baby. But this is made harder in a culture where  motherhood is simultaneously idealized and denigrated to the extent that it is. 

In 2008, the British writer, Rachel Cusk, published a memoir called ‘A life’s work. On  becoming a mother’. She takes us, in vivid and painful detail, through her own  subjective experience of pregnancy, childbirth and the early months of her child’s life.  The book is raw and honest. She is courageous in the way that she shows us the depth  and intensity of her experience. She doesn’t shy away from expressing and exploring  the feeling that with birth, mothers experience a death of parts of themselves that they  had taken for granted. She describes herself as being both more virtuous and more  terrible than she had ever known. She says, ‘as a mother you learn what it is to be  both martyr and devil’ (p. 14). Motherhood can evoke hatred and rage as much as it  evokes profound love and care. She describes as much joy and delight in the baby as  she does despair about being a mother. Many of the reviews of the book were vicious.  She was accused of being a child-hater, of being greedy, a bad mother, irresponsible,  selfish. One critic said that pregnant women shouldn’t read the book. These reviews  are symptomatic of the ways that mothering, and the intensely personal processes that  a mother goes through, are often deemed to be public property. 

The term ‘ambivalence’ has a mild, almost benign, connotation – a bit like ‘mixed  feelings’. To me, it doesn’t quite capture the turmoil, violence and confusion of  feelings that a mother experiences in relation to her child, herself and her identity as a woman and mother. The feelings of love and hate, resentment and devotion, despair  and joy, don’t necessarily mix in the sense that one cancels out the other – they  continue to co-exist as polar opposites. Mothering often involves a constant tension or  battle between these two opposites – each very strong, and each very valid and real.  Sometimes it feels like being torn in two. 

Cusk (2008) writes: 

‘Birth is not merely that which divides women from men: it also divides  women from themselves, so that a woman’s understanding of what it is to  exist is profoundly changed. Another person has existed in her, and after their  birth they live within the jurisdiction of her consciousness. When she is with  them she is not herself; when she is without them she is not herself; and so it  is as difficult to leave your children as it is to stay with them. To discover this  is to feel that your life has become irretrievably mired in conflict, or caught  in some mythic snare in which you will perpetually, vainly struggle.’ (p. 13) 

It’s not so much that the ambivalence is ‘resolved’ in some fixed or permanent way so  that the mother and baby can then get on with things. Each new situation that puts a  strain on the mother needs to be renegotiated every time. 

Ambivalence, or rather, the tolerating of ambivalence, that is, to love where you hate  and to hate where you love, is seen as a sign of maturity or health as it applies to most  relationships – except the mother baby relationship. Where the baby’s achievement of  ambivalence in relation to the mother marks an important developmental stage, the  mother’s ambivalence toward the baby tends to make the alarm bells sound. 

We naturally want to resolve or reduce the clash of feelings and come down on the  side of love. Rozsika Parker (1997) has written a lot about maternal ambivalence and  makes a case, not just for its existence but its use and value in helping both the mother  and the baby develop. She talks about manageable and unmanageable ambivalence.  

‘When manageable, the pain, conflict and confusion of the coexistence of  love and hate actually motivate a mother to struggle to understand her own  feelings and her child’s behaviour. When unmanageable, the potential for  ambivalence to foster thought and spark concern is overwhelmed by the  anxiety generated when hate no longer feels mitigated by love.’ (p. 21) 

Susan Kraemer (1996) seems to take this further. She shows that feminist  psychoanalytic thinking has fleshed out the mother and made her more real and  nuanced. However, she argues that this work hasn’t really grappled with the ‘grimmer  experiences of ordinary maternal hate’ (p. 766). The agonizing struggle is  downplayed and she argues that there needs to be more attention paid to the conflict  women feel about freeing themselves from a maternal ideal which has power and  aggression on one side and love and nurturing on the other. 

Parker (1997) emphasizes that the mother’s capacity to experience and tolerate her  ambivalent feelings is crucial to her maternal development and the ongoing  relationship with the baby. For example, maternal reverie (Bion, 1962) relies on being  able to take in the baby’s feelings and the mother having an awareness of her own  feeling responses to these projections. It is inevitable that there will be a mixture of  terror, rage, frustration, devotion and concern within this process and that the mother  could feel torn in two by these opposing forces. Grappling with ambivalence sparks  creative and nuanced ways of dealing with problems that seem intractable. When the  darker side of maternal feelings are unrecognized and unacknowledged, they tend to  

go underground. When rage, frustration and despair are not known and held, but kept  out of awareness, they are far more likely to be acted upon, putting the mother and the  baby at great risk. 

To truly experience the ambivalence of mothering requires a kind of emotional  flexibility and fluidity. The mother has to allow herself to feel the frustration and  resentment while, if not also feeling loving, patient and concerned at the time, must,  somehow, have faith that those feelings will return. What does this mean for mothers who are traumatized and for whom this kind of fluidity feels terribly dangerous?  Where it is barely possible to have faith and hope that, when so much has been lost,  good things can be recovered. 

As I was writing this paper, I thought a lot about how best to bring some of these  ideas to life, to help us have a sense of what pregnancy and early motherhood is like  for the women in the groups. One compelling question kept coming back to me.  

Can I hold the baby? 

One of the women, while pregnant with her first child, expressed to the group her  anxiety about whether she would know how to hold the baby once he was born. I’ll  call her Kelly. For Kelly, holding him safely inside her was one thing. But there  seemed to be so much to worry about – supporting and protecting his head, not letting  him flop, making sure he could breathe okay. Babies are so fragile, ‘What if I hurt  him?’ The other women in the group were encouraging and reassuring. One sat next  to her with her own newborn, gently put her baby in Kelly’s lap for her to hold and  said, ‘See, you can’. This is an example of the atmosphere of tenderness, love, caring  and warmth that was created and protected in the groups in spite of the trauma and, at  times, unbearable pain.  

The important question, ‘Can I hold the baby?’ was central to the concerns of all the  women in different ways. It can be thought about on many levels, pertinent to the  experiences of Aboriginal mothers. 

There is certainly the question of managing the literal holding and demanding day-to day care of the baby. We could also think about the ongoing challenges of providing  the emotional holding that babies and children need (Winnicott, 1965). And what  about her own baby self? Can that part of her be held in any way while there is a  vulnerable baby to be cared for? 

But beyond these considerations, the central question for all the women in the groups  was, ‘Will I be allowed to hold the baby?’ 

After her little boy was born, Kelly came back to the group and told us about a home  visit from the Early Childhood Nurse and the Aboriginal Health Worker. During the  course of the visit, the nurse mentioned FACS. (At the time, FACS was the acronym  for the NSW child protection department.) It was unclear about the exact context, but it seemed to be in the course of giving Kelly some general information. There was no  question of a concern for the baby’s safety. The very word was like a bombshell and  felt to be a terrible danger to her and the baby. Kelly said to the nurse, ‘You think that  because we’re blackfellas, we don’t know how to look after our kids.’ And she asked  the nurse to leave. 

The word ‘FACS’ had become the thing in itself (Segal, 1957). I didn’t see this so  much as a result of her concreteness of mind or a ‘failure’ to symbolize. What  registered was an immediate trauma and terror for her, timeless in nature and based on  the weight of history of child removal, her own expected insecurities about herself as  a mother and, no doubt, her awareness that Aboriginal children are, currently,  removed from their families at disturbing rates. 

Many other women have talked about similar experiences. It took a long time in the  lives of both groups for these fears to emerge and be talked about openly. The terror  that babies and children could be taken hung like a dark spectre over the groups, felt  but unknown. It stifled the vital awareness and acknowledgement of the darker side of mothering. 

One woman spoke of her experience in the A&E1 Department of a hospital after she’d  been seriously assaulted and injured by her husband. She had her two very young  children with her. The doctor who was treating her told her that she would have to  notify the child protection authority, that it was legally required. She described how,  even as she was having the wound stitched she was in a state of panic and all she  could think about was, ‘They’re going to take my kids; they’re going to take my kids’. 

As she told us more, it became clear that the doctor did her best to handle things in a  sensitive way, as did the child protection worker who came to speak with her. The  children stayed safely with her, because she was able to provide that protection. Not  all women are able to do this, and it shows up a structural and systemic attack on and  undermining of the women and the security of their relationships with their children.  In circumstances of domestic violence, the onus is on the mother to provide protection  for the children, and she is often blamed and punished if she is unable to do this. It’s  hard enough for women who are traumatized by violence to be a mother for  traumatized children. When legal systems and other services hold women responsible  for the effects of the violence on their children, the trauma is compounded and  mothering further attacked and eroded. 

Kyllie Cripps (2019) is a Senior Lecturer in Law at UNSW and a Palawa woman who  has researched and written extensively about this nexus between child protection and  domestic violence policies and practices. She notes that these policies impact  particularly harshly on Indigenous women and children. She has found that, 

‘In complex domestic and family violence situations, child protection  

services often blame the mother for failing to protect the children and place  significant conditions on the care and custody of the children. This doubly  punishes Indigenous women who are not only victims of violence but who  

also risk removal of their children despite severely limited options to secure  their own safety and that of their children.’ (Cripps & Habibis, 2019, p. 14) 

1 Accident & Emergency Department 

As the conditions around their parenting become more difficult (due to factors such as  racism, isolation, poverty, loss, trauma, violence), the expectations on Aboriginal  mothers have increased. 

There is no equivalent onus on perpetrators, usually fathers and stepfathers, to ensure  protection and safety for the children. 

Some of the women expressed the feeling that they began motherhood at a point of  disadvantage, rather than with a sense of hopeful anticipation. The disproportionate  risks of lower birth weights, premature births, and complications like gestational  diabetes and pre-eclampsia are well recognized. The women had access to specialized  Aboriginal peri-natal health services to provide extra care during pregnancy and birth  and to reduce these risks. Although acknowledged as helpful and necessary, they also  felt this to be stigmatizing and engendered fear that their bodies could betray them. 

The women spoke a lot about feelings of being scrutinized and judged as mothers – in  supermarket queues, at the park, in doctor’s surgeries, in playgroups. ‘It’s like  someone’s always looking over your shoulder, waiting for you to do something  wrong.’ They feel pressured to try extra hard to prove that they are good mothers but  that they are seen as likely to fail. There is an enormous expectation on the women to  do a better job with their children, and themselves, than previous generations. Not just  in spite of the history of disadvantage but because of it. 

The women are made scapegoats of what is a very complex, systemic, historical,  social, political and psychological phenomenon that permeates every level of  Australian culture. They are scapegoats in the sense that they are made to feel blamed  and ashamed for the difficulties they and their children face – over which they have  little or no control – at the same time as being handed the responsibility for ‘fixing’ the problem. The choice of a scapegoat within any group often hinges on finding and  targeting a vulnerability or relative powerlessness.  

The guilt, shame, regret, and grief related to colonization, disavowed within white Australia, is projected into Aboriginal mothers via complex cultural, legal and  structural attitudes and practices. It is as if Aboriginal motherhood has been largely  appropriated and used as the arena in which we play out our anxieties about how we  came to be here. 

Acknowledgements 

I would like to acknowledge the Gadigal People, who are the traditional custodians of  the land on which I grew up and where I now sit. I pay my respects to Elders past and  present. I would also like to acknowledge the Wangal people, on whose land a close knit group of Aboriginal women, babies and children met weekly with me for nearly  eight years. It is these women who have helped me to begin to think about and  understand what I want to share with you tonight.

I would also like to thank and acknowledge my supervisors Louise Gyler and Jeff  Eaton, my colleagues at Gunawirra and my friend, mentor and psychoanalytic Auntie,  Norma Tracey. 

References 

Bibring, G. (1959). Some considerations of the psychological processes in pregnanacy. Psychoanalytic  Study of the Child, 43, 306–310. 

Bion, W. (1962). Learning from experience. London: Karnac. 

Bion, W. (1965). Transformations: Change from learning to growth. London: Maresfield Library. Cripps, K., & Habibis, D. (2019). Improving housing and service responses to domestic and family  violence for Indigenous individuals and families. AHURI Final Report 320. Australian Housing  and Urban Research Institute Ltd., Melbourne. http:// www. Ahuri.edu.au/research/final reports/320 doi:10.18408/ahuri-7116201 

Cusk, R. (2008). A life’s work. On becoming a mother. London: Faber & Faber. Deutsch, H. (1925). The psychology of women in relation to the function of reproduction. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 6, 405–418. 

Kraemer, S. B. (1996). Betwixt the dark and the daylight of maternal subjectivity: Meditations on the  threshold. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 6, 765–791. 

Parker, R. (1997). The production and purposes of maternal ambivalence. In W. Holloway, & B.  Featherstone (Eds.), Mothering and ambivalence. London: Routledge. 

Rosado, F. F., & Marques, M. E. (2016). The creation of meaning during pregnancy. Studies in the  Maternal, 8(1), 4. doi:http//doi.org/10.16995/sim.215 

Segal, H. (1957). Notes on symbol formation. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 38, 391. Winnicott, D. W. (1965). The maturational processes and the facilitating environment. London: Karnac.