Maternal Guilt, Attachment Theory, and the Mommy Wars

Or: How John Bowlby and Erica Komisar Failed to Understand Human Evolution

Many modern women, once they become mothers, have this intuitive sense that something is wrong with the world. For me, it hit especially hard after my second child, my daughter, was born, less than two years after my son. I could not square my overwhelm and depression with the idea that this was just a woman’s lot in life, that this was the natural order of things. Afterall, is there anything more ancient and natural than bearing children? Is there anything more woman? I tried to articulate this thought to my husband, but it came out garbled and nonsensical. It was all mush in my postpartum brain. And anyway, my husband didn’t get it. How could he? He did not, could not, grow a baby with his body, push the thing into the world, feel his breasts engorged with too much milk, experience the the alienation of being a stranger in your own brain, what with all of the rewiring and strengthening of this and atrophying of that.

Motherhood is so raw, so primal, so beastly. Never have I felt so much like the mammal that I am. Never have I felt so totally captive to the forces of biology. And yet, it did not make sense to me that it would feel this impossible, this painful, this incapacitating. Afterall, the human animal must survive, must hunt and gather and care for her young, must not be depressed and massively sleep deprived or else how could she do it? In my mind I had conjured up this image of a lone woman in the wild with a string of offspring in tow and another, the smallest, tied to her back, roaming the savannah in search of food, defending her children from savage predators, sleeping in a cave at night. How many children did she have? Maybe 13, 14? Like my grandmother, who was the 12th of 13, back in the days before reliable birth control, when her mother, good German Catholic immigrant that she was, churned one out every 18 months from the time she was 20 until she hit menopause.

Why so many children? Why was she alone? There was not even a husband in sight in my prehistoric imagery land. Where was he? Eaten by a lion? Busy defending the territory from other males? Corralling his harem? It’s embarrassing that I have a degree in human biology from one of the world’s most prestigious universities and yet this was somehow my mental image of wild motherhood. You see, they had not thought to cover it, the professors at this very fancy, very expensive school I attended, because it did not concern them. That’s what their wives did at home while they were off teaching and researching. Never mind that at some point this motherhood thing was bound to happen to about half of the sitting class. We were learning about organelles, and mitochondria, and eyeballs, and lactose intolerance and other very important things. Actually, I don’t really remember most of what I learned at that very fancy school, except that they most certainly did not cover anything relevant to my life as a mother today. Am I not a human? Am I not biology?

So here I was, 32 years old, with two babies under 2, wondering why I couldn’t do what other women had done for the last 300,000 years or so, despite the modern comforts and conveniences afforded by my comfortable station as American Housewife, living in my modest suburban home with a grocery store just down the road and not a lion or hyena in sight. As it turns out, this thing I was trying to do - namely, parenting two children under 2 alone within the four walls of a single-family home - was just not a thing women did for the vast majority of human history. If I was struggling, it wasn’t because there was something fundamentally wrong with me, but rather there was, and is, something fundamentally wrong with contemporary society, especially when it comes to motherhood and the raising of human offspring.

The legacy of the nuclear family is just so damn sticky

It turns out that the most glaringly inaccurate piece of my mental image of wild motherhood was the fact that she was solo. Where did I conjure that up from? Part of it probably has to do with the fact that I was, myself, mostly alone. My mother was also alone and so was hers. I had also absorbed this idea from watching too many animal documentaries, with mother bears and pumas and chimpanzees out hunting and fending for themselves, all while trying to feed and protect their young. Sure, chimpanzees are social, but for the most part, child care is really up to mom. Males are more of a threat than they are helpful. No one else in the group is offering to take a turn babysitting. But humans are not chimpanzees, and too much of our understanding of human nature, human psychology and human prehistory have been shaped by observing the apes. It turns out that a closer analogy for human social structure might be wild dogs, a highly social matrilineal species that raises pups collectively as a group.

Anthropologist Sarah Hrdy, herself a mother and a feminist, was the first to suggest that humans may actually be cooperative breeders, like the wild dogs. In her famous book, Mothers and Others, Hrdy lays out the evidence for why human mothers, without the help of the group, could not possibly have survived in our evolutionary past. Indeed, collective child rearing is the only plausible explanation for why mothers were able to shorten the number of years between births, relative to our last common ancestor with the Great Apes (the natural Chimpanzee interbirth interval is closer to six years). Hrdy calls the social nature of human child-rearing “a striking departure from the Great Apes.” She says of human hunter-gatherer societies, “Babies are never left alone and are constantly held by someone, but that someone is not invariably the mother.” (Hrdy, p73). As we will see below, who cares for babies and children and how much non-maternal care they receive varies between different hunter-gatherer societies, but there is no society in which the mother is left to care for her offspring alone.