The Good Mother

I'd like to think that at the end, the car in which Alex and Michael Smith were trapped turned into an amniotic sac, providing sweet, uncaring, uncomprehending oblivion.

Much of the country has been following the smith case. There's been the not unexpected chorus lamenting, yet again, the nation's loss of innocence.

And indeed, we have all been flailing about for explanations, trying to make sense of a seemingly incomprehensible act, wondering why a young mother might kill her offspring. And therein lies our problem. By focusing on the fact of her motherhood and by assuming that this biological position confers greater moral responsibility on a person, we lose sight of some of the real issues at hand.

Mothers (and fathers) have been killing and devouring their offspring since time immemorial. (Even Mother Harvard has been known to abandon her own.)

The poet Adrienne Rich '51 has written of "the invisible violence of the institution of motherhood to mothers: the guilt, the powerless responsibility for human lives, the judgments and condemnations, the fear of her own power, the guilt, the guilt, the guilt."

Contemporary middle-class parenting requires an abdication of certain responsibilities which are replaced by the assumption of other responsibilities in other spheres. Yet this overwhelming guilt which too often permeates parenting can have a debilitating effect on other aspects of one's life.

Obviously, in the Smith case some sort of psychiatric or social intervention should have occurred before tragedy struck.

But in looking at the trailer park ambiance of Susan Smith's life--the 1990 burgundy Mazda Protege, the $6.35-an-hour job as a secretary, the early, fractured marriage--in all of its awful banality, it becomes a little easier, if not to accept her action, but to see why she was desperately looking for a way out.

In her own misguided way, Smith's bid to escape can be seen as paralleling bids by women from other socio-economic strata in the United States, who by their attempts to join the public realm, are perceived as violating cultural norms and from whom severe penalties are exacted for these transgressions.

Our focus on Susan Smith, the person, solely as a mother means that we invest too much in the term "mother." By delegating all or most of the responsibilities of domestic life, including child rearing, to women, we continue to perpetuate stereotypes.

As long as the burden of devising multiple coping strategies, both personal and political, falls to women, their enterprises are bound to fail.

It doesn't matter how many women are elected to Congress today or in the future. As long as there are no society-wide provisions to help people cope with the increasing complexities of modern life, then the tenuous scaffolding that many of us have erected to support our individual enterprises will collapse.

(Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), campaigning in Georgia this weekend, made the ridiculous assertion that the Smith tragedy could have been averted under a Republican administration.)

Women need to realize that they are a constitutive element of the culture, acting upon and within it. Why should they allow norms of mothering (artificial, shifting cultural constructs) to be dictated to them?

There needs to be a reimagining and subsequent implementation of new societal structures which can accommodate increasingly complex lives.

Lorraine A. Lezama's column appears on alternate Tuesdays.