The Bad Dads Who Helped Invent Modern Motherhood (with Nancy Reddy)

Apple Podcasts  |  Spotify  |  Other Apps

 

Intro – 00:00

 

BLAIR HODGES: This is Relationscapes. We're mapping the stories and ideas that shape who we are and how we connect with each other. I'm Blair Hodges, introducing our guide in this episode, Nancy Reddy.

NANCY REDDY: That whole approach to motherhood, the idea that it was a kind of professional practice—something that could be studied and done and improved—sucks the joy out of it. It prevented me from actually connecting with my baby. And if you're always trying to study and improve and do better, it's really hard to just actually be where you are.

BLAIR HODGES: When Nancy Reddy had her first child, she approached the situation like the overachieving PhD student she was at the time. She went to find the best research on parenting, studied it, and then tried to apply it so that everything would work out perfectly. The problem is that a lot of the research she found about caregiving and attachment turned out to be based on flawed lab studies, sloppy research, and so much misogyny.

Nancy joins us to talk about the problems she found and to offer alternatives that can benefit parents today. And maybe she'll also give us better perspective about what our own parents were up to. We're talking with Nancy Reddy about her new book, The Good Mother Myth: Unlearning Our Bad Ideas about How to Be a Good Mom.

 

Depressed at Postpartum Pilates – 01:57

 

BLAIR HODGES: Nancy Reddy, welcome to the show.

NANCY REDDY: Hi. I'm so glad to be here.

BLAIR HODGES: Let's start off with a postpartum Pilates class you attended about two and a half months after you gave birth. And just to say this up front, like, this is a fairly privileged position to be in for you. You're able to go to a postpartum Pilates class. You had the time and the means.

But your life as a mother at this time was complicated. I actually thought I'd have you read your account of what was happening in this Pilates class.

NANCY REDDY: Yeah. I'm laughing a little bit now, just because the project of postpartum Pilates is such a, yeah, it speaks to the kind of cultural milieu I’m in. But in any case—

BLAIR HODGES: I was gonna say, I've never been to one myself.

NANCY REDDY: Yeah. [laughter]

BLAIR HODGES: I'm glad you brought me into the classroom.

NANCY REDDY: Yeah. So if I can set the stage just slightly, which is that we lived in Madison, Wisconsin when my kids were born. I was a graduate student, and there was a natural parenting store where I had gone to prenatal yoga. They had a consignment store for kids clothes and maternity stuff. They had a breastfeeding clinic there. It was a really wonderful, supportive place. And it’s also is a little bit of caricature of a certain kind parenting style.

After my son was born, nothing was as I had imagined or expected it. And so one of the things I did to try to, like, figure out how to do things correctly—which was my obsession when I was first a mother—was to go to this postpartum Pilates class.

The instructor asked us each to share our birth story. When it was my turn, I started my story by sobbing, which surprised me because the birth was the one thing I felt I'd done well. I'd followed my birth plan. Low intervention. No drugs for pain relief. That roaring birth, those peaceful three days in the hospital, were the last time I'd felt like a good mother.

Another woman in the class gently told me about the postpartum depression group, how the group helped her work through those first dark months of motherhood. I'd seen photos of that group on the store's website. I'd looked at those women and thought, “It's good that they got help.” I didn't think their faces had anything to do with me.

My bad feelings, the way my whole body buzzed when I was away from the baby, the tightening across my chest when he cried, didn't belong anywhere in what I understood to be the domain of postpartum depression. Postpartum depression had been explained to me as an extension of the baby blues, and I'd imagined it as a kind of photogenic weeping selflessness made of love for the baby.

So when my bad time didn't feel like that, I figured that what I had was more like postpartum being a bad mother, or—

[laughter]

I'm glad you're laughing, because I do intend for this to be a little funny.

BLAIR HODGES: It's so funny and sad, like, at the same time.

NANCY REDDY: Exactly.

Or postpartum being an asshole who shouldn't have had kids anyway.

BLAIR HODGES: And I saw that was coming up, too.

NANCY REDDY: It would take me years to learn that postpartum depression is just one condition on the spectrum of postpartum mood and anxiety disorders with complex and varied symptoms. Even today, postpartum mood and anxiety disorders frequently remain undiagnosed and undertreated, amounting to what Postpartum Support International calls a silent health crisis. Because I understood my own feelings as a personal failing, I didn't know how to ask for help.

It was only later that I could hear what that mother at Pilates was saying, that I was one of them, too. She was being gentle, but she was saying, “I can see that you are struggling. You should get help.” And this is how, in all those months, the only one who really saw me was a fellow mother, and I couldn't hear her.

BLAIR HODGES: This passage is important because it shows how you bring yourself into this book. You did a lot of research for this, but it's a personal story. And what you're describing here is not being able to hear yourself or hear what was happening with you because it was just drowned out by all the cultural noise about what moms were supposed to be and what they were supposed to feel.

NANCY REDDY: Yeah, absolutely.

 

Good Moms Erase Themselves – 05:54

 

BLAIR HODGES: And you decided, as you noted, to have a baby during graduate school while you were earning your PhD. That's a really bold move. Did you wrestle with that, or was it just kind of something you'd already planned on?

NANCY REDDY: That's a good question. I think, in part, I'm a deeply stubborn person and also pretty ambitious, though it took me a long time to really be able to name that as something in myself. And writing this book, we can talk about it later, maybe actually really helped me to name ambition as a value.

BLAIR HODGES: Do you think women are sort of enculturated against that? Like, women are supposed to do their woman thing, and otherwise you're, like, taking up space that you shouldn't be taking up?

NANCY REDDY: Yes. I mean, I was certainly raised, you know, as I write about in the book, I was raised largely by my mom, who was a single mom for much of my childhood. Her mother, my grandmother, was like, an incredible force in the family, kind of Irish Catholic matriarch, and raised us to be hardworking and smart and accomplished, but also really valued modesty about those accomplishments.

You didn't want to draw attention to yourself. It wasn't okay to brag. And that's a pretty complicated combination, I think.

BLAIR HODGES: And it really makes sense of your experience here because you were working so hard to figure out how to be the best mom, but also not celebrating any victories or feeling like you could celebrate, like, the wins that you were having. And you talked about preparing for motherhood with the same kind of discipline you were using for everything else.

Like, work hard, read the right books, listen to the right experts, you're good to go.

NANCY REDDY: [laughs] Yeah. I mean, and I can kind of laugh about it now because I'm far enough away from it, but it was not funny at the time. And I think what I really had to reckon with in my life and in writing the book was really the way that this whole approach to motherhood, the idea that it was a kind of professional practice, something that could be studied and improved, that kind of professionalization, like, sucks the joy out of it.

It prevented me in pretty horrible ways from actually, like, connecting with my baby at first. Which is not to say it was all darkness. But I think that idea, if you're always trying to study and improve and do better, it's really hard to just actually be where you are.

 

Four Main Myths – 08:15

 

BLAIR HODGES: It's also really future-oriented. You're thinking of all the things you have to do now because of the future. It's harder to live in the moment.

Your book is called The Good Mother Myth. But there are multiple myths that you talk about, you talk about four in particular. Maybe as we're starting out, just give us a sense of what the myths are, speaking broadly.

NANCY REDDY: I mean, the big myth that I keep thinking about that probably brings everything together is just the idea that being a mother is natural and that what that means in order to do it, well, it means you can do it basically all on your own, that having a baby will create this transformation and make you a new person who's capable of being a kind of perfect, selfless caregiver.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. Those are the first two. That, first of all, motherhood's an isolated pursuit. Like, you're the mom, you're in charge. This is your job, and women have to master that. And then that women have this instinct and that hormones and evolution and genetics or God or whatever people believe in will make you into the good mother.

So you’re doing it alone. And you're also made for this.

NANCY REDDY: Yeah.

BLAIR HODGES: And that sets you up for problems if things aren't going well. You’ll think it's a defect in yourself.

You also talk about the myth that it's actually pretty easy if you just follow the right instructions. That it's easy.

NANCY REDDY: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, that was really the trap. And I think that speaks in part to the culture of Madison, where we lived when I had my kids. But, I mean, I still see it. I see it online for sure. This idea that it is easy if you do it the right way, which means you have to know what the right way is.

And that requires a certain amount of practice and study and also probably buying things and having access to services. Like, in order to be the right kind of natural mother, you need the right kind of wrap. You need to go to a breastfeeding class. You know, this is “natural,” but it's not cheap, or—

BLAIR HODGES: You have to breastfeed, yeah.

NANCY REDDY: Or you have to breastfeed. Right. Which is not free, actually.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. So these first three myths, I could really relate to them even as a father that, like, being a father was an isolated pursuit in partnership with my wife. So I guess it's a little bit different than what moms might experience. But also I expected to kind of have all the equipment and all the instinct that I needed to be a good dad and that if I would just follow the right path, it would be easy.

The other myth, though, I didn't relate to, and I think this is really interesting and I wonder, my instinct is to suggest this is a gendered thing. The other myth is that your personal desires would fade away and your child would rightfully come to occupy everything and that you would just sort of naturally go into that.

As a man, I never expected to lose my hobbies or, I mean, I wondered if, like, oh, this is probably going to take up more time. But I didn't think of self-erasure in the way that you described.

NANCY REDDY: That's so interesting. And I think, I mean, I think you're right that gender's an important part of that. My husband got really into golf in a couple of years before we had our kids, and really liked that, and stopped golfing. Because you can't really golf with a newborn.

I mean, you can, but, like, it's, you know, it's a long, full-day pursuit.

BLAIR HODGES: See, but I think a lot of people wouldn't stop, though.

NANCY REDDY: Well, exactly. I think you're right. I mean, to go back to your question, I think you're probably right that we expect motherhood in a different way than fatherhood to be a complete transformation of who you are and what you care about and what matters to you.

And I do think we expect mothers to put aside and maybe to not even notice that they're putting aside all of the things they had cared about and valued before they had their baby.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. It becomes their primary purpose more often for women, I think. And for men, we're sort of supplemental.

Also in pop culture, a lot of the dads are goofy dummies and like, “oh, look at us, we're so dumb trying to be dads. We don't know what we're doing.” And I mean, the truth is, like, women learn, too, but women don't get to see as many goofy moms screwing up on TV as a way to say, like, “oh, moms are supposed to be that way.”

NANCY REDDY: Yeah. I mean, and this is one of the ways, I think, this mythology around motherhood is also bad for dads, right? There's a lot of, like, goofy dad kind of stuff out there. I mean, if you look at books that are written for dads, they're embarrassing.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. And they usually have, like, a hammer on the cover or something. Or like, a monster truck.

NANCY REDDY: Yeah.

BLAIR HODGES: Dads for Men!

NANCY REDDY: Exactly. Exactly.

BLAIR HODGES: ManDad!

NANCY REDDY: [laughter] Well, I think there's something in, maybe especially, the marketing of it that assumes it's, like, a little embarrassing. Like, if you're a man who's buying this book, you're already a little embarrassed about it. So, like, let's make it a joke. And yet, there's this whole parenting advice industry that's aimed at women, and it's too much. But I think if a portion of that was directed towards men, it would be probably genuinely helpful for them.

 

Harlow's Monkeys and Their Always-Available Mothers – 13:01

 

BLAIR HODGES: I agree. And I’ll be talking about that in other episodes, too. But for now, let's zoom in on the story you tell of the social scientists who helped create these myths about what being a mom was about. These myths weren't “natural.” They didn't just appear out of nowhere. They were manufactured. They were created. And you actually, as you mentioned, happened to be in Wisconsin at the time you had your first kid. How many years ago was it?

NANCY REDDY: My first son was born in 2013. We moved there in 2009.

BLAIR HODGES: Okay, cool. So you happened to be mothering in the same place there in Wisconsin as one of the foremost psychologists of the 20th century that helped shape our public ideas about what good mothering and good parenting was. This is Harry Harlow. And you say that his work is crucial and also problematic.

Give us a sense of what Harry Harlow was about.

NANCY REDDY: Sure. So Harlow was a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin for most of his career, and he did the studies of maternal attachment. So if you took an intro psych class in college, you probably remember these images of, like, the tiny baby monkey clinging to that cloth mother?

BLAIR HODGES: I mean, those are iconic images, and they look horrifying, by the way.

NANCY REDDY: Yeah.

BLAIR HODGES: I mean, they're wire cages with blankets around them.

NANCY REDDY: Yeah. And I spent a long time looking at those images and also watching videos of it. It's very upsetting, it's pretty troubling.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

NANCY REDDY: I mean, he thought of himself as revolutionary. He was, in important ways, in that he was studying love. He believed love was really worthy of scientific pursuit. It's an interesting thing and genuinely important at the time because this was still an era where, I mean, it's not that far from Watson, who was saying, you know, don't spoil your children. Like, maybe you can shake your kid's hand on their birthday.

BLAIR HODGES: Pat them on the head!

NANCY REDDY: Yeah, right. And so his research is a corrective to that in a lot of ways, which is important. I heard this story when I was first in graduate school, before I had kids, that Harlow's work had been done in the same building where we took our classes. And so I'd be sitting in seminar rooms and I had this image in my mind of his labs being in the basement. And I just was like, haunted by that image.

It turns out that's not quite true. He actually was across campus in—it's a great Wisconsin detail, an abandoned cheese factory that he kind of just took over. [laughter] I'm not sure he was really supposed to have it. He just kind of moved in. Put all his monkeys there.

BLAIR HODGES: So basically he made these wireframe moms. He's like, let's find out how these monkeys interact with their mom. So he made a wireframe mom where they would feed, so they'd get their food from this wire frame. Very harsh that, you know, you wouldn't want to cuddle up to.

NANCY REDDY: Yeah. Just kind of like a wire cone.

BLAIR HODGES: Then this mom-shaped thing with blankets around it that I think was warmed as well.

NANCY REDDY: Right.

BLAIR HODGES: And he found that the monkeys would gravitate to that. So they'd eat, but then they'd go over to the comfy mom for love.

NANCY REDDY: Exactly. Yeah.

So there are a couple of different experimental conditions, but he was trying to figure out, which mother will they cling on to? Is it the one who feeds them or the one who comforts them? Because she's soft and she's warm, and it's the one who provides comfort. Even if there's not food there, it's the one who provides comfort.

I mean, he has these graphs where he'll show, you know, they would cling to those cloth mothers for like 18, 20 hours a day. They'd get panicked.

BLAIR HODGES: Because they were so isolated.

NANCY REDDY: That's the thing, right? I mean, this is a study that purports to be about love. And his finding is that contact comfort is an important variable for love, which, again, is important. And that is true. That is absolutely true.

But one of the things that I'm kind of obsessed with in general and that I really thought about in this book is experimental design. It was like, in order to design an experiment that was clean enough methodologically, he had to have something he could put on a graph.

And so that meant, in part, designing these surrogate mothers and then saying that, I mean, those babies had mothers like they had actual mothers. And so he's separating them from their actual mothers to test this kind of wild wire mother, cloth mother protocol that he's set up.

BLAIR HODGES: And the thing mothers might take away from this is the importance of constant availability. Like, the monkeys could always access the mom. Contact was the key, being soft and being available. So, as you said, he was challenging these kinds of harsher ideas about parenting. Very austere, like no hugs, no kisses, very at a distance so they grow up properly.

But he also found these monkeys ended up growing up very maladjusted. None of them had good outcomes. They were very antisocial and very. I mean, it ruined the monkeys!

NANCY REDDY: Yes. And, I mean, in the first round of research, the first time he presented it, he was like, “We are now in contact with the nature of love.” And then it turned out that was not true. Those babies were really damaged by not having actually any social interaction. And so it turns out, you know, he said he had created this perfect mother, you know, she's soft, warm, tender, available 24 hours a day. And very quickly, both Harlow and the popular press jumped to saying, “That's what mothers should be, human mothers.”

BLAIR HODGES: They're setting us up for the Leave it to Beaver model of mom at home, constantly available, dad being the provider in the workplace, mom being the nurturer.

NANCY REDDY: Exactly. And it turns out that's not good for monkeys. Or humans, you know?

 

Bowlby's Attachment Theory – 18:06

 

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. And you say Harlow couldn't do it on his own. His theories wouldn't stand on their own. He needed some help. He needed some other people to kind of be in on the project. And you talk about the British psychoanalyst John Bowlby, who was cooking up a theory of parenting that is still around today.

It's called attachment theory. And as a new mom, you didn't know Bowlby's name, but you do say his ideas were everywhere around you. So how was it playing out in your life, the idea of attachment theory? And you can tell us a little bit about how Bowlby came up with it.

NANCY REDDY: Sure. So attachment theory is really the idea that what a baby needs most is a secure attachment with one primary caregiver. And I mean, defenders of Bowlby point out “caregiver,” but he said mother, like, all the time. That is who he was imagining. He was a lifelong crusader against daycare. Like, he meant very specifically, the biological mother needs to be available for her child all the time.

And I wouldn't say that I personally ever totally bought into that. Like, I grew up going to daycare. I always planned to send my own kids to daycare. But I do think one thing that is pretty pervasively accepted in our culture is the idea that those first couple of years are kind of like the “make it or break it” moment.

Like, that your child's entire psychological and physiological and social, emotional health, like, everything is made in those first three years, and that if the parents mess it up, something is broken forever.

And early childhood is obviously important, but I think attachment theory also really underestimates the resiliency of children. And also the resiliency of that relationship, that you can mess up and you can repair is something that I think doesn't get discussed enough.

BLAIR HODGES: And also, if you're just talking about—adverse childhood experiences is something that social workers and others analyze. That they can trace effects from ACE’s. But you also have to tie in things like class and race and all of the different things that affect a person as they grow up, so that adverse childhood experiences can affect people differently depending on the resources they have growing up, and all kinds of other variables.

I liked how you were exploring attachment theory and pointing out some issues with it while also recognizing, like, yeah, I mean, this is an important developmental stage.

NANCY REDDY: Yeah.

BLAIR HODGES: So you felt like, as a mom, that you had to be focused entirely on your baby and be satisfied with that. And one of the biggest troubles you had is you didn't feel satisfied with that, and that started to make you feel guilty. Like, oh, my gosh, I don't maybe want to be available to this baby 24 hours a day, and that's not all I want to focus on.

And then guilt or shame comes in.

NANCY REDDY: Yeah, absolutely. And my kids are not babies anymore. I'm much better rested than I was back then. And like, I am able to look at that with a kind of distance, But I did really believe that.

I really believed that my job as the mom was to meet all of my baby's needs, that I should be able to, you know, care for him when he cried, just immediately know how to soothe him, that when he woke up in the night and needed to eat, that I should be the one to get up and nurse him.

I so bought in, which is hard to believe now. I was so bought into the idea that that was both possible and optimal.

 

Economic Anxieties After the War – 21:19

 

BLAIR HODGES: You know, I wanted to mention, along with that, this idea that what the scientists and researchers are putting out can also get misconstrued in the media or get represented differently when it hits the popular imagination. And I think you hinted at this earlier, but Harlow himself suggested in his research that men could do this role just as much as women.

Here's a quote from his work. He says, “The American male is physically endowed with all the really essential equipment to compete with the American female on equal terms in one essential activity, the rearing of infants.”

And you point out that most reporters focused instead on that really memorable image of the baby and the cloth mother. And they just skipped over this other stuff like, you know, what a connection with somebody is is what matters. That's not what the press focused on.

NANCY REDDY: Yeah, I mean, even in Harlow's talk, that's like the very end of the talk. It's kind of a little footnote. And I think that moment arises from a lot of specifically economic anxieties in that time period and the concern that maybe women were gonna overtake in the workforce. So if you somehow ended up in a situation where you had a female breadwinner, actually the father could do okay at home.

But I also think it's important to note that, I mean, Harlow might have believed that, I think, but he certainly didn't do it. Like, he did not do much raising of his own children at all. I mean, he had four children total, two each with each of his wives. And he seems to have not spent much time with any of them because he devoted his career to telling women how to mother.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, he didn't come off like the best dad in the book, I have to say. And you also mentioned the post-war context when this was happening. Like, women had gone to work during the war, and now there was this drive across America to get them to go back home. Men wanted to go back into the workforce and not have this sort of diversity that cropped up during the war. Talk about that context this post-war period

NANCY REDDY: It feels to me, I mean, as you say, so this is a period during the war. You know, a lot of men are overseas fighting, A lot of American women are working in the war effort. A lot of them are mothers. There's a lot of children in daycare, a lot of state-supported daycare.

And it feels to me like this moment, this post-war moment of radical possibility, like we could have had an entirely different America from that time. And that did happen for some. So much of Europe really expanded the social safety net at that point. And in America, we really kind of had the opposite impulse of going back to, in some ways, a way more conservative and kind of regressive model.

And the science I'm looking at is really informed by responding to those economic and cultural imperatives. I mean, I think part of why Harlow's work was immediately so popular is that it reaffirmed what a lot of people wanted to believe. It fit with an agenda at the time about where women should be and what their work was, and that was at home with their children.

BLAIR HODGES: And a big part of that message too, you point out, is that culture, American culture, American society, the success of the country in a global context hinged on mothers doing their quote unquote “jobs” at home. So it was also a social mission, like, mothers are the backbone of America. This is why we need them back home.

That's a lot of pressure.

NANCY REDDY: It really is. I mean, and this is a long story in American history, right? Like, you can go back to the Revolution, you can look at the idea of Republican motherhood where education for women was important if it enabled them to raise the next generation of citizens. This is not a totally new idea in the post-war era.

What I'm especially interested in is the way this idea about women's roles in like taking care of American culture and American economy really became encased in science. So it's not just “whoever” saying that the most important job in the world you can do is with your kids. It's also, “Science says,” you know, “you will mess up your baby if you send him off to daycare!”

 

Ainsworth, The Mother of Attachment Styles – 25:23

 

BLAIR HODGES: You've talked about Harry Harlow and John Bowlby. But they're not the only ones. You also talk about Mary Ainsworth. This is another really important researcher who helped develop attachment theory. Talk about her experiments, how she took that idea of attachment styles and amplified it.

NANCY REDDY: Yeah, so Ainsworth is a really fascinating person to me. She's a Canadian and American psychologist and she first worked with Bowlby in London. And I mean, she is the originator of attachment styles. So if you've ever seen like an Instagram post about someone's anxious avoidant attachment, that's her work.

Attachment styles as a field of research emerges from her study in Uganda, and then later in Baltimore at Johns Hopkins. She did yearlong observational studies there. There were like 26 women that were selected. They were new mothers. She and her team went into their homes and observed, and what they were trying to understand was attachment. How effectively did the mothers respond to their baby's needs?

And then from there she recruited those women to come into the lab and she designed this laboratory protocol called “The Strange Situation” that's meant to test your attachment style. So the baby is brought in with the caregiver. They say “the caregiver,” but they mean mother—

BLAIR HODGES: You point out, even when they were doing the experiments, only mothers would have been able to like be involved anyway, so.

NANCY REDDY: Exactly. So she does this study that proves, or purports to prove that the quality of your attachment to your caregiver in your first 18 months to 3 years determines how you'll build relationships for the rest of your life.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. And it's like basically the mom leaves the room and they see what the kid does while the mom's away.

NANCY REDDY: Yeah. And then how they respond upon return. And I mean it's so interesting to me because she designed the original. So she does this observational study. It's a yearlong study and they designed it to test caregiving, but they also designed it so they came at all kinds of times of the day—except in the evening. They designed it so they would never be able to observe shared caregiving.

And I just feel like if you claim that the primary caregiver is the most important one, but your research protocol prevents you from ever observing another caregiver, you haven't really proven that very well.

BLAIR HODGES: And you point out there was only 23 infant/mother pairs that they even studied. So like the main study that a lot of this theory is based on is microscopic.

NANCY REDDY: It's microscopic! It's like 26, and 23 by the time they go into the lab, like a randomly selected group of white women in mid-century Baltimore. And there are all these other problems with it.

There's a historian of science, Marga Vicedo, a really respected historian of science, who went into the archives to look at the original records made by Mary Ainsworth’s team when they were observing these mothers in their homes. And she says something really—It's like when academics want to kind of be snarky about something like, “these studies do not constitute quality scholarship,” or something where you're like, ooh, that burns!

BLAIR HODGES: That's a burn. Yeah, basically, like, these reports are crap. [laughter]

NANCY REDDY: Exactly, exactly. And just that with the quality of the observations, you know, if you're going to do that kind of observational work—which is, I think, really important and a good way to learn about things—

BLAIR HODGES: Sure.

NANCY REDDY: You have to train everyone so that they're observing with some amount of, you know, certainty.

BLAIR HODGES: What are we looking for? What are the things we want to see?

NANCY REDDY: Yeah, exactly. And it turns out instead that these records are full of judgments of the women. It seems like there was some personal animosity between some of the observers and the women themselves, which I've got to say, like, I would not have been that happy if someone was just, like, sitting in my living room kind of watching me struggle to comfort my baby and, like, making a tick, being like, “Hmm, she’s…” you know, like, I wouldn't like that either.

And one of them wasn't even making her records at the time. Like, she recorded her observations like six months later. And it's just, when I was in graduate school, my dissertation work was archival, so I didn't do that kind of human subject research. But the people that I know who did were so rigorous and so careful in the designs of their studies and how they recruited people to be part of their study. And the Baltimore study just doesn't live up to that kind of rigor.

And so, I mean, for me, that in a way is really freeing to be able to say, like, well, you don't need to worry about your baby being anxiously attached, because that's not really a thing you should think about. Like, you know, how are you connecting with your kid?

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

NANCY REDDY: So if you see some sort of scoldy thing on Instagram or somewhere about anxious attachment, like, you can just free yourself. Like, it's not real.

BLAIR HODGES: If only you could go back in time! Because you say that the first few months with your baby, there was a lot of misery there. There was so much sleep disruption for you, postpartum depression, feeding difficulties that you encountered, and social isolation. Especially a person like you that was in the academy and, like, going to class and really connecting with these communities.

And suddenly you're here alone with this baby, and you were worried about going back to campus. It wasn't like you were just like, “I finally get to escape this.” You're also like, “Oh, no. Not only am I not enjoying this, but I'm actually worried about going back,” because you had all these ideas about, like, attachment styles and stuff in your head. So you really were carrying it with you. It seems like it felt sort of oppressive to you.

NANCY REDDY: I think so. I mean, I don't think I would have articulated it that way at the time, but I don't know, I probably wasn't a very accurate observer of my own experience at the moment. I knew that I wanted to have a baby. And it seemed like the right time to do that in graduate school for any number of reasons. And, I mean, my work was really important to me, is really important to me.

You know, I loved my baby, and I also really struggled in connecting with him and feeling like a competent caregiver for him. And so there were ways in which actually, like, going to work is way easier sometimes than caring for a little baby.

I don't know. It's a complicated kind of tangle, I think, to try to figure out, and I think this is probably true for everyone. How do you both care for your baby and try to sustain whatever kind of work life you had?

BLAIR HODGES: So did you figure out what attachment styles your kids have now? [laughs]

NANCY REDDY: No, no. I don’t know what. [laughter]

BLAIR HODGES: Because they're crap.

NANCY REDDY: Exactly. No, I wouldn't worry about that. Yeah, I don't believe in it.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

NANCY REDDY: I mean, and I will say, what I do know is true, that I think is helpful to me, the scary way attachment styles are used, I think, is to say, if you either actually get your kid assessed or you do your own kind of homemade science assessment of their attachment at eighteen months or three years or whatever, some of the researchers—and this is, you know, the research is being done now is more complex—but the scary pop psychology version of is like, that's what stays with you forever!

So, like, if you mess your kid up, they're going to be anxiously attached forever in every relationship. And that's just not really true. Actually, there's been some good research that shows it doesn't correlate exactly. That your attachment style can change over a lifetime and then it changes in different relationships.

BLAIR HODGES: Well, and also they forget that kids bring their own selves to the mix too. Like these aren't these blank slate kids that we just shape into whatever they become is because we did everything.

And it's funny cause like when we had our first kid, we thought we were such good parents. We were like, we are so good at this. We had our second kid and we're like, oh, wait a minute.

NANCY REDDY: I mean, I do think people should have as many kids as they want. Or don't want, or whatever. But I will say for me, like, having the second kid like really showed me…

BLAIR HODGES: How much they bring.

NANCY REDDY: Yeah, exactly. Like, oh, you are your own person. He still really is like, you know, whatever was challenging with the first, like, was not my fault. And whatever you're doing now is also, you know. And this is, I think, this mythology of “You have to be a certain kind of mother, this is the way to do it,” right? It's harmful for women. I think it's also bad for kids. Because if there's one way to be a good mother, that also assumes you're trying to create a kind of factory-standard kid.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

NANCY REDDY: Which is not actually, you know, how kids are.

BLAIR HODGES: No.

NANCY REDDY: And seems like a really harmful way to approach things, right?

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, exactly.

I want to remind people we're talking about the book The Good Mother Myth: Unlearning Our Bad Ideas about How to Be a Good Mom. We're talking with Nancy Reddy. Her previous books include the poetry collections Pocket Universe and Double Jinx, which was a winner in the National Poetry Series. She also teaches writing at Stockton University and writes the newsletter Write More, Be Less Careful.

 

Dr. Spock Changed the Game – 34:26

 

BLAIR HODGES: Let's talk specialists Nancy, because your book gives some advice, gives us some history, gives some ideas about parenting, and I think it would be a great resource to learn more about where our baked in ideas about parenting came from. But your book exists amongst many, many, many, many books. There's parenting advice everywhere.

Back in the 1940s and 50s, there was really just one book that people turned to. This is Dr. Spock. They didn't have the same kind of glut of information that we have today where you can read books and see stuff on TikTok and Instagram. They just had Dr. Spock.

NANCY REDDY: Spock's so fascinating to me because for many decades, his book outsold everything but the Bible. And you hear these stories of women who had, like, three copies. Like, they had one in the kitchen, they had one they would keep in the bathroom of the nursery, and one they would keep in the car.

Like, they never wanted to be more than an arm's length from Spock. He was that important to them. And I don't know how many women were really like that, but he definitely sold a lot of copies.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. And they were like 500 pages. Kind of like, it was.

NANCY REDDY: So, yeah, doorstop.

BLAIR HODGES: It was sort of shaped like a novel, too. The kind of novel that a mom might have. So even in the way they made the book was like, “oh, this is something you can have in your hand.”

NANCY REDDY: Yeah, they tried. As it got bigger and they did new editions, they tried to keep it to a size where that you could hold a baby and hold the book at the same time. It wouldn't get too big. But, you know, they kept adding to it. So it got bigger and bigger.

But Spock's real innovation, his contribution, I think part of the reason for his popularity, was this kind of famous tagline that's at the very beginning of the book where he says, “Trust yourself, you know more than you think.”

And I think that that approach really spoke to a lot of mothers at the time who, a lot of them had became mothers younger. A lot of them were farther away from their own families. People were moving more often and really needed both the reassurance that they could figure it out. And also wanted guidance from a pediatrician like Spock, because the sentence that gets forgotten after that one is something like, “But don't forget to check in with your pediatrician if you have a question.”

BLAIR HODGES: Or my book. You say this is the paradox at the heart of Spock's book, like, trust your instinct. And also! Everybody needs this 500 page book.

NANCY REDDY: Exactly. Right. Trust yourself. But, like you know, check, ladies, we've got a big index. You can look up any problem you're having.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. So his approach to how to raise kids was really particular and also told women to rely on their instincts. And you say that unlike a lot of the other scientists we've discussed so far, Spock maybe tried a little bit more often to listen to some of the criticism from women themselves and tried to make some updates to his work.

Talk about some of the feedback and how that worked with Spock, that he was a little more plugged in, because even with some of these earlier things there were—We're not talking about women who are robots all along, taking whatever theory comes their way. There were always women who would try to follow the theories that were being put out there and just be like, this isn't fitting. What the heck is this?

And that happened with Spock, and he was a little bit more responsive.

NANCY REDDY: Yeah. I mean, one of the things I love about Spock is that, I mean, women wrote to him, he said, this is what you're supposed to do. This is how it should work. And women wrote back when they had questions or when they had problems or when they thought he was wrong.

And he really did, over the course of the many editions of his book, make changes based on that feedback. There's a lot of stuff it took him a long time to get. There was a lot of stuff he kind of never got. But he did attempt to listen to women, I think, in a way that actually makes him very different than many of the other scientists I studied in the book.

BLAIR HODGES: Can you think of any examples off the top of your head about anything where women might have challenged him, where he might have listened?

NANCY REDDY: Yeah. I mean, one of the most interesting and also just kind of funny moments of Spock trying to change his mind or kind of getting there is when he ran for president as an independent, a third party candidate. And he was trying to secure the nomination from the National Organization for Women.

And he had spent his career working with women, and they wrote him letters telling him how much they loved him, so I think he thought he had it locked up. And then they booed him, like, off the stage. [laughter]

BLAIR HODGES: He wanted to parent America and they rejected him.

NANCY REDDY: Yeah.

BLAIR HODGES: Well, in fact, the US is an anxiously attached country, maybe those are attachment issues.

NANCY REDDY: I know, right?

BLAIR HODGES: Or avoidant, I guess.

NANCY REDDY: Yeah. I mean, Spock really was like—His politics, I think, are so complicated. He was the first kind of celebrity to march with Dr. King. He was a Vietnam War protestor. He got arrested a bunch of times, like, intentionally.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

NANCY REDDY: And so I think that he’s one of these guys who really thought of himself as this probably progressive or at least, like, on the right side of things. And so to have this crowd of women not want to have anything to do with him, I think must have genuinely shocked him. And Gloria Steinem later told him, “You are considered a symbol of male oppression, just like Freud.”

And I think that probably really shocked him. And he tried to come around. He tried to come to grips with that and kind of recant, but he couldn't quite get the whole way there. He couldn't quite, I think, get his head around why women of the 70s didn't love him in the way that maybe an earlier generation of women had loved him.

BLAIR HODGES: And then for all his progressiveness, you also point out he ended up divorcing and getting together with a woman who was 40 years younger than him. His second wife. And having her, you know, he kind of erased his wife's imprint and contributions to his work as well. And then he wasn't a very good dad either. Really doesn't end with a happy ending for Spock.

NANCY REDDY: I mean, it's wild that so many of these men who were so central to the science and the public face of motherhood, like, raised children who wanted very little to do with them in adulthood. When people started saying, like, “Oh, Spock is to blame for this generation. Spock led a generation of parents in permissive parenting, and that's why they're all doing permissive parenting. Yeah, like, he's to blame for that.” One of his sons—

BLAIR HODGES: I've seen that again today, by the way.

NANCY REDDY: Oh, a hundred percent. I mean, you know, you can always blame parents for things.

But one of his sons wrote this article defending him, sort of defending him, that said basically, like, “No, Spock, he was not a permissive parent. Like, I don't think he ever hugged me,” and I'm like, woo, that's not really much of a defense!

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. Maybe that doesn't do the work you hoped that it would do there. Poor Spock. [laughs]

NANCY REDDY: I mean, I think he probably knew. I think he probably knew what he was doing. I think he grew up very much in public and kind of knew how that would read.

 

So Many Experts to Choose From Today – 41:24

 

BLAIR HODGES: I mean, the big takeaway from this chapter is how you point out, like, Spock was such an important person, but today we have countless influencers and parenting gurus and momfluencers and that the voices have only multiplied. The advice has gotten more complicated, more difficult to follow, more contradictory. And that although research has continued and we arguably know more than ever with evidence-backed methods about potty training or whatever else, now we've just got all these voices everywhere.

And you suggest it's just making people more anxious and worried about their parenting, like the more expertise, the harder it might be.

NANCY REDDY: Well, and the more options for expertise. Because I think the thing with Spock is, you know, it's an enormous book, but there's only ever one answer. So if you look up potty training, that section will always read the same. But if you're a parent today trying to figure out how to potty train your kid, there's an infinity of advice, and it contradicts itself.

And it’s just, I think that overwhelm that so many parents feel now because there's so much advice available to us is, I think it's pretty bad. I think it's not helpful for us. And I also think our desire for experts to tell us what to do is really intertwined with the kind of isolation and individualism of American parenthood.

I think it's much easier to log on to Instagram and try to find someone who will tell you what to do than it is to talk to a neighbor and be like, “Hey man, I am struggling. Can you help me?”

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, yeah, exactly right.

NANCY REDDY: It's like, that's really hard to do.

And also just like, structurally a lot of us don't have the space in our lives to build the kinds of relationships that I think we actually need and that actually make parenting—and just like being a person—better. I mean, and I will say like the one thing, when my kids were born, I did feel very alone at times.

But in practical terms, we were not alone. You know, we were the first ones of our friends to have kids in Madison, which had its own challenges, but also meant that we had a lot of friends who had time to come hang out with us. Because they weren't at home with their own kids.

So we did have the kinds of friends who would just come sit on the couch while we were sitting on the couch, come hang out with the baby. And I think that having people who had really been there in a casual, long-term way and who really cared about my kid, like that is way more meaningful than an expert telling me, “This is what you're supposed to do.”

You know, it means that like my friend Anna was able to take the kid and be like, “Hey, I think he seems a little fussy right now. Can I take him for a second?” Like that's so much more helpful than a lady on Instagram who's going to give you like a five-step plan to get your baby down for a nap or something.

 

Community Parenting – 44:06

 

BLAIR HODGES: You know, for all the criticism and investigation you did with these specialists, you also found some interesting examples of people who were doing some good work that's worth considering. I'm thinking, for example, of Margaret Mead.

So while these kind of traditional folks, these men experimenting with wireframe monkeys or this woman observing how white middle class children would react when their moms leave the room, Margaret Mead was much more nontraditional. She was looking at parenthood through the lens of anthropology. Talk about her approach, how it differed, and what she was coming up with.

NANCY REDDY: Yeah, I mean, I love Margaret Mead, she was really the surprise in the book. Like when I sold the book, there was no Margaret Mead chapter. But she kept coming up and I emailed my editor. I was like, can I write a Margaret Mead chapter?

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, it sounds crucial.

NANCY REDDY: I know. And it really was. And I came to her in part via Spock because they called her Dr. Spock's first baby. He was trying to build up a pediatric practice in New York and found a kind of clientele of like academics and intellectuals. And I mean, some of the stuff that Spock did, like breastfeeding on demand, that was very unusual for the time, was in part because that's what Margaret Mead had wanted to do. And she was like, okay, I want you to be my baby's doctor, but here are some things that we are gonna do.

And those ideas for her really came from the work she had done as an anthropologist as a very young woman when she went to Samoa. And she was trained to really observe, to really spend time in a place to get to learn a language, to get to learn a culture. She did participant observation.

So she really was part of a community. And certainly there are like problematic things about Margaret Mead and how she talked about Samoans. But what I really found fascinating and encouraging about her, is that she came back from this research with pretty radical ideas about how to be a parent and how to make a family.

When she had her daughter, they always shared a home with other families. She kept working and she really carefully surrounded her daughter with other adults and other families. She talked about it as being a “composite household,” which is just such an appealing—I mean, can you imagine if you were raising kids and there were always other adults around, like not just your partner, but like other people too, who you could just kind of pitch in and help?

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

NANCY REDDY: She was also involved in some debates with Bowlby earlier on. And her response to Bowlby specifically, who was so obsessed with a primary caregiver, was that actually babies did best and children did best in the care of many warm, friendly people. And I just love that as a way of thinking about family, that actually one person not only is it not optimal, it's not enough. Like all of us need many warm, friendly people.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. She really knew from her research that there are many different ways to make a family. And this exclusive mother/baby emphasis could actually be dangerous and could be unhealthy for kids, depending on the circumstances. And you point out her theorizing was reflected in her personal life. Alloparenting is the technical term that comes up, sort of sharing the role of parenthood in a group rather than having these isolated people.

There’s more. She experienced divorce, she had kids. And she was also bisexual. Let's take a second to talk a little bit about that aspect of things for Margaret Mead.

NANCY REDDY: Yeah, so Mead's kind of a fascinating. I mean, she's fascinating for so many reasons. One of the things that I loved in the biographies and other things I read about Mead is that she just was this incredibly unconventional person. She was married three times and I mean, with each of her first husbands, I think she just kind of, she's like, “Oh, this has run his course. We were moving on to something else.”

In all of her marriages, certainly the first two, she also had affairs with women. I don't know that she would have considered—I don't think she would have called herself bisexual.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, I don't even think that word was sort of on the radar maybe?

NANCY REDDY: Yeah, I think that was not. I don't know what language she would have used for it.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, good point.

NANCY REDDY: But there are these funny things where, towards the end of her life, there was a New Yorker profile of her and the woman she lived with, who was also her coeditor for the column she was writing at the time at Redbook. And it was this very kind of Boston marriage. Like, look at Margaret Mead and her close friend.

And so she was very unconventional in her personal life and she believed in free love. Like that was really a belief and a value of hers, that you didn't need to be constrained to, you know, one romantic or sexual relationship.

You asked about her daughter. She was very close with her daughter throughout her life. And the one way in which this seems to have become a point of tension was a letter that she wrote late in her life kind of saying, you know, “This is who I am. There are these other things about me you may not have known.”

And Mary Catherine, when she writes about it, is not hurt by that revelation. I don't think she's bothered at all by the idea of her mother having romantic or sexual relationships with women. I think she's just hurt that she didn't know. And there's this whole part of her mother's life that she wasn't part of, which I don't know, it raises these really interesting questions, I think, like, as parents, we always have things that we don't share with our kids and parts of ourself. And I don't know, I think there's value in that. Mary Catherine Bateson’s book is really a beautiful memoir of having two parents who are really interesting, complicated people and trying to understand herself in relationship to them.

BLAIR HODGES: Well, I found this part of the book extremely valuable. And also to point out that, like, all the parents you discuss in this book have shortcomings. Even Margaret Mead, for all the interesting ideas and theories and research and stuff that she did, that there were difficulties there, too. Like, nobody really comes out unscathed. None of our kids do. And I don't think any of us do.

NANCY REDDY: Yeah, I had really wanted Margaret Mead to be kind of the hero of this book. Like, for a little while, I thought, if we can all just follow Margaret Mead's example, then we'll know what to do! Which is kind of the irony of saying, actually, there is no one way to be a good mother.

Even late into the writing of this book, I was like, but maybe Margaret Mead knows how to be good. And it turns out, of course, that it’s way more complicated than that, there are all kinds of things in her personal life that are kind of complicated and not ideal.

She wrote an advice column for Redbook for a long time. And women would write in with all these kinds of questions. And she was remarkably kind of conservative in her advice to them. She would write things like, “Well, go to college if you want. You know, that way you'll have a backup. But really, you should get married.”

And this is woman who got a PhD in her 20s when no women were doing that. And I think she had—so many of us have a really hard time distinguishing between her own views of what she wanted and thought was possible for herself and maybe what she thought was possible for other women or kind of squaring her personal values with her public statements.

And so ultimately, I mean, there’s no one model that any of us can follow. I think we have to try to figure out what our own values are and also who our kids are, instead of trying to follow anybody's mold, even hers. As much as I love her.

 

The Substitute Mother – 51:44

 

BLAIR HODGES: For all the problems you saw with some of these researchers, and especially with the monkey research, you also witnessed your own monkey story at that same zoo that Harlow had started at so long ago. And this monkey moment helped you come to terms with what you wanted to be as a mom.

NANCY REDDY: Yeah. The kind of funny thing about this is—So Harlow had been doing his research on the same campus where I was a graduate student. And he had also done his first research, had been at the zoo, which is still Henry Vialla Zoo. It's still the zoo in Madison, where, because I had young kids, I was also spending a lot of time.

It's a free zoo, so you can go and just walk around and see whatever animals there are to see. And there's a moment late in the book where I'm very pregnant, like, maybe 35, 36 weeks pregnant with my second kid. And, you know, I've taken the toddler out of the house just to do something.

And we're inside the primate house, which is, you know, if you've ever been to a zoo, it's kind of like small and stinky and a little bit overheated. And I’m sitting down on a bench, and I look through one of the cages, and there's an orangutan in one of the cages. And the zookeeper was sitting alongside the glass with a clipboard, like, looking, but not looking.

These orangutans don't like it when you look at them directly. They see it as a sign of aggression. And the orangutan was on labor watch. They were waiting for her to give birth, which is how I felt at the time, too. Like, kind of everyone was looking at me like, “Are you gonna get birth in this restaurant?” I was like, I don't think so. I hope not.

BLAIR HODGES: And you didn't like people to look directly at you too. [laughs]

NANCY REDDY: Exactly right. Like, please don't perceive me.

And I went to a prenatal checkup maybe a week or so after that and mentioned to my doctor that we had been at the zoo and I saw this monkey and she's pregnant too. And isn't that funny?

And my doctor, who I loved, kind of offhandedly said, “Oh well, no, she had her baby, but it's not going well. And she wasn't able…”

She's a first time mother. First time orangutan mother who had been raised in captivity, so she had never seen mothering done by her species. And she wasn't connecting with the baby. She kind of picked it up and it cried and it freaked her out and she put it back down and wouldn't pick it up again after that. And the zookeepers did all of these things.

And this is a thing that happens actually with orangutans that have been raised in captivity, it turns out.

And the zookeepers had these kind of felt vests that have these strips of felt on them because orangutans have to learn how to cling. So the zookeepers had to care for the baby and the baby orangutan had to cling to these kind of orange felt vests. And they really tried to help her bond, help the orangutan mother bond with her baby and learn to care for her baby.

But it just couldn't happen. She wasn't able to do it. And the baby ended up being moved to a zoo in Atlanta where there was another orangutan who they called a super surrogate, that she had never given birth to her own babies, but she had performed this role of becoming a mother to like three or four other orangutan babies who did really well, like, who really thrived in her care. 

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, it's a beautiful moment to see this other mothering opportunity and that you were witnessing this as you were about to have a kid.

You know, we're about to talk about regrets, challenges and surprises, which is how I end every interview. Before we do, I wanted to mention the biggest surprise for me in the book, which is after all the difficulties you describe with your first child, like your partner Smith wasn't the most helpful or most enthusiastic about having the first kid.

And so I felt like, okay, that's probably it. But you decided to have another kid. So for me, the biggest surprise was when you said that you wanted to have another kid.

NANCY REDDY: Yeah, I mean, and I should clarify. I mean, it’s in the book, right? Like, it was a really challenging time in our marriage. And I think that's common for a lot of people. I think adding kids to a partnership places a lot of pressure on things and there's a lot of reasons for that. You can read all the dirt in the book.

We got to a point where, where our baby, our older son was just about a year old and he was like sleeping so well and he was going to daycare and I was doing well in my schoolwork, and it just, everything was so great.

And I figured, like, “Oh, we've got this figured out.” Like, this is, you know, “We have learned how to do this. It was hard, and we learned how to do it.” Which is not how really parenting or anything works. You know, you can't figure it out one time and be done with it.

But I really felt like I had always wanted to have more than one kid. You know, I have a sister and I have several stepsisters and, you know, my husband has two brothers. Like, siblings are very important to both of us. And so that was part of it.

 I think also there's probably just an idea that like, two is the right number of kids to have. And I do not believe that anymore. But I think kind of culturally, that's the idea that I just kind of still bought into, you know, this is the right way to do it kind of a thing.

It also made sense as much as it ever makes sense to have a baby, it kind of made sense personally with my time or professionally, I guess, with my timing in school, like, if we're going to do it, do it now while we've got the good union healthcare, we've got friends here, we've got a doctor we love.

So, yeah, we had a second kid and I did kind of have to—I chose to. I did kind of push my husband into it. [laughter] And that was a really tough moment for us. He would say now that he's really glad we do have the second kid. Our second kid is totally different than our first in the way that I can't imagine not having had him.  

I mean, I don't know how anybody decides how many kids to have or when to have them. It's such a, you know, there's no good time. There's no right number.

 

Regrets, Challenges, & Surprises – 57:44

 

BLAIR HODGES: So that was my surprise.

Now let's talk about your regrets and challenges and surprises. Again, we're talking about the book The Good Mother Myth: Unlearning Our Bad Ideas about How to Be a Good Mom by Nancy Reddy. Okay, here we go.

NANCY REDDY: Yeah. I mean, Margaret Mead was one of the big surprises. And I'm glad I discovered her because her work is so different. So that was a great surprise.

The other big surprise of the writing of the book was the wives. I had proposed this and sold it as a book that was really about these mostly male scientists, with the exception of Mary Ainsworth, who had done this work on motherhood. And, I mean, I spent years on the book before we sold it. And so I really thought I knew, like, exactly what would be in it. And I was rereading some of the Harlow stuff and there are mentions of kids. And I was like, wait, he had a wife? No, wait, he had two wives. Like, what was the story there? What happened? And it really kind of unpeeled for me this question of, you know, here are these men who spent their whole lives devoted to telling women what to do.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

NANCY REDDY: And how to be good moms. And who was raising their kids? And we know the answer to that. That's not actually, like, a very surprising trick question. But what I did find, when I really looked at the wives, like Harry Harlow's wives, he was married twice. John Bowlby's wife, Donald Winnicott's two wives, that they were really remarkable, amazing women.

I mean, each of them very ambitious, very accomplished in their own right. And they were women who, you know, because of their culture, because of the time period and also just the choices they made, had their own kind of professional ambitions really stunted. And, you know, that kind of sexism, I don't think is really a surprise to anyone.

But what was especially striking to me was just the way the things they knew and if their husbands had been able to listen to them, how different the science would have been. I mean, at the same time that Bowlby was, you know, traveling around Europe and doing all this research and talking about how easy and natural it is to be a mother, I mean, his wife was raising their four kids at home. And certainly, I mean, they were wealthy people. They had, you know, staff. They had people to help, but she was writing these plaintive letters about how hard it was. And he really seems to have not been able to register that at all.

And if he'd been able to listen, we'd have a very different kind of science of motherhood today.

BLAIR HODGES: I got one other question for you. In your acknowledgments, you say that your agent, Maggie Cooper, saw the potential in a very different proposal than what this book ended up being. And I just wanted to know what that was. What changed from what you originally planned?

NANCY REDDY: Oh, my goodness. It was a much less focused book. I was like, here's some research about the history of lactation. I really was trying to include every interesting thing I had learned.

BLAIR HODGES: Okay.

NANCY REDDY: And pack it all in. It was like my Theory of Everything kind of a book. And it took, I think, maybe three times for Maggie to say, in a very kind and gentle but clear way over the course of several months, to say, like, “Well, what if it were simpler? What if there were, like, one, you know, researcher per chapter?”

And it took me, I think, until the third time where I could hear her and be like, “Oh, I'll have a Harlow chapter, and then I'll have a Bowlby chapter.”

And once I could figure that out, the structure of it really came together.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. And to put it along with your own story is the powerful part for me, because what we see is your goal at being a mom was going to be to study it out, find all the answers, and then do it. That was impossible for you.

And then you're like, well, why is that? Then you kind of tell us the shape of the history of all this theorizing about parenting that most of us are unaware of, but it affects every single one of us because it's just in the water we drink now.

NANCY REDDY: I mean, I think there certainly are things about my story that are particular, but I also think there's a lot that's pretty kind of unspecial, and I don’t want to say universal, but it is common, right? Like, that feeling, if nothing else, that I think probably every parent has had at some point of like, wow, this is not what I expected, or, like, I didn't know it was going to be like this.

BLAIR HODGES: You give parents permission to take a breath and to take some of the pressure off. And I think that makes the book incredibly valuable. So I appreciate it.

NANCY REDDY: Thank you. That's really my hope.

BLAIR HODGES: Again, that’s Nancy Reddy, author of The Good Mother Myth: Unlearning Our Bad Ideas about How to Be a Good Mom. She's also coeditor of The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood, which she co-edited with Emily Perez. Her essays have appeared in Slate, Poets and Writers, Romper, The Millions, and other places, and she teaches writing at Stockton University.

You can check out her newsletter, Write More, Be Less Careful.

Nancy, this has been a lot of fun. I love the book.

 

NANCY REDDY: Thank you so much.

 

Outro – 62:24

 

BLAIR HODGES: That's it for this episode of Relationscapes. We're mapping out the stories and ideas that shape who we are and how we connect with each other. And last month was kind of a rough one, and so I was heartened to see a few reviews of the show appear in Apple Podcasts. To brighten up my day, I'll read one because maybe if I do that, it'll inspire you to go review the show.

This is from n.l.l.a. They said so many of the guests are charming and insightful and the show is so relevant to daily life. And they also said that my voice is super listenable. So thanks for that. Here's the deal. I also right now have Relationscapes stickers and I want you to have one.

Here's how you can get one. Go rate and review the show in Apple Podcasts and DM me me a screenshot or email me a screenshot and I'll send you a sticker through the mail. As long as the postal service still exists by the time you're you're listening to this. Yeah, I'll be doing that until the stickers run out, so don't wait.

People can also rate the show in Spotify or Pocket casts. Mates of State provided our theme song Relationscapes as part of the Dialogue Podcast Network. I'm Blair Hodges and I'll see you again soon. Maybe I'll see you again in right now. If you want to go back and listen to an episode from the archive, then we'll see you right now.

Let's go.