The Myth of the Perfect Mother

I grew up believing my great-grandmother was an orphan. The truth, uncovered in an Italian archive, changed how I understand maternal love and what it means to be a "good" mother.

My mother always told me her Nonna Lina was an orphan. This was where our maternal line began, with a parentless girl from Bologna whose first name, Natalina, meant "Christmas". I had assumed, since my mother knew nothing more of her grandmother's origins, that the girl's parents must have died before she had the chance to know them.

I never imagined there had been a mother, still living, unknown to Natalina. A father, too. Then I found my great-grandmother's birth record. The document was among a pile of family papers belonging to Natalina's last surviving daughter. Nobody else in the family wanted them and, since I have an interest in this sort of thing, I saved them from the rubbish heap.

The birth record was yellowed, two pages long, and the bottom right-hand corner was missing. At first, I was tickled to read her birthdate: 23 December, the day before Christmas Eve. It explained her pretty name. The record also informed me where she was born: in a house on 12 Mother Shadow, a street named for the abbot, Via Abate, in a town I had never heard of called San Giovanni in Persiceto, somewhere in the fecund plains outside Bologna.

I read down to the end of the first page until one of the last lines pulled me up. Those jarring words: che non consente di essere nominata, "who does not consent to be named". They were her mother's words, and I hadn't been expecting them.

Natalina, this told me, was not an orphan at all. Her mother had not died in childbirth or shortly after. Instead, she had not recognised her daughter as her own. For reasons I could not have explained at the time, this circumstance struck me as far more tragic than had both of Natalina's parents been killed in an industrial accident or a natural disaster.

Another word, over the page, informed me why her mother had not wanted to be named on the birth certificate: brefotrofio. I had to look it up. An Italian Wikipedia search enlightened: an institution, distinguished from an orphanage, that takes in and raises illegitimate, abandoned and unrecognised infants at birth or in danger of abandonment.

In short, a brefotrofio is a foundling home. The provincial official who recorded Natalina's birth ordered the baby be dispatched to the foundling home in Bologna and charged the midwife who oversaw her birth, Rosa Rizzi, with the task. It made sense now. The mother was unmarried. Her daughter was illegitimate. She had abandoned her.

My impulse, when I understood the significance of those words — who does not consent to be named — was to assume some degree of maternal indifference, that the mother had cast off her daughter because she did not want her. Natalina, the unwanted Christmas gift. By withholding her name from her daughter's official papers, the woman consigned her to a life as a "child of nobody".

What kind of mother abandons her child?

I consider myself an empathetic person, one easily moved by vulnerability or injustice. As a teenager, I wrote letters for Amnesty International campaigns demanding the release of political prisoners. As a journalist, I so irritated a cabinet minister with my sympathetic newspaper articles about the plight of asylum seeker mothers of young children at the Villawood Immigration Detention Centre, he whispered, "I am watching you" into the telephone. I despaired when the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade. Cried when, the same year, my AFL club's women's team played their first ever match — because women weren't allowed to before. I consider myself progressive. A feminist.

Yet I judged my great-great-grandmother. What kind of mother could forsake her child?

I couldn't let it go. Not only the act of abandonment but my initial, aggrieved response to it. Something about what Natalina's mother did both compelled and horrified me. Was it because of how I was raised (in a "traditional" two-parent family by a stay-at-home mother and a father in stable paid employment)? Or did it have something to do with my more recent history as a career-driven woman with latent aspirations of motherhood, surviving a terrible plane crash with devastating injuries and fearing I would never be able to have a child?

Perhaps it was a combination of both things that meant I couldn't immediately grasp how a mother could forsake her child. It seemed extraordinary to me. Yet that mother and I were connected; we shared a common bloodline.

I fought to become a mum

In 2007, I emerged from a coma in an intensive care unit with my arms stretched out in a crucifix position, my body covered in bandages, not yet comprehending my injuries. I was 34, a foreign affairs correspondent for a major newspaper. I had survived a plane crash.

When I was transferred to the burns unit, the treating surgeon who had removed my critically infected legs to save my life came to see me. One of the first questions I asked her was: "Will I be able to have children?"

Not: will I be able to feed myself, sit up, walk, swim, write newspaper articles, watch football ever again (though they were all concerns). But will the burns on my abdomen, the infection that almost killed me, allow me to have a baby? And, further, was it permissible for me, whose body had been punished in this way — burned and flayed and shredded and cut and broken and sawn — to want this?

"I see no reason why not," the doctor, who had six children of her own, replied.

When, some years later, I had not been able to fall pregnant, I met with a person who was familiar with the adoption process. It was an information-seeking exercise, one I approached as any woman who wished to be a mother and had not been able to have a child naturally might do. 

The person told me that I may not be able to adopt because some countries required mothers to have all their limbs, and I did not. How their words stung; I feel their imprint still. Like a slap you were not expecting from a teacher across your arm from behind. How dare you.

I had assumed that love, sense and good intentions were all a person needed to qualify them for parenthood. I didn't know there were people out there who thought me inadequately equipped to be a mother, because of my disability. Was it wrong of me to want a child? I no longer had my legs, but I still had my heart and brain.

I found some kind medical professionals, was diagnosed with (and treated for) endometriosis and, with the aid of IVF, had my son. I fought to have my child, never believing, until the moment the surgeon sliced open my belly on the operating table, that it would happen. I understood how lucky I was, knew that I would give my life for him in an instant. 

Was I worthy of motherhood?

I was nervous holding my baby, L, and never did it while walking on prosthetic limbs. I didn't trust my broken body not to hurt him. My selfless, loving husband, Michael, did much of our son L's early caring, especially anything that involved carrying him — activities I always associated intrinsically with motherhood as I had experienced it as a child. Simple things, like pushing his pram to our local park or, when he'd learnt to walk, holding his hand to cross the road.

Making dinner in the kitchen or working in my study, I'd picture the two of them out walking the dog. My son would be strapped into a backpack-style baby carrier on his father's back. Michael sometimes took photos so I could see where they had been, what adventures they'd had.

I often felt guilty that my son was missing out in different ways because I was not an able-bodied mother. If those adoption gatekeepers were right, that I was unfit to be a mother of an adopted child, did it not follow that I would let down a biological one too?

There were many practical things I could still do for my boy, I reminded myself — dressing and feeding him, booking his appointments, reading with him — at least I had these. I was deeply conscious of how great a privilege it was to mother this beautiful boy, to love and to be loved by him. My very own, much-wanted son. Yet the misgivings continued to plague me. That, having given birth to my son, I wasn't good enough, whole enough, worthy of being his mother.

It seemed I was as agonised by my judgement of Natalina's mother, by my moral outrage over something that occurred more than a century ago, as I was by my incessant judging of my own mothering because of something bad that had happened to me, through no fault of my own.

I became aware of my prejudices around motherhood, ones I didn't know I had. That urge to hold the mother accountable for all ills.

I thought of the ways I felt judged and judged myself as a mother. For wanting a child as a disabled mother. For being an older mother. For using IVF. For bottle-feeding from six weeks because the burns made breastfeeding too painful. For having an only child and not trying harder for a sibling, because birthing for me was deemed high risk and we didn't want to push our luck. For bringing to motherhood some of the trauma of what had happened to me.

At one with my beautiful boy

As a child, nothing was as exciting as accompanying my mother on shopping expeditions. Hanging off that overloaded supermarket trolley with errant wheels as she steered it through Franklins doing our weekly grocery shop was my idea of heaven. It saddened me that I could never re-create these experiences for my son with the same freedom, autonomy and regularity as my mother.

When my son was little, however, sitting together on the wheelchair — even just to explore our house — offered consolation. It was an intimate, shared experience that was unique to us. When we were nestled this way, my child resting his back into me, so close I'd inhale his freshly shampooed hair, his little boy scent, we encountered the world together.

In Bologna, where Michael, L and me lived for three months while I investigated why my great-great grandmother had given up her child, it was all very congenial travelling by wheelchair under the smooth porticoes. Every time we met with a bumpy cobblestoned laneway, however, I feared the wheelchair was going to crack under the weight of us. 

Our Italian teacher was always thinking of ways to enrich our son's time in her city. Her pupil might enjoy his time better in Bologna with its 60 kilometres of porticoes, she gently told me following one of our lessons, if he had his own set of wheels. "You could get him a scooter."

The scooter was little, like him. It had a bright red deck and grips and three wheels, and was perfect for careening along the smooth pavements beneath the porticoes.

The little red scooter proved a master stroke. It gave L a sense of autonomy in an alien city I had forced upon him, in turn allowing me to feel more at home with my wheelchair in the land of my maternal ancestors, where I yearned to fit in. We could now ride Bologna's porticoes together.

Uncovering her shame, I found my own

Are our expectations of maternal love unrealistic? Are mine? I could yearn all I like for a "deeper" relationship with my mother, or I could accept that she loves me the only way she is capable of, because that's all we mothers can do.

My mother shows me her love whenever she takes a new pair of trousers for me to the tailor to get them taken up, so they fit the prosthetics. Or returns an online shopping parcel to the post office for me. She showed me her love when I said I wished I could try presnitz, the Triestine nut-and-raisin-filled strudel Natalina used to make (which James Joyce himself was known to like), and she immediately baked me one.

I was riven by maternal doubt about my great-great-grandmother's mothering because of her abandonment of Natalina, and about mine because of my disability. But doubt hollows out and weakens, like a fruit tree punctured by boring insects. It is wearying to run yourself down all the time, to feel that you are never enough. In trying to understand my great-great-grandmother, I realised something about myself: how urgent my own need for self-forgiveness is. Uncovering her shame, I found my own.

Having once asked what kind of mother my great-great-grandmother was, I tried to answer it about myself.

I am an older mother of one son. A mother who writes, gardens, swims, and cries at the football. A mother who has never driven her son to school but has read with him almost every night of his life. A mother whose left leg plugs into an electric socket to recharge overnight; a mother who loves to walk beside her son, but doesn't very often. A mother whose wheelchair squeaks and clunks, most annoyingly when she's trying to exit her son's room quietly after he has finally fallen asleep (this doesn't annoy the son, however, who tells her that, to his ears, the sound is "musical").

A mother who misses her old body and often feels alienated from the world because of what happened to her. Who tries not to take this out on the people she loves most, but does not always succeed. A mother who worries, is too hard on herself and others, but never stops trying to be otherwise, who admits when she has made a mistake.

Like any other mother

I had to piece together the shards of my great-great-grandmother's broken, troubling story because I needed to learn what it means to be a mother, so that I might forgive my own maternal failings — and understand that sometimes the failings aren't necessarily my own, but society's.

I think of how I feel when a mum sees me sitting alone at a mothers' lunch for my son's year, while the other mums interact on their feet, and asks to join me. How I feel when a mother I befriended at that lunch asks, six months later, if I'd like to go to an art gallery event with parents from our son's year, then calls ahead to arrange a disabled parking spot for us.

I feel surprised, grateful, reassured when I am given opportunities to make social connections that will enrich our son's life. I feel like any other mother.

What a difference it would make if school leaders — leaders of any organisations with parental involvement in children's experiences — decreed it a core value to consider those with disability in their communities. It would mean such parents don't have to decide every time: should I ask about accessibility, potentially causing the organisers to have to alter their plans for me, drawing attention to myself? Or should I just not go at all?

Such a complicated thing it is to love your child. 

My son does not ask me about my injuries very often. So I was surprised when one night back in Sydney, as I was tucking him into bed, he asked me what I liked about being in a wheelchair.

"Nothing," I replied instantly. 

Then I stopped and thought about it. 

"Nothing except for this," I added. "That when you were little, we got to ride together. First, when you were with me, sitting on my lap. And later, when you were beside me, riding your scooter, like we did along the porticoes in Bologna."

It occurred to me that maybe my great-great-grandmother already knew everything I had told her about her daughter. That Natalina may have found her in the afterlife, that they might be together now.

Silently, I thanked her for her story. Unexceptional, unromantic. At times so ugly I wanted to turn away. Yet defiant, hopeful. Through it, I understood more about my female lineage, about how we mothered. I learnt that at its core was how we survived as women, and how — despite the cards dealt to us — we loved as women, and as mothers.

My husband and son and I returned to the apartment for our final night in Bologna, me in my wheelchair, L beside me on his scooter, Michael walking behind us. And I knew that I loved my boy as completely as I could, constrained in my actions but never my words, and that was enough.

This is an edited extract of Cynthia Banham's book Mother Shadow: A Meditation on Maternal Inheritance, published this month by Upswell.

Credits

Words: Cynthia Banham

Illustration: Kylie Silvester

Editing: Catherine Taylor