Nancy Reddy, THE GOOD MOTHER MYTH: Unlearning Our Bad Ideas about How to Be a Good Mom
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[0:45]Nancy Ready is the author of The Good Mother Myth, Unlearning Our Bad Ideas About How
[0:49]To Be A Good Mom.
[0:51]Nancy is the author of The Good Mother Myth, as I said, and her previous books include the
[0:55]Poetry Collections, Pocket Universe, and Double Jinks, a winner of the National Poetry
[1:00]Series.
[1:01]With Emily Perez, she's co-editor of The Long Devotion, Poets Writing Motherhood.
[1:06]Her essays have appeared in sleep, poets, and writers, romper, the millions, and elsewhere.
[1:11]The recipient of grants from the New Jersey State Council and the arts in the Sustainable
[1:15]Arts Foundation, and a Walker E. Deacon Fellowship from the Sowani Writers Conference.
[1:20]She teaches writing at Stockton University and writes the newsletter, write more, be less
[1:25]careful.
[1:26]Welcome, Nancy.
[1:27]Thanks for coming on the show to talk about The Good Mother Myth, Unlearning Our Bad Ideas,
[1:32]About How To Be A Good Mom.
[1:33]Thank you for having me.
[1:35]Of course.
[1:36]Okay, so how did we think about being a good mom, and how should we be thinking about
[1:40]being a good mom?
[1:41]Oh, my God.
[1:42]I mean, so you're starting with an easy question.
[1:43]Yeah.
[1:44]Just a layup for you this morning?
[1:46]Exactly.
[1:47]I mean, I think the biggest thing that we've gotten wrong is this idea that a good mom
[1:53]can kind of do it all in her own, this idea of the super mom, right?
[1:56]Who can, when she's got a baby, she can like nurse and be up in the middle of the night
[2:01]and make the homemade baby food and dress the baby in a cute outfit and, you know, kind
[2:06]of carry it all in her own.
[2:08]And then I think that carries through to older kids, right?
[2:10]The idea that like moms create the magic in the family and, you know, take the kids to the
[2:16]dentist appointments and remember to sign them up for soccer, all of that kind of stuff.
[2:21]I think that's the biggest thing we've gotten wrong.
[2:24]And what I've really been trying to think about with this book is how we could understand
[2:29]mothering instead as like a relationship, which is what it is, and to think about the work
[2:38]is being more shared, you know, that it's not just one good mom, but really a whole community
[2:42]of people working together to raise kids.
[2:46]So true.
[2:48]Oh, the stuff I was like, oh, shoot, dentist, I just had to write it on a little sticky.
[2:51]I know.
[2:52]I know.
[2:53]I know.
[2:54]I know.
[2:55]One of my kids still needs the dentist to wear them anyway.
[2:57]Yes.
[2:58]Oh, my God.
[2:59]I know.
[3:00]Yeah.
[3:01]I'm going to return to my own list after this call probably.
[3:04]When did you become excited to delve into this topic and give us a little background about
[3:09]you?
[3:10]Oh, sure.
[3:11]So I probably have like always been a writer, I started writing as a poet.
[3:16]I had my own kids when I was in graduate school, I was in a PhD in English.
[3:22]And I really, you know, I've been working on my poems, I was working on scholarly work.
[3:26]I had, I think by the time I started publishing this book or I started writing this book,
[3:31]I had published a book of poetry and was working on another one.
[3:35]And I really felt like for this topic, I wanted to reach more people.
[3:41]I mean, I love poetry, but you know, not a lot of people read it.
[3:45]I think people feel intimidated by it.
[3:47]And when I started working on this book, I felt like, you know, these are these really
[3:52]big questions that I have and a conversation that I want to have.
[3:57]And that prose felt like the right container for that, the writing nonfiction would be able
[4:01]to reach people who maybe wouldn't read it in a poem.
[4:04]And so I started really working on this book in earnest when my kids were three and five.
[4:09]And I kind of like came up from that haze of early motherhood and was like, what just
[4:14]happened to me?
[4:15]And the book is kind of an attempt to try to figure that out.
[4:18]Well, I love how you weave in a lot of sort of psychology studies and all of that.
[4:23]I was a psych major like a million years ago in college and Harlem studies and all of
[4:28]it.
[4:29]I had learned about all of the things and you referenced many of them and I was like, yes,
[4:33]I remember that.
[4:34]Kind of remember that.
[4:35]Yes, that.
[4:36]So give us some of the context and how Harlow's monkeys and everything can give us some
[4:41]context of how we are parenting ourselves in 2024, 2025.
[4:46]I know, I mean, it feels wild to be talking about like the historical, the research
[4:50]during the book is really all like the 50s and 60s, which feels kind of, I mean, it's
[4:54]a very long time ago.
[4:55]But I think those ideas are still really with us in a lot of ways.
[4:59]And so the research that I really started with as Harlow is you, as you mentioned, and
[5:04]he's someone who like, I think anyone who's ever taken an intro site class has that image
[5:07]of like the tiny baby monkey clinging to this cloth mother that's like a terry cloth, kind
[5:13]of wrapped wire thing.
[5:15]They're kind of terrifying looking.
[5:17]And I got interested in that research.
[5:20]I'd heard about it.
[5:21]I heard about my own intro site class and I'd heard about it when I was first in graduate
[5:24]school.
[5:25]I went to school at Wisconsin where he was also a professor for a long time, though decades
[5:28]before.
[5:29]And I had heard the story that he actually did that research in the building that then
[5:33]housed the English department.
[5:34]And so I thought about like, oh my goodness, those monkeys turns out that's not quite
[5:37]true.
[5:38]His lab was across campus.
[5:40]But I was just fascinated by that image and what it meant about what it meant to be a good
[5:47]mother.
[5:48]Like, do you really have to be totally available all the time?
[5:52]Is that what makes a good mother?
[5:56]And I think that's the message from his research that was spread and that I think is still
[6:01]with us, right?
[6:02]Like a good mom will always be there for her baby.
[6:06]And his actual research turns out to be a lot more complicated than that.
[6:09]And that was a lot of what I delved into in my research and then shared in the book.
[6:14]So what did you learn about what babies really need and how that can change what we overextended
[6:22]women can get?
[6:24]Yeah.
[6:25]I mean, the thing that really like resonated with me the most.
[6:30]So there's all these men who are studying motherhood through like the 50s and the 60s and
[6:34]they're all working together and they're sharing their research.
[6:37]But the thing that I discovered is that the anthropologist Margaret Mead was also involved
[6:41]in that and she was at these meetings and she was debating them and she came from a really
[6:45]different background.
[6:46]She was an anthropologist or she had studied communities and you know, and someone she
[6:50]had seen really different ways of raising kids.
[6:52]And the thing that she said, which like meant so much to me and still does was the idea
[6:59]that what a baby needs, what children need is not one perfect mom, but many warm friendly
[7:06]people and that actually the best way to raise a kid is in community.
[7:13]And that I think is a really powerful idea that it's not kind of like if you are asking
[7:19]neighbors for help, if you're asking friends, if you have a nanny, if you're sending kids
[7:23]to daycare, you're not kind of settling in some way that that's actually a great way
[7:27]to raise your kids because it's really well when they're surrounded by lots of people
[7:30]who love them.
[7:31]I mean, it seems fairly obvious and yet as a mother, it feels counterintuitive, right?
[7:39]Yeah.
[7:40]Like it, yes, of course, how nice more people to love your child, more wonderful influences.
[7:45]Like if I'm in the world, like I wouldn't want to just be with one person who loves me,
[7:50]I would much rather opt for the scenario where many people love me.
[7:54]Kind of binary.
[7:55]Like yes, this sounds better, but then when you are that parent feeling that, yeah, overwhelming
[8:01]responsibility, it feels like a failure to ask for help for it.
[8:05]Maybe this is now I'm just projecting my own.
[8:07]I mean, I think that's a really common sentiment.
[8:11]So how are we supposed to hold both of these truths and have it affect our behavior?
[8:16]Like how do we remember that and maybe it is like reading books like yours and studies
[8:21]and reminding ourselves and all of that, but how can we help people internalize the findings
[8:27]of the book to make their, to go easier on themselves, honestly, right?
[8:31]Yeah.
[8:32]Yeah.
[8:33]Well, and to not even understand it as going, I mean, it is in one way going easier
[8:36]on ourselves, right?
[8:37]Like letting go of these like wild expectations that we have for ourselves, but it's also
[8:43]understanding that kind of care, like sending your kid to a daycare where you know
[8:49]they're going to be well cared for, like that's a great way to be a good mom, you know,
[8:53]like that's actually really excellent parenting.
[8:55]And so not actually thinking about a second best, but you're right, like how do we, I
[8:58]think that speaks to the power of these myths that we have that it's so hard to shake
[9:04]it.
[9:05]I mean, I think the way we do it is by doing it, right?
[9:07]Like the thing that made early motherhood start to really get better from me was when I
[9:12]was willing to like let people see how much I was struggling and like talk to talk to friends
[9:18]who are hanging out about like, oh my god, can you just come like sit with me as the
[9:22]baby, like plays on the floor, like I just need another human engagement with me or, you
[9:27]know, taking the baby places and knowing that like maybe he was going to cry and like
[9:31]I wasn't going to look like a good mom in the way that I had intended to.
[9:36]I think the more we often want to think about building community as like offering help that
[9:42]we're going to, you know, show up for other people, but I actually think that asking for
[9:46]our help is a really great way to build community too.
[9:48]And I think that's especially important in early parenthood when you need so much and
[9:53]I think you're so vulnerable.
[9:55]So would you consider yourself to be a good mother?
[9:57]I've really tried.
[9:58]I mean, yeah.
[10:00]argument of the book.
[10:01]And I really tried in my own life
[10:03]to like set aside that idea entirely
[10:07]because I think that goodness,
[10:08]I mean, I spent so much of my life
[10:10]and it still shows up trying to be good at various things.
[10:14]And that's almost always been about
[10:19]what somebody else thought I should be doing
[10:21]or my idea of how I wanted to look.
[10:25]And it really has so little to do
[10:29]with what my kids actually need, what I need.
[10:33]And so I just think that question of goodness.
[10:35]It's like, it's a trap.
[10:36]It's just like sets us up for failure.
[10:39]Because even if you're good, right?
[10:40]Like you could have an afternoon
[10:41]where like, you're having a fun activity
[10:43]and your kids are cute and everyone's getting along well.
[10:45]And you feel like a good mom for like a minute.
[10:47]And you don't be able to ask for,
[10:48]I mean, a little while, right?
[10:50]Until something else happens.
[10:52]And I think if we focus on goodness,
[10:54]we miss out on like a lot of the joy and the love.
[10:57]That's true.
[10:58]I feel like this overlay of perfectionism
[11:00]and doing a good, doing like such a good job
[11:05]and achievement culture and all the forces on us,
[11:09]especially because so many of us were raised
[11:11]to like do better work harder, achieve this.
[11:14]Like you have all the opportunities.
[11:15]Like you're no longer part of the generation of women
[11:18]that like wished they could do.
[11:20]You guys have to go out and do it.
[11:22]And then applying that to something where
[11:25]all of those things actually kind of make it worse.
[11:28]So it's like if we're trained,
[11:29]it's like we're trained to be like professional tennis players.
[11:33]And then all of a sudden we're like playing,
[11:36]I don't know what something was to like,
[11:37]we're like in a gymnastics tournament
[11:39]where like the same skills actually won't benefit you at all.
[11:43]Yeah.
[11:44]I think that's really accurate.
[11:45]And I think that's, I mean, that pressure
[11:47]that I think so many of us bring to motherhood, right?
[11:50]Like I've been good at school.
[11:51]I think good if I job, I'm good friends.
[11:53]Like I'm gonna be good at motherhood.
[11:55]It doesn't really work because little babies don't work that way.
[11:59]And it also just, I don't know.
[12:00]That's not what our kids really need.
[12:02]And I don't think this is just little babies.
[12:05]I mean, my kids are older.
[12:06]I have so many friends with older kids.
[12:08]I have friends with grandmas, right?
[12:10]Like, I mean, it doesn't end this desire to do well
[12:17]by the people you love the most.
[12:19]And therefore, I think you need to alter your behavior to do so.
[12:22]Also, the fact that, like, I don't know about you,
[12:25]but sometimes I'm having my hardest days
[12:27]or I'm the most hard on myself.
[12:29]And like, bad mothers don't think about the fact
[12:33]that they're bad mothers.
[12:34]They are just really bad.
[12:35]Do you know what I mean?
[12:36]The fact that you're worried about beating themselves up
[12:39]for like the thing that happened before school drop-off.
[12:41]Exactly.
[12:42]Exactly.
[12:43]That's kind of going about their day.
[12:44]Right.
[12:45]And if you care enough to feel bad about your behavior,
[12:47]you're already winning.
[12:48]Like your kids are already loved.
[12:50]And that is the most fundamental thing.
[12:52]So I don't know.
[12:54]That's really true.
[12:55]I mean, it's hard thing to remind ourselves.
[12:56]No, I mean, it's a hard thing to remind ourselves of.
[12:59]But I think that's really true.
[13:00]I mean, I feel like I started out writing a book
[13:03]about like motherhood and why is it so hard?
[13:05]And what are all of these things?
[13:07]And in the end, I really wrote a book about love.
[13:10]And like, what does it mean to actually like, to love our kids?
[13:12]And I think a lot of it is like, getting to know them
[13:14]as particular people and what do they need?
[13:16]And then also letting them know us, which means like,
[13:19]sometimes we mess up.
[13:20]And then we apologize and we try to move on.
[13:22]Yeah.
[13:23]That was me last night being like, OK,
[13:25]I shouldn't have screamed at you about the iPad.
[13:27]I'm really sorry.
[13:28]I lost it.
[13:29]I was tired.
[13:31]Yeah.
[13:32]Yeah, but that's, I mean, that's the thing, right?
[13:33]That like attachment researchers talk about that
[13:35]is repair.
[13:36]And I think that's really beautiful.
[13:38]And important is that the work is not actually
[13:40]like being perfect and doing the right thing
[13:43]all the time, but repair.
[13:45]And when a lesson to teach your kids too,
[13:46]they're like, oh, you can mess up.
[13:47]And you can apologize too.
[13:49]Yeah.
[13:50]OK, well, I definitely have no lack of that.
[13:54]There you go.
[13:55]So they've got that model.
[13:56]I mean, you've got that model.
[13:57]Yes, exactly.
[13:58]And your kids have your achievement model too,
[14:01]because you can write a book about it, right?
[14:04]I know, I know, right?
[14:05]It's like all these things we give our kids,
[14:07]whether we mean to or not.
[14:10]So how do you take your poet's sensibility
[14:14]and apply it regularly?
[14:15]I have so much respect for poets.
[14:17]I mean, the way language can be used to create art
[14:20]essentially is poetry, right?
[14:22]Like distilling things down to their most essential.
[14:25]And then giving us another way of looking at the world.
[14:28]I just, you know, it's in the most impactful,
[14:31]time-efficient little package.
[14:34]Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[14:35]And I think poetry is such a great medium for like early,
[14:40]or maybe a parenthood at all, right?
[14:41]When you have these like, maybe you can't read a whole novel,
[14:43]but you have like three minutes that you can read a poem
[14:46]and enjoy it.
[14:47]And so I think there's something,
[14:50]I think poetry taught me a lot about attention,
[14:52]how to really look at something,
[14:54]how to think about it, how to create an image,
[14:59]how to find a metaphor in something.
[15:01]I really love thinking about how sentences sound.
[15:04]And so I think that's something that probably you can see
[15:07]in the book.
[15:09]There definitely were times though,
[15:10]where like, I think my editor had to be like Nancy,
[15:12]just say it.
[15:13]I think it's just right this in a simple sentence.
[15:16]So, you know, like there's a little balance of like,
[15:18]bringing a poet's sensibility to the prose,
[15:21]but also making sure that, you know,
[15:23]it's a little cleaner and more digestible in some ways
[15:26]or more straightforward, maybe, for the vehicle of prose.
[15:29]And are you working on a collection now?
[15:32]Like, are you gonna continue to delve into poetry
[15:35]and all of that?
[15:37]At the moment, I feel like this book really
[15:40]filled up my whole brain,
[15:41]like, of course, kind of all of my concentration.
[15:45]And so I have like bits and pieces of things.
[15:47]I'm a collector of kind of fragments and notes and things.
[15:51]So I've got little things tucked away,
[15:54]but I feel like I haven't figured out
[15:55]with that next project in poetry would be at least.
[15:59]I feel like I've learned so much,
[16:00]literally from Maggie Smith.
[16:01]Yeah.
[16:02]And she has really, I mean, democratized
[16:04]is the wrong word, but just sort of like,
[16:06]with her sub-stack and the way that she is showing us
[16:09]how poetry sort of happens today and that it isn't rushed.
[16:13]And some poems, she's had like two sentences scratched
[16:16]on a piece of paper and she'll come back to it
[16:18]like 10 years later.
[16:19]And then it's a poem that like some poems can take it decades.
[16:23]Yeah.
[16:24]That's just not the way I had to thought about poetry prior to that.
[16:27]Like, I thought it was, I mean, I don't know what I thought,
[16:29]but I didn't get that.
[16:30]And how did you know you were a poet,
[16:32]like more than like scribblings in a journal, right?
[16:36]That's such a good question.
[16:38]I mean, I think I just always,
[16:40]it's the genre where it was for a long time,
[16:43]the genre that made sense to me
[16:45]in terms of thinking about the world and understanding
[16:48]how I feel, understanding what I'm seeing
[16:50]and what I'm experiencing.
[16:52]There's something really satisfying about like the container
[16:55]of a poem, because even a pretty long poem,
[16:58]you can mostly keep in your head.
[17:01]You know, and you can kind of perfect it,
[17:02]you can hone it.
[17:05]And I think that the space of a poem really appeals to me,
[17:11]that it really captures a moment and kind of zooms in.
[17:14]I feel like it's like a, you know, it's a photograph.
[17:16]It's one moment in time or one realization
[17:20]or one big idea, usually.
[17:22]Maybe your next book could be The Good Poet Myth.
[17:26]Maybe, I mean, yeah, that's an interesting question.
[17:28]And I did, I mean, I was working on,
[17:30]I have a book of poems called Pocket Universe.
[17:33]It's like a little poetry cousin of The Long Devotion.
[17:37]And it was really interesting.
[17:38]I started writing that probably a little bit before this book,
[17:41]but I was working on them both at the same time
[17:43]for a little while.
[17:44]And some of the same ideas and some of the same research
[17:48]show up in both, like I have a poem about Harry Harlow.
[17:50]I have a poem about Donald Winacott,
[17:53]who coined the idea of The Good Enough Mother.
[17:55]And I really like the project of exploring the same ideas,
[18:00]the same moments, the same stories in both genres.
[18:02]Because you can do really different things.
[18:03]If you have, you know, kind of one page
[18:06]or two pages for a poem versus, you know,
[18:08]thousands of words in a book.
[18:10]So to the mom who's standing at a bookstore right now
[18:14]in the parenting section,
[18:16]and trying to figure out the book for her or him.
[18:19]I mean, I guess it's mostly motherhood,
[18:21]but whatever, caretakers who need to take home a book.
[18:25]Who is gonna benefit the most from pulling out your book
[18:27]on the shelf and go into the checkout?
[18:29]Like who needs this book?
[18:30]And what are you giving
[18:31]at the other books or not?
[18:33]Yeah, I mean, I would say my book is definitely not, you know,
[18:36]tell you, you know, what food you're supposed to be
[18:38]to baby once I start first food.
[18:39]So it's not prescriptive.
[18:41]And I think that's a benefit.
[18:43]My book is really meant to be a companion.
[18:47]I think that early parenthood can be really lonely.
[18:49]I think it's possible to really feel like you're the only one
[18:52]who is messing everything up.
[18:54]And it's my hope that the book is really a companion
[18:58]to people in alleviating that feeling.
[19:01]I think that, I mean, the book is kind of half memoir
[19:05]and in sharing my own story,
[19:06]it's not an exceptional story.
[19:08]I think I had like a very normal kind of hard time.
[19:12]And I hope that in sharing that,
[19:15]people will feel that sense of companionship
[19:17]and will feel like they can reach out.
[19:19]I think it's for anyone who is like,
[19:22]I was so excited to be a mom and like,
[19:23]oh wow, this is not what I had expected.
[19:27]And why is this so hard?
[19:29]And my book really tries to delve into that
[19:32]and also think about ways that we can,
[19:34]as you said, like be kinder to ourselves
[19:37]so that we can actually enjoy mothering more.
[19:41]I wonder, I mean, I totally agree with everything you're saying.
[19:45]And I wish, you know, I think about myself those nights,
[19:48]I was like pushing the stroller around crowded city blocks,
[19:51]just like praying for bedtime and like,
[19:55]yeah, sort of longing to be a person who was not pushing.
[19:59]Not that, I mean, that's.
[20:00]to say that. But just like the fact that they could have their night and or they wouldn't
[20:03]be nursing or whatever it is, right? When you're just like in that, like, oh, wow, other
[20:08]people are still living their regular lives and now my life is forever changed, even though
[20:11]I was so lucky and I'm feel so lucky. Like, you know, it's just hard to, it's hard to
[20:17]think that I could actually change how I felt. Like, I feel like good, hearted people
[20:23]were trying to give me advice back then too, but I was always so dismissive of it. Do
[20:28]I mean, like, oh, yeah, right. Like, I understand, but like, right. You don't get
[20:32]it. You know, but this is, you know, like, can we, and this is not even just parenting,
[20:38]but like, can we really prevent the, you know, psychological mistakes that we might
[20:45]have made? Do you know what I mean? Like, can we, can we do it or not? I mean, I really
[20:50]relate to that, because that's like, I mean, I did. I mean, I remember my mom visiting
[20:52]you're doing so great. Like, look at this. And I was like, she doesn't know. Yeah. I mean,
[20:57]I think the thing that does one of the biggest things that helped me was being around
[21:04]other moms and realizing that I was not judging them nearly as harshly as I was judging
[21:11]myself and trying to be like, thinking like, oh, like, she's feeding her baby formula
[21:16]because she's back at work and pumping is a pain. And like, that's the choice to me that
[21:20]makes a ton of sense. And like, why I'm not judging her at all for that. So why can't
[21:26]I be that kind to myself? And I think that sometimes that can help like, trying to extend
[21:31]to ourselves that compassion, we bring to others. But yeah, I don't know. It's so hard
[21:38]to let go of all of those expectations. And I think as you say, like, the perfectionism,
[21:44]but it's worth trying. But it's great to have this reminder, right? It's great to have
[21:49]it. The reminder in the form of a book, right? And obviously the research and everything
[21:54]included in the book that it's not just like, you know, it's not a quote in a frame, right?
[21:58]Yeah. Yeah. But it's, it's an important reminder and essential. And all we can do is like
[22:05]try to help other people through it, right? And that's what you're doing. So nice. So that's
[22:09]the, that's the hope. That's the hope. Well, thank you so much, Nancy. Thanks for taking
[22:13]your time to help other moms and grandmothers and everyone else. Thank you so much.
[22:19]All right. Thank you. Okay. Bye. Thank you for listening to totally booked with Zibi,
[22:25]formerly momstone have time to read books. If you loved the show, tell a friend, leave
[22:30]a review, follow me on Instagram at Zibi Owens, and spread the word. Thanks so much. Oh,
[22:36]and bye the books.