Tigers moms, troubled moms, badass moms
Most Mother’s Day articles are cut from the same fabric. You know the drill: Best Moms Of All Time, starting with Mama Mary and working your way down the list. Bromides and heart emojis.
This isn’t going to be that article.
I have heaps of admiration for moms of all stripes, but I know it’s not an easy gig. From what my own mom tells me, even when I don’t bother to ask her, it’s a tireless, thankless job. Apparently, there are many sacrifices made, bodily and otherwise, in bringing us all safely into the living, breathing world. And what do they get? Finicky remarks about their cooking when we’re kids, and snide Facebook posts on Mother’s Day.
Mothers don’t always fall into the “Mother Teresa” lane. Some are indeed saints. Some are truly great, or good. Some, not so good. Some are badass. Some are merely, well… bad.
I was recently watching a series on Netflix called Hitler’s Circle of Evil (nice segue from motherhood, right?), and the one incident that struck me, more than all the Nazi atrocities, was the tale of Magda Goebbels, wife of Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels. She was a true Hitler fanatic who, when stuck in the Berlin bunker as the Allied forces drew closer, opted to poison her own children before killing herself, instead of surrendering. No “Best Mom In The World” coffee mug for her!
You’ve also got your Tiger Moms, such as the cartoonish one Constance Wu plays in Fresh off the Boat, steering her kids toward success with an iron fist. You’ve got the ones who just push way too hard, like Tonya Harding’s mom, played by Allison Janney in the movie I, Tonya — a real piece of work who wore an FBI wire to try to entrap her own daughter after the Nancy Kerrigan scandal broke. Yikes.
And then there are those twisted, scary moms we encounter in song, such as Pink Floyd’s Mother (a shrieking, overprotective maternal figure who eventually ends up testifying in court against her own son, Pink, by Side 4 of “The Wall”).
That’s what motherhood must feel like sometimes: a trial. What is it about being a mom that makes it so? It could be the fact that mothers (and all parents) are essentially making up stuff as they go along, trying to learn to handle things better every single day. There’s no pre-training manual, no graduate program available in parenting. For their efforts, they are constantly under the scrutiny of the ever-so-woke generation, instantly faced with pushback when they revert to default mode, or the bad old days of parenting. It makes being a tough mom problematic, to say the least.
In literature, there are countless examples of tough, troubled moms: there’s Medea, who, like Magda Goebbels, killed her own kids. She did it because her husband ran off with some other princess, though. Or maybe it was post-partum depression. The Greeks weren’t too clear about that. Anyway, she must have had her reasons!
There are those moms who are forced to make insane decisions, like Sophie Zawistowska in William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice. Any way you look at it, choosing which child to sacrifice in a Nazi prison camp has got to be way more harrowing than deciding which kid gets the last Magnum bar in the freezer.
Then there are the plotting moms of lit. The Lady Macbeths. The Munchausen by Proxy moms who hurt their own kids in Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects and Darin Strauss’ More Than It Hurts You. And arguably, that mother of all bad mothers, in books and on TV: Cersei Lannister, the sneering, wine-guzzling brother-banger from Game of Thrones, who ends up losing all her kids through her evil schemes and bloodthirsty dreams of conquest. (We’d like to say that her opposite number in the Westeros books and TV series, Daenerys, the “mother of dragons,” was a better parent because she was driven by her love for her reptilian offspring to incinerate all the people of King’s Landing; but that just makes her seem like a cray-cray baby mama.)
And what of the badass moms? Oh, they’re out there. From Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley in Aliens 2, spitting out, “Get away from her, you bitch!” as the fanged Alien Queen advances on her newly adopted Newt (in fairness, Ripley had just torched the Alien Queen’s own pile of eggs); to Sarah Connor, trying to protect the protector of mankind’s future in Terminator; to Joyce Summers, fighting off badass Spike with an axe to protect her daughter in Buffy the Vampire Slayer; to Dana Scully, doing her best to protect a half-alien baby from dark military forces in The X-Files.
A mother’s instinct to protect her little ’un is very often the key focus of sci-fi and horror, whether it’s the nightmare landscape of The Handmaid’s Tale, where Elizabeth Moss hangs around to save her daughter amid a god-awful puritanical dystopia, or robot host Maeve sacrificing her freedom to stay behind in Delos and recover her daughter in HBO’s Westworld, or Mia Farrow’s mind-blowing decision to stick around and rock the cradle at the end of Rosemary’s Baby. You can’t discount the slight amount of insanity that is required to become a super mom.
Everyone, arguably, has their own image of the heart-tugging, “perfect” mom, whether it’s Claire Huxtable from The (hard to watch now) Cosby Show or wise, warm Meredith Baxter-Birney in ’80s TV’s Family Ties. There’s fierce mom Joy (Brie Larson) in Room, managing to free herself and her son (Jake Tremblay) from years of captivity, only to encounter the difficulties of real life in the outside world. And there’s the witty, inventive Rosie (Scarlett Johansson) from Jojo Rabbit, slyly steering her Hitler Youth son away from the worst Nazi impulses.
Moms are survivors. They have strengths that go beyond the mere dispensing of Band-Aids and bromides. They bring us life. Day by day by day. Fortunately, not too many are as real-life damaged as the wire hanger-phobic Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest, as cuckoo overprotective as Margaret White in Carrie, as conniving as Anne Bancroft’s Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate, or as cold as Livia Soprano trying to have her son Tony whacked in The Sopranos. (Ouch!)
In short, there are all kinds of moms out there. None of them fit the cookie-cutter Donna Reed image. But ultimately, the real-life moms are the reason for all those cards, all those songs, all those movies and memes and emojis and TV shows out there. Moms are getting it done doing the best they can, without bonuses or hazard pay. They’re the original frontliners. In our hearts, at least.
