512270

research-article2013
CSCXXX10.1177/1532708613512270Cultural Studies <span class="symbol" cstyle="symbol">↔</span> Critical MethodologiesFaulkner

Article
Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies

Bad Mom(my) Litany: Spanking Cultural

XX(X) 1­–9
© 2013 SAGE Publications
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DOI: 10.1177/1532708613512270
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Sandra L. Faulkner1

Abstract
Through personal narrative, the author shows the experience of new motherhood by juxtaposing a social science relationship
researcher role with middle-class cultural expectations of mothers. Autoethnographic scenes of the exhaustion of juggling
expanding roles and cultural advice about what being a good mommy means with anxiety about being a bad mother help
the author question (spank) entrenched mommy myths. The author uses poetic inquiry and personal narrative as forms
to acknowledge, examine, and potentially alter the complex reality that although a mom might like and love her child, she
might be anxious and abhor the prescribed role of being mommy.

Keywords
attachment, autoethnography, motherhood, personal narrative, postpartum anxiety, role adjustment

Instructions for Surviving Infant When I was 7 weeks old

I went back to teach, to speed up
Remember the stubborn latch the insufferable infancy
clown purple mouth of gentian violet the mothering work I suck at
your own face melted off Sit your boots in the chair
from exhaustion, say no thanks Baby Doo, Ms. Baby
to the OB at the 6 week cry first word: dog, ball, ockpuss
because you must remember other first sentence: more cookie, please.
remember not to have another
do not get over it Motherhood is a contested space from news of opting
do not cherish this out to tiger moms to welfare moms (Belkin, 2003; Chua,
no taking something to ease your face 2011; Maura, 2010). Mothers are evaluated by society and
all ears that ear plugs can’t stop up. one another based on what they do and don’t do, and even
what they think and don’t think about mothering (the action)
Forget which onesie you put and being a mother (the role). Ayelet Waldman (2010)
on the 9 week old you have to pick up, writes in “Bad Mother” that mothers need to tell the truth
panic when you must identify her about motherhood.
on the floor in the infant room
because all the white babies look alike I believe mothers should tell the truth, even—no, especially—
rows of drool encrusted chins when the truth is difficult . . . One of the darkest, deepest
clumsy arms in the nursery shames so many of us mothers feel nowadays is our fear that
don’t tell them her first sentence: we are Bad Mothers, that we are failing our children and falling
daddee needs more beer. short of our own ideals. (p. 3)

My super power means I use this quote and my poem as a prequel to the piece
even lactation consultants that follows and hear Patty Sotirin’s (2010) call for radical
are not safe from the arch of spray, subjectivity in mother writing.
pure power, pure stubborn,
no bonding here 1
Bowling Green State University, OH, USA
you contested and I persisted
Corresponding Author:
like daughter like mother Sandra L. Faulkner, Department of Communication, Bowling Green State
give away the parent manuals University, 302 West Hall, Bowling Green, OH 43403, USA.
offer no cloak of citations. Email: sandraf@bgsu.edu

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2 Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies XX(X)
The point is not to engage in radical specificity for its own sake
but for what such a practice enables us to do: as a way of
reading our own experiences and as readers of autoethnographic
writing, radical specificity opens unfamiliar connections and
relations that move both beyond and against the familiar
storylines, emotional verities, and the all-too-recognizable
critiques of cultural-political constraints that characterize
personal narratives in both popular and academic writing.
(para. 31)
I use poetic inquiry and personal narrative as a social
scientist to contend with dominant discourses about moth-
ering, being mother and the concomitant evaluations by
acknowledging, examining, and altering the complex real-
ity that although a mom might love her child, she might hate
the role of being mommy. I consider the personal writing
here to be more taboo than investigative writing because of
the refusal to engage the mind/body split. A narrative poetic
inquiry, in particular, is a form uniquely situated to re-pres-
ent such liminal space.
*
Bad Mom(my) Litany
I do not like being a mommy.
I like my child.
These two sentences are not supposed to coexist, at least
not within all of the well-intentioned unsolicited cliché
advice one receives when she has a small child. Cherish
every moment; they grow up too fast; enjoy the best role of
your life. In my kid’s first year, I wished it would all go too
fast, be a blurry action shot photo as I passed pink moun-
tains in a speedy stroller that would land me in a country of
hot lattes and giant bottles of Excedrin. That first year
moved at a pace that pinched every little nerve. Was it the
battle of my overactive letdown breasts versus the defiant
nurser? The bite of attachment parenting and advice books?
I read them with clenched knuckles and bloodied nipples
until I found a small portion of my brain that had not been
bored through by the baby-brain worm and burned them in
a goodwill pile. Or I would have burned them had I found a
match in the baby proofed, I mean adult-proofed, old church
I live in with the kid and my spouse.
The secret I couldn’t speak during Mimi’s infancy is
how strange, odd, and queer I felt—not a good mother
because of my will to skip over the difficult part (which
almost 4 years in, I understand to mean all of it). My
thoughts about infants as gaping holes of un-full-fillable
need were not even as bad as my refusal to list mom first
and last in the string of important identities. I could have
been the “bisexual mom,” but I wasn’t sure what that meant
except a refusal to dream the dream of being Mommy as the
heterosexist feminine fulfillment of a good breeder (Elia,
2003). I hate being a breeder. In middle-class circles, being
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“mommy” means everything. The role is the person; instead
of overlapping Venn circles, the middle-class mommy must
overschedule her child into a moneyed genius. She must
rope herself to the child to be an (over)involved parent, a
good mother (Hays, 1996).
The trouble is we can’t let go, can’t unattach ourselves
from these mommy myths of intensive parenting (Baxter,
Scharp, Asbury, Jannusch, & Norwood, 2012; Cooley &
Stone, 2009). Dr. William Sears, a pediatrician and the king
of attachment parenting, may mean well (Sears & Sears,
2001). If you do an academic premier search, attachment
theory holds cache in the academy—5,322 articles and
growing. The idea is this: the kind of attachment one has
with a caregiver as an infant determines cognitive models of
the self and others, how we feel about ourselves and what
we expect others to be like in interaction.1 What this looks
like: A mom binds a child to her with some type of sling,
piece of cloth, or baby carrier 24/7, a womb outside of the
womb. Co-sleeping and breast-feeding are the gold rope. So
if you care about the moral and sexual and social develop-
ment of your child, if you want a child that plays well with
others and can cry with them at the right pitch at the precise
right moment, if you want a child who will not pull a gun on
classmates, you better hitch your bulging womb to the
attachment bus, because as the API (Attached Parenting
International; 2013) website claims, “It eliminates violence
as a means for raising children, and ultimately helps to pre-
vent violence in society as a whole.”
Because I did not pump breast milk for Mimi until she
was 6 weeks old, I was tethered to her from nipples to
mouth around the clock. This attachment chafed in the
August heat as I feed Mimi in public bathroom stalls, on
park benches, downstairs, upstairs, on the couch, around the
block, and in the bank manager’s office while signing mort-
gage refinance papers. At least the banker didn’t flinch
when I signed my name on multiple paper copies as Mimi
slurped a snack at the table. I couldn’t even go to the bath-
room alone to be off duty. I now “out” myself as an attach-
ment curmudgeon, and thereby reduce my prospects of
publishing in top relationship journals for the blasphemy
that follows: You could correlate attachment with anything
and find significant results, like how long it takes to throw
away the baby manuals. Attachment and lagging sexual
desire. Attachment and spousal satisfaction and role adjust-
ment. Attachment with a side of old eggs. Perhaps I’m
really an ambivalently attached mommy. Securely attached
individuals don’t need to feel anxious about all of the ways
they are harming their child. Securely attached individuals
feel good because their child fits into every normal curve of
every chart that some nurse photocopies and writes the all-
important numbers in predetermined blanks. I curse the nor-
mal curve of the whatever-chart because my child (and thus,
this mom) always falls too many standard deviations away
from the mean.
Faulkner 3
At a relationship conference 4 months before I became
pregnant, some colleague friends and I played a game dur-
ing paper presentations we called Attachment plus Every
Relationship Process. “Hey Faulkner, what about attach-
ment and . . . ” Pam or Jessica or Caroline whispered during
plenary sessions. Every other paper used attachment theory,
the conference program inked with title after title of porn-
like theorizing, Attachment and xxx, Attachment styles pre-
dict xxx, Attachment and the relationship to xxx. I can’t get
away from attachment, even in my personal life. And if
70% of children have secure attachment, why care? But I
am characteristic of the target of this craze: overeducated,
old(er), liberal, breast-feeding is best, stubborn, White
woman. Besides, the API website (2013) instructs us about
how natural it is, how instinctual it is, and how ancestral it
is. But I find strapping the kid to me while eating, sleeping,
writing, and going potty is unnatural, the baby wearing/co-
sleeping/no-yelling mom just another role, a professional
problem for a relationship researcher to deconstruct.
I can’t shake the diagnosis we received when the kid was
1 year old.
“Are you producing enough milk? How much does she
eat in a day?” The pediatrician’s questions about whether we
feed our small—off the weight and height chart in the nega-
tive direction—girl, coupled with the diagnosis failure to
thrive written on a script for a cystic fibrosis test at Toledo
Children’s Hospital, prove that I’m a bad mother. Failure to
thrive tattooed on my inadequate mommy card. I said no to
the cystic fibrosis sweat test and lost. I argued with my
spouse that our kid’s head circumference percentages com-
paring her with other children went up like an arrow from
35% to 42% to 69% at 12 months. She was growing. She
was smart. She met all of the cognitive milestones. Good
Lord, her third word was octopus. If I must write the (shame-
ful) height and weight ratios in something other than a baby
book, in which I won’t ever find time to record, fine. Here:
Fourth visit/6 months: Height 24.75 in; Weight 12 #;
weight/height ratio .57%
Fifth visit/9 months: Height 27 in; Weight 13#13 oz;
weight/height ratio .06%
Sixth visit/12 months: Height 28 in; Weight 15#2 oz;
weight/height ratio .15%
Seventh visit/15 months: Height 29 in; Weight 15#14 oz;
weight/height ratio ____
What I did not know then is that the push to breast-feed
has not translated into an understanding of healthy, “nor-
mally” growing breast-fed infants. A report from the Centers
for Disease Control (CDC) urges clinicians to recognize
that breast-fed babies gain weight initially but then the
weight gain trickles. Hum, this seems like my chart above?
The use of the World Health Organization (WHO) versus
CDC charts matter.
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Beginning at approximately age 3 months, WHO curves show
a slower rate of weight gain than the CDC charts, both in
weight for age and weight for length. Because WHO curves are
derived from infants who breastfeed through 12 months,
infants who are still breastfeeding at approximately age 3
months are more likely to maintain their percentages on the
WHO growth charts but to decrease in percentages on the CDC
charts. (Grummer-Strawn, Reinold, & Krebs, 2010, p. 7)
However, my relationship researcher credentials could
not trump Mimi’s pediatrician and his interpretation of
growth charts, especially because I’m a PhD who uses
poetry and personal narrative, what some call “poetic
inquiry,” to analyze and represent how we embody our rela-
tionships (Faulkner, 2009). The idea that we need more
poetry and attention to how language + form (choose from
the following): Writes/paints/evokes/lambasts/shakes-up
our cultural expectations of motherhood make my feelings
and emotions like the broken crayons in the coloring bucket.
Professionally and personally, I do not color a pretty picture
of the good mother.
Mom, if you blink too much,
your eyeball will fall out. (Mimi, age 3)
“They grow up so fast, don’t they? Take time to enjoy!”
said the 60ish man with the mean-well avuncular smile. I
get these drive-by comments when strolling around Bowling
Green with the kid. Sometimes from a perky woman with
coiffed hair, perhaps a small well-groomed dog attached
with an untangled leash to her painted nails. Never do
women carrying, dragging, or coaxing (okay, begging)
small children across the sidewalk fling these comments or
questions at me. They are all too busy trying to not lose their
shit under the impossible weight of mommy expectations.
I imagine my mouth drops open from shock, as I know
my thoughts are all anti-social—Obviously, you have not
been around infants anytime in this decade or you would be
buying me a cup of coffee at Grounds for Thought and
offering to cook dinner, perhaps even cleaning my toilet
while I nap with your generous gift of noise-cancelling
headphones to drown out the cries for my soul. “Right, I’m
enjoying her,” I say instead, because even my feminist rage
is muted by exhaustion from the chafing of what this whole
“mommy” role means.
I am so busy trying not to be a mommy that I feel like the
outlier when I must interact with others as mother. All those
joyous Facebook posts about loving mommy-hood, how
fantastic it is to see wonder child smile for the first time,
making proud proclamations about a child’s “report card” at
the well child visits—ABC is in the 90th growth percentile!
The subtext I read in these posts: We are the best parents
with the best children. Out of guilt, I probably have posted
similar stuff about how Mimi is the culmination of our mid-
dle-class ambitions for the smart child—the kid just said
4 Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies XX(X)
octopus! I don’t go back and check now, just in case. It will
be hard to enough to explain how we don’t know the exact
dates of some milestones (first tooth? first word?). When
the kid was a few weeks old, a former colleague who had
adopted two children sent me a Facebook message with the
subject line—Don’t you just love being a mommy?
(No.No.No.) I try to explain that I like my child, though.
And these questions kept coming, even after the infant
stage. Because you must expand the self to include the capi-
tal role M(om), embrace motherhood as natural desired des-
tiny. The action of mothering free of gendered expectations
is a more preferable position (Cooley & Stone, 2009).
Motherhood (noun)—mothering (verb) = Don’t you just
adore being a mother? I want to be like the poets Nicole
Cooley and Julia Kasdorf and use my writing to interrogate
compartmentalized totalizing models of motherhood, intel-
lect and activism to demonstrate they are still predicated on
a mind/body split (Cooley & Kasdorf, 2008). “Perhaps the
split between domestic and professional is a utopian fiction,
a dream of purity as false and ultimately impossible to sus-
tain as the split between the body and mind, and becoming
a mother has driven that fact home” (Cooley & Kasdorf,
2008, p. 209). This was demonstrated at another confer-
ence, this time when Mimi and I were entrenched in tod-
dlerhood. I presented a paper on poetry about motherhood
(Faulkner & Nicole, in press). Even in the previously safe
space of my academic world, I couldn’t escape the expecta-
tions of being totally mommy. During the question and
answer session, there were no questions about my articulate
analysis of the dialectical tensions between poetry and
mothering, between a poet’s artistic process and the idea of
motherhood. Missing the point of Leah Souffrant’s (2009)
observation that “A mother’s love can—indeed must—
coexist with representations of violence, indifference,
ambivalence” (p. 28), a male in the audience asked, “How
does your motherhood influence your writing? How does
being a mom affect this work?” None of your business, I
should have said, but I wrote this poem in response.
How to potty train when presenting a manuscript on maternal
poetry
Drink a cold espresso after the coffee line maul.
Catch the conference plane with a wet crotch in your pants.
Think about how you are not a (fill in the blank) mom.
Don’t speak of tiny fish crackers, too much
starch and big T-truth makes them antsy,
like a double espresso day line at the mall.
Walk with dry pants to the podium, blink like a mole
fresh from under the school, that darkened land
where we all crawl with bloody knees to this mom
they all want you to be. Now with malice,
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No, no, No, do not pant.
Drink that espresso, man.
If you must answer that question about your mind
the biography behind your paper, the argument in the last part
Repeat: “but I am no star mother”
as you curl your fingers by the podium mums
yellowed from the incandescent lights, you can’t
ignore the conference attendees’ espresso mad,
say, “I don’t want to be your mommy.”
The public dialogue contrasted with the private support.
I kept notes that were emailed to me—mothers never pub-
licly told me their hatred of the infant stage, never spoke in
person about the unbearable exhaustion, the feelings of
inadequacy, the difficulty of breast-feeding, juggling a part-
ner’s needs with an infant’s needs and forgetting what the
(mom) self needs.
“How are you? How is the little one?” These are typical
questions as I walked down the university hall in my office
building toward my work mailbox.
“Fine, fine.”
Versus
The collage of support I composed from emails female
office staff and female colleagues with small children sent
me privately, after I complained about the hourly feedings
that made me feel like a bartender who is in constant
demand for service.
I hear from Josh you are a regular dairy bar right now . . . :(
You need a BG (Bowling Green) soul sister with a newborn.
The infant stage is virtually NO fun in my view . . . so I share
your thoughts, views and general exhaustion on the matter.
If you can get past this little challenge, it does get better.
And while good colleagues like (Male 1) or (Male 2) can
also offer support, it’s not the same . . .
I fed him about every hour on the hour for 2-3 days. He would
take a 3-hour break from about midnight till 3 a.m. and then go
back at it again! I also talked with Jen the lactation consultant
at WC hospital for moral support A LOT that week!! It’s
normal, but that doesn’t make you feel any better :( It was
pretty hellish in fact!
Of course, I never called the phone numbers my soul
sisters put in parentheses on the bottom of these emails,
though I did read and reread the notes more than any love
letter, especially when the kid nursed incessantly, when she
would not nap, sleep through the night, would not tell me
what to do, when she gagged while breast-feeding and
Faulkner 5
ripped her mouth away with such force my nipples cracked,
when I couldn’t admit I hated being a mother and that I
wanted to skip over the new part.
Or take the city park. I cannot describe how the panic rises
when I see other moms at the playground, because that means
having to talk about babies like I care, like I love babies, like
my mission in life is completed because of the sky-blue-eyed
baby with patches of blond tresses dressed in a fleece bear
suit scooping up wads of bark chips under the swing. I never
ask moms the name of their kids or talk to them about mine
unless I am forced into the polite script because my kid
bounced into someone or took a bucket swing seat. The talk-
ative mom gives me a felicitous smile that starts with the
wide-open eyes, the arched brow, and ends with that sincere
Midwestern posture. The script goes like this:
“So cute! What is her/his name?” says Mom A.
“Oh, how unique and pretty,” says Mom B.
“What preschool are you attending? Is that the one that teaches
sign language?” says Mom C.
“I did not like the curriculum at ‘All About The Kids’ . . . too
much screen time,” says Mom A.
“Well, Mimi goes there, but they do teach signing, and the
owner is a BGSU graduate?” I say.
“Oh yes, teaching children signing is important for their
language development.” Mom A looks at Mimi throwing bark
chips at our pound puppy under my feet.
Notice the sentences trump back and forth like a card
game.
The syrupy admonition from strangers that they grow up
so fast has not translated into the kid growing up so fast.
The moments are excruciating from the incessant thrush
necessitating treatment with gentian violet. Having an
infant with a purple clown mouth and a mom with purple
nipples sounds like a fun circus act, but that preceded the
colicky I’m-7-weeks-old-&-pissed-to be in the world-
scream that lasted for . . . —I was going to write a year, but
I can’t even remember how long, 2 weeks, a month, 2
months, 4? The detail shaking the epithelium in my ear-
drums with hurricane force wind is the hour it all begins:
I am alone with the kid after the parental shift change; my
class on campus finished and my spouse’s class began. No
maternity leave. No family leave policy means I teach an
interpersonal communication course as a 7-week mother.
The option presented to me by the Bowling Green State
University human resource office, unpaid leave and sick
days (I had four as a new employee), would mean an unin-
sured kid and pregnancy on my suspended insurance policy.
My spouse has his own policy because it’s cheaper than a
family plan, and the door to change options is locked for
another trimester. I would need to write a memo detailing
this plan to the Dean of my college and copy HR. Right.
Because the semester you put up your tenure case is the time
to present as a (non-working) mommy. I still had the nothing
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will change in my life bravado when I pitched my option of
a course release and no student advising to the school direc-
tor. She accepted. No need to write a memo about our deal,
no printed line recorded with—From: SAHM (Stay at Home
Mom). The truth was that I liked being in the classroom; hav-
ing to shower and put on teaching clothes and walk to a
room with desks and a whiteboard were activities I could do
with a baby-ravaged brain/body. I was competent at this.
What I am not competent at is when the grandfather
clock clicks to 5:30 p.m. Cue the infant wail that marks the
half-hour chime, reaching the crescendo as the 6 p.m.
Westminster bell chimes. I pace with her in my arms around
the hardwood floors pitted with old pew marks, our circles
grooving new marks in the path from the baby swing by the
altar (insert don’t-put-me-down wail here) to the clock,
through a rectangle of afternoon orange light from the
stained glass, under the spiral staircase (insert curse word
here, when my head connects with the corner of a stair),
through the kitchen (don’t look at the oven clock—fuck—
when will he be home to take the kid), down the hallway
past my home office (page proofs need to be reviewed. Any
news on my tenure case?) back to the piano in front of the
altar. All pre-kid intentions of not stuffing a pacifier in her
mouth failed on the second day; we watched the “Happiest
Child on the Block” DVD in which Dr. Harvey Karp
espouses recreating gestation for your traumatized child by
soothing, wrapping her like a burrito in a blanket, jiggling,
and shhhhhhing the wailer to womb-like bliss. As long as
one of the traumatized adults shuffles the circular path, the
paci and our gerunding plug the wails inside our burrito
wrapped baby. We disavow Kim West (2006) and her regis-
tered (un)ironic trademark The Sleep Lady®, the treatise on
teaching your child to self-soothe.
Three years later, I can enjoy the snarky back and forth
comments on Internet message boards from the proponents
and naysayers of how best mommy should contend with a
fussy infant. Dr. H. Karp versus Dr. Billy Sears versus The
Sleep Lady® versus Dr. S. L. Faulkner. This is pleasure
reading now that the pit of wailing is filled in with shovel-
fuls of day care reports, parenting advice, and well-kid visit
sheets with vital growth statistics all confirming that per-
haps the kid was more difficult than those riding the normal
curve. Research by political scientists such as Diener,
Inglehart, and Tay (in press) suggests that parents enjoy less
life satisfaction compared with non-parents if you look at
global measures, the curve on a satisfaction graph like a
child’s drawing of a sea bird. This is because the moment,
the second reigns over the week or year; the individual
moments are more important for assessing satisfaction than
a question asking how satisfied are you with your life? It
seems that the question for parents is how satisfied are you
this second? One lap around the block and you feel you
have it. The next lap you regret having birthed a kid. I chart
my second by second satisfaction here (see figure 1):
6 Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies XX(X)
crapCrapCRAP
Whew
crapCrapCRAP
Whew
Whew
walkRUN
walkRUN
walkRUN
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
My Satisfaction (x=competence) over Time (y=one hour)
Figure 1.  Faulkner’s historiography of life satisfaction as a
mother.
More than once, I combed the sidewalks around my
house, retraced steps, frantic to find the dog squeaker toy
that the kid loved—loved to see what kind of arc Barf Dog
made when she tossed it overboard from her stroller, how
I chased the well-slobbered and chewed on dog like a
rabid squirrel. I knew that she was attached to the squeaker,
though mostly I didn’t want to hear her howl at its loss. I
am a bad mommy for worrying more about my own needs
and giving into anxiety. It does not all go too quickly.
And then there was the time around 9 weeks when I had
to pick up the kid at day care, wait, I mean “learning cen-
ter,” because my spouse was unavailable. I use my keytag to
unlock the door, walk a few slow steps to the infant room
past the bulletin boards stapled with pictures of the center’s
children doing activities and field trips, stop in front of the
split-door entrance. The door is closed at the bottom so that
the crawlers can’t get out, but the visitors and parents can
see the baby cuteness spilling from the open top door into
the hallway. Construction paper pumpkins or turkeys or
elves or hearts or shamrocks with the children’s names writ-
ten on the front taped to the door.
Which one is mine? I think to myself in a panicked voice.
I can’t recognize her in the sea of infant drool and bald
heads. I scan from the cribs in the back to the rocking chair
by the window to the toy section by the door, trying to
remember what onesie I had dressed her in, but all the White
babies look alike with the bunny or lamb or elephant
perched cheerfully on the front. She wouldn’t be in a crib
because she refuses to sleep here, adding another check
mark to my mental guilt list of bad mothering.
Okay. I see her nametag on the door, so the room has not
moved. She is too young to smile at me, give me any hint. Ms.
Melissa isn’t working, so I also don’t know the teacher. Will
someone help me? I narrow the selection to two, not the
African American baby or the boy with cradle cap, maybe . . .
“Do you have any ID?” the teacher asks me. I have no
crapCrapCRAP
idea how long I have been standing by the infant room door.
She smiles apologetically and mumbles something about
the center rules. I am saved. I can show her my id, and she
Whew
will hand over the kid.
“Sure. I understand,” I say, relieved until I can’t find my
crapCrapC
license. I root through my bag and mumble, “Where is it?
RAP
Whereisit?” The director of the center walks by, and I ask
her, “I can’t find my ID?”
“I’ll vouch for her.” Ms. Erica winks at me. She gets why
we call Mimi “the kid,” and told me once that I was a good
mother. I remember her words when I feel like the worst
mommy in Bowling Green, because every mother needs to
hear “you’re a good mother” at least once.
“Mimi went through two onesies today.” The teacher
points to the kid as she gathers empty bottles and a plastic
grocery sack with dirty diapers and onesies to hand me. Oh,
not such a bad mother. Of course, no infant stays in one shirt
all day. Sure, I drove without a license, but when I picked
Mimi up from the infant room floor she smelled like joy. And
maybe she even gurgled for me. The kid was becoming a girl
who may even recognize me as “mama.” (see figure 2)
Postpartum women are more likely to be anxious than
depressed (Wenzel, Haugen, Jackson, & Brendle, 2005).
Oh. Now I read this. Three years too late. Andrea Wardrop
and Natalee Popadiuk (2013) interviewed six women about
“postpartum anxiety,” a term I never heard or read or
thought about until writing this litany and becoming the
mother of a preschooler. Their questioning of a generic
label, “postpartum depression,” to describe generalized
anxiety about motherhood and self-criticism almost makes
me say okay, I was not a bad mother. Mimi is almost 4 years
old, and only now do I have a term for what I called the
“bad mommy blues.” I was searching for examples of good
interview work and interpretive analysis for a graduate
humanistic research method syllabus when I found this
work: “Women navigating the transition to motherhood
contend with a number of changes and new roles, and our
societal scripts and cultural attitudes toward mothering play
a large role in how this transition unfolds” (p. 20). I read
every sentence in the article with personal interest, my pro-
fessional persona suspended. My professional and personal
worlds collide in a positive way this time, the overlap like a
bandage securely attaching me to my work and to my child
and my work to my child.
At the 6-week postpartum checkup, I burst into tears
when the nurse practitioner asked me how I was feeling.
“This is not me,” I may have said. I had that experience of
being outside myself with my intellect, watching the woman
crying on the exam table, willing her to stop being a cliché.
But my angry thoughts did not stop the tears, my tears. I had
not let anyone see me cry; I used a shower as cover when
my 7-day-old cried from pain when I fed her, the moist
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Faulkner 7

Bedtime Story
“Guys, don’t eat the moon in space and in the clouds.”
-Mimi, age 2

What’s going on at Mimi’s house?

the bears bite

the bed off
the bears bite
the room off

I don’t want-to bite

the bears because
because they
are too strong

Why do the walls hatch?

All the raspberries fall

down my throat

I want a Manhattan

Figure 2.  Bedtime story.

August air and my proclivity for yeast a trigger necessitat-
ing her purple rimmed mouth like a sad clown, because my
milk ducts grew rapid-rise yeast and turned breast-feeding
into bread making. I cried with the water running over my
exhausted body, realizing that you really can’t protect any-
one, and tried to remember that a colleague told me that
postpartum blues was a stupid label. The color blue mini-
mized feelings, made them seem like something a whiny
girl would have. I felt fine, mostly, really?
Did I want a prescription for something?
“No, thank you.” I said with a sniffle. I wanted to talk
about losing all the pregnancy weight plus 5 more pounds in
5 weeks because that seemed to be a problem, not this tear
attack. The obstetrician and nurse were not concerned about
my weight at all. The obsession with how much weight
gained or lost began every prenatal visit, but now that I
wanted to talk about weight, it was unimportant. I thanked
them and left the office sans drugs or advice.
This exchange is not unusual as screening for postpar-
tum anxiety is not usual. I never told any health care pro-
vider about my ambivalence about pregnancy, so that
experience may have carried over into the infant stage and
manifested as anxiety (Faulkner, 2012; Reck et al., 2012).
Ian Paul, Downs, Schaefer, Beiler, and Weisman (2013)
studied anxiety and breast-feeding women postpartum with
the goal of recognizing the importance of anxiety to infant
and maternal health.
During the postpartum hospital stay, anxiety was far more
common than depression among breastfeeding women.
Anxiety remained more common for the 6 months after
childbirth, and was associated with increased health care use
and reduced breastfeeding duration, particularly among
primiparous women. (p. 1218)
I wonder now if I had known much sooner the term post-
partum anxiety, as a primiparous ball of bad will, if the first
year would have been easier? I look up the term and see that
the higher the postpartum anxiety, the more likely a woman
is to label herself as “bad mother” and to feel negative about
motherhood (Wardrop & Popadiuk, 2013). This means I can
call my stubbornness “pure persistence.” I put the positive
spin on it given that skin-to-skin contact between mother
and child helps alleviate anxiety (Lonstein, 2007). I hesitate
to be public with my story because of fear. Labeling a
woman “bad mother” is too easy. “It’s as important to iden-
tify and critique those totalizing paradigms, and to work for

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8 Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies XX(X)
Figure 3.  Family planning.
institutional and social changes, as it is to personally refuse
to comply with their demands—that is, we can deliberately
find ways to live otherwise” (Cooley & Kasdorf, 2008, p.
212). What I want the most is to knock these myths upside
the head with a backhand, spank them until my knuckles are
bloodied, the palms of my hands stinging red until no more
tears are possible.
Still, I get the question I hate the most: “When are you
having another?” This question asked in a variety of ways
from the time I was 6 months pregnant to infinity and beyond.
The good mother should want to keep producing to get credit
for the 2.5 kids. Helaine Olen’s (2008) astute observations in
an essay titled, The Mean Moms sum up the too easy judg-
ments we pass on one another, the normative presumptions
and categorizations that overlook the likelihood that women
cannot or do not want to cherish every moment, and even that
motherhood may not be the best role of our lives.
The fact remains that the decision to become a mother almost
always moves women several rungs down on both the economic
and social ladders . . . The solution is within all of us. It is
possible to tolerate each other’s differences and revel in the
fact that more than one type of parenting can lead to good
results . . . to keep from bickering with one another over
problems that cry out for societal solutions—like the need for
and appropriateness of daycare and flexible work schedules.
(Olen, 2008, pp. 248-249)
Cherish every moment; they grow up too fast; enjoy the
best role of your life. I queer this relationship between
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mothering as an embodied action and mother as a role
within a seemingly heteronormative configuration through
reflexively queer work (Adams & Holman Jones, 2011;
Elia, 2003), and through negotiating identities and feelings
about identities that shift with cultural understanding
(Berry, 2013). I use poetic inquiry and personal narrative to
acknowledge, examine, and potentially alter the complex
reality that although a mom might like and love her child,
she might be anxious and abhor the prescribed role of being
mommy. Thus, I practice a chant—One and Done. First and
Last. First and Last. One and Done. Infancy is not the best
because it does not all go quickly, and I cannot live through
another infant and keep myself. Through the chanting I
hope to ward off this pro-natalist obsession and practice a
form of family planning I call get-rid-of-the-kid’s stuff-
before-she-can-pass-it-on. (see figure 3)
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with
respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Note
1. See K. Bartholomew (1993) for a full discussion of attach-
ment theory and attachment styles and the influence on
relating.
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Author Biography
Sandra L. Faulkner’s teaching and research interests include
qualitative methodology, poetic inquiry, and the relationships
between culture, ethnic/sexual identities, and sexual talk in
close relationships. She is the author of two chapbooks, Hello
Kitty Goes to College (dancing girl press), and Knit Four, Make
One (forthcoming, Kattywompus Press). Her poetry memoir,
K4, M1: Knit Four, Frog One, is forthcoming (2014) from
Sense Publishers.