"When I was eleven, my sister bought our father a "World's Greatest Dad" coffee mug; and, frankly, the man coasted until the day he died."
- Sheldon Cooper (The Big Bang Theory)
Donald Winnicott (Yeah, I did just abruptly go from Sheldon Cooper to Winnicott) said and did a lot of useful things. Among these were his detailed postulations on motherhood and what a child needs in order to develop a healthy sense of integration and be initialised into the larger world with a sufficient degree of mastery, self-worth and confidence. Even better was the fact that Winnicott's ideas developed from earlier psychoanalytic thought that emphasised the role played by the mother/ primary caregiver (though the primary caregiver bit was only added as an afterthought) to such an extent as to frighten prospective mothers into believing that every problem faced by their offspring in adulthood could potentially be traced back to something they did or did not do as mothers of young children. Winnicott's theories offered mothers a necessary breather by dis-idealising (un-idealising?) motherhood ("It's only too easy to idealise a mother's job. We know well that every job has its frustrations and its boring routines and its times of being the last thing anyone would choose to do. Well, why shouldn't the care of babies and children be thought of that way too?"), advancing the idea that a parent who has fears and frustrations is preferable to one who is omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent ("I would rather be the child of a mother who has all the inner conflicts of the human being than be mothered by someone for whom all is easy and smooth, who knows all the answers, and is a stranger to doubt") and forwarding the notion that one did not need to be perfect, but just 'good enough'.
I find myself remembering Winnicott's 'Good enough mother' on the eve of the American version of 'Mother's Day'. My Facebook feed is already filled with posts about mothers, honouring mothers in general and our mothers in particular, doing something 'special' for them on this day et cetera, et cetera. While I personally don't participate in these 'Hallmark Holidays' or 'Symbolic' days, I'm quite happy to leave each to their own.
Having said that, one of the themes that social networking sites throw up near such holidays are posts about having "The best mom in the world", "The world's greatest dad" or "The best husband/wife ever". These make my face automatically twist into an expression combining bemusement with just a trace of annoyance...and let me tell you why.
Because it's not a contest. There are no awards or prizes and there shouldn't be because there is no gold standard against which one's prowess as a parent or partner can or should be measured. Motherhood, fatherhood, indeed all relationships are extremely complex, highly diverse, subjective processes. They can mean vastly different things to different people so even if it were a contest, what scale or measure does one use to assess a parent or partner's greatness? This becomes particularly tricky when you consider things like liberties and privileges. For example, how do you compare a woman in South East Asia who works as a labourer for 60 hours a week and feeds her child one meal a day with a well-to-do mother who feeds her children organic, homegrown stuff three times a day? How does one judge a father who works evenings and nights to support his children but in doing so, misses all their school plays? The problem with superlatives like 'best' is there can only be one.
Since 'best' and 'greatest' are superlatives, they are essentially based on comparisons. Who are people using as comparatives? If someone has only been married once and states that their husband/wife is the "best husband/wife ever", the sheer inaccuracy of the statement irks me. Only someone who has been married more than once can make a comparison of their various partners and arrive at some conclusions on which one is (or was!) 'better' (though in the absence of damning evidence or facts, even this comparison would be unfair based on the point previously mentioned). How do you know that your husband/wife is the best husband/wife ever? And more importantly, why does he/she need to be the best?
Society and culture bombard us with messages about what it means to be a "good mother", "a good wife", "a real man" et cetera and these have done more harm than good because people ruin their identities and lives, and often the lives of others, in trying to subscribe to these imaginary, impossible standards. They tell us that parenthood and relationships exist in a world of absolutes (where there is an absolute good, an absolute bad is implied). In such a world, comparatives and superlatives about motherhood (and any other -hoods and -ships) can make people feel guilty or stressed about "not being a good mother", let alone not being "the best".
I JUST googled the words "Am I a..." and- I KID YOU NOT- the first two autocomplete hits were "Am I a bad mother" and "Am I a good mom". Incidentally, these were followed by "Am I a psychopath" and "Am I sociopath". Interesting, and slightly disturbing. I don't think these ideas emerge out of a vacuum. There are mothers out there who are wondering whether they are 'good' or 'bad' because there is some standard in their mind they are trying to live up to or worried about falling short of.
There is no universal definition of a good mother/husband/wife/father. No boxes people can check to ensure that they have met the requisite criteria with merit or distinction that puts them in the 99.99th percentile and therefore makes them the 'best'. What is out there is a world of real relationships, diverse collections of people with different identities and backgrounds, and people you care for and who need you to be there for them in a manner that is unique to your relationship with them.
Why must we use inaccurate superlatives to describe our loved ones when accurate adjectives would suffice?
"You are funny" or "You are caring" means a lot more to me than "You're the best partner/daughter/sister ever" because a. I know the latter is impossible to determine with any degree of certainty and b. I believe that when someone close to me tells me specific things about me that they cherish, they speak from experience within our relationship rather than a comparison with someone else or some imagined standard.
Some might say that it's just a sentiment or a figure of speech and that I'm being too literal and over-thinking this. Well, so be it.
I do like to think about the words we choose to use.
I would much rather be a sincere 'good enough' for my loved ones than an inaccurate and impossible 'best'.
