Rose Byrne in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, left, Jessie Buckley in a scene from Hamnet, top right, and Jennifer Lawrence in Die My Love.Photo Illustration by The Globe and Mail
Linda is at her wits end. In Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, the psychotherapist (played by Rose Byrne), is weeks into a scenario that would send anyone into a spiral: temporarily living in a Montauk motel after her roof caved in, caring solo for her daughter with a mysterious illness who relies on a feeding tube, with an aloof husband travelling for work and a patient who’s gone missing.
She’s overwhelmed and screaming for help – literally. Exhausted and begging for her therapist (who also happens to be her co-worker) to understand her, Linda says the quiet part out loud, exasperatedly stating: “I’m one of those people that’s not supposed to be a mom … this isn’t supposed to be what it’s like. This isn’t it, this can’t be it.”
It’s a moment as poignant as it is jarring; the illustration of a mother who is not only questioning her own abilities, but motherhood itself. Because, as she says, whatever it is she’s experiencing can’t be what motherhood is supposed to be.
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Recently, mothers in media everywhere – across time periods, continents, mediums and class lines – were, like Byrne’s Linda, screaming. In what feels like a refreshing departure from previous portrayals in media, we’re finally seeing the emotional complexity of motherhood being depicted in our books and on our screens.
In Hamnet, director Chloé Zhao explores the nuances of maternal grief and loss through the story of Agnes Hathaway (Jessie Buckley), playwright William Shakespeare’s wife, after the loss of her eldest son.
In Die My Love, Oscar-winner Jennifer Lawrence spirals deeper and deeper into postpartum depression after the birth of her first child. Mystery series such as Peacock’s All Her Fault and The Stolen Girl on Disney+ delve into the fallibility of mothers who trust the wrong people with their children – with potentially devastating consequences.
On our shelves, Jessamine Chan’s 2022 novel The School for Good Mothers explores the fictionalized dystopian repercussions of being a “bad mother,” and Molly Jong-Fast’s memoir How To Lose Your Mother offers a daughter’s first hand perspective on her famous mother and their complicated relationship.
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And in Life After Ambition: A “Good Enough” Memoir, Toronto-based author Amil Niazi explores the ways motherhood helped her feel her like her truest and most and creatively fulfilled self, while also completely ruining her once identity-defining ambition.
These stories frame motherhood not as fulfilment, but as complex work. And it’s clear they’re striking a nerve, with both Byrne and Buckley receiving Academy Award nominations for their roles.
For Dr. Miranda Brady, an associate professor in the School of Journalism and Communication at Carleton University and author of Mother Trouble: Mediations of White Maternal Angst after Second Wave Feminism, the draw to these themes and stories makes sense – for one specific reason: they’re relatable.
“They depict very realistic experiences of motherhood and things that are, to some degree, universally experienced by a lot of mothers,” Brady says. This includes a sense of being “overall depleted and being expected to handle all these things on your own, and feeling a sense of shame if you can’t handle it all.”
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A 2023 report from Statistics Canada found that 52 per cent of women aged 15 and older provide some sort of care to a child or dependent. And for a long time, this idea of women as consummate caretakers has been the expectation – both in real life and in the depictions of women we see onscreen.
Niazi grew up in Vancouver in the 1980s and ‘90s watching sitcoms where mothers were depicted as unfailing and perfect. These women onscreen were her first introduction to the idea of just who, and what, a perfect mother should be.
“She was put together, she was always there for her kids, she baked cookies, she made cakes, she made the costumes, she went to every play and every PTA meeting, and she was also beautiful and kind and never fazed,” Niazi says. “She was not quite a Stepford wife, but there were no cracks in the veneer – and that is something I’m sure I internalized.”
While there have been slight deviations since, in recent years social media has taken over, with Maggie Seaver and Clair Huxtable replaced by “tradwife” influencers such as Hannah Neeleman (a.k.a. Ballerina Farm) and Nara Smith. Both are conservative-coded influencers promoting traditional values on their platforms, a.k.a. “Trad Wives.” Like the sitcom lives of yore, it all looks idyllic, but it can be alienating for those who don’t see themselves and their experiences reflected back.
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“The whole reason that I started writing about motherhood in the first place was [because] I did not see myself reflected in anything,” says Niazi, who also writes a parenting column for The Cut. “In books, in television, in films, in motherhood columns – it was constantly a very specific middle-class, educated white woman.”
Increasingly, these perfect depictions are feeling more and more out of touch as reality become anything but. As Niazi explores in Life After Ambition, desire for more realistic depictions of motherhood began to shift noticeably during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the distance between what these influencers were presenting online became increasingly removed from the day-to-day realities of overworked moms.
“I just think honesty and transparency and vulnerability really resonate in the era of the influencer,” Niazi says.
For Brady, it’s not only the fact that these depictions are relatable, but also the current political climate that’s fuelling this shift, especially looking to our neighbours south of the border.
“[Women] are not naive about some of the formidable challenges that they face,” she says. This includes stagnant wages, a continuing housing crisis, and the attack on reproductive rights. “Our political landscape is a mess right now, [so] seeing well-curated, beautiful images of motherhood, they’re not naive to the fact that these are a fantasy.”
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And while films such as If I Had Legs I’d Kick You and Die My Love are pushing the needle forward in conversations around what to expect of mothers, it’s hard not to notice that a majority of these cultural touchpoints still centre on white women.
“It’s so important for people to see us as good mothers, as people who exist in this space,” Niazi says. “There’s so much judgment and shame for a lot of mothers who don’t fit into that ideal; and they feel constantly like they’re falling short. It’s really necessary for people to hear the experiences of women of colour and to understand their experience of motherhood as well.”
Regardless of how long it takes us to get there, both Brady and Niazi agree that we need to keep talking about motherhood – and watching its realities onscreen.
“I don’t want to see mothers relegated to some dark corner of the internet that no one cares about,” Niazi says. “I’m so grateful that these types of movies and television shows and podcasts are starting to pop up, because we need to see the spectrum of the experience of motherhood and talk about it and understand it, because for too long we’ve ignored it and we can’t ignore something so important.”