Press Release

A Potent Spellby Janna Malamud Smith

• About the Book• About the Author• A Conversation with Janna Malamud Smith• From A Potent Spell

"Intelligent and empathetic . . . not only brings our age-old dread out of the shadows but places it in a historical context that, even if we cannot expunge it, will go far in helping us to understand it." — Anne Fadiman, author of The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down

"Groundbreaking . . . Destined to become an important part of the cultural conversation in America." — Doris Kearns Goodwin

"Skillfully written . . . likely to find a secure place in the canon of women's studies." — Kirkus Reviews

About the Book

"Is Your Home Toxic?""What's in Your Breast Milk?""The New Pogos: Danger on a Stick?"

Open up any magazine aimed at contemporary moms and you'll find a litany of such alarming headlines. The experts seem to agree: being a mother is a fearsome job, with any wrong turn or inattention destined to damage a child irrevocably: Hug him. Don't hug him. Give him lots of milk. Milk is bad. Set limits. Let him cry. Though the fear of child loss — the anxiety inspired by a

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feverish toddler, a wandering grade-schooler, a newly licensed teenager — affects all parents, the message implicit in these articles and in the conflicting advice of "the experts" is that children are always at risk and that responsibility for their safety lies solely with their mothers.

In A Potent Spell: Mother Love and the Power of Fear (Houghton Mifflin, January 2003), psychotherapist and critically acclaimed author Janna Malamud Smith explores for the first time the ways in which mothers' fears have been fostered and manipulated in today's society and throughout history, from a seventeenth-century minister who suggested that a child's death was caused by an excess of love from his mother to a best-selling parenting guide of the twentieth century that warned that a child's intelligence and stability might be damaged if his mother works.

Smith contends that this phenomenon of "mother-blame," which has become an effective constant in society, produces the exact opposite of what every child needs — a free and happy mother, "one who feels that she is in fact living her life . . . who has resources to enable her to make real choices . . . who is not constantly abraded by philosophies that inflate her accountability while obscuring her effort." A child with such a mother, one who is valued and supported, will likely feel more loved and valued himself, better able to envision "a life of possibility and hope."

Twenty-five hundred years ago, Euripides described motherhood as "possessing a potent spell," one that holds an intense and profound power. Smith argues that the core, primitive fear of losing a child has been a central and yet mostly overlooked historical force, inducing mothers throughout time to shape their own lives to better shelter and guard their young, often hobbling their own mobility and place within the social hierarchy.

Personal and in-depth, comforting and profound, A Potent Spell is a book for mothers and for those who want to understand them better. It will redefine the way we look at the experience of motherhood in America.

About the Author

Janna Malamud Smith is a clinical psychotherapist and social worker. Her first book, Private Matters: In Defense of the Personal Life, was a New York Times Notable Book, and she has contributed to the New York Times, Family Circle, and the Boston Globe. The daughter of the writer Bernard Malamud, Smith

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has two children. She lives in Massachusetts.

A Conversation with Janna Malamud Smith about A Potent Spell

Q) What made you want to write A Potent Spell?

A) The biggest impetus came from being a mom and feeling many powerful "mom" feelings and wanting to write about them. I particularly hoped the book might offer empathy and comfort to other mothers.

The rest of the answer is a little more roundabout. I knew by my mid-twenties that I wanted to work as a psychotherapist. So I attended a graduate program in clinical social work in which I received very fine basic training in doing psychotherapy. Soon after, my husband and I started a family. It quickly became clear that the mother I had learned about in psychotherapy texts had almost nothing in common with the mother I was becoming.

Q) How so?

A) The normal mother's intense, consuming, life-preserving effort and perspective had been left out of the literature! At the least, she had been patronized, minimized, and devalued. To put it another way, psychologists have published countless theoretical books documenting how mothers fail, but, remarkably, have been almost silent on the dedicated daily work mothers do with children, and on what it feels like to be a real woman raising children. It's rather like writing detailed books about our solar system without mentioning the sun.

So I wrote this book using mythology, history, old advice texts, art, drama, literature, and interviews with contemporary mothers to explore what I believe to be the heart of the mother's experience: the way her love for her children makes her vulnerable in new ways, and particularly makes her fear child loss or harm, and why her fear is important both personally and historically.

Q) What do you mean by your title, "A Potent Spell"?

A) It actually comes from Euripides. Among the stories I use in the book to illuminate mothers' feelings are several from Greek mythology and drama. In

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Euripides' play Iphigenia at Aulis, a mother (Clytemnestra) and father (Agamemnon) argue about whether it's okay for Agamemnon to kill their beloved daughter, Iphigenia, to appease the gods, so that he and his soldiers will have wind to sail them to Troy.

Clytemnestra objects vehemently, and by doing so, she oversteps. Mothers in ancient Greece were supposed to be dutiful, quiet, and completely obedient. But she loves their daughter so much that she violates these rules. The Chorus then tries to explain how she could do something as extreme and foolhardy as protesting her powerful husband's decision. They say, "Oh, what a power is motherhood, possessing a potent spell. All women alike fight fiercely for a child."

The "potent spell" that overtakes women when they attach to children is an extraordinarily powerful emotional state. Under its influence, women transform into mothers focused on keeping beloved children safe. Once held in the power of the spell, mothers will do all kinds of things to protect children: they'll even, in a moment of extreme duress, talk back to Agamemnon! The phrase captures perfectly the constellation of maternal feeling that I'm trying to explore, what I'm calling the heart of the mother's experience.

Q) What about fathers? Are you saying they don't love their children?

A) Not at all! I was very close to my own father. And my husband and sons are very close. I also know from my work as a psychotherapist, not to mention my own bad-mother days, that there are plenty of times in family life when fathers are the more loving, kinder parent. However, across history, societies have tended to assign different roles to mothers and fathers, and mothers have mostly been the primary caretakers for young children. One of the really interesting things I learned while researching the book is that bottle-feeding has been viable for babies for only about 150 years — since pasteurization came along. So until recently men really couldn't be primary caregivers to infants and toddlers. Indeed, bottle-feeding (and reliable birth control) have created revolutionary changes, the consequences of which we're only beginning to appreciate. Up to now it's usually been the mother who's taken on the duty of keeping a young child safe and anticipating its needs minute by minute. And this labor division has had very large societal and historic consequences.

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Q) You mentioned that you want the book to offer empathy and comfort to mothers. What do you mean?

A) I had a weird experience — several times — while writing the book. A mother — one of the parents of my kids' friends, or a neighbor, or a colleague — would ask me what I was writing about. I'd answer "mothers." And my interlocutor would look pained and say, "Oh no. You're not going to make me feel worse, are you?" Maybe because I'm a therapist they assumed I'd be critical — although nothing could be further from my intent. But I think their responses point to something bigger: very rarely do you meet a mom who feels she's doing a great job. Most mothers are self-critical, self-doubting, and at least periodically filled with worry that maybe something about them or how they're parenting is making life tougher for their kids. Contemporary mothers have absorbed all our culture's mother-hating, all the impossible standards of how loving and perfect moms ought to be, all the psychological assumptions about ways mothers harm children — all the blame. So, sadly, women who are doing dedicated, loving, hard work raising their children, instead of feeling the satisfaction and pride they have earned, too often feel distressed and chronically criticized.

When I say that I hope the book will offer empathy and comfort, I mean that when readers take in the stories across thousands of years — from Persephone's mother, Demeter, in Greek mythology to the present day — I hope they'll feel a new, deeper understanding of (and new company for) their own intense feelings and fears, particularly the way their love for their children makes them worry and fear child loss, and also how their fears affect them every day.

Q) You're pretty high on mothers. Are you saying there are no bad mothers?

A) Goodness, no! All mothers are bad some of the time. And a tiny minority of mothers are terrible much of the time: sadistic, torturous, even murderous. I don't want this book to sentimentalize mothers. The Hallmark card angel is no friend to real mothers. But why do we expect mothers to be so good in the first place? We hold inflated standards of how devoted, pure, and loving they ought to be in order to be called good. For the past two hundred years or so, and even more intensely for the past fifty, we've been constantly raising the bar, so we accept as plausible what is really a very idealized fantasy. Don't try this at home. You know, it's as if we told major

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league baseball players that a guy who regularly hits 400 is only okay, that 600 is good, while in truth it's amazing that anyone steadily hits 300!

Q) How much do you talk about your own experiences?

A) Actually, the best stories were offered to me by moms I interviewed or spoke with informally. Often they would start out hesitantly, seemingly embarrassed to describe some of the things they did for love, but before long, they'd realize they had a receptive audience, and the tales would pour out!

The introduction is personal. I talk a little about my own childhood in Oregon. And I tell some tales about myself here and there. But, almost paradoxically, the really personal part of the book is the way I use interviews, history, art, and literature to try to understand my subject. Before I became a psychotherapist, I did my undergraduate work in American history and literature. History, literature, and psychotherapy, each in its own way, seek to understand the past. And psychotherapy especially seeks to understand how the past affects the present. So it seemed natural to me, when I felt plagued by a disconnect between my own experience and the public images of mothering, to turn to the past to see what light it might shed. That's what led me to library archives and rare book collections, to read through old advice books for mothers, and also back to some of the ancient Greek stories.

Q) But what about the present?

A) Overall, the book focuses on contemporary mothers. It starts in the present, goes to the past, and then uses what it finds there to look with new insight at how the same themes carry weight today. Particularly it looks at how texts and experts in earlier centuries treated the mother's fear of child loss or harm, and often played upon this fear to try to manipulate mothers in different ways, and how they still do! Readers hear not only from contemporary mothers, but also from contemporary pundits, magazines, radio, television, fiction, politics, and child care books. It's a lively story, and I very much enjoyed writing it.

From A Potent Spell

Nothing in my worries prepared me for the complete transforming joy of having children, nor for the way that the experience would shake my universe

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and rearrange all meanings so that the rest of life retreated into the background. And while these are not fresh observations, oddly, one experiences them as such. I think many women — but perhaps particularly ones who, like me, started out uncertain about how to reconcile child-rearing with other wishes — experience the pleasure, the anxiety, the enormous depth of feeling as an original discovery, as something surprising. The strange infant is in your arms. It breathes funny and your heart stops. Fear has become love's best friend. You are owned.

The worst clumsiness tends to pass. But a new, enlarged vulnerability remains. In fact, it settles in like a great hawk perched on your shoulders. Its talons grasp flesh whenever the sharp-eyed creature startles, and much makes it uneasy. Whether you talk to the mother of a newborn or the mother of a twenty-five-year-old, she will tell you how her stomach knots and worry descends whenever she senses that a child's well-being is at risk. If she believes she has made a serious mistake, she feels worse than awful. Until you have children, one mother reflected when I interviewed her, "You don't think about what an impact you can make on someone else's life."

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