The painful truths about motherhood exposed
Sky Uk/HBOA wave of TV shows, films and books is now really getting to grips with the difficult, and sometimes shocking, realities of becoming a mother. Is it about time, asks Laura Martin.
"He'll bulldoze your life, destroy your relationships, and when he's got you completely to himself: he'll destroy you. It's what he does," says a wizened older lady to another woman, who, in a strange series of events, has had a baby literally drop into her arms.
This statement in the third episode of the brilliantly dark TV comedy-horror The Baby (available on HBO Max in the US now; premiering in the UK today) will likely ring true with anyone tending to a screaming newborn for the sixth, seventh or eighth time in the middle of the night, and feeling like a reheated corpse the morning after – even if the predicament of its maternal protagonist may be somewhat extraordinary. In the show, despite his cherubic face and cute little yellow booties, the baby in question is destructive on an extreme scale: a murderous demon who brutally slays anyone who crosses him, giggling delightedly after each kill.
Sky Uk/HBOMichelle De Swarte stars as Natasha, the straight-talking chef who gets pulled into the wild story when she catches a baby falling off a cliff. And while this surreal, often hilarious and gory British tale hooks you in with a plot full of twists and turns, the allegory it's presenting is crystal clear from the start: motherhood, at times, can be a total horror show.
The Baby is part of a current wave of film, TV and literature interested in laying bare the difficult, sometimes shocking realities of being a mother, from those initial discussions around having children, through to pregnancy, labour, birth and then the all-encoming, life-long experience of raising a child. What we're seeing now is the fuller, wider spectrum of motherhood represented in fiction. And if that takes readers and viewers to a dark place sometimes, it's a sign that society is finally opening up to truthful discussions around the traditionally emotive subject.
"We were excited about the possibility of exploding cultural ideals around motherhood," says co-creator Siân Robins-Grace about the starting point for the series, "and revealing the darker, violent or oppressive forces at play in that kind of ideal of what motherhood should be. The genre of horror obviously allows you to take that to a really extreme place, and set up some really taboo situations to explore why they might be taboo."
Happily, breaking these taboos is something that's become especially prevalent of late. While classic films like Rosemary's Baby, The Omen and Mommie Dearest looked at the experience of motherhood as a horrifying one, the stereotype of a mother on screen has traditionally been a beatific, selfless stay-at-home wife, happily wedded to the idea that her life revolves around her children. As Robins-Grace says: "I think a lot of ways that motherhood is depicted is thin and uncritical, and reinforces the idea that 'the mother' is cis, female, straight, middle-class, white, caring and nurturing."
Her co-creator Lucy Gaymer adds that for her, the series – and genre – was a way to process her own internal battles about motherhood: "The genesis of this idea comes from me being in my 30s and feeling really confused about whether I wanted to become a parent or not, and I didn't realise that until after we'd plotted episode one, when I was like, 'Oh, of course I had that idea as it represents what it would feel like for me to become a parent right now'. It definitely comes from that place of anxiety, and also of jealousy of people who seem to feel so clearly one way or another. That feeling of not being sure feels scary and sometimes isolating."
Tapping into terror
That anxiety and isolation that women might experience while contemplating one of the biggest life decisions there is (while having an undetermined biological deadline hanging over them: a subject explored with bracing honesty by the journalist Nell Frizzell in her recent book, The Panic Years) is arguably only then exacerbated by both the reality of pregnancy and raising a young child. These emotions are again explored in heightened, terrifying in the 2016 film Prevenge, another horror story in which a pregnant woman's foetus orders her to carry out a series of murders to avenge her partner's death. As the baby's chipmunk-esque voice threatens her ("What did I say will happen if you don't do as I say? Blood will be shed, one way or another") it's extreme and ridiculous of course, but, deep down, speaks to fears that many carry about the power that the living being inside them holds over them. As Ruth (Alice Lowe) says about missing an ultrasound scan: "I don't want to know what's in there. I'm scared of her. I'm not even in control. It's like I'm some crap, banged out car and she's driving, I'm just the vehicle," she tries to explain to the patronising midwife, who replies with another platitude.
AlamyWhile I've never procreated a homicidal infant, I have had two babies delivered prematurely by emergency C-section who both required a five-week-long stay in a NICU (neonatal intensive care unit) – and so slasher horror plot aside, the abject terror around labour and birth that the film depicts is something I can relate to. Even before my double traumatic labours, while pregnant with my first child, I feeling like the experience was akin to knowing you're going to be in a car crash, but you don't know when, or how bad it's going to be.
Understandably, it's hard to relax and "enjoy the pregnancy" as you're so often reminded by healthcare professionals, midwives and anyone else who happens to be walking past in the street. Portrayals in popular culture push the idea that babies are something that happen to you, rather than because of you. In Prevenge – aside from all the slash-and-kill sprees – it's implied that Ruth is already a bad mother as she's breaking the unspoken code of complying and not complaining, as her baby hasn't even been born yet. In an interview with Indiewire, Lowe – who was eight months' pregnant when she wrote, acted in and directed the film – said: "I kind of took all my frustrations of what I was feeling… Suddenly, you're a mother and people think different about you and you don't have control over your job anymore. All of this stuff, I was feeling fairly grim and dark about, and I just put it in this film."
Another mother breaking the code is Leda, the protagonist of The Lost Daughter, Maggie Gyllenhaal's 2021 Netflix adaptation of Elena Ferrante's 2006 novel. While not a horror story, Leda (Olivia Colman) is regarded as something of a monster by the family she meets on the beach while holidaying in Greece – including the pregnant woman who she tells bluntly: "Children are a crushing responsibility". The character then flips the script on how mothers are expected to act with her unsettlingly unpredictable behaviour: she helps find a lost young girl on the beach to the relief of her family, only to steal her doll, watching the girl's devastation unfold, to play with at home. Over the course of the film, we discover she's behaved in this kind of impulsive way before, committing the most unthinkable, most transgressive of acts – in the eyes of much of society, anyway – and walking out of her family home, leaving her two young daughters behind.
Through flashbacks we see young Leda (Jessie Buckley) struggle as a young mum with her career, relationships, sexuality and personal sense of being, as well as some clearly unprocessed trauma from her own mother. The story asks the audience to confront an uncomfortable question: who was my mother before I was born? What were her desires, wills and opinions before she was in this role; and what has happened to those now?
Seeing the funny side
When it comes to the frustrations of motherhood, the sitcoms Motherland and Workin' Moms explore this territory in a lighter fashion, foregrounding in a both realistic and hilarious way the manic juggle that parents – mainly mums, if we're being honest – are expected to undertake. Mistakes will inevitably be made, and then there's the guilt and shame to contend with when this happens. A nice touch in Motherland is the absence of children in the main: rather they're seen rushing past the screen, the tops of their heads just visible as they enter school. It's the perspective of a mother's gaze, not just on her offspring, but the entire circus of life that surrounds her. Like Leda, we also see Motherland's lead character Julia (Anna Maxwell Martin) furiously grappling with her identity as a mum in a way that feels painfully authentic; juggling parenthood with wanting to be seen as a PR dynamo in her career, and as a woman of desire when she has a crush on a visiting builder.
BBC/AlamyAnother comedy-drama that has nailed the complications and conflicting emotions of the maternal experience is Australia's The Letdown. So much popular culture tells the story of pregnancy and birth – typically shown in a nice, neat, two-minute montage of a woman crying and screaming – and then wraps things up there. Which is why The Letdown was refreshingly unusual in starting its story when its lead character was two-months post-birth. Having been through a distressing labour, we see Audrey (Alison Bell) seriously minimising her experience and telling her mum-and-baby group: "It was fine, thanks, in the end, C-section," while also emphasising she was "not too posh to push. I didn't elect it." She's already guiltily justifying an experience that was out of her hands, in the hope that people don't judge her for it.
As the show goes on through its two series, we're shown in both banal and excruciating detail how difficult it can be just to get through the day with a newborn, and the emotional weight of the first year that hangs heavy each day. Finally, fighting back tears, Audrey its why she's struggling: "It wasn't a great start. I kept arguing for a natural birth because I'd read all this stuff and… we nearly lost her." One of the other characters later suggests Audrey has PTSD – official figures estimate anywhere between three to nine percent of women who give birth do, although it's likely that many more women are never diagnosed. For me, that PTSD hit home on my son's first birthday – while everyone was celebrating his arrival, I was experiencing upsetting flashbacks of the anniversary of one of the scariest days of my life. Everything ended up fine, I was reminded by my partner and well-meaning friends, and that's all that mattered, wasn't it?
The experience of mothers struggling to convince themselves they're "fine" after what can be an ordeal at the best of times – and a near-death experience at the worst of times – is perceptively examined in Marianne Levy's new book, Don't Forget To Scream. In one anecdote, she explains: "I got chatting to a mum at the school gate and I asked her about her experience of birth. 'Oh, it was awful,' she said. 'It's why I only have one. But, you know, it's fine.' 'Is it">window._taboola = window._taboola || []; _taboola.push({ mode: 'alternating-thumbnails-a', container: 'taboola-below-article', placement: 'Below Article', target_type: 'mix' });