Clodagh Finn: Can we cancel ‘supermum’ and embrace wonderful, messy reality instead?

In the same year that ‘supermum’ entered the vernacular, ‘wake-up call’ also became a popular phrase — that is what we need right now

Medieval historian Elizabeth Boyle, in her book 'Fierce Appetites', punctures the myth of Queen Medb as a feminist icon. Picture: Bob Foyers

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the word ‘supermom’ — “an exemplary or exceptional mother, especially one who successfully manages a home and brings up children while also having a full-time job” — first appeared in print in 1974.

The American dictionary also offers a helpful guide on how the word is used in sentences; for example, this from Marie Claire magazine in 2018: “Model, supermom, and all-round cool person Chrissy Teigen really is out here living her best life.”

(As we’re on the subject of irksome phrases, how did we ever allow ‘living your best life’ spill over from social media to torment us in the real, filter-less world where nobody gets to choose which life they live?)

To be fair, some dictionaries pierce the myths that have grown up around supermom, or supermum as she is known on this side of the Atlantic. Collins English Dictionary quotes this salutary sentence from The Sunday Times in 2008: “The absurd pretence of the supermom role was taking its toll.”

Surprisingly, the noun didn’t inveigle its way into the Oxford Dictionary until June 2012, a fact that gives us reason to hope that we might actually be able to start a campaign to cancel ‘supermum’, to use another exasperating phrase of our times.

Or we might take inspiration from British author and mental health advocate Rachel Kelly, who is starting a club called the Supermums’ Survivors Club for women who have tried to be exemplary mothers, but have “crashed and lived to tell the tale”.

She describes being suited and blow-dried at her desk one moment, then holding a clean-bottomed baby in a perfectly tidy house the next; a perfect vision of juggling and having it all.

“Except none of it was true,” she writes. “We were worn out and worn down. Bone-weary and tearful. And in the end, it was all too much. In my case, the pressure of trying to keep all the balls in the air led to two severe depressive episodes when I was in my 30s.”

She is not alone. Ahead of Mother’s Day on Sunday, take note that 63% of mothers are exhausted trying to be perfect mothers, according to a recent Bupa UK survey.

Closer to home, our own writers have been doing an excellent job calling out the relentless pressures on mothers.

Edel Coffey, of this parish, broached the subject in bestselling style with her debut novel Breaking Point. While writing, she says, she kept thinking about this Instagram phrase (not all of them are bad) as it seemed to capture the impossible demands of modern living: “We expect women to work like they don’t have children, and to raise children as if they don’t work.”

Tellingly, her book was written in the snatched moments between child pick-ups and drop-offs. That echoes the experience of author, poet, and mother of four Doireann Ní Ghríofa, who spoke of eking out snatches of time to sit in her parked car to write the exquisite Ghost in the Throat, the An Post Irish Book of the Year in 2020.

Her words “this is a female text” — repeated several times in the book — resonate still, as Ní Ghríofa so lyrically described the relentless work of motherhood while, at the same time, seeking out the wisps of forgotten history to tell the story of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, the 18th-century poet who wrote Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire.

That forward-and-back, between memoir in the present and search for resonance in the past, came to mind when I read  Fierce Appetites by medieval historian Elizabeth Boyle. It is pure nectar for the imagination, and it’s my book of 2022 — even if it is still only March.

One of the sections that had me sitting bolt-upright was the one puncturing the myth of Queen Medb as a feminist icon. We need all the feminist icons we can get, but when I read the medieval saga The Táin, I thought the Queen Medb portrayed within was a thundering cow. She was reckless, tone-deaf, violent, and a callous mother, but who was I to challenge the enduring myth of a kickass, feminist Medb?

What a relief, then, to read Boyle, a medievalist and seeker of knowledge, describe her not only as an “infuriatingly idiotic bitch”, but a bad mother as well; one who, in her misguided pursuit of the prized bull of Ulster, was willing to offer up her daughter to anyone prepared to kill another mythic hero, Cú Chulainn.

It’s not that I wanted Medb to be a villain, but it is so refreshing to see women, of all hues, inhabit the vast grey space between the ‘black’ and ‘white’ narratives we force on them.

Boyle also evokes the reality — and emotional complexities — of ‘blended families’ in both the past and the present. She writes of motherhood with searing honesty too. Her own mother told her, to her face, that she had never felt a maternal instinct.

“A mother’s love is not guaranteed,” she writes.

When Boyle had her own daughter, she suffered postnatal depression and describes, in one deeply poignant paragraph, that she took out a metaphorical baseball bat and smashed her family to smithereens. Her daughter stayed with her father in England and she moved to Dublin to take up a post at Maynooth University.

She also flails herself for making that decision, though, since then, she has done everything possible to build and maintain a good relationship with her 15-year-old daughter.

In sharing her story, and the stories of so many mothers, good and bad, from antiquity, Boyle has done us an immense service. 

As she puts it so eloquently herself, motherhood comes in all shapes and sizes: “The world has always been full of stepmothers, foster-mothers, fathers who do the ‘mothering’, aunts and cousins and grandparents who take on primary caring responsibilities, adoptive mothers, institutions that rear children [for better or worse], and innumerable kinds of almost-mothers, surrogate mothers, ‘they-were-like-a-mother-to-me’s.”

That offers a timely reminder to challenge our own well-worn stereotypes because they, too often, hold us captive.

Consider the idealised version of motherhood that emerged after the foundation of the Irish State. Newly independent Ireland glorified mothers, but only “respectable”, married ones; anyone outside the norm (unmarried mothers, those pregnant by violence) was hidden away in Magdalene laundries or in the country’s 180-plus mother and baby institutions.

I’ll be thinking of those mothers on Sunday. Also their adult children who are still struggling to find out who they are. We are still nowhere near addressing the injustices of the past, or admitting to ourselves the damage done by imposing such a narrow definition of motherhood.

Which brings me back to ‘supermum’ — a straitjacket of a word that is responsible for unquantifiable amounts of shoulder-rounding guilt.

Interestingly, in the same year that ‘supermum’ entered the vernacular, ‘wake-up call’ also became a popular phrase. And that is what we need right now.