Cultural ideologies of motherhood in the Western tradition prescribe not only certain behaviors that are seen as appropriate and desirable for practicing good mothering, but they also define the emotional framework that is supposed to govern the mother–child relationship, that is, the nature of mother love. These ideologies represent mother love as unproblematically selfless, unconditional, and a source of continuous joy. Most mothers likely love their children and find great and sometimes unique fulfillment in that emotion, but many mothers identify their love in more qualified terms: children are a source of joy for them, although not a continuous one, and selflessness and unconditionality, although significant parts of that love, are not always unproblematic. The idealized, a priori nature of maternal love promulgated by traditional discourses on motherhood is still widely assumed to be inherent and natural so that scholars rarely question its structure (Reference LaChance Adamscompare LaChance Adams 2014, 4). Motherhood studies, an area of study initially founded on candid reflections about the conditions of patriarchal motherhood, as described in Adrienne Rich's Of Woman Born, and later developed by a small number of feminist philosophers and scholars of motherhood, has challenged the tenets of these ideologies (Reference RuddickRuddick 1989; Reference ParkerParker 1995; Reference O'Reilly and O'ReillyO'Reilly 2004; Reference O'ReillyO'Reilly 2008; Reference Brown and O'ReillyBrown 2010). By daring to speak the “unspeakable,” these studies call attention to the fact that what we think of as “mother love” is often, whether consciously or not, permeated by powerful negative and conflicting emotions, and that we need to think instead about what has been termed “maternal ambivalence.” Theorists working in feminist affect studies have also recently built on the psychoanalytic object relations theory of Melanie Klein and her account of the “good” and the “bad” mother from the child's perspective to advocate critical readings of affect and attachment grounded in ambivalence (Reference SedgwickSedgwick 2003; Reference WiegmanWiegman 2013; Reference StaceyStacey 2014). However, the study of maternal ambivalence in relation to mother love still appears marginal to mainstream discussions of motherhood and is still often constructed in the context of pathology rather than healthy mother–child relationships.

This essay contributes to feminist love studies through its critique of traditional ideologies of motherhood in which maternal ambivalence is seen as incompatible with maternal love. My analysis proceeds by summarizing relevant feminist literature that defends the acknowledgment of feelings of maternal ambivalence as necessary to healthy mothering. The more specific contribution of this essay is the contrast it delineates between the ideal of maternal love propagated by traditional discourses on the maternal, and the reality of mothering and maternal ambivalence as evidenced in the narratives of Bosnian rape survivors who are engaged in raising children born of war rape.Footnote ¹ This aspect of my analysis draws upon my recent work focused on depathologizing maternal ambivalence in the case of Bosnian war rape survivors. In contrast to other feminist theorists, including affect theorists working on maternal ambivalence, my empirically grounded study shows clear reasons for maternal ambivalence, and strengthens the theoretical argument for making such ambivalence visible, and hence more justifiable. Highlighting the experiences of maternal ambivalence in mothers raising children born of war rape paradoxically works to highlight the complex nature of mother love and maternal care in a more general sense. Being able to see clearly and justify the reasons for ambivalence in the mother–child relationship is crucial for a more constructive interrogation of this phenomenon, since most social, intellectual, and personal contexts remain hostile to and intolerant of ambivalence. Considering the conscious strategies used by mothers raising children born of war rape to manage their ambivalence in the context of a healthy mother–child relationship brings to the foreground, and from a more obviously sympathetic perspective, the need to consider maternal subjective experience as separate from the experience of pregnancy and motherhood, and as an important and constitutive force in mother love. Finally, I extend current feminist analyses that defend maternal ambivalence by arguing that acknowledging and accepting maternal ambivalence by the mother herself can enrich the mothering experience by allowing her to mother from a position of greater agency and authenticity, without suppressing potentially vital aspects of her subjective experience. I specifically contend that acknowledging and assimilating healthy ambivalence into maternal practice helps develop empowered forms of mothering.

Motherhood and Ambivalence in Western Contexts

The concept of ambivalence was developed in psychoanalysis to describe the “quite contradictory impulses and emotions” that coexist in our feelings toward the same person (Reference ParkerParker 1995, 6). Ambivalence exists on a spectrum, and the extent to which it is manageable depends on a series of complex personal and social factors. Rather than being a static state, maternal ambivalence is best understood as a “dynamic experience of conflict with the fluctuations felt by a mother at different times in a child's development, and varying between different children” (6). However, ambivalence is not only an aspect of individual experience; it is borne out of and situated within the broader social, cultural, and political contexts in which mothers live. The sociocultural conditions of mothering, the image of the “good mother” that women internalize, and the conflicting cultural expectations about what it means to be a mother are among the important causes of ambivalence. Maternal ambivalence can thus best be understood as constituted by both psychological and social factors, emerging from contradictions at the subjective level, but also contradictions at the level of male‐dominated social structures that are oppressive to women.

Rich is the first second‐wave feminist to have acknowledged that motherhood is a complex site of women's oppression as well as a potential locus for women's creativity and joy. The awareness that the cultural role of mother and maternal expectations as defined within patriarchy are profoundly implicated in women's oppression has prompted radical feminists not only to see motherhood as incompatible with feminism, but to call for a collective “exit” from mothering. Jeffner Allen, for example, rejects motherhood and advocates a philosophy of “evacuation” from it on the basis that it is dangerous to women because it “continues the structures within which females must be women and mothers,” whose “body is used as a resource to reproduce men and the world of men” (Reference Allen and TreblicotAllen 1984, 314). Ti‐Grace Atkinson sees romantic love and by extension motherhood as psychological pivots in the persecution of women, and key functions in how women have come to internalize patriarchal coercion (Reference Atkinson and Ostrov WeisserAtkinson 2001, 140). Although extreme in their complete rejection of the mother function within patriarchy, some of the terms of radical feminist analyses in fact resonate with the circumstances of wartime rape and enforced impregnation faced by Bosnian survivors. The rape of the Bosnian Muslim women by Serb soldiers in particular, and the patriarchal injunction to bear children who were assumed by the perpetrators to be future Serbs who would later destroy their Bosnian mothers, is an extreme example of what Allen calls motherhood that is “men's appropriation of women's bodies as a resource to reproduce patriarchy” (Reference Allen and TreblicotAllen 1984, 317). In this case, the reproduction of patriarchy refers to the specifically Serbian male appropriation of the Bosnian female body and its issue as representative of a deeply patriarchal and ultra‐nationalist Serb worldview. The Bosnian survivors’ children can thus be seen to have come to the world literally as well as symbolically from a male‐defined, male‐dominated social and physical intercourse. Yet despite this undeniably oppressive truth, a small number of survivors chose to continue to mother their children, demonstrating that motherhood is not naturally, necessarily, and inevitably oppressive. In less extreme terms, however, it is clear that a number of other contradictions at the social and cultural level, as well as lingering traditional expectations mothers face, contribute to experiences of maternal ambivalence.

Traditional Western discourses regarding motherhood and mother love can be traced from at least as far back as eighteenth‐century Romanticism in Europe and the nineteenth‐century ideals of True Womanhood. William Wordsworth was among the first English writers to record and idealize the profound influence of early experience in relation to motherhood, paving the way for the emergence and then ossification of the image of the ever‐present, self‐sacrificial, and all‐providing mother who is singly responsible for the well‐being of her children (Reference DallyDally 1982, 73–74). The four qualities of True Womanhood as they were articulated during the nineteenth century—piety, purity, domesticity, and submissiveness—had the effect of solidifying not only the patriarchal notion that motherhood constitutes the true purpose and pinnacle of womanhood, but also the inequality and power imbalances inherent in the notion of separate spheres (Reference DavisDavis 1976, 49).

In the twentieth century, a 1951 British report commissioned by the World Health Organization to assess the needs of homeless children, and written by a doctor and a member of the aristocracy with a special interest in mother–child relationships, John Bowlby, made many of these inherited ideals official. Bowlby's dictum, that “the infant and young child should experience a warm, intimate and continuous relationship with the mother (or mother substitute), in which both find satisfaction and enjoyment” (Reference DallyDally 1982, 97–99), becomes the mantra of traditional mothering. Bowlby defines the nature of mother love in overt prescriptive and gendered terms: “the child needs to feel he is an object of pleasure and pride to his mother; the mother needs to feel an expansion of her own personality in the personality of her child” (quoted in Reference DallyDally 1982, 99). The two major twentieth‐century middle‐class ideologies of motherhood prevalent in Anglo‐American contexts, Intensive Mothering and New Momism, continue to reflect and embody the implications of this sentiment. New Momism insists that “no woman is truly complete or fulfilled unless she has kids, that women remain the best primary caretakers of children, and that to be a remotely decent mother, a woman has to devote her entire physical, psychological, emotional, and intellectual being 24/7, to her children” (Reference Douglas, Michaels and O'ReillyDouglas and Michaels 2007, 619). The New Momism is in fact founded upon and related to another late twentieth‐century middle‐class ideology, which sociologist Sharon Hays labeled Intensive Mothering. She defined Intensive Mothering as a still dominant “gendered model that advises mothers to expend a tremendous amount of time, energy and money in raising their children” and requiring that mothers hold their children in their minds at all times (Reference HaysHays 1996, 22). Underscoring the mother's constant cognitive, emotional, and physical preoccupation with her children as the basis of mother love, and the consequent denial of any of the mother's own immediate and long‐term needs, interests, and desires, these ideologies are intolerant of and even hostile toward signs of ambivalence in mother–child relationships. According to traditional maternal discourse, the best mothers always smilingly put their children's needs ahead of their own, do not mind suppressing their own needs and desires, are never tired and never lose their patience, and their children are the center of their universe; the best mothers experience untroubled love toward their children in every second of every day. Those mothers who fail to deliver on these expectations are “bad” mothers either in their own eyes or the eyes of society, and often both. In its mythic dimensions, mother love is constructed as a perfect blend of continuous self‐sacrifice and the experience of unadulterated joy in always fulfilling the needs of one's children. The dominant discourse, as Erika Horwitz explains, “promotes an ideal that is impossible to achieve and often leaves mothers feeling inadequate, deficient, guilty” (Reference Horwitz and O'ReillyHorwitz 2004, 45). Living under the specter of this myth, and frequently nurturing it themselves out of a desire to experience the untroubled harmony the myth promises, many mothers experience feelings of guilt and personal failure if they appear in their own eyes to be falling short of the ideal.

In terms of their relationship to feminist thought, Intensive Mothering and New Momism emerge as a backlash against second‐wave feminist gains (Reference HaysHays 1996; Reference O'Reilly and O'ReillyO'Reilly 2004; Reference Douglas, Michaels and O'ReillyDouglas and Michaels 2007; Reference O'ReillyO'Reilly 2008). As sets of ideals, norms, and practices, they seem on the surface to celebrate motherhood, and appear to be based on the feminist insistence that women have choices, “that they are active agents of their own destinies, that they have autonomy” (Reference Douglas, Michaels and O'ReillyDouglas and Michaels 2007, 620). However, in reality they propagate standards of maternal perfection that are impossible to achieve, and they suggest that the only truly enlightened choice to make as a “real,” “decent” woman is to realize one's personal potential through the role of mother, while bringing to it an impossible combination of selflessness and professionalism. They are also based on still prevalent patriarchal ideas about the primacy of the nuclear family and continued inequities in household and childcare labor, divided along traditional, gendered lines. These ideologies thus assign mothers what Rich calls a “powerless responsibility” in which mothers carry all the responsibility for mothering, but are denied the power to define and determine their own experiences of mothering. In the case of most traditional religious and political ideals, the distance between the ideal and the reality is not perceived as particularly troubling, but what is perceived as failure to adhere to the tenets of mother love are often experienced as personal failures on the part of the mother, rather than realities borne out of interlinking systems of oppression facing women in a male‐dominated society.

Rich's sustained reflection on motherhood in Of Woman Born is the first extensive account in recent women's history that deconstructs some cherished cultural mythologies concerning actual maternal experience and mother love, laying the foundations for the development of motherhood studies and a more systematic understanding of the relationship between motherhood and feminism. In describing her reasons for writing the book, Rich articulates the ambivalence that informed her experience of motherhood:

Here she articulates the discrepancy between the patriarchal ideal and the lived reality of mother love: her awareness of how she should be feeling, and a sense of failure, “division,” and “self‐blame” for failing to feel that way all the time. She notes, “my children cause me the most exquisite suffering of which I have any experience. It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw‐edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness” (1). The sense of ambivalence Rich articulates arises from the conflict she experiences between her own needs, interests, and desires (as a person, an intellectual, a poet), and the unceasing demands of her young children for attentiveness, simplicity, and patience. Written during the second feminist wave, Rich's narrative defines the plight of many of her peers (white, educated, middle‐class women), and participates in the efforts for women's liberation to achieve essential rights of freedom and equality with men, while finding ways of reconciling them with motherhood.

Four decades later, the fight for full equality continues, but women appear to have a number of choices their mothers may not have had, among which is the option to fully participate in the workforce, and to give priority to personal ambitions. At the same time, however, women still take on three quarters of the domestic work, which includes child‐rearing. The ambivalence modern mothers feel thus also arises out of a particular historical and class context. Now, more so than before, that conflict arises between a male‐dominated capitalist system that on the one hand advocates individualism, freedom, and the pursuit of personal gain and fulfilment for men and women, while on the other hand expects a good mother to show complete selflessness and unconditional, round‐the‐clock devotion to her child. Coupled with the relatively low status our society accords the work involved in mothering, and the devaluing of feminized domestic care in general, this context is particularly relevant to the maternal ambivalence felt by white, educated, middle‐class women with careers or commitment to work outside the home, whose sense of self prior to having children has been defined in relation to a more public and professional identity.

From an intersectional perspective, we may thus have enough reasons to assume that maternal ambivalence may be either less prevalent or exhibited in different ways in different economic, cultural, racial, and class contexts. The background against which African American mothering can be examined, for example, contrasts with motherhood as it is practiced by the dominant culture. Writing as a second‐wave feminist in 1990, bell hooks notes, “[h]ad Black women voiced their views on motherhood, it would not have been named a serious obstacle to our freedom as women. Racism, availability of jobs, lack of skills or education … would have been at the top of the list—but not motherhood” (Reference hookshooks 1990, 133). Like Patricia Hill Collins, hooks points out that “early feminist attacks on motherhood alienated masses of women from the movement, especially poor and/or non‐white women, who find parenting one of the few interpersonal relationships where they are affirmed and appreciated” (134–35). Within Black families, mothering does not occur “in the confines of a private, nuclear family household where the mother has almost total responsibility for child rearing”; as well, strict sex‐role segregation is less common (Reference Collins, Bell‐Scott, Guy‐Sheftall, Jones Royster, Sims‐Wood, DeCosta‐Willis and FultzCollins 1993, 43). Furthermore, motherhood in the African American context is not linked to economic dependency on men, as Black women are structurally central to their families in terms of economic support; mothers and motherhood are accorded a culturally high status, and childcare is seen as a collective rather than individual responsibility (compare Reference Collins, Bell‐Scott, Guy‐Sheftall, Jones Royster, Sims‐Wood, DeCosta‐Willis and FultzCollins 1993, 45). Thus, many of the conditions that make motherhood an oppressive patriarchal structure in the dominant culture are not constitutive of the African American conception of mothering.

Similarly, recent work on traditional Aboriginal mothering reveals its differences from white, middle‐class ideals of the good mother, not least in that, as with African American mothering, motherwork is culturally highly valued, understood as a collective responsibility, and seen as equivalent to any other work, structurally important to the community. Kim Anderson points out that “Indigenous ideologies of motherhood are distinct from patriarchal western models of motherhood, and this means that strategies for empowered mothering are also distinct” (Reference Anderson and O'ReillyAnderson 2007, 775). Indigenous ideologies of motherhood involve understanding the reciprocal relationship that exists between mothers and children. According to this view, “[c]hildren are not viewed as helpless babies who need to be controlled”; they are viewed as “independent spiritual beings, who have many things to teach their parents” (Reference Simpson, Memee Lavell‐Harvard and Corbiere LavellSimpson 2006, 26). Conceiving of the mother–child relationship in reciprocal terms contrasts with patriarchal ideologies of mothering that are oppressive to both mothers and children as it leaves enough psychic space for both mother and child to find their own unique place in the relationship, thus rendering less likely the conditions under which maternal and child interests may be seen as existing in conflict.

As an emotional experience, ambivalence arises in any situation when the interests of the mother and the child are at odds with each other, from very simple to very complex ways (see Reference ParkerParker 1995, especially 83–99). Sarah LaChance Adams points out that “mothers often feel as though their own desires are directed against themselves when those desires are in opposition to their children's needs and wishes” (Reference LaChance AdamsLaChance Adams 2014, 36). Although psychoanalytic studies demonstrate that mothers who accept ambivalence as a creative rather than a threatening force in their love toward their children are happier mothers, the reality is that many mothers deny its presence because the recognition can become overwhelming and produce almost unmanageable anxiety and guilt as it clashes with dominant maternal ideals. Mothers will vary in the “extent to which they can tolerate and manage the conflict provoked by loving and hating the same child” (Reference ParkerParker 1995, 4). The more unquestioningly a mother identifies with the prevalent ideal of mother love, the more likely she is to deny the presence of ambivalence in her love for her child (compare Reference ParkerParker 1995, 18–25; Reference LaChance AdamsLaChance Adams 2014, 27–38).

In the context of predominantly Western, white, and middle‐class mothering, the importance of Rich's narrative is that it dared to challenge widely held patriarchal assumptions about motherhood and mother love. These assumptions include the premise that a “natural mother is a person without a further identity—one who can find her chief gratification in being all day with small children—as well as belief that maternal love is or should be ‘quite literally selfless’” (Reference RichRich 1976, 3), that is, that it “naturally” and automatically empties the mother of any other self she has previously identified with, or that it completely negates its validity and existence. Rich cites the common‐sense remarks of her then twenty‐one‐year‐old son upon reading the above passages in her book: “You seemed to feel you ought to love us all the time. But there is no human relationship where you love the other person at every moment” (3). Yet that is precisely how dominant patriarchal ideologies of motherhood have defined mother love: a good mother always and in every second of her existence feels nothing but pure love and unadulterated joy for her children. This means that these ideologies insist on treating the mother–child bond as being outside of all other human bonds, according it a mythical, otherworldly uniqueness. The effect of this mythologizing and its widespread acceptance by society as well as mothers themselves results in an aspect of surveillance of how mothers feel and should feel about their children and the task of mothering, virtually prohibiting a full discussion of maternal feeling. The discrepancy between the myth of mother love and its more complex realities leads Rich to distinguish between two meanings of motherhood: the “potential relationship of any woman to her powers of reproduction and to children,” and actual, individual experiences of mothering, on the one hand, and the patriarchal institution of motherhood whose tenets and demands work to oppress mothers as well as make suspect those women who are not mothers, on the other (Reference RichRich 1976, xv). This perspective allows us to distinguish between hegemonic, patriarchal discourses of motherhood and the possibility of empowered mothering (Reference O'Reillycompare O'Reilly 2008). I follow Andrea O'Reilly's definition of empowered mothering as an oppositional discourse constructed consciously or not in negation of patriarchal mothering: one that in theory and practice may be shaped by explicitly feminist philosophy and politics, but also by other, diverse forms of mothering that take place from a position of agency, autonomy, authority, and authenticity (Reference O'Reilly and O'ReillyO'Reilly 2004; Reference O'Reilly2008).

Bosnian Rape Survivors: The Heart of Maternal Ambivalence and Empowerment

Discussing maternal ambivalence based on recorded narratives of women survivors who are raising children born of rape renders that ambivalence somewhat less culturally reprehensible and allows us to let our defenses down a bit further, as it were, in order to examine the potentially creative and positive nature of the often contradictory feelings that comprise mother love not just in this more difficult context, but in any context. Their narratives provide us with powerful, and in fact, unique examples of mothers who are not only tolerating it, but have embraced ambivalence as an inevitable part of their love for their children. Their personal experiences of rape and enforced impregnation provides them with a clear reason for understanding the sources of their ambivalence—something that is not always so readily available to most mothers whose ambivalence appears to come from “nowhere.” What is instructive about the case of Bosnian mothers raising children born of rape are the positive and empowering uses to which they put their feelings of hostility and aggression in the context of their desired relationships with their children.

For mothers raising children born of wartime rape, due to the physical and emotional trauma of unwanted pregnancy and birth, untroubled love and the fantasy of oneness promoted by culturally dominant ideologies of motherhood is not a “default” psychic option. They begin their relationship with their children very aware of the conflict between the interrelated but separable interests of self and other, and thus have to embrace ambivalence as an emotional principle that allows them to more fully realize their maternal responsibility and the conflicting feelings their children evoke in them. Rather than starting from the culturally embedded expectation that the mother–child relationship will achieve and satisfy their deep desire for union and oneness in a form of “primary love,” and what is known as “maternal narcissism,” these mothers have to accept from the very beginning that “hatred, resentment and hostility are unavoidable components of the full range of feelings for a child” (Reference ParkerParker 1995, 30–38) and that these emotions can exist in a creative and enabling tension with love, tenderness, and intensity of devotion to that child.

Several recorded narratives from Bosnian wartime rape survivors can illustrate this issue within a context where the ontological validity and emotional inevitability of negotiating interrelated yet separable interests of self and other set up an enabling and creative tension that allows the mother to more fully and consciously embrace her maternal responsibility.

Jasmina, a rape survivor raising a daughter born of wartime rape committed by a Croat, had a very difficult pregnancy because “like other girls and women in her situation, she did not accept that she was pregnant … she somehow disassociated herself mentally from the child she was carrying and even when the baby was born, wanted to do little with her” (quoted in Reference ToomeyToomey 2003). Seven days after her daughter's birth, the staff of Medica Zenica, the center for providing medical and psychological help for traumatized and raped women, arranged for a traditional Muslim naming ceremony to be held for the child. Very slowly, Jasmina came to accept her daughter, Elma, despite the fact that her own mother strongly advised her to abandon the baby after birth. Jasmina articulates how her mother came to accept her decision and the reasons she decided to keep the child: “It was only after she saw how determined I was to keep the child that she began to change her mind. Now I realize it was my daughter who helped me back to some sort of normality. Perhaps that is why I love her so much” (quoted in Reference ToomeyToomey 2003). At the same time, Jasmina's reality shows that in her case, protective love and answering the demand for preservation required a great deal of conscious effort and perseverance (see, for example, Reference Takševa, Takševa and SgoutasTakševa 2015).

In describing the interaction between herself and her infant daughter in the early days, Jasmina articulates strong feelings of ambivalence: “I used to block out the sound [of her daughter's crying] and just leave her, walk away … . I had to work very hard to love my child” (quoted in Reference ToomeyToomey 2003). Jasmina's words point toward the effort required to accept her child and to negotiate her own feelings of resentment toward a demanding, crying infant whose existence she did not hope for, and her awareness of the infant's needy vulnerability for which she feels responsible. Her narrative also shows her fundamental attitude toward the vulnerable, a “protectiveness” that Sara Ruddick calls “holding … a way of seeing with an eye toward maintaining the minimal harmony, material resources, and skills necessary for sustaining a child in safety” (Reference RuddickRuddick 1989, 78–79). Here, too, it becomes evident that maternal love is not something that “naturally” springs into being with the act of giving birth, but that it, too, like love in any other close relationship, requires conscious and ongoing renewal of commitment. In this case, walking away from the crying baby can be seen as an act of preservative care and maternal love. Rather than starting from an idealized premise according to which she should be loving her daughter unconditionally and in every single instance with the same level of selflessness, learning how to see her daughter, Elma, as a “separate individual endowed with personal characteristics and changing mental states” resulted in an interactive awareness on Jasmina's part, greater self‐understanding (Reference Raphael‐Leff, Tyano, Kereen, Herman and CoxRaphael-Leff 2010, 20), and thus a more empowered mothering practice.

Jasmina admits that the child's gender contributed to her decision to keep her. She feels that the possible physical resemblance and gender identification between the child and the rapist/biological father would have been too much to bear. Of her daughter, Jasmina says: “even now, when my daughter gets angry, there is something in the expression of her face that reminds me of the one who did this to me. I feel like hitting her in those moments. I have to walk away to calm myself. Imagine what that would be like if I had a boy” (quoted in Reference ToomeyToomey 2003). Jasmina articulates the presence of “intense, ambivalent, thought‐provoking feelings” (Reference RuddickRuddick 1989, 70). In her situation, these feelings are amplified exponentially due to the traumatic nature of her daughter's conception, and her own coming to terms with an unwanted pregnancy. At the same time, her actions—walking away when her daughter's behavior and appearance trigger traumatic memories—demonstrate a form of thoughtful mothering governed by “a commitment that perseveres through feeling and structures the activity” of mothering (70). Nadia's story demonstrates a similar perspective. One of the few women who has been raising a child born of war, she notes: “I love my son. Sometimes I look at him and feel very angry though—I see him as a focus for what has gone wrong with my family and our lives” (quoted in Reference Holt and HughesHolt and Hughes 2005). Nadia's words show in ethical terms that mother love can assimilate ambivalence as it is contingent on the active and ongoing negotiation of interrelated yet separable interests of self and other.

Safeta's experience of mothering a child born of rape by a group of Serb volunteer soldiers shows both similarities and differences. Like Jasmina, Safeta was unable to prevent the birth; after the birth she refused to look at the baby, claiming she would strangle him. For Safeta the child's gender was also an important factor in her decision to keep him, but for different reasons. In her view, she was glad that her child was a boy. To an interviewer she said: “I was afraid that it would be a girl, and that what happened to me will happen to her” (quoted in Reference TremontiTremonti 2012). Her infant son was deposited in an orphanage in Tuzla (Reference BećirbašićBećirbašić 2006). However, six months after giving birth, haunted by thoughts of the baby, Safeta set out to find her son: “I couldn't sleep for four months. After six months it became unbearable. If I hadn't found him when I did, I probably wouldn't be alive now” (quoted in Reference BećirbašićBećirbašić 2006). The intensity of her feelings toward her child, and the connection she makes between her own life and well‐being and his, echo Jasmina's experience, but at the same time they coexist in a complex manner with Safeta's initial rejection of the baby and the desire to harm him. It took seven years for Safeta to summon the courage as well as the financial means to take her son, Edin, out of the orphanage. Until she was able to secure work and a place to live, Safeta visited Edin regularly and was driven by a vision of the two of them living together under the same roof. She describes this vision as being the sole purpose of her living: “That was what I lived for, the moment when darkness would turn into light. And if people disapproved, I couldn't care less” (quoted in Reference BećirbašićBećirbašić 2006). Safeta's ordeal demonstrates not only the conjunction of “passionate thought and protective acts,” but also that her understanding and experience of mothering was governed by a “commitment that perseveres through feeling and structures the activity” (Reference RuddickRuddick 1989, 70) despite complex, contradictory feelings that define her maternal love. Medical research shows that “antenatal emotional experience primes postnatal interactions,” and that “pregnancy is a blending of three intertwined systems: biological, psychological and social” (Reference Raphael‐Leff, Tyano, Kereen, Herman and CoxRaphael-Leff 2010, 11). For the rape survivors this reality is even further complicated due to the fact that their antenatal experience includes severe physical and emotional trauma combined with the acute cultural awareness that any children born of such circumstances are likely to be shunned and ostracized along with the mother herself.

One of the aspects of protective love defined by Ruddick as constitutive of answering the demand for preservation is what she terms mothers’ “cheerfulness.” Cheerfulness is “a matter of fact willingness to accept having given birth, to start and start over again, to welcome a future despite conditions of one's self, one's children, one's society, and nature that may be reasons for despair” (Reference RuddickRuddick 1989, 74). Neither Jasmina's nor Safeta's experience can be understood as “a matter of fact willingness to accept having given birth.” However, their daily, years‐long fight for their children's survival amid bigotry, rejection, poverty, and ongoing struggle with their own precarious mental health and the consequences of personal trauma can be termed cheerfulness in a philosophical sense, as through their mothering practice they do show a willingness to start and start over again, and to welcome an uncertain future in psychologically and socially adverse conditions, including remaining open to their ambivalent feelings.

Rather than discussing mothering as a natural activity defined by biological imperatives, Ruddick argues that maternal practice is a conscious and thoughtful endeavor focused on meeting the demands of children in three main areas: preservation, nurturance, and training in social acceptability, often informed by conflict that arises between them. Ruddick's views enabled the emergence of a perspective according to which the status of mother is not necessarily or solely determined through conception, gestation, and giving birth, but through the mothers’ thoughts, intentions, and actions. Mothers are mothers “just because and to the degree that they are committed to meeting the demands that define maternal work” (Reference RuddickRuddick 1989, 17), and the survivor narratives illustrate this. Rather than theorizing the mother as an “object” of the baby's desires, or “depicted through the containing or transformative function she performs,” the mother as a person, her psycho‐social history, the specific circumstances of this particular conception, as well as the subjective meaning a woman assigns to the experience of mothering, must not be neglected in any consideration of motherhood (Reference Raphael‐Leff, Tyano, Kereen, Herman and CoxRaphael-Leff 2010, 1–3). This philosophical and ethical framework allows us to reposition maternal love as not only a pure feeling divorced from daily, living reality and the mother's own subjectivity, but as a form of ethical commitment to meeting the demands of children in ways that are always contingent upon the mother's personal, emotional, social, and material circumstances. This ethical repositioning of the idea of mother love works to move the discussion away from abstract notions of the maternal to the lived reality of mothers. It also allows us to situate mother love within the ethics of all close human relationships, and thus within the realm of ethical and moral complexity.

The intensity and prevalence of maternal ambivalence is especially emphasized for mothers engaged in raising children born of rape, but there is much to be learned from their situation and the way in which they approach the task of mothering and understand mother love. Other examples reveal that “in the very anguish of maternal ambivalence itself a fruitfulness for mothers and children resides” (Reference ParkerParker 1995, 6). Two therapists who led a group of mothers in Australia recorded that every time the mothers came into contact “with guilt over deeply ambivalent feelings” they begin to demonstrate new initiatives and resourcefulness, and an increased capacity to think and act (Reference Christie and CorreiaChristie and Correia 1987). Just as in the case of the Bosnian rape survivors, these studies show that where motherhood is concerned, “the conflict between love and hate actually spurs mothers on to struggle to understand their baby,” revealing that ambivalence “can promote thought” and leading researchers to conclude that “the capacity to think about the baby and child is arguably the single most important aspect of mothering” (Reference ParkerParker 1995, 7). The development of feelings of responsibility and concern for the other is “intricately linked and even stimulated by hatred and harming impulses,” so that “more than any other group, it is mothers who need to ‘achieve’ ambivalence in relation to their children” if they are to move beyond “primary maternal persecution” (19). Once mothers allow themselves the cognitive and emotional space to acknowledge the “full weight” their children carry (whatever that weight means in each individual, economic, cultural, and social context), they no longer have to find subconscious ways to save themselves from these unmanageable feelings and distress, and can actually think about them more constructively and creatively (compare Reference ParkerParker 1995, 20).

Normalizing Maternal Ambivalence: Theoretical and Practical Benefits

Restructuring dominant discourses on maternal ambivalence can have wide‐reaching benefits related to psychology and psychiatry as well as social work. In his study of internal conflicts and aggression mothers experience both in themselves and in their relationships with their children, Leon Hoffman calls for eliminating the concept of “normality” when considering the activities of women as mothers, and suggests instead normalizing the “omnipresence of ambivalence” not only in the psychology of mothers, but in that of women more generally (Reference HoffmanHoffman 2003). Extending the significance of these findings and applying them to the context of social services and child‐protection agencies in North America, Linda Davies argues that acknowledging and tolerating maternal ambivalence in child‐protection services, while difficult, can help to alleviate unmanageable anxiety for both mothers and social workers (Reference DaviesDavies 2008). As in the cases of the Bosnian rape survivors, ambivalence can motivate mothers to integrate contradictory emotional responses to their children into an “enriched, more open mental structure.” As such, ambivalence is a powerful force propelling mothers into a “distinctly maternal subject‐position” (Reference StoneStone 2011, 8) from within which they actively make meaning of their own past, their own identity demands as well as the subject‐positions of their children.

I contend that Bosnian survivor narratives and other studies showing the benefit of accepting maternal ambivalence by mothers have significant implications for feminist theories of maternal and mother love. The most significant implication is that when harnessed and consciously acknowledged by mothers themselves, maternal ambivalence can act as a tool of maternal empowerment, providing for mothers a counter‐narrative to dominant patriarchal discourses of ideal motherhood. Starting on the path of mothering with the understanding that ambivalent feelings are likely to arise at different times and in varying intensity would better prepare mothers for the realities of mothering, and in fact allow them to more fully experience the truly unmitigated moments of joy and bliss that children bring. Understanding and accepting ambivalence can propel mothers toward a distinctly maternal subject‐position by enabling them to practice mothering from a place of greater authority, agency, authenticity, and autonomy, and by encouraging them to cultivate a beneficial interpersonal reciprocity in their relationships with their children. Repositioning and redefining the myths of mother love in this way honors the mother's subjectivity by acknowledging the intertwined but separate interests of herself and her child, and provides her with the cognitive tools for negotiating more successfully between the two. Redefining the bond between mother and child in these terms means that in their mothering practice, mothers would not only live through their subjective experience of mothering, but they would also be able to more fully author the meaning of that experience and deepen their understanding of intersubjective ambiguity that is central to all relationships, including that with their children. This conscious and creative harnessing of maternal ambivalence would also empower mothers as it would propel them to exercise some autonomy in authoring their own maternal experience. Being able to see, understand, and accept oneself without idealization and/or denigration is crucial to achieving emotional and ethical maturity, and mothering from that subject‐position is inherently advantageous to both mother and child because “only an empowered mother can empower children” (Reference O'Reilly and O'ReillyO'Reilly 2004, 12–13). For most mothers this means negotiating daily the tension between social expectations related to being a mother, and their own personal experiences of mothering. Moving beyond feelings of guilt and inadequacy, however, mothers can identify and create new, more constructive behavioral frameworks of mutuality and reciprocity in their care for their children.

The love that governs the mother/parent–child relationship has been taken by some feminists as a prototype for the best kind of love, sustained over time and based not only on declarations, but also on committed and active work (Reference GilliganGilligan 1982; Reference NoddingsNoddings 1984; Reference RuddickRuddick 1989; Reference TrontoTronto 1993; Reference Bryson, Jónasdóttir and FergusonBryson 2013; Reference Lowe, Jónasdóttir and FergusonLowe 2013; Reference OverallOverall 2013). Recent feminist studies on love urge a more serious and sustained study of love, recognizing its importance as a significant creative, social, and biomaterial power capable of changing and shaping social and political forces, and a key element in ethics and epistemology (Reference Ferguson, Jónasdóttir, Jónasdóttir and FergusonFerguson and Jónasdóttir 2013, 2). Repositioning maternal ambivalence as an enabling and creative factor constitutive of mother love, and advocating for normalizing maternal ambivalence in individual, social, and political contexts opens up several important possibilities with significant feminist implications. First, it redefines mother love in terms that are empowering to mothers themselves and their children. Second, it makes clear that different contexts for mothering—including adoptive mothering, lone mothering, lesbian and gay mothering, and feminist fathering—create different contexts for ambivalence. Normalizing maternal ambivalence helps lay the groundwork for new relationships between children and other involved caregivers, and can be empowering for them as well. Third, it frees motherhood from patriarchal maternal discourses that are detrimental to women, and claims the place of the maternal within new developments in feminist love studies.