Not All Mothers Rise to the Role

Motherhood is more than a biological imperative. The fact that you carried an embryo to term does not make you a mother any more than it makes you an obstetrician. Strictly speaking, it makes you nothing more than a viable genetic host. Motherhood is something else altogether; a relationship earned by years of sacrifice, dedication and care, not awarded by an accident of birth.

So on this Mother’s Day, we should be doing more than mouthing laudatory platitudes. We should be asking every assumptive mother to ask herself one honest question: Am I doing or have I done my job?

I say this partly because one of the most infamous mothers in recent memory, murderess Sante Kimes, is in the news again. Kimes and her son, Kenneth Kimes, were convicted of swindling and murdering an elderly New York City woman and now are accused of killing a Granada Hills businessman. But Kimes other son, Kent Walker, has just published a memoir, “Son of a Grifter,” about his life of crime and abuse with his mother and half-brother.

Now a vacuum cleaner salesman living with his wife and children, Walker managed to escape his charismatic mother’s corrupting clutches as well as the life sentence she and Kenneth are serving in New York prisons. Meanwhile, Walker is on a book tour, shocking everyone who thought motherhood was sacred. He says he’s lucky to have survived and did so only because he managed to befriend a few “normal” adults and because he is an unusually strong person. His brother, he says, never had a chance.

I say this also because a conversation I had recently with two fifth-grade public schoolteachers who work in one of Manhattan’s most blighted schools reinforced my belief that maternal irresponsibility is at the heart of a great many problems in the inner city. Problems that government largess cannot solve because it cannot reach into the private lives and decision-making processes of ignorant, unprepared or uncaring women and girls. Fathers are guilty here too, but they have long been rightly pilloried for desertion and neglect. Mothers often get a free pass as the innocent dupes left holding the bag. This is a myth.

One of the teachers with whom I spoke related a conversation she’d had with two 12-year-old girls in her class, both of whom said they had already had consensual sexual intercourse. When asked if they had used a condom or any other form of birth control, they answered with a puzzled “no.” The concept of prophylaxis was clearly foreign to them--as was, subsequent questioning revealed, the concept of pregnancy being a likely result of unprotected sex.

Yet the phenomenon of young motherhood was not, by any means, unknown to these girls. They were, in fact, surrounded by it. Their own mothers had given birth while still in their early teens. Countless friends and acquaintances were doing the same. The degree to which these girls had come to expect teenage motherhood became obvious when one of them said derisively of her older sister: “She’s already 20 and she doesn’t even have a baby yet.”

Here you have the classic vicious cycle. Girls getting pregnant way too young because their own teenage mothers didn’t learn from their mistakes or bother to convey the facts of life to the children they were woefully ill-equipped to raise. Thus, the legacies of ignorance, unplanned pregnancy, poverty and abuse go on apace, robbing generations of children of any opportunity to better themselves.

They go to school unable to learn because their ruinous home lives have left them with severe behavioral problems. Their teachers can’t reach them. As one of these teachers told me, she spends all of her time disciplining and virtually none of it teaching. She’s a surrogate parent, forced to lecture her students not on history or standard written English but on the perils of condomless sex, because nobody else cares enough to do it. When she calls mothers and tells them of her concerns, they say, “Why are you calling me?” and hang up.

Leaving aside demagogic rhetoric about family values and the dubious post-feminist dogma that all mothers are good, it’s time we spent Mother’s Day this Sunday reminding ourselves that simply having a child is no accomplishment and that raising one responsibly must be a mandate. Throwing public money at the problem won’t help.

Every mother in this country needs to take a long, critical look in the mirror.