Customer Reviews

Maternal Desire: On Children, Love, and the Inner Life

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(1)
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This is the first book I have encountered that has intelligently given voice to the seemingly obvious yet currently obfuscated fact that many women desire to have children and to play a very active role in taking care of them rather than "outsourcing". While this was seen as the only route just a few generations ago, the choices available to my generation of now 30-somethings have actually made it a rather suspect choice among the upwardly mobile. Why would anyone stay at home with the kids given the choice not to?

de Marneffe turns this question on its head and begins from a place that acknowledges and respects maternal desire no matter what a woman's situation may be vis-?-vis working and mothering. She does not come up with any prescriptives that maternal desire means that all women should be doing one thing or the other. Instead, she simply gives voice to that desire in a way that I experienced to be extremely cathartic as a mother of two who has clocked two years as a working mother and one year at home with the kids.

This book creates the psychic space needed to consider the role we want to play as mothers while deftly avoiding getting caught in stale debates that either sentimentalize or devalue our choices. The way women think about and experience working and mothering has undergone a monumental shift from the now decades old idea that motherhood is a trap that women are pushed into. While this was once a revolutionary thought that played its role in helping to open up opportunities for women, it is overly ripe for refining. de Marneffe rightly puts her finger on the fact that our own desires, our own agency plays a driving role in our choice to mother and is therefore able to revisit old debates from a meaningful new perspective. This is not a "backlash" against feminism. It is more like the evolution of feminism.

This book is the "Feminine Mystique" for the current generation of young mothers. Buy it! Read it! Discuss it with your partners and your friends.

Wow. I cannot thank De Marneffe enough for writing this book. I just started it, and I already feel like it has changed my life because it offers such a simple but revolutionary new perspective on motherhood. It is incredibly validating to me -- as a woman, as a mother, and as a feminist. But it certainly isn't "old-school" feminism. I think it represents the direction that feminism will take in the 21st century.

Ever since I became a mother, I feel like I'm living in Babel - everyone's speaking a different language, and no one's speaking mine. This book is like a revelation, a lucid translation of all the surprising new feeelings that have surfaced in me since I had a child, but that I have been afraid or ashamed to admit to. The book represents the first discourse that I've found to look at motherhood neither as a foolish and short-sighted sell-out of a woman's individuality, nor as a perfectly selfless act of Christian martyrdom pursued solely for the sake of the children. What if motherhood , even full-time motherhood, is a self-actualizing spiritual journey and a valid form of self-expression that enhances the mother herself? I've never been able to figure out WHY I want to have children so much. De Marneffe's view of motherhood helps me understand and give a voice to my desire to mother.

If you're looking for a book that covers the economic realities of dealing with work/life balance issues, this is not the book for you. But I don't think it's reasonable to think that we can tackle that much larger social issue until we've developed this individual discourse about the true meaning and value of motherhood (and of parenthood).

My only criticism of the book is that I would rather see a book written about "parenting desire," not just maternal desire, because I don't think it's just women struggling with this issue. I hope that De Marneffe's next book does for fathers and paternal desire what this book does for mothers.

FINALLY- a book for someone who likes to be and wants to be a MOTHER! I found this book to be a refreshing change from the barrage of books available on how to be supermom, how to balance a career and a family and everything else, or how to not let your children get in the way of your life. This isn't a self-help book or a personal account, but more on the lines of a sociology book on the current aspects of motherhood. It addresses the modern-day feminist needs to "have it all". My favorite chapters were those dealing with women's desires to stay home with or be the primary figure in their children's lives, and how they have to contend with society telling them that they are unintelligent because they do not have careers or weak because they cannot or do not want to leave their children in daycare all day.

This book does NOT attack the non-traditional, modern-day mom. It DOES support the traditional family, letting women know there is nothing wrong with the desire to be a mom.

If you are hoping for an ideological tribute to the women who leave the workplace to look after their young children, you should look elsewhere.This is an extremely compelling and forcefully written exploration of the nature and vicissitudes of maternal love. The author marshals her understanding, both clinical and personal, of feminist pyschoanalytic theory to argue that maternal desire has unique characteristics and that these are at best sentimentalized and at worst villified in social and economic institutions. She asks us to take maternal desire seriously, not as a basis for any particular "choice" in regard to parenting, but as an individual and collective good. The author's experiential engagement with the issues she raises serves to illustrate the progress of her reasoning without setting itself up as an exemplar for all women. The framework she develops creates new possibilities for reasoned discussion of social/economic justice and equality in relation to women's identity formation, children's needs and the "un-gendering" of maternal desire.

A extraordinarily well-written and perceptive book. DeMarneffe combines her skills as a psychologist with her heartfelt understanding of motherhood. I took it with me to Mexico, assuming that I'd never touch it on vacation, and found the book so engaging that I read the entire book in four days.
Whether you're a parent at home, just contemplating motherhood, or deciding whether to return to work after your baby is born, this is an important book to have under your belt.

Daphne de Marneffe (a psychoanalyst and mother of three) noticed that she longed to spend time with her little children. It is this longing to be with and enjoy one's children, a desire that our culture often ignores or even labels as neurotic, that she explores in "Maternal Desire."

Throughout her exploration of maternal desire the author is refreshingly candid about other healthy desires a mother can have: desire for creativity, for acknowledgment of her work, for intellectual challenge, for engagement in the competitive arenas that exist outside the home. She recognizes that it is often not possible to satisfy all our desires at the same time. She also argues convincingly we have the best chance of living a rich and rewarding life when we are aware of our desires, especially the conflicting ones. For example, if one is aware of a desire to engage in competition one can avoid expressing it in "competitive parenting" and learn to find other outlets or even to set that desire aside for a time.

By exploring what mothers want from their lives, de Marneffe avoids completely the debate about whether it is best for a woman to focus on career or on family, since each woman must decide for herself what is most fulfilling at each stage of life. She gives examples of healthy & of toxic stay-at-home mothers, and healthy & toxic career-focused mothers.

The book opens with a definition and discussion of maternal desire, and goes on to examine the history of how feminists and psychoanalysts have dealt with this "problem." This is followed by a chapter reflecting on the pleasures of maternal desire and one on the ambivalence women can feel about relationships with their small children. A series of chapters then roughly follows the development and evolution of maternal desire from adolescence through midlife/menopause, with compassionate and insightful discussions of the related issues of fertility and of abortion. The book concludes with two chapters on the relationship of maternal desire to one's partner and to one's experience of time with children.

The essential nature of this book is that de Marneffe does not offer solutions or rules. She offers insight and empathy, encourages women to observe and honor our own desires for children as one of life's great gifts, and points out ways that ignoring or misunderstanding maternal desire leads to unhealthy parenting and partnering. A blessing of a book.

In Maternal Desire DeMarneffe does for mothering what Freud did for sexuality-acknowledges its power as a driver of human thought and action. A veritable tour de force of the feminist, psychological and cultural literature on mothering, Maternal Desire filters several centuries of thought on the subject through the concept of women's innate desire to raise, not simply bear, young. Although this premise seems surprisingly simple, DeMarneffe correctly points out that it has been almost an unmentionable in contemporary society. The book is also somewhat unique in that it doesn't argue for or against working mothers, but rather that we consider maternal desire in the work/life balance equation. I found this book extremely thoughtful and reading it an enriching experience.

This is not a book that tells you that you have made poor choices, or that you need to do exactly what the author says to ensure your kids will turn out ok. The object of this book is to encourage women to acknowledge their mothering instincts. Our society sends very mixed messages about the "value" of caregiving, and this book provides a framework for understanding how maternal desire can fit into a modern life. de Marneffe asks a different question than most books about mothering, childcare, and parenting in general. Under the auspices of searching for a way to integrate a desire to truly mother her children, she touches upon many of the very real moments most parents feel at some point. This book does not take the traditional working parents- versus - stay-home parents, but instead encourages women to listen to their feelings about mothering itself and make better choices about how they will raise their children. What makes this book different is the lack of condemnation of mothers who work outside the home.
Also, although this book is primarily about caring for children, it sends very positive messages and provides encouragement for those who have chosen to care for their elders full-time.

is just an EXCEPTIONAL book on womanhood and what it means to be (or not to be) a mother. candid. insightful. refreshing. explorative. well-written. it has everything. i feel that almost any woman would get something out of reading this special, wonderful book. a joy to read, really.

As a mother of ten grown children who often turn to me for child-rearing advice, I find myself more and more often referring them to deMarneffe's book. Her credentials (Ph.D. psychologist)and experience (mother of three)qualify her for her subject matter, but her insights and sensitivity are what make this book so wise--one of the wisest I've read on the subject. Her thesis--that many women desire not only to have children but also to care for them--brings a fresh perspective to the feminist viewpoint. By acknowledging the co-existence of female ambition and maternal desire, by presenting mothering as a complicated, vibrant, enriching endeavor, she gives hope to mothers-to-be, women currently balancing the act, and even those of us who've been there, done that, who now can nod our heads and say sincerely,'Yes, that's true.' DeMarneffe's book deserves wide attention.