San Francisco. -- Susan Smith is in jail for the alleged murder of her two children. Throughout the country, we American mothers feel ourselves in the defendant's block.
The Susan Smith story spooks us the way a Steven King novel does. Who else but Mr. King could have come up with a town named Union, South Carolina? Here in middle America, in the white American small town, was the astonishing story of evil. A mother had drowned her own offspring.
The national media quickly noticed that the Susan Smith story was not unique. Throughout the country in recent months there have been several instances of mothers murdering children. In the inner city, crack cocaine had done what centuries of slavery had not been able to do: broken the maternal link, leaving mothers who were willing to sell or abandon their babies, or even murder them.
But what about husbands and boyfriends? When a boyfriend murders a child, what preoccupies us is the story of the mother who covers up the boyfriend's crime.
On television Kathie Lee told Regis Philbin that she cried her eyes out when she heard about the two boys dead in the lake. All over America, on the radio call-in shows, women rushed to voice their grief. The oldest faith within us is faith in the maternal instinct. What never rang true for many Americans was Susan Smith's claim to having left the car at the kidnapper's demand. Why hadn't she thrown herself against the windshield? Why hadn't she wrapped herself onto the bumper as the car drove away?
In U.S. law, the classic example of "diminished capacity" -- when someone temporarily loses the capacity to tell right from wrong -- is the mother who runs over the fireman to save her child from a burning house. While it is impertinent to speculate about Susan Smith's sanity, her boyfriend's admission, made through his lawyer, that he didn't want a ready-made family was the most troubling part of the story for me. The boyfriend's statement raises this possibility: Children have become an inconvenience to women in their dealings with men, as well as in their public lives.
What we mothers give our kids diminishes us in the eyes of people around us. You hear it all the time -- the woman on the TV quiz show apologetically says she is "just a homemaker." In America, a homemaker is not much of a thing to be. (Remember Hillary Clinton's cruel caricature of the little woman who sits around "baking cookies?")
If we women have only recently started abandoning the sentimental trappings of motherhood, it is not because we didn't know the American scheme of things long ago. The whole point of America is individualism. The entire culture encourages anti-domesticity. Americans admire Annie Oakley, Katherine Hepburn, Gloria Steinem -- America admires women without children.
Recently, mothers in America have been attacked for being less than ideal mothers. There was the case of a divorced woman lawyer in Washington whose ex-husband had sued her for custody of their two children and won. What apparently swayed the judge was the description of mom, seated on the kitchen floor during a child's birthday party, barking orders to her office staff over a cellular phone.
On the day Susan Smith confessed her deed, the jury in the Paul Hill case (the minister who murdered an abortion doctor and his bodyguard in Pensacola, Florida) recommended that he die in the electric chair. Few in the media drew a connection between the two stories. But in Paul Hill's eyes, the mother who aborts a child to accommodate her lifestyle must be as guilty of infanticide as Susan Smith. It is easy to turn a deaf ear to Hill. But as a mother who has had an abortion, I take his point of view seriously. He implicates me in today's infanticide cases.
Yuppie mothers like me are otherwise rarely linked to infanticide. We have day care and Guatemalan nannies. We have ways of managing the inconveniences that children create. Clearly, there are pressures on many other women, less wealthy, to get rid of the kids. The pressure comes from boyfriends as much as from the anti-domestic bias of our culture. Clearly, too, America is not going to return to a romantic "Ozzie and Harriet" scenario. Even in small towns like Union, South Carolina, there were three cases of infanticide, including the Smith case, in the last month alone.
Nor can we expect to play "Supermom" all alone. Motherhood is cracking precisely because we mothers have tried to be the pivot on which family life in America balances.
The myth of motherhood is that mothers create families. The truth is that families create mothers. A good mother is created by a network of relatives -- grandmothers, uncles, godparents, neighbors. And, yes, husbands. The fact is, mom can't be a very good mom in a country that refuses to value mothering. In every Steven King novel, the protagonist rarely seeks out other people to help organize some common opposition to evil. A character, singly, tries to evade evil, until it passes on to some other town.
What spooks us about Steven King is the possibility that, unless we see the problems of life as shared problems, we may all end up alone -- guilty -- in towns with ironic names like Union.
Sandy Close is executive editor of Pacific News Service.