Mom Genes: Inside the New Science of Our Ancient Maternal Instinct
Abigail Tucker
Gallery, pp.336, $28.00
This summer my husband ought to have been celebrating seven years of
above-average headship. As I glance over the gradebook it’s the middling scores
that pull at his excellence—there are very few failures. And yet, six years
ago, when the whole steering of the ship was still a new thing, my husband
failed me. “Maybe I should go to one of those parenting classes,” I said about
halfway through my first pregnancy. “You do not need to go to a stupid
parenting class. You are going to be a great mother. It will come naturally.”
I had never held a baby, never put on a diaper, never
strapped anyone into a car seat, never babysat anyone under the age of five. I
was an only child. I thought that normal babies slept through the night. I
didn’t know the different ways to soothe an infant. We were four states away
from any family. I was twenty-two. I had no friends who were moms. I read one
terrible book. (In case you are looking for anti-recommendations, this was The Baby Whisperer, which took for granted that you knew plenty of things already and gave
very bad and very English advice about the all-consuming importance of
schedules). Will and determination have carried me my whole life; they did not
help me put my angry, colicky newborn to bed. I could have avoided some anguish
if I had taken that stupid class.
Now four children in to this thing of ours I can
confidently say that the doing of it is a skill learned like any other. There
is no Good Mothering book downloaded into our brains during pregnancy. The
correct answer will not magically occur to us at two a.m. Yet there is
something that has changed about me. I don’t know if “natural” or “instinct”
are the right descriptive words here, but I will say that the love required, the
laying down of my life, the abdication of my desires—these have all come to me
without my looking for it. Thank God. Love is much harder to cultivate than a
knowledge of diapering and feeding.
Abigail Tucker has written a new book entitled Mom Genes: Inside
the New Science of Our Ancient Maternal Instinct. Previously she wrote a bestseller about house cats. “Mom science,” as
she calls it, has long been neglected by the scientific community, but it has
recently enjoyed a bit of a boom. Cynical me thinks it might have something to
do with new “mom drugs’’ aimed at postpartum depression. (The first-of-its-kind
F.D.A.-approved Zulresso is I.V.-dripped over sixty continuous hours and costs
thirty-four thousand dollars). In my rare romantic moments—my husband seems to
have more of them than I do—I hope it is happening because as we look closely
we are dazzled by the strangeness of the whole mom thing.
There are two definitions of “maternal instinct” in
Tucker’s book. The first, which applies to animals, is compulsory and easy to
identify: rats lick their babies, rabbits make comfy nests with their belly
fuzz, ewes memorize their lambs’ scents, the burying beetle shoves “the whole
wriggling baby into her own open jaws like a foot-long sandwich” to eat when there
isn’t enough rotting mouse carcass for everyone. Human moms have to learn
everything. “Even that definitive mammalian behavior, nursing, varies wildly
among our kind. . . . If it were so natural, so deeply ingrained and
instinctive, why would we need a four-hundred-page brick of a bestselling
manual on the ‘womanly art of breastfeeding’?” When Tucker talks about the
human maternal instinct, what she is referring to is not a change in action,
but in mind. “Infant-centric pleasure, heightened sensitivity to baby cues, and
bullheaded motivation make up the heart of a new mother’s instinctive
awakening.”
I don’t want to spend too much time wondering whether
what Tucker is describing about human moms actually qualifies as an instinct.
And I don’t want to waste your time with my own musings about whether human
beings have instincts at all. (I am no philosopher.) But it occurred to me,
almost immediately, that the scientific research devoted to animal moms and the
human-focused variety could not be less congruent. I know this is a popular
science book, but I need more of an explanation than “Across the whole
mammalian family, hamster moms and wallaby moms and human moms are all kindled
by a common spark.” This “spark” is our shared pattern of hormones (at least I think
that’s what Tucker means here), but wallabies, in addition to having some of
the same chemicals as me, uniquely have two uteruses and are pregnant for their
entire adult lives. And hamster moms routinely eat their young, a fact I know
Tucker knows because one of the funniest parts of this book is her kid’s
hamster eating her babies. I resent this underpinning of materialism. Possibly
one is not allowed to write a science-y book without it, but isn’t motherhood
one of our best shots at pushing back?
Mom Genes has topical chapters in which
Tucker layers her autobiographical experience as a mother of four, human
“mom-science,” and animal “mom-science,” with the occasional journalism as she
visits labs all over the United States. The autobiographical sections are the
best parts of the book. She is honest and vivid and funny. Very funny. At first
I audibly groaned at the portmanteaus and puns—“momsplain,” “momster,”
“momentum,” “thermometers”—but by the end I chuckled appreciatively at each
one. The hamster bit is funny. There are also lots of fat mom jokes—not “your
mama” jokes, but jabby little asides, like “Finally, folks who appreciate a
plump mom.” There are at least twenty of these and at first they made me
uncomfortable, because I carry a bit after having four under five (the oldest
will be six when this is published), but by the end of the book they made me
smile.
Tucker does a very good job of weaving together all the
disparate threads, though there is the occasional awkward transition (“Human
mothers are not just giant hairless two-legged rats . . . scrounging for the
last scrap of cheese in the fridge”: One hopes not). And even though learning
about mammalian moms didn’t alter my views about my own experience, I was
interested to learn that
Other mammals spend far less time nursing their young. For wild rabbits, with their rich milk, it’s about five minutes a day. Fur seals may nurse only once a week.
I was also horrified by Tucker’s description of experiments on rat-moms
meant to show what might curb their devotion. “She will brave an electric grid
to reach pups,” we are told. “You can blind her, deafen her, muzzle her,
amputate her nipples, disable her nose, even burn off certain bits of her
brain. You can trap her babies in a glass bottle.” She still tries to succor
them. Let’s have a moment of silence for the graduate student who had to cut
off rat nipples.
Since I have poo-pooed a bit
already, I should confess my biases. Neuroimaging doesn’t hold very much water
for me. The brain communicates with electrical pulses. These pulses make the
machine light up. And so what? It reminds me of the old men with their metal
detectors who are certain that every beep-beep will lead to a valuable ring or
coin. The machines indicate that mothers respond in particular ways to their
own children. “We don’t really need neuroimaging to tell us this, but it does,”
someone called Linda Mayes of Yale University’s Child Study Center is quoted as
saying. Linda, I couldn’t agree with you more. Much of the neuroimaging stuff
in Mom Genes is like this. Scientists use
technology to “confirm” what we already know. (Would it surprise you, reader,
to learn that men do not find baby faces as compelling as women do?) But maybe
I should be more sympathetic. Our speculations about the human person have
become so silly in recent years that maybe we need the Lite-Brite to tell us
things no one would have disagreed with before roughly five seconds ago
historically speaking.
Some of the new research in Mom Genes is fascinating. The placenta, long thought of by me as the miraculous
organ a woman’s body makes to sustain her baby, is actually the biological
representative of the father, containing many of his genes. It begins by
“peeling off from the outside of the barely there fetal clump,” just five days
after gestation and immediately
“bypasses the woman’s brain and takes the reins, messaging her ovaries
directly for more and more progesterone, so that her pregnancy-preventing
period never comes.” Placental cells then attack arteries to redirect blood. An
incredible amount is needed to grow the baby’s brain. These zealous cells help
explain why postpartum hemorrhage is so common in women but mostly absent for
all other mammals. The placenta also initiates much of the hormonal change that
takes place during pregnancy. It is not completely understood, and according to
Tucker, “scientists suspect that the imprinted dad genes are driven to maximize
maternal care.”
There is also new research that builds on the discovery of mom and baby’s sharing of D.N.A. and cells. Tucker mentions the famous case (famous to those of us interested in these sorts of things, anyway), in which a woman’s liver damaged by hepatitis C was able to grow an entire new lobe thanks to her son’s cells still living in her. The strange part: she had no living son, just the memory as it were of his abortion. Every child a woman carries leaves a part of him or herself inside her. On occasion this can lead to problems, but it can be beneficial too. “One decade-long Dutch study tracked 190 women in their fifties and sixties, and those with detectable leftover baby cells were less likely to die of virtually everything.” I wonder when one of our theologians will write a book about the Marian implications of all this. (I am not a theologian, but if this suggestion gives rise to more learned speculations, do remember to acknowledge a simple housewife from the Midwest).
In her introduction Tucker writes: “I want to know what
rocks the hand that rocks the cradle.” We never quite return to that “what.”
Tucker talks about the hand, the cradle, and the rocking. She tells us a great
deal about the how, but very little about the “what.” And that is because
science doesn’t really tell us about that kind of thing. Science depends upon
an increasingly narrow definition of reason, and love defies what is
reasonable. At best our methods tell us about the symptoms of its failure.
Still, I enjoyed reading Mom Genes. Here is a very good snapshot of what science is up to these days. The
book is admirably free of the new woke language; no “birthing person,”
“chestfeeding,” “body-feeding,” “them,” “cisgender.” Tucker should be
congratulated for this. I like her personality on the page, her enthusiasm for
her subject, and her goofiness. I wish that she had been able to write a book
more focused on her own experiences, which I suspect might have told us a bit
more about that mysterious “what.”
Lydia
Sherwood has written for the Washington
Free Beacon, the American Spectator, and
other publications.