2023-05-04 11:54:00
Et was just one bad day. No matter how often Frida repeats these words, nothing changes. Even a one-off crime is a crime. And even the incidental, viewed from a different perspective, may not seem so harmless. For example from the perspective of educational advisors, the youth welfare office and other mothers.
Frida left her newborn unattended in the apartment. Without thinking, she got into a car and stayed away longer than planned, ending up two hours. If she wants to go out by herself whenever she likes, she should have gotten a dog, says the social worker.
You can understand Frida’s excessive demands, she too imagined it all differently: her husband Gust, with whom she had a dream relationship, cheated on her during her pregnancy with a woman in her early 20s. And although Frida was willing to forgive him, he left her for Susanna and started a new family with her.
As the modern day Josef K., Frida now contends with therapists, social workers and judges, except that she knows her crime. Yes, not a day goes by when she isn’t reproached in the strongest possible terms: she is a bad mother.
Jessamine Chan’s debut “Institute for Good Mothers”* is a chilling parody of the classic institutional and Bildungsroman. At the Institute for Good Mothers, all the conversations of the women who introduce themselves by name and action are recorded (most are incarcerated for neglect and abandonment).
The supervisors provide them with AI-controlled puppets to train maternal skills such as patience, empathy and time management. Sexual activity is strictly prohibited on campus because it interferes with maternal care. The love for the child must always come first, everything else just distracts.
regret motherhood
Points are deducted for every intimate touch between the trainees. Anyone who fails the final exam at the end of the year not only has custody permanently revoked, but also visitation rights. Frida’s video calls with her daughter are limited: at best, ten minutes a week, at worst – for example, if she is to be punished for failing a task – she has to do without contact for several weeks.
Harriet also receives therapy to deal professionally with her mother’s two-hour absence. Most of the institute guests were denounced by neighbors, by walkers or ex-partners.
Such an experimental novel structure, reminiscent of dystopias such as George Orwell’s “1984”, Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World”, Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Report” and most recently Frida Isberg’s “The Marking”, can quickly go wrong because the recipe is so predictable is: Take an injustice, an uneasiness about the present and exaggerate it into a state-regulated surveillance fantasy. But “Institute for Good Mothers” rarely rests on the catchy idea of the reform school.
The laconic narrative style reveals the fate of the antiheroine even more clearly in the first part of the novel, which lovingly and perceptively depicts Frida’s personal initial situation and social environment and is frighteningly close to reality in its concreteness than in the second part, which is dystopian exaggerated institute and at times seems schematic and abstract. Chan pulls out all the stops to reduce the current heated debates about motherhood, feminism and racism to a parable of state control; her plot runs rigorously towards a heart-shattering finale.
Since the sociologist Orna Donath caused a worldwide sensation with her study “Regretting Motherhood” in 2015, authors have collected the female experience of regretting motherhood under the hashtag of the same name. As obvious as it is, the taboo that in retrospect one would rather have decided not to have children than to interpret the novel as a theoretical foil, his plot demonstrates the opposite: Frida experiences first-hand what is even worse than with Harriet to be: to be without her.
„Mom Shaming“
The novel marks this hierarchy of suffering particularly impressively in the motif of a never-ending scream: the first time this scream drives Frida to flee, the second time Harriet screams when she is supposed to say goodbye to her mother forever – and this time Frida wants to not for the scream to stop, for the silence to engulf her that would mean life without her daughter.
The reason for motherhood regrets, Chan suggests, may not be because of the children, but because of rampant mom shaming. What is meant is the constant criticism that mothers – mostly from other mothers – have to put up with when it comes to upbringing. What is good for my child? And can it be measured objectively? By negotiating these questions with the help of a fallible protagonist, Chan creates a debut that is as contemporary as it is timeless and gripping from start to finish.
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