My mother, my monster
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 22: MoneySexPower
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Sydney Smith
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Sydney Smith's biography and other articles by this writer
Reality TV: a phenomenon whose lure I had resisted until late last year when, in my search for shows to write about for the TV guide, I came across Wife Swap USA. In fact, I was already curious about it – a show dumped in the summer non-ratings period because of its limited and unglamorous appeal. Reviewers called the participants ‘idiots'. They all used that word, their tone so ferocious and exasperated that I imagined they had wanted to smash the television. Despite the reaction, the premise of Wife Swap USA intrigued me. The producers take two families with opposing views on all things, swap the wives, and pass on to viewers edited highlights of the ensuing chaos. The first episode I watched was fun, but it was the second that really got to me. When asked about her reason for going on the show, one of the wives said, ‘I want my family to know there are people out there worse than me'. I was hooked.
The families live under new management for two weeks. In the first week, each wife has to do things the way her counterpart does them. She has provided the other with an operating manual which includes information on how the household is run, but also the wife's philosophy – for example, ‘I believe a wife serves her husband; he is the head of the household; his opinions are her opinions'. In the second week, the wife gets to impose her own idea of domestic congeniality.
During the first episode, I kept wondering what spoke to me about it. I felt a tug I rarely feel with TV. Most television presents a world that doesn't speak to my imagination. Soap operas, reality shows like Australian Idol and Big Brother, and the liposuctioned prime-time sitcoms that come out of the United States don't engage me. They appeal to a part of the collective psyche I seem to have been born without. This is a handicap for someone who earns part of her living writing about TV. So I was curious to understand why this show, of all shows, with its grating voiceover and its working-class vulgarity, should attract me. The next episode I watched not only hooked me in, it answered all my questions. One of the wives was a domestic monster. I recognised this woman the way I recognise faces in my photo albums; she conjured up memories. Some of the situations were so familiar, all I could do was laugh. I wished my brothers were there to watch it with me. But I had abandoned my family twenty years earlier. I enjoy my freedom too much to give any serious thought to going back.
The mother who wanted her family to know she wasn't that bad didn't do housework and didn't spend much time with her two children. On the surface, this seemed fair enough; she was the breadwinner; her unemployed husband ran the home. She went to work at a call centre in the afternoon and, after knocking off, she visited a casino where she proceeded to plug the poker machines until 5am, then returned home to sleep off the night's activity. Her husband hadn't seen the marital bed in three years.
In some ways, this woman was unlike my mother; she didn't impose rules on her children (aged nine and four) or structure their day; she let them do whatever they liked as long as they didn't bother her. Often they didn't go to bed until midnight. My mother had a rule for everything. My life was hedged about by all the things I was not allowed to do: I was not allowed to have friends; I had to come straight home after school and not get sidetracked at the shops; I was not allowed to play outside unless she specifically said I could; I was not to talk to my father or play with my brothers; I was not to wear the clothes I liked, I must wear only the clothes she had approved for me. And yet these two women – one dictatorial, the other anti-authoritarian – struck me as similar. They were both women who did not engage with their families in any but the most circumscribed ways. The Wife Swap mother's hours in the casino reminded me of my mother's long weekends in bed curled up with a stack of Mills and Boon romances.
The Wife Swap mother had switched households with a woman who was as strict and traditional as the first wife was lax. The traditional wife cleaned her house with the zeal of caustic soda, waited on her husband hand and foot, and rang her sons, aged nineteen and fifteen, several times a day to see where they were and to remind them of their curfew.
As I write, I note that it was the lax, withdrawn wife who reminded me of my own mother, not the one who imposed rules. The reason comes to me in an image of the lax wife trying to put her son to bed when he doesn't want to go. She tries and tries – probably for the sake of the camera. The look on her face reminds me of the look on my own mother's face when I acted up. Her rules were real, they were rigid; she had a violent, unpredictable temper that threatened to flare when she was opposed. Yet there were moments when my own rebellion overwhelmed her. If instead of saying, ‘No!' I evaded her rules by pretending to misunderstand them, she retreated in confusion. At these times, she was a helpless child, not a parent. The rule-setting wife on the show was a parent par excellence, the mother to end all mothers, a woman whose reason for being was to nurture and instruct – the very antithesis of my own mother.
It seems obvious that in order to gain the most conflict out of the wife swap, the show's producers find pairs of opposites. In one episode, a vegan animal rights activist who imposed raw food on her family and banished the stove from the house, along with the furniture (even the beds and chairs), was swapped with a carnivore mum whose husband went hunting in the nearby forest several times a week and, on returning, presented the furry corpses to his wife for skinning, gutting, butchering and cooking. Week after week, it worked. I enjoyed seeing these women dismantled by the conditions of the swap, their cherished beliefs challenged, their habits overturned, their domination of their families exposed in all its many varieties.
At the same time, I kept thinking, my mother would never have accepted this kind of reproach. I was surprised a show like this had been made, one built around censure of bad mothers. I wondered how it was possible. These days, despite the high public profile given to child abuse in families, there is still an idea that mothers are loving and nurturing, that they are above certain kinds of bad acts. The stereotypical child sex abuser, for example, is still a man; children are warned to beware of male strangers; one unwary therapist, when learning that I had been sexually abused by a family member, assumed the culprit had been my father. In the 1970s and '80s when I was in my teens and early stages of womanhood, it was difficult to tell people how oppressive my mother was. They talked over me, or ignored what I had said, or told me flatly that I was lying. One of my mother's sisters said I was wrong to criticise: ‘Your mother's a very good mother.' For me, seeing a therapist every week was a relief from the pressure to keep quiet and pretend everything was all right. I still meet people who are perturbed by my satirical way of speaking of ‘Mother'. I don't have to mention abuse; I just have to talk disrespectfully. Mother was a woman with many lamentable failings, not someone who deserved esteem and kindly indulgence.