Book Review: The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan

Monday, March 13, 2023

“Frida wishes she could laugh about it with Will. She wants to tell him about Roxanne rustling the sheets and smiling in the dark. She wants to tell him that these buildings are composed of pheromones and regret. Hostility. Longing. That it’s possible to stop noticing sadness. That the sound of women crying now resembles white noise.” (p 131)

If I were a good mother, my sink would not be overflowing with dirty dishes. Laundry would not sit in the hamper for weeks, both clean and unclean. I would’ve never, ever said fuck in front of my three year old that one winter day in Chicago, who then repeated the word. 

I wanted to read this book from cover to cover without stopping, but a good mother wouldn’t do that. A good mother literally couldn’t do that because she must always be present, attentive, aware and in tune with her child or children’s needs (it was also a pretty heavy, painful read at times, but riveting nonetheless.)

In short, in this demented world that Chan deftly creates—a setting that increasingly reminded me of Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale—-a mother must erase herself completely to ensure that her child thrives. She must be everything and nothing at the same time. 

Meet Frida. Frida is a first generation Chinese American mother to her mixed race baby, Harriet. Harriet is around 18 months old when the incident happens—-Frida leaves Harriet alone in their house for two and a half hours. A neighbor finds Harriet crying and alone and calls CPS, and Frida’s nightmare begins. 

Harriet is temporarily taken from Frida and placed in the care of Harriet’s father who has recently split from Frida and is living with his girlfriend, Susanah, Susanah being the reason for the split. Susanah is younger and has bigger boobs. Shocker.

After social worker visits, court visitations, constant in-home monitoring and state sponsored counseling, Frida is given two choices: either sever her parental rights permanently or attend an experimental year long program to rehabilitate bad mothers, at the end of which she still may lose all parental rights if she doesn’t pass. Nevertheless, Frida chooses rehabilitation and prepares herself to be apart from her toddler for an entire year. She will miss Christmas, Harriet’s second birthday, and an explosion of language that Harriet will learn in that time. 

What follows is truly a hellish existence for these mothers. The women are stripped of all of their personal belongings as well as their autonomy, they are forced to wear prison-like jumpsuits, and every detail of their lives are controlled from when and what they eat to what they are allowed to think. And this, this psychological torment and control is–by far–the worst and most disturbing aspect of the school. 

Frida and the other mothers are forced to repeat a mantra to reinforce their failings: I am a bad mother, but I am learning to be good. Anytime they try to defend themselves against the insane standards that the school held for them, they are told that they are selfish, that they don’t truly love their children, that they will never get their children back if they continued to talk this way, be this way, think this way. Their therapy sessions are essentially further brainwashing sessions in which the “therapist” continues to evoke low feelings of self worth and hounds on their imperfections as women, as mothers, as humans. 

Despite the extreme nature to which this novel pushes the narrative of the impossible expectations that are put on mothers, I felt seen. In the book, the women are expected to forsake themselves in the name of mothering, both physically and emotionally. Anything less is tantamount to abuse and neglect. In real life, this pressure is unspoken but tangible. Add to this the layers of careers (with domestic work still largely falling to women in addition to work outside the home,) as well as the expectation to remain sexually desirable. I’m exhausted just writing it all out. 

What this fictional school fails to address—as does our present day, real life society–is how these women are supposed to make money while they are also expected to be supermom? How are they supposed to provide the basic necessities for existence if 100% of their energy is directed towards physically being next to their child at all times?  It assumes a two parent, one income family that can afford to have one parent (the mother) stay home with the children. In real life, this may work for some families, but it certainly doesn’t work for many. Without the safety net of universal healthcare, subsidized preschool, and now, rising inflation and interest rates, how the hell can anyone afford anything? Since the 1970’s the cost of living has skyrocketed while wages have not kept up. From pewresarch.org:  

“After adjusting for inflation, today’s average hourly wage has just about the same purchasing power it did in 1978, following a long slide in the 1980s and early 1990s and bumpy, inconsistent growth since then. In fact, in real terms average hourly earnings peaked more than 45 years ago: The $4.03-an-hour rate recorded in January 1973 had the same purchasing power that $23.68 would today.”

While the novel draws attention to the challenges mothers face not only internally but socially, it also forces us to grapple with how exactly do we define a good mother? Where do we draw the line? We are introduced to women who have done some pretty terrible things by their children. There are women who have hit their children, who put out cigarettes on their children. As I read the opening pages and it details Frida’s “very bad day,” I myself couldn’t help but think: “Yikes. Leaving a toddler alone for 2 and a half hours? I would never do that.” And then there was the mother who left her 6 month old to be babysat by her 12 year old niece because the mother was called off to work, this job being the only source of income for her and her baby. Or the mother who let her 10 year old walk the short distance home from the library alone to increase her sense of independence. There is a varying array of “infractions” and it’s an interesting mental exercise to figure out how and why we assign blame and to whom.

The level of nuance is what makes this story truly engrossing. Through the lens of Frida, it asks us to ultimately discard all judgements and assumptions and to seek to extend empathy and compassion not only toward others, but ourselves as well, while also wrestling with the larger questions of what role, if any, the government should play in the well being of families and how we decide who makes a good mother.

I’m an easy cryer, but mostly from movies with a really emotional score. I don’t often cry from a book, but by the end of this one, I wept.