Mothers who kill

Dear Gabriel

I am fascinated by the real story, that appeared in the press, of a mother who killed her own child. She said he was evil – he was a gangster, who raped and killed people. She said the drugs had made him evil. I would like to write about a good person who ends up being driven to do a terrible thing. I want to keep her sympathetic, but show how she could end up doing what she did.
One thing that confuses me: in my experience, even when a mother is driven to dislike a child, she will swing wildly between that feeling, and wanting to protect that child, taking on the guilt and responsibility for his actions. This would make it pretty hard, I think, for a mother to actively set about killing her adult child, in cold blood. Is this push-pull fairly universal – would she have to be driven past this point to harm her child? Or do some mothers not experience it?

Thanks

Yolande

Dear Yolande

I remember this story and it intrigued me too! I think there are two distinct questions here: firstly, do mothers experience ambivalence towards their children and secondly, when can angry, “homicidal” feelings tip over into actual harm?

These are great questions and in fact go beyond only the mother-child bond but also have relevance for all our intimate relationships. Ambivalence is certainly normal for us humans – and in fact psychologists regard the capacity to tolerate it as a sign of a more mature psyche. For example, we can love and hate people at the same time – a common experience in many relationships! And we can hold onto the idea of someone’s goodness even when they are being horrible towards us, in a sense the ability to step back and see the bigger, more nuanced, picture.

We all have shadow and light in our natures and if we can tolerate this in ourselves, we can tolerate it in others. When we split the world into simple binaries: black and white, good and evil, we are destined for heartache and disappointment because no one is ever all good and perfect. It may feel simpler and more comforting to think that people are either good or bad but the truth is we are all capable of doing bad things.

Perhaps what adds another dimension to this is that when a mother sees the bad in her child she may be inclined to take responsibility for this because “I raised him”. Perhaps mothers struggle to accept that “nurture” is only one part of the story and “nature” – the aspects of our beings which may be hardwired into us – also plays a role. I think here of the book “We need to talk about Kevin” by Lionel Shriver – he seems a pretty evil kid and yet it’s hard to tease out whether his mother made him bad or if she saw his badness from the outset and shrunk from him, thereby exacerbating his darker urges.
As for the second question, yes it would be hard for a mother to overcome her protective instincts and kill her own son (though it has to be said that the intensity of this bond is not a given – some mother-child bonds are more tenuous, in some instances because of the nature of the bond the mother had with her own parents).

Perhaps what makes this possible, and of course there could be multiple explanations, is that the mother you describe has abandoned her ambivalence towards her son. In other words she can no longer see any good in him and by believing that he is irredeemably evil, can accept that he needs to die, and that she must do it. In this logic, she has in fact acted in a moral way, congruent with positive norms of society: bad people must be put away and do not deserve to live freely among us.

This is a rare act but clearly one which requires the mother to have been pushed beyond a point. To keep your character sympathetic you need to help us understand the forces which conspire to push her into uncharted territory. In the same way that we can see why a battered women might kill her husband, even in cold blood, so too can your character find it in herself to do something terrible. Give us the detail, the back story, the inner turmoil, and you’ll keep our interest and our sympathy.

Good luck!

Best wishes

Gabriel.