The Push: Mother. Daughter. Angel. Monster?

“Motherhood is no different. We all expect to have, and to marry, and to be, good mothers.” 

Across virtually every culture, geographic location, and even species is a common belief that mothers should take care of their children. A mother’s abandoning a child is considered the ultimate perversion of the natural order. However, this is precisely what Etta does to Cecilia, and what Cecilia does to Blythe. Nevertheless, to conclude that this makes Etta and Cecilia “bad people” is reductive and unfair, particularly given the circumstances surrounding each woman’s pregnancy. Etta became a single parent before Cecilia was even born because her father forced his lifestyle on her husband. Cecilia was coerced by Seb into carrying a child to term against her wishes. In human society, where patriarchal norms and expectations influence the behavior of women, the above quote is not as self-evident as it appears.

“Family was too important to you—neither of us could risk how the whole truth about mine might change the way you saw me.”

Before even talking about having a baby, Blythe’s anxieties about motherhood seep into her relationship with Fox. She withholds the truth of her parentage, as if giving voice to it is enough to corrupt the happy life she seeks to build with her husband. This reflects the profound insecurity Blythe feels about motherhood, which she hopes to correct by having a baby herself rather than by confronting her unresolved trauma head-on.

“She felt, to me, so obviously a mother. Was it the way she looked, or moved? Was it the way she seemed to have more to care about than I did? When would this happen to me, this crossover? How was I about to change?”

Blythe believes that at some point after getting pregnant, a switch will flip and suddenly her maternal instincts will kick in. Moreover, she believes that those instincts will subsume her entire identity, inducting her into a new class of humanity known as motherhood. Blythe needs this, in part because she doesn’t much like who she currently is, and in part because of her compulsion to not become like her own mother.

“I half listened but my mind was elsewhere, searching my past for the same kind of familiar tokens, blankies and stuffies and favorite books, but I couldn’t find any.”

As Blythe prepares to become a parent, she feels the absence of these tokens of motherly affection in her childhood more acutely. One of the joys for many parents is to recreate aspects of their own idyllic childhoods for a new generation, yet Blythe has no emotional or physical items to draw on for such an endeavor. Consequently, while Fox breathes in deeply the scent of his childhood items, for Blythe their presence is like a negative nostalgia, reminding her of everything she missed out on growing up.

“I felt like the only mother in the world who wouldn’t survive it. The only mother who couldn’t recover from having her perineum stitched from her anus to her vagina. The only mother who couldn’t fight through the pain of newborn gums cutting like razor blades on her nipples. The only mother who couldn’t pretend to function with her brain in the vice of sleeplessness. The only mother who looked down at her daughter and thought, Please. Go away.”

Tellingly, when discussing her experiences as a new mother after Violet’s birth, Blythe dwells on images of anatomical pain and viscera. These are the realities of motherhood, yet in Blythe’s mind they’re so overwhelming that they leave room for little else. This stands in stark juxtaposition to her later impressions of birthing Sam and caring for him as an infant. Blythe is certainly not “the only mother” to feel the things she does with her first baby, and she has no reason to be ashamed of those feelings. However, because of the emphasis she places on being the perfect mother as a rebuke to Cecilia, these thoughts and feelings send Blythe into a spiral from which she struggles to recover.

“I felt a rush of power when I made clandestine decisions like this, decisions other mothers would not make because they weren’t supposed to, like leaving a wet diaper on too long or skipping her overdue bath again because I couldn’t be bothered.”

In this passage, Blythe is referring to her refusal to wipe off the nipple of Violet’s bottle after it falls on the floor. However, unlike most mothers, she makes this choice not because she’s in a hurry or because she’s prioritizing Violet’s other needs but because on a perverse level she enjoys doing so. This is one of many passages in which Blythe’s attitude toward Violet is actively adversarial. Her attitude is understandable given that Blythe had no one to model motherly affection for her, so all she knows is the pain, discomfort, and sleepless nights of motherhood.

“I started to understand, during those sleepless nights replaying the things I’d overheard, that we are all grown from something. That we carry on the seed, and I was a part of her garden.”

Even from an early age, Blythe has an intuitive sense of how trauma passes down from mother to child. When hearing Cecilia discuss with Seb her mother’s physical and emotional abuse, young Blythe comes to understand why her mother is the way she is. Tragically, awareness alone does not end the cycle: Blythe’s emotional wounds hamper her confidence as a mother. If anything, that awareness worsens things, as Blythe feels a constant thrum of anxiety that she’ll continue to pass down the trauma that came from Etta and likely began even earlier.

“You used to care about me as a person—my happiness, the things that made me thrive. Now I was a service provider. You didn’t see me as a woman. I was just the mother of your child.”

At numerous points in the novel, Blythe resents the way that having a child, at least in Fox’s eyes, collapses her entire identity as a woman into one quality: motherhood. This is ironic given how eager Blythe was earlier to join the ranks of the maternal elite. However, her feelings are understandable, particularly given the fact that Fox is free to be a father, a lover, and a professional all at once.

“Some people frame their perspectives of the past with worn photographs or the same stories told a thousand times by someone who loves them. I didn’t have these things. My mother didn’t either, and maybe that was part of the problem. We had only one version of the truth.”

Blythe acknowledges that the trappings of so-called happy families—photo albums, stories, and trinkets—paint an overly rosy picture of familial dynamics. After all, even in the best circumstances, families experience some hardship. Nevertheless, she craves these revisions to the past that are denied to her. Without the ability to put a happy spin on her upbringing, Blythe is left only with the trauma—and very few tools for dealing with it.

“Mothers aren’t supposed to have children who suffer. We aren’t supposed to have children who die. And we are not supposed to make bad people.”

Again, Blythe fixates on the expectation of what a mother should be, not the reality. She demands much of both herself and Violet, and this influences her growing belief that her daughter may be a murderer. Even if this is true, Blythe attaches far too much importance to her own role as a mother in shaping her daughter’s actions: Although bad people do exist, and these people do have mothers, to say that their mothers are responsible for their children’s misdeeds is unfair.

“The blood poured from me into the toilet and when I looked down at the mess, for some reason I thought of our daughter again.”

This is one of many passages that reveal a massive difference between how Blythe describes giving birth to Sam and how she describes giving birth to Violet. The parts of the experience that are most grotesque to Blythe, like expelling the placenta and fetal membranes into the toilet, remind her only of Violet, not the child she just birthed. She effectively compartmentalizes her children, associating the most painful elements with Violet and the most comforting elements with Sam.

“I cried without thinking, without knowing why, but the tears were a release of love. [...] My nipples stung at the thought of feeding him next. And yes. I didn’t want that time with him to end.”

Blythe views the same experiences she had with Violet—incessant crying, raw nipples—as evidence of the miracle of birth and motherhood with Sam. This may be because her upbringing subconsciously conditioned her to experience mother-daughter relationships as traumatic and poisoning. A mother-son relationship, however, is untouched by her experiences with Cecilia, so she’s free to establish a relationship with her son without the intrusion of traumatic memories.

“I remember one day realizing how important my body was to our family. Not my intellect, not my ambitions of a writing career. Not the person shaped by thirty-five years. Just my body.”

Blythe’s identity as a mother consumes her and leaves her little time for intellectual or professional pursuits. Her belief is not unjustified; consider Fox’s resistance to sending the children to daycare and his mother’s resistance to allowing a night nurse to stay on for more than a few weeks. However, it’s telling that Blythe views motherhood as being about her body instead of focusing on affection and emotional nurturing. Even when she does feel the heavy emotions of motherhood, Blythe attributes them solely to her brain’s release of oxytocin, a function of evolution that encourages mother-child bonding.

“The thoughts I had were awful, they were harrowing, but there was something satisfying about letting myself go there. The extent of how far she might go.”

As when she refuses to wipe off the dirty nipple of Violet’s bottle, Blythe approaches her daughter with a measure of perversity, pushing the limits of how un-mother-like she can be. However, another element may be at play here: If Violet truly is a monster, as Blythe suggests multiple times, then that at least partially exonerates Blythe’s behavior. In this view, Violet is simply broken, and Blythe could have done nothing to change that.

“She caught her breath and threw herself around your waist, in awe, in terror, in amazement, the kind of reaction you might catch only a few times in your child’s life, a reminder that they are new to this world, that they can’t possibly understand when they’re safe or not.”

Here is a rare moment in which Blythe views Violet for what she is: a child. Put another way, in this rare moment, Blythe’s motherly instincts toward Violet kick in. She feels a twinge of affection when Violet, despite what her mother believes may be her daughter’s full-blown psychopathy, needs and craves protection.

“My brain had changed, as though it were on a different frequency. Before. After. After felt curt, my sentences abrupt and sharp, like every paragraph could hurt someone.”

This meta-fictional moment is a stark reminder that the woman writing these pages is in the throes of unimaginable grief. The way she describes her writing is precisely how the words come off the page in The Push: clipped, harsh, and suggestive of violence. This further complicates Blythe’s status as an unreliable narrator and may even make her more sympathetic. If she honestly believes that Violet killed Sam, then it stands to reason that her memories of giving birth to Violet and taking care of her as a baby would be interpreted through the darkest lens imaginable.

“I wanted you to wake up in our bed and smell that I was toasting a bagel. You hated bagels. You would realize that I wouldn’t be going to the brasserie for breakfast. I wanted you to think, Maybe she doesn’t love me anymore.”

For Blythe, this is major step in the disintegration of her relationship with Fox. Previously, whatever curtness, inattentiveness, or lack of affection she directed at him was largely a passive product of her being overwhelmed by grief—or by motherhood in general. Here, however, Blythe takes an active and intentional step toward alienating him, even if the immediate stakes are relatively small.

“I watched you watch me. And I wondered what this body meant to you now. Was it just a vessel? The ship that got you here, father of one beautiful daughter and a son you’d barely known.”

At the heart of Blythe’s alienation from her husband lies the fact that Fox did not visibly grieve for Sam the same way she did. It is thus easy for Blythe to think of Fox as a heartless opportunist who views his wife as little more than a utility for fulfilling his ambitions to become a father. The extent to which this is a fair characterization is unclear, however, given that the story is told entirely from Blythe’s perspective. It seems equally likely that Fox dealt with his grief by pouring all his energies into the child who is still alive—though that does not exonerate him for cheating on Blythe.

“We’ll be fine. I’m her mother.”

Blythe says this in response to Fox’s reasonable concern over Violet being left alone with her as part of a shared custody arrangement. On one level, this statement reflects Blythe’s continued allegiance to the societal expectation that a mother’s presence is always what’s best for a child. Moreover, it speaks to the extent to which Blythe continues to allow her identity as a mother to subsume all other qualities of her personality.

“You thought of motherhood as the ultimate expression of a woman, but he didn’t; for him, the vagina was nothing other than a vessel for his pleasure. To think of it otherwise made him physically queasy, the way others felt when they gave blood.”

Having lost Sam and with Violet slipping away, Blythe embraces a man who recasts her as anything but a mother. This is her way of stripping off the motherly identity which so consumed her, whether she wanted it to or not. The quote also reflects Blythe’s consistent struggles to embrace multiple roles as a mother, an extraordinary challenge, particularly given the patriarchal messaging she receives everywhere she goes about what a mother is supposed to be. Eventually, however, she tires of the literary agent, yearning to recapture her identity as a mother.

“As far as she was concerned, she didn’t have that thing other women did—she didn’t feel nurturing or see the joy of a chubby little thigh. And she certainly didn’t want to see herself reflected in another living thing.”

Here, Blythe gets at the heart of why Cecilia was so reluctant to become a mother. For both characters, to be a mother is to see something of oneself reflected back at them. Because neither character very much likes herself, each struggles to feel affection toward a small person who only reminds her of her own self-loathing.

“I don’t want you learning to be like me. But I don’t know how to teach you to be anyone different.”

Once again, Cecilia’s self-loathing plays a major role in her unwillingness to be a mother and, eventually, her total abandonment of her daughter. Cast in this light, Cecilia thinks that leaving will be the best thing she can do for Blythe in that it might be the only way to prevent her daughter from repeating her mistakes. However, while Blythe is quite different from Cecilia on the surface, especially given her stated eagerness to have a child, both women struggle to feel affection for their daughters. This suggests an inevitability to Blythe’s fate as a mother, rooted in the inherited trauma of her maternal lineage.

“She wasn’t always easy. But she deserved more from you [...]. And you deserved more from me.”

This is one of the few moments when Blythe captures Fox in a moment of frank sincerity and introspection. For most of the novel, she depicts Fox as reserved to the point of unfeeling, generally only showing emotion with respect to Violet—particularly how Blythe treats Violet. Here, however, Fox is finally willing to admit his part in their family’s disintegration—that he failed to make room for Blythe’s grief in the wake of Sam’s death. Although hardly a reconciliation, this helps pave the way for the healing Blythe undergoes in the final chapters.