Normotic Moms
Dispatch from the group chat
Nausicaa Renner
When we were finally driving out of Silver Spring—family of four packed into a minivan, and pod soon to follow—I waited until we turned off the Beltway and onto I-270 North through Maryland to get out my phone and quickly compose a WhatsApp message to Forest Glen Moms: “Just rolled out of silver spring, moving to Chicago to be near our family—thanks for everything, moms chat!!” I saw several people begin typing, but I didn’t wait. I imagined that they might find it abrupt or rude, but it no longer mattered to me what they thought. My adrenaline spiked as I left the group.
I’ve spent a long time considering why I had been looking forward to that moment—why it was the first thing I was moved to do as we left, to brutally exit and say, “I am no longer in the group.” I had felt not a part of it for a long time, if ever. I had stopped attending the group play dates with my two-to-three-year-old and I never took up an invitation to go to local Touch a Truck events. When I tried to participate—when my fingers hovered over my phone, trying to figure out the appropriate emojis to use after someone’s kid was sick—I felt myself working hard to conform. How many extra h’s and o’s in “Oh no”? I could not speak as myself in the group; I had to literally imagine what someone else would say, and then type that.
When we first moved to Silver Spring in 2020, my husband Jonah sent a message to the neighborhood email list introducing us and mentioning that I was pregnant. We didn’t know anyone. It was a purely logical decision based on pregnancy, spatial requirements, the pandemic, and cost. I soon got invited to a meetup of six pregnant women who lived within a two-block radius. We sat outside on someone’s patio in the late fall chill and discussed our symptoms. I struggled to squeeze my experience into the lexicon of completely normal suburban moms. I felt unexpectedly welcomed, but confused: Why were they not treating me like I was out of place? I had long identified myself as a freak—was it possible that I, too, could be one of them?
Someone formed a group chat; the only requirement was being a mom in our neighborhood with a kid born in or around 2021. I was in. There were more than a dozen of us. The basic function of the group was to agonize over the vicissitudes of being a parent—the volatility of babies and toddlers and the hassle of lugging around a breast pump.
In service of the shared identity of “mother,” all other identities were stripped away. Many were Christian or Catholic, but no one was too explicit about Jesus. (Being in a Jewish family felt very foreign.) All were transplants to the D.C. area. Most were white, but not all. Race never came up. Everyone seemed straight. I was never asked what I did for work; nor was anyone else. When it did come up obliquely, it was skimmed over as an almost irrelevant fact of life, as though we all had office jobs with no meaning.
At the time, I thought of it as a side effect of living in the D.C. area, a hyperpolitical town in which political feeling has to be carefully excised from every interaction. When you’re standing around at a backyard barbecue, a job is only a job. We can discuss working remotely, but not working remotely for Booz Allen Hamilton. A gregarious and genuine mom in the group worked in communications on Capitol Hill; what would it mean if we acknowledged that my news outlet had written a critical story on a policy put forth by her husband’s boss, a Republican senator? (What would it mean if she acknowledged to herself that her husband’s employer was voting against affordable insulin that their own son needed?)
Instead of ourselves, we messaged about things: things like the best diaper bag ever (a bespoke affair which had a GoFundMe and a waitlist); the sale on diapers at Costco; the wide-enough toddler sneakers at StrideRite; the subscription to Lovevery. Things also like the cookie-cutter joys and complaints, ready to be taken down from the shelf. Children were precious, but you definitely needed a drink at exactly 5 p.m. Dads were hilariously unhelpful and available for mockery (“Men are always sticking their hands in their pants.” Reply: “ALWAYS.”).
Eventually it became clear to me that “things” were not just the detritus that was left in a group chat when you aren’t able to talk about anything meaningful; things, including tropes about mothering and men, were actually taking the place of the big feelings of parenting. When adults needed to brutally suppress the primal attack of the child, it became an eyeroll emoji (“UGHH”). Crying at the first day of daycare was easily chalked up to being a “mom thing.” The most perfect diaper bag would become a magical object by transforming the most stressful part of being a parent of a young child—their shit—into something manageable. Stuff comes in to help, to replace the work of parenting with useful items that take their place: a box that plays stories so you don’t have to read them five books in a row, or deal with their whining when you say no. A screen that gives you time to detach, mentally, from your kid and do everything else you’re supposed to do.
The repression ran so deep I was never even convinced they were upset by dropping off their kids at daycare— it seemed more that they felt they were “supposed” to cry—or at the rigidity of toddlers and the tantrums and meltdowns they caused. The last conversation that occurred before I left was prompted by the question, “Anyone else’s 3-year-old an emotional wreck this week?” (Hand raise emoji, thumbs-up emoji, heart emoji responses.) But the examples were endearing, not frustrating (“X’s newest threenager schtick this week is yelling “NO THANKS BYYYYEEEE” then walking away to any simple thing I ask. Slightly hilarious while massively infuriating.”).
This group chat has become emblematic, to me, of what Christopher Bollas would call a “normotic” element of U.S. culture. Someone with normotic illness, in Bollas’s definition (and I know of no others), is an abnormally normal person who appears “too stable, secure, comfortable and socially extrovert. He is fundamentally disinterested in subjective life.” Subjective life—personal reflections and attachments—is buried so deep, at such a young age, that it is often completely inaccessible. Instead, Bollas writes, the normotic “is inclined to reflect on the thingness of objects, on their material reality, or on ‘data’ that relates to material phenomena.” They view even themselves as an object among objects.
This instantly tracked with my experience of how moms related to each other within the group: connections were established not based on our interests or even our particular attitude or idioms of mothering, but on shared facts: our second children were born two days apart, maybe, or we used the same pediatrician. At its base, we related around the biggest stuff of all: our homes, where we lived, our zip codes, our properties, whether we owned them or not. There was no need to question or examine our connection beyond that.
“Capitalism of course has preyed on this, opening up an industry to help parents assuage emotional needs with things.”
The person with full-blown normotic illness rarely makes it into psychoanalysis, not seeing any reason to do so. But there is a less pathological version of the normotic, a “common” normotic element that, Bollas writes, could be defined as “any mental activity that constitutes a transfer of a subjective state of mind into a material external object that results in the de-symbolization of the mental content.” In a group, this function moves everyone toward the norm; and it is not always negative. When parents get worried about their child’s development, it can be very soothing to ask, “Is anyone else’s child doing X?”
Capitalism of course has preyed on this, opening up an industry to help parents assuage emotional needs with things. The long lists of items you need to buy in order to feel prepared for baby to come is the infrastructure to insulate the mom from fear. Bollas writes about the normotic being deeply comforted in a foreign country by the appearance of the familiar Coca Cola; at times I feel my own soul soothed by the administration of an apple sauce pouch.
But when the group overregulates toward the norm, it can completely sever emotional life from interactions. At one backyard event, I found myself talking to a clean-cut dad who was very friendly, smiled all the time, and wore Warby Parker-ish thick-framed sunglasses. I was surprised to notice that he had a sleeve of tattoos. He told me that he had gotten the first one just after his first daughter was born; a giant clock showed the time of her birth. After he had gotten the first one he kept going back for more, compelled by a force he did not stop to examine. To the clock he had added long, swinging chains down his arm. It struck me that the tattoo represented a spillover of emotion from his daughter’s birth, too much for him to actually feel, so he turned it into a tattoo. His demeanor was so sunny that it took my analyst to point out the chains were clearly a representation of his feeling trapped as a parent.
I’m still not sure why this group was so tightly wound around such a homogenous version of motherhood. Why was there such a strong need to hold onto the model of the happy suburban nuclear family with Amazon Prime? It was all too de-symbolized—blank of any meaning—for me to figure out. On occasion I gave into temptation and posted my own “toddler is annoying” message, just to see what it felt like. And I can honestly say it didn’t feel like anything; I felt even less than getting a single Instagram “heart.” And perhaps this is why I felt the need to abruptly leave; to finally send a message that felt like something.
My analyst (in one of my endless sessions on this topic) questioned whether this was a group at all; a group works on something together. This group wasn’t doing any work. Was it? Are group chats even groups? I wondered. My analyst noted that group chats are fragmented spaces where we can put dissociated pieces of ourselves; or, as Bollas would put it in a later essay, when we are looking at our phones, “our obligation is simply to pass on what we have seen or heard, mimicking the function of transmitting objects.”
The group chat was, itself, helping its mother-members make their experiences generic; to turn joy and difficulty into an image and a caption that could be observed by sender and receivers alike as one in a feed, burnished as a trophy for having survived the gauntlet of motherhood. It was evidence, in other words, of our ambivalence toward being mothers, expressed as a total embrace.