2021 Irish film You Are Not My Mother was the first feature film of Kate Dolan and was claimed by Irish Times newspaper film reviewer, Tara Brady, as “an unholy marriage of Irish folklore and familial dysfunction.” You Are Not My Mothermostly leans towards the latter, set as it is in the small working class Dublin home of teenager Char, her mother Angela and Angela’s mother, Rita. The film narrates Char’s observation of her mother’s increasing distancing from family life and her depressed disengagement from motherhood until suddenly, after a brief and unexplained absence, Angela returns home, invigorated and full of life. Except, of course, this is not Char’s mother and Char knows this. Thus commences the final act of the film in which the changeling who has replaced Angela is found out and cast out, and Char and Angela return to some sort of normalcy. In this short curatorial note, I consider the representation of mother Angela in respect of the contested role of mother in Irish society as well as the experience of maternal ambivalence that Angela seems to represent.  

Although You Are Not My Mother may feel like an ‘every family’ and feature relationships and domestic life familiar to many outside Ireland, its Irish social context is particularly important to understanding the film. Family, of course, is a common experience of many, but the social practices that constitute family relations and the ideologically formed models of family can be highly localised. In Ireland, family was, quite literally, enshrined in the Constitution. In 1937, the Irish Constitution, formed as a consequence of Ireland’s newfound independence, constructed and legally defined an ideologically conservative and economically limiting role for women in the family.  In what became known as the ‘woman in the home’ clause introduced to the Constitution, it was stated that “the State recognises that by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved….The State shall, therefore, endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home.” (1937) In other words, a woman’s place is in the home, as unpaid labour, and the State will guarantee that she remains as such by ensuring that she does not need to undertake other labour outside the home. This exists within the Constitution still, despite a recent referendum to remove it (which was not voted through). This clause both constructs and reflects the continued representation of women and mothers – by the State, in wider society, the economy – as primary carers of children and as economically dependent (Moloney and Thompson, 2003; Sydora, 2015). Women are then socially valued and judged on their performances as mothers, as carers and as unpaid domestic labourers (O’Connor, 2002: 180). Women are equally expected to care for others and service their needs (children, husband, parents), while at the same time their ability to make choices about this were constrained. Divorce was illegal until 1995 and abortion de facto illegal until 2018. 

It is within the context that You Are Not My Mother sits. Angela is a single mother. We do not see any father. Angela is the primary carer for Char, she also ‘carents’ her mother Rita, who has limited mobility. By the time we arrive in the family home at the start of the film, Angela is already exhausted. She is barely able to leave her room. Char is reluctant to ask her to drive her to school. Angela is overwhelmed by such simple tasks. In one crucial sequence early in the film, maternal ambivalence and regret are overtly represented through Angela’s outright rejection of the demands of motherhood. Maternal ambivalence is broadly understood as contradictory feelings about motherhood and towards children, feelings of loss of independence, and uncertainty about selfhood (Parker, 2002). Although it is a psychological experience of a mother towards her motherhood and her children, it is also argued to be sociological insofar as it is an experience that emerges from the social idealisation of motherhood and the pressures to adopt a performance and persona not experienced by the mother (Brown, 2010; Williamson, 2023). This ambivalence – expressed as the jaded performance of motherhood by Angela and revelation that she wants to disengage from it – comes to the fore as Char starts to challenge Angela about the quality of her mothering.

In the scene, a reluctant Angela has agreed to drive Char to school. The dull, grey tones of the urban landscape they drive through, their grey and blue clothes and the shallow focus photography in the car collectively contribute towards the sense of an oppressive and claustrophobic environment. While Angela drives, Char presses her mother to buy groceries for the home and Angela responds that she just wants to go home. When Char presses further, Angela insists, ‘I’m just tired”. When Angela has a near crash, and Char challenges her, Angela repeats that she ‘can’t do this anymore.’ Char leaves upset and Angela disappears for a few days, her car found abandoned with the requested groceries in the passenger seat.  Motherhood is represented here as a demand made of women, as something they enter and engage with reluctantly or with ambivalence. While the film doesn’t explain the origins of Angela’s ambivalence, it is represented oftentimes through her responses to both Char and Rita. Angela appears in frame when Char, for example, needs something from her. Thus, Angela’s resistance is to her daughter’s request for mothering. As suggested by Heffernan and Stone, expressions of maternal ambivalence are rarely represented at all, so it is significant that it appears here. Equally, given Ireland’s recent reckonings with its treatment of women and mothers, particularly unmarried or single mothers, it is possible to see Angela’s behaviour as representing one facet of the Irish maternal experience. Where much attention has been given to unwed mothers whose children were taken forcefully from them by the Catholic Church, less public attention has been given to mothers who regret being mothers or having children. You Are Not My Mother gives us a brief moment of maternal interiority of a different kind here.  

I must be careful not to overstate the radical intent of the film because it ultimately reunites mother and child who, it seems, will live happily ever after. However, there is some suggestion of reciprocity between mother and child,  with Char somewhat responsibilised for Angela’s wellbeing. Once the changeling is banished and Angela has returned, Char makes a talisman to ensure the changeling cannot return, meaning that Char will care for her mother as much as her mother does her. Nonetheless, while the horror of the changelings is momentarily contained, it remains to be seen whether the horror of motherhood is overcome.

References

Brady, Tara. “You Are Not My Mother: An unholy marriage of Irish folklore and familial dysfunction.” The Irish TimesOnline. Available at : https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/film/you-are-not-my-mother-an-unholy-marriage-of-irish-folklore-and-familial-dysfunction-1.4815255

Brown, Ivana. "Ambivalence of the SEVEN motherhood experience." Angela O’Reilly (ed.) Twenty-first-century motherhood: Experience, identity, policy, agency. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. 

Bunreacht na hÉireann. 1937. Stationary Office Dublin.

Enright’s The Gathering.” Women’s Studies, vol. 44, no. 2, Feb. 2015, pp. 239–63. 

Field. Syracuse University Press, 2003.

Heffernan, Valerie, and Katherine Stone. "International responses to regretting motherhood." Women’s Lived Experiences of the Gender Gap: Gender Inequalities from Multiple Global Perspectives, editor Angela Fitzgerald, Springer, 2021, pp, 121-133.

Ireland, vol. 30, no. 3, 1995, pp. 177–87. 

Moloney, Catriona and Helen Thompson. Irish Women Writers Speak out : Voices from the

O’Connor, Pat. “Defining Irish Women: Dominant Discourses and Sites of Resistance.” Éire

Parker, Rozsika. "The production and purposes of maternal ambivalence." In Mothering and ambivalence, pp. 27-46. Routledge, 2002.

Sydora, Laura. “‘Everyone Wants a Bit of Me’: Historicizing Motherhood in Anne

Williamson, Rachel. 21st-century narratives of maternal ambivalence. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023.