What sort of woman would give up her own child in the struggle to be famous?
What would you be willing to sacrifice for the ultimate prize? Your friends? Your family? Your health? Your relationships?
The media tells us that if you want to succeed, want to excel, want to attain your dreams, you have to be entirely ruthless and single minded. The message is constantly being banged home in singing, dancing and other talent competitions. Chefs, business apprentices – they all have to give “110 per cent” of themselves to the job. So you are doubtless going to have to make some sacrifices in other areas. You can’t give everything to your career if you have a child to care for and love.
The hard working parent who later laments the time they didn’t spend “watching their children’s school plays” is a cliché, as is the child who grows up to resent his or her parents’ absence from their early years. Some people forgo relationships or let marriages and friendships slip in the rush to be “successful” or “rich” or “famous”. But what about someone who goes all the way in choosing their career over their child? Someone who knows that if they make the decision to bring their child up they will never achieve their dreams?
Mommie Dearest [Photo source]
There have been examples both in fact and fiction of successful and famous women who have neglected – or even abused - their children for their careers. Sometimes the children have hit back later, like Christina Crawford, daughter of the great Hollywood star, Joan, in her memoir, “Mommie Dearest”.
To be a bad mother is one of the great taboos of our age. In the days when the middle and upper classes had servants it was perfectly normal for children to look upon their housekeepers and nannies as surrogate mothers, (think of Scarlett O’Hara’s “Mammy” in “Gone with the Wind”, not to mention “Mary Poppins”). But to the modern sensibility the idea of a mother who neglects or is indifferent to her children is unthinkable. Such relationships have spawned any number of “misery memoirs” like Dave Pelzer’s “A Child Called It”, written by people unable to forgive what was done to them by their mothers. Readers will nearly always be led to despise these women as much as the authors do.
We Need To Talk About Kevin [Photo via The Guardian]
In “We Need to Talk About Kevin” Lionel Shriver showed the consequences of a mother trying to do her duty, while feeling no maternal love for her child. So, what if a woman knows from the moment she conceives that she will be a bad mother, and instead of soldiering on like Kevin’s mother, she makes a conscious choice to give the child to someone who she knows will make a better job of it? If the readers understand her motivation will they be willing to stay on her side? That was the question that haunted me while I was writing “The Fabulous Dreams of Maggie de Beer”. Then I asked myself how that child would react when reunited with the mother she didn’t even know she had.
Maggie de Beer chose the dream she wanted to follow on the day she ran away from home at 15, but the child she abandoned eventually becomes the key to her achieving the fame that she had worked so hard and fruitlessly for, sacrificed so much for. Would that mean that it was a sacrifice worth making? Even if Maggie believes so, would the child feel the same way?
So, how many of us would you be able to go that extra mile, making the ultimate sacrifice to win their moment in the celebrity spotlight, the stardom of their dreams?
To be separated from your child at birth and unable to watch them growing and thriving must be one of the most painful experiences any mother can endure. Worse of course to have them die before you, but there must be a very special agony in knowing that they are alive, growing up somewhere else, in someone else’s care, loving someone else, and that you have no part in their lives.
The reunion of such mothers with their lost children is bound to be fraught with dangers. What if they hate you? Blame you? Want nothing to do with you? What if they have been told nothing of your existence and would prefer not to be disillusioned about those they believe to be their true parents? What if it looks like you are back only to cash in on their good fortune? What if you come to regret your decision? Maggie has to face all these questions and many more and the difficulty as a writer was to lead the readers to understand why she did it, and to forgive her.