October
25
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The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan
A mother lets her 8-year-old girl walk three blocks home from school by herself. A neighbour sees, calls the police and she taken away to the School for Good Mothers. If, after 12 months of correctional training, she hasn’t met the state’s standards of what makes a good mother, she will lose her parenting rights for good.
There are just over 80 mothers in Jessamine Chan’s creepy, dystopian school for good (or should I say, not so good ) mothers. One mother got caught spanking her child at the grocery shop, another didn’t childsafe her apartment properly and a third was caught posting a video of her 3-year old’s tantrum on Facebook. Most offenses constitute some form of neglect, but spare a thought for the Mum of the 17-year-old boy charged with coddling – considered a highly damaging “subset of emotional abuse”. Not a risk in my household.
The book’s protagonist is Frida Liu. She’s locked away after leaving her 18-month-old home alone for two and a half hours in a toddler activity centre to pick up something from work. According to the state, this is neglect, abandonment but worst of all, the sign of someone who lacks the innate ability to be focus on motherhood above all else.
On arrival, the mothers are required to chant “I am a bad mother but I’m learning to be good” before being stripped of all personal items, given their own robotic baby and up to 12 months to re-train.
The mothers are under the 24-hour surveillance of guards with lab coats, clipboards and body cams. As if that’s not enough, the clammy robot babies are also collecting data – gauging heart rates, blinking patterns and facial expressions to measure the emotions that good mothers should and shouldn’t experience when spending time with their child. There are weekly lessons and regular tests that include how quickly the mothers settle their robots to sleep at night (note – more than 8 minutes is a fail) and how well they modulate their voice during bedtime stories. Yes they have to do more than just stay awake.
The School for Good Mothers plays on all the wretched themes of perfectionism, judgement and mother guilt. But it doesn’t end there; there is a school next door for bad fathers with a far more lenient set of rules so you could say there’s a feminist angle as well. There are also big racial and class themes as mothers from minority groups and disadvantage struggle more than others to meet society’s impossible (but scarily real) hurdles and expectations. Last but not least, the disturbingly compliant parents will make you ponder authoritarianism.
As debut novels go, The School for Good Mothers is as big a success as any author could hope. A TV series is in the works and Barack Obama has included it in his top 10 reads for 2022. Be prepared for a slowish start that gathers pace and then settles in. At no point is there any sense of how it is all going to end, which is possibly a metaphor for the life of a contemporary Mum.
And that’s my 2 cents worth
Readhead 