Throwing the Baby Out with the Bath Water: Miranda and the Myth of Maternal Instinct on Sex and the City

Out of all the Sex and the City women, high-powered lawyer Miranda Hobbes (Cynthia Nixon) is the most unlikely to become a mother. Turning up at Laney Berlin's (Dana Wheeler-Nicholson) baby shower with a gift packet of condoms, Miranda's attitude toward mothers and babies is playfully prophylactic ("The Baby Shower," episode 10). Sitting on the steps, away from the fecundity inside, Miranda bemoans that the witch in Hansel and Gretel was very misunderstood: "I mean the woman builds her dream house and those brats come along and start eating it." Compare this to the finale of Miranda's story. Hunched over the tub, bathing her husband's sick mother, embracing family life in Brooklyn, and being told by her housekeeper Magda that this is love constitutes a hard ending for many viewers to accept. There is a feeling that, surely, the cynical Miranda would never compromise in these ways. And yet if we follow her story and look again at the last scenes of Miranda bathing her mother-in-law we can see that her narrative makes a plausible progression. By the end of season 6 the representation of Miranda has taught us the complexities of motherhood as a learned behavior rather than as one that is instinctual to all women.

Looking back at Sex and the City it seems that the series has deliberately worked against the myth of motherhood that, according to Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels, has been perpetrated by the media since the 1980s. In The Mommy Myth (2004), Douglas and Michaels argue that the media works to pit woman against woman and, more importantly, mother against mother. They contend that the new momism "seeks to contain and, where possible, eradicate, all the social changes brought on by feminism," adding, "It is backlash in its most refined, pernicious form because it insinuates itself into women's psyches just where we have been rendered most vulnerable: in our love for our kids" (23). To illustrate their thesis they give examples of two media stereotypes: the ideal / Madonna / nurturing mother and the bad working mother. The media uses both of these stock stereotypes of motherhood to judge mothers while at the same time giving them impossible standards by which to judge themselves (11-12). Douglas and Meredith propose that it is now time to "exhume what feminists really hoped to change about motherhood" and, further, "to go back to a time when many women felt free to tell the truth about motherhood—e.g. that at times they felt ambivalent about it because it was so hard and yet so undervalued" (27).

Miranda's ambivalence toward motherhood is identified early on in season 4. Rather than follow the obvious narrative trajectory of Charlotte and Trey's attempt to have a child, the series gives us Miranda's surprise pregnancy ("Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda," episode 59), which further deflates the fictional ending: a single woman with a lazy ovary knocked up by a man with a missing testicle. At brunch she is forced to tell her friends the news. Charlotte, who has devoted herself to being a wife to Trey and is desperate to conceive their baby, is devastated and leaves the restaurant abruptly. A conversation about abortion ensues. If you consider that it was only in the 1950s that Lucille Ball changed the fact that pregnancy could not be alluded to on U.S. television and in 1992 that Vice President Dan Quayle berated the sitcom character Murphy Brown for having a child out of wedlock (Nelson in Akass and McCabe 87), you can see how radical and groundbreaking this discussion is. Despite telling Carrie that she can barely find time in her busy life to schedule an abortion let alone have a baby, Miranda decides, at the last moment, to keep the baby. It may, after all, be her last chance and even the cynical Miranda cannot pass up the opportunity to experience motherhood, which according to Peggy Orenstein has "supplanted marriage as the source of romantic daydreams' for childless, unmarried women in their twenties and early to mid-thirties" (Douglas and Michaels 25). It is safe to say that Miranda's decision is based on more practical concerns than romantic daydreams; if she had working ovaries (and maybe a partner) the pregnancy would possibly have a completely different outcome.

It is not only that Miranda chooses to keep her baby (much to her friends' delight), but her swelling body, with its fatigue, uncontrollable flatulence, and out-of-control sex drive, that are constant sources of amusement to the viewer and bemusement to Miranda. As she so eloquently puts it, "I don't know why they call it 'morning sickness' when it's all fucking day long" ("Just Say Yes," episode 60). Told that she is expecting a boy, Miranda finds herself "faking her sonogram" ("Change of a Dress," episode 62); the romance of pregnancy turns out to be no less fictional, Miranda discovers, than prince charming and simultaneous orgasm. Telling Carrie that "everyone else is glowing about her pregnancy," Miranda wonders whether she ever will. Magda finds the sonogram photograph of the baby and tells Miranda that a boy is good luck, compelling Miranda to perform her now ritual fake joy. She pulls a muscle in her neck as a result. If this is not a good enough example of how mothers are taught to respond to their pregnancies (in the same way women are taught to respond to engagement proposals), it is reinforced by Carrie's reluctance to marry Aidan. Asking the question "are we just programmed?" to want marriage and babies, this episode confronts the viewer with the fiction of "maternal instinct." Carrie's question is partly answered by Miranda's rant two episodes later: "The fat ass, the farting, it's ridiculous! I am unfuckable and I have never been so horny in my entire life. That's why you're supposed to be married when you're pregnant—so somebody is obligated to have sex with you" ("Ring a Ding Ding," episode 64). In this line, Miranda translates maternal instinct into social mores. Her nine-month-long abjection is eventually complete when, interrupting Carrie's last New York night with Big (Chris Noth), her waters break over Carrie's beautiful new Christian Louboutin shoes—the reality wave of motherhood washing over the fairy-tale glass slippers ("I Heart New York," episode 66).