Braun-Levine, Cahn and Brott emphasize that maternal gatekeeping is usually not malicious. In some cases, it was the men who rebelled against being shut out and pressured the women to curb their possessiveness. Levine's husband, a home-based freelance writer like her, was an active, nurturing father to their young son, which was exactly what she had always wanted. What she had not expected was to feel hurt every time the boy cried for Daddy, not Mommy. When I am honest with myself, what I really want is for Bill to be an eager but charmingly inept father, a soldier to my general.
Some mothers wisely keep such feelings to themselves.
But in some instances, maternal jealousy can turn ugly and wreak havoc on parents' and children's lives. The result was that instead of being in the care of his father while the mother worked, the boy was now left in day care. This is an extreme example. James Levine, director of the Fatherhood Project at the Families and Work Institute, recalls that after he gave a talk on encouraging father involvement to a group of nurses, a woman in the audience said that her daughter needed regular medication for a chronic illness and she simply couldn't trust her husband to give it to her. There was no rational basis to believe that he couldn't or wouldn't give the daughter the medicine.