Once my daughters began school, I was surrounded, it seemed, by women who had surrendered their better selves -- and their sanity -- to motherhood. Women who pulled all-nighters hand-painting paper plates for a class party. Who obsessed over the most minute details of playground politics. Who -- like myself -- appeared to be sleep-walking through life in a state of quiet panic.
Some of the mothers appeared to have lost nearly all sense of themselves as adult women. They dressed in kids' clothes -- overall shorts and go-anywhere sandals. They ate kids' foods. They were so depleted by the affection and care they lavished upon their small children that they had no energy left...
This felt like she'd been following me around for the past ten years of my life. It was almost scary how accurate it was.
Most of us in this generation [born between 1958 and the early 1970s] grew up believing that we had fantastic, unlimited, freedom of choice. Yet as mothers many women face "choices" on the order of: You can continue to pursue your professional dreams at the cost of abandoning your children to long hours of inadequate child care. Or: You can stay at home with your baby and live in a state of virtual, crazy-making isolation because you can't afford a nanny, because there is no such thing as part-time day care, and because your husband doesn't come home until 8:30 at night.
These are choices that don't feel like choices at all. They are the harsh realities of family life in a culture that has no structures in place to allow women -- and men -- to balance work and child-rearing.
I think where Warner begins to veer off course is here. She's got it right -- we have un-chooseable choices. However, she begins to blame it on our culture and on our society, in typical liberal fashion. Another HUGE clue that she's way off the mark -- she begins to wax eloquent about, what else, France:
I lived in France before moving to Washington, and there, my elder daughter attended two wonderful, affordable, top-quality part-time pre-schools, which were essentially meant to give stay-at-home moms a helping hand. One was run by a neighborhood co-op and the other by a Catholic organization. Government subsidies kept tuition rates low. A sliding scale of fees brought some diversity. Government standards meant that the staffers were all trained in the proper care of young children. My then 18-month-old daughter painted and heard stories and ate cookies for the sum total in fees of about $150 a month. (This solution may be French -- but do we have to bash it?)
Yes, actually, since you mentioned it, I will. Here's why -- France -- and you, and all the other blue-staters like you -- believe that it's SOMEONE ELSE'S RESPONSIBILITY TO FIX THIS FOR YOU. Warner descends into a laundry list of government solutions to the problem of Mommy Madness, which boils down to the following:
- tax subsidies for corporations to create incentives for them to adopt family-friendly policies
- federal standards for child-care facilities
- "...flexible, affordable, locally available, high-quality part-time day care so that stay-at-home moms can get a life of their own."
- convoluted systems of child-care vouchers and tax credits
- "...progressive tax policies that would transfer our nation's wealth back to the middle class. So that mothers and fathers could stop running like lunatics, and start spending real quality -- and quantity -- time with their children. And so that motherhood could stop being the awful burden it is for so many women today and instead become something more like a joy."
Huh?
Okay, let's take this point by point. I admit that I brightened up when I saw the word "tax", at the possibility I was actually going to see some sensible talk from this magazine. HAH! What was I thinking?
So we start tinkering with external manipulations of private corporations' employment policies? Yes, we all here on the outside know better how to run YOUR business than you do.
And then, of course, creating a set of federal standards for child care facilities will completely do away with crappy daycare. Mmm-hmm. Wave your magic wand, O Great And All-Powerful Congressman, and all will be well.
Of course, it will take a wave of that special magic wand to give us the next thing: perfect, flexible child care staffed by perfect, brilliant, dedicated people with no lives of their own so they can completely give themselves to our children. Keep dreaming, hon! I was on the inside of the child care biz for a while and I know what the conditions are like. There are some very precious people who take special care, and there are some ditz-brains who can't find "up".
Warner does eventually come back around to the stuff she should be writing about, because it's true. Here's a long excerpt from the end of the article, which I found resonated strongly with me:
Women today mother in the excessive, control-freakish way that they do in part because they are psychologically conditioned to do so. But they also do it because, to a large extent, they have to. Because they are unsupported, because their children are not taken care of, in any meaningful way, by society at large. Because there is right now no widespread feeling of social responsibility -- for children, for families, for anyone, really -- and so they must take everything onto themselves. And because they can't, humanly, take everything onto themselves, they simply go nuts.
I see this all the time. It never seems to stop. So that, as I write this, I have an image fresh in my mind: the face of a friend, the mother of a first-grader, who I ran into one morning right before Christmas.
She was in the midst of organizing a class party. This meant shopping. Color-coordinating paper goods. Piecework, pre-gluing of arts-and-crafts projects. Uniformity of felt textures. Of buttons and beads. There were the phone calls, too. From other parents. With criticism and "constructive" comments that had her up at night, playing over conversations in her mind. "I can't take it anymore," she said to me. "I hate everyone and everything. I am going insane."
I looked at her face, saw her eyes fill with tears, and in that instant saw the faces of dozens of women I'd met -- and, of course, I saw myself.
And I was reminded of the words of a French doctor I'd once seen. I'd come to him about headaches. They were violent. They were constant. And they would prove, over the next few years, to be chronic. He wrote me a prescription for a painkiller. But he looked skeptical as to whether it would really do me much good. "If you keep banging your head against the wall," he said, "you're going to have headaches."
I have thought of these words so many times since then. I have seen so many mothers banging their heads against a wall. And treating their pain -- the chronic headache of their lives -- with sleeping pills and antidepressants and anxiety meds and a more and more potent, more and more vicious self-and-other-attacking form of anxious perfectionism.
And I hope that somehow we will all find a way to stop. Because we are not doing ourselves any good. We are not doing our children -- particularly our daughters -- any good. We're not doing our marriages any good. And we're doing nothing at all for our society.
We are simply beating ourselves black and blue. So let's take a breather. Throw out the schedules, turn off the cell phone, cancel the tutors (fire the OT!). Let's spend some real quality time with our families, just talking, hanging out, not doing anything for once. And let ourselves be.
She's right about this. And she doesn't even realize it, I don't think. It's not about fixing our government or our society, or emulating France. It's about changing our frame of reference, our mindset, our paradigm. The "anxious perfectionism" is unrealistic and unhealthy. Even the Proverbs 31 woman had household help.
Nathan had a good point, in that it seems like for many of these women, their desire to be a "good mother" was more of a competitive one rather than for actually seeking the real, lasting good of their children. We've got to be good mothers or our friends will look down on us and we won't get called to host the next playgroup. Please, people!
I think that the turn for me began when I was able to break free of competitive motherhood and realize afresh that I'm an imperfect person, my kids are imperfect people, and that even though I'm responsible for them, I can't create a perfect bubble-world around them either. They look to me to meet their needs, yes, but one of their needs is to be able to see a functioning, rational Mommy who is fulfilling God's call on her life -- a call that not only includes guiding and caring for them, but also doing the other things He created her to do, like make music, paint, write, teach, etc. They need to see a whole adult, not just one who has completely buried her own self deep in some hiding place, only to re-emerge when the youngest one turns 18.
This is not about federal vouchers and grants and subsidies and regulations and standards. Those things are completely wrong-headed. If you want to fix things, let's eliminate the hassle of taxes completely and go to a flat-rate tax. Besides being more fair, it would make our winter-time lives much more pleasant and stop forcing me to take the kids and leave the house so my husband can finish the taxes. But really and truly, I don't care about all that. No, what has to happen is that women need to wake up and grow up. Our kids don't need a buddy or an ease-of-life-facilitator. They need clear-thinking parents who set realistic boundaries for themselves, who recognize the need to be themselves but who don't let their search for self lead them away from their responsibilities as parents.
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