Thanks so much to everyone who has commented or sent an email- I didn't know that anyone still even read this blog! All is going just fine in Lucaland. He is now five weeks old and beginning to smile which definitely makes all the drudgery a lot more worthwhile. Nico absolutely loves being a big brother, much more than I thought he would actually. He can't wait to wake Luca up every morning, he sings him songs, and he's constantly kissing and hugging him and talking about how much he loves his baby brother (who he refers to as "his" baby). At least until now, he hasn't seemed to resent the extra attention that Luca gets although he does realize that the baby can be rather demanding at times. The other day he summed it up nicely when he said "So my baby is sort of like a boss who cries right?" Exactly.
So a few months ago, there was an article on one of my favorite online parenting magazines- Babble.com. What this woman had to say really drove me crazy and since I've written for them in the past, I decided to write a reply and see if they'd be interested in publishing it . Unfortunately the editor decided that they'd already published enough stuff on the topic. Rather than let all the work go to waste I decided to post it here. Please feel free to let me know what you think!
Lose the Labels
Lately
there’s been a spate of attention given to the so-called Bad Mothers.
Through tell-all mommy blogs, revealing essays, and a slew of recently
published confessional “mommoirs,” mothers are diving off of their
home-made Play-Doh pedestals in unforeseen numbers. In a recent essay here on Babble
Katie Allison Granju discussed this phenomenon. “Once upon a time,
women were under tremendous cultural pressure to be something known as
"Good Mothers”… Fast forward to 2009. The public Cult of the Good
Mother has been replaced by the Cult of the Bad Mother, and everything
has been turned on its head,” Granju writes, as though the time when
mothers were under pressure to be “good” is in the far distant past,
buried under a pile of June Cleaver’s discarded aprons and a stack of
freshly laundered bell bottoms.
The
reality is that the pressure to be a good mother has not gone anywhere,
and has in fact been steadily increasing over the past three decades to
the point that we are now caught up in a toxic tornado of advice,
judgment and self-doubt. To coincide with this, we are living in a
country in which mothers are given less governmental support in terms
of maternity leave, health care and childcare, than the majority of
other developed nations in the world.
Nevertheless,
we are supposed to manage it all with aplomb. “Luckily,” there are
plenty of people out there who want to tell us just how to do this.
Between 1970 and 2000, over 800 books on motherhood were published. A
mere 27 of those books however, were published during the first 10
years of that time period, a drop in the bucket compared to the number
of parenting books published in 2008 alone.
Our newsstands are packed with dozens of parenting advice magazines and
then there’s the internet where everywhere you turn, there’s another
parenting site, another online mother’s forum, and yet another expert
telling us how we can improve. They tell us how we can better protect our children, make them sleep and eat better, get them to do better in school; in short, they tell us how we can
be better mothers because let’s face it, the general consensus seems to
be that we’re not quite good enough. Otherwise, why would we need all
this help? The truly crazy thing is that with
all the conflicting “expert” opinions, we are invariably left feeling
guilty because no matter how much advice we try and follow, at least
according to someone out there, we never will be good enough.
Amidst
this deluge of parenting pressure, there have always been mothers who
fought against the tide by trying to write about motherhood in a more
realistic tone. In the fifties and sixties there were Shirley Jackson
and Jean Kerr, both of whom wrote with humor about the less glamorous
side of motherhood. Then along came Erma Bombeck and later, Anne Lamott
and Salon.com’s “Mothers Who Think.” Now with the advent of the
internet and personal blogs, we have a medium that allows more mothers
than ever before to write truthfully about their experiences. Granju
admits that having this sort of release can be a positive thing.
However, she then goes on to worry that perhaps we’ve gone “too far in
destigmatizing parental lapses.” She is concerned for example, that if
we forgive the woman who blogs about losing her temper and “swatting”
her child in the grocery store, does this mean we also forgive the
woman who doesn’t blog but does the same thing, leaving a nasty red
mark?
She
writes about a time when she blogged about accidentally forgetting to
pick up the youngest of her four children from the babysitter (who
happened to be her mother-in-law), and compared this incident to
parents who forget their children in the backseats of sweltering or
freezing cars with tragic consequences. Naturally, most of the readers
of her post were sympathetic and supportive which made Granju feel
better. BUT, she writes, maybe that’s not what she needed. Maybe
instead, she needed a “bigger helping of maternal guilt, spurred on by
negative judgment” to prevent herself from repeating the mistake. “In
hindsight, I am comfortable saying that I screwed up to such a degree
that I deserved negative judgment, not affirmation or support. That day
at least, I truly deserved the bad parent label…”
I
find it shocking that in a society where as mothers we are positively
swimming in guilt and judgment, Granju is actually suggesting that she
needed to feel more guilty and be judged more harshly.
Her claim that what she did was essentially the same thing as parents
who forget their children in cars is a stretch to say the least. Even
so, I find myself wondering, since when has it become our job to judge
in the first place? Why is it our duty to “forgive” the hypothetical kid swatters (or Granju for that matter either)? Isn’t judging each other as mothers the thing that’s gotten us into this quagmire in the first place?
Because
after all, we can blame the media pressure all we want but a good
portion of the criticism we receive is coming from, well, each other.
Ironically, the internet, which has provided a platform for so many
mothers to express their frustrations, is also the very thing that has
allowed us through the ease and anonymity of comments sections and
forum posts, to become so hypercritical of each other in the first
place. Rather than turn our anger towards the sources of all this
pressure to begin with, we’ve turned it against each other, in the
process, becoming our own worst enemies.
Granju
however, seems concerned that rather than becoming too judgmental, our
society is actually heading in the opposite direction and becoming too
permissive of any and all mothering behaviors. She
worries that the media appetite for maternal imperfection might be
“leading us down a slippery slope of misplaced tolerance, where passing
any sort of judgment against any sort of parenting — no matter how
clearly unsatisfactory — ceases to exist.”
I hardly think that we are anywhere even near to that scenario. The media is obsessed
with maternal imperfection but not in any sort of condoning or tolerant
way. “Bad mothers” such as Susan Smith, Andrea Yates, and at the lower
end of the spectrum, Britney Spears, are constantly being herded under
the spotlights as the latest example of atrocious mothering behavior.
Even the non-psychotic bad mother media darlings such as Lenore Skenazy (“I let my 9 year old ride the subway by himself”) and Ayelet Waldman
(“I love my husband more than my kids”), are for the most part treated
with vilification rather than tolerance or God forbid, respect. Never
mind that there are many other mothers out there who agree with their
thoughts and choices, or that neither of them actually think of
themselves as being bad mothers, only imperfect women who are trying to
raise their children in the best ways they know how.
Of
all of the recent articles that have come out about the “bad mother,”
Granju's is the only one that suggests that perhaps we have gone too
far in accepting “bad” parenting behaviors. However, almost without
exception, all of them succeed in treating mothers who write honestly
about their experiences with a certain level of derision. They refer to
them as naughty mommies and medicated mothers who have been professionally diagnosed with badness. They are said to be big kids who are going through a stage and in danger of having their worst habits reinforced by their over sharing.
In short, they are made out to be seen as a combination of a toddler in
the midst of a tantrum, and a rebellious and narcissistic adolescent
who is merely following the cool new “naughty-mom blogging” trend.
Although most of the articles give lip service to the fact that today's mothers are
fighting against legitimate societal pressures, the issue is dropped in
favor of other concerns such as whether or not these women are sharing
too much, or that perhaps what they’re sharing doesn’t matter that much
in the first place since they are, for the most part white and middle
class. Some of these criticisms are valid and worth thinking about.
However, I find the infantilization of these mothers to be insulting,
as well as counterproductive to improving the lot of mothers
everywhere, no matter what their class background may be.
At
the end of her essay, Granju states that she hopes we can soon find a
balance between the extreme expressions of Good Motherhood and Bad
Motherhood. I agree. But even more so, I hope that we can one day stop
the pointless activity of labeling ourselves as good and bad mothers
altogether. It's safe to say that most women who write about
questionable parenting actions, whether it be choosing not to
breastfeed, losing one’s temper, or, as it was in Granju’s case, being
a working mother who forgets to pick up her baby, are already
questioning their behavior and don’t need the rest of us to judge them
as well. If a mother writes about committing a serious crime, by all
means let’s voice our objections but as for the rest of the time, how
about we just keep our labels and our judgments to ourselves for a
change?
