The year of being full-time mom is coming to a close. The city is fully spring now, and yesterday we had our first hot day. The streets are beginning to hold on to the sour smell of garbage swill, and since two days ago, we’ve had the windows open 24/7. Fall is too close.
This time has been so sweet, of course, because it is fleeting. I’d like to say it’s been all daffodils and roses the entire 14 months, but the truth is, it has been terrifying, frustrating, stagnating, and, well, hard. Even as I type those adjectives, the Uber Mother voice rears up inside and raises her finger to chastise me. Isn’t this the most important thing you’ve ever done? Can’t you think of someone besides yourself? Don’t you love your son????
I both hate the Uber Mother, and want to be her. I want to hear her, and I want to shut her up for good. At least, I think, I am beginning to understand her.
I don’t know how or if I tried to prepare myself for motherhood. The goal of “growing up, going to college, getting married, and having children” was pretty heavily ingrained from early on. It’s not a path I ever denied or tried to see around. When I hit my mid-twenties and had no immediate marriage prospects, I sought depression, not options. Eventually, I got out of the habit of waiting for something to happen and told myself that I might just have to consider other paths. I stopped thinking about wanting children because I wanted children to be a conversation, a possibility that came from a conversation with the right person. I didn’t want children to be this “one size fits all” dream that I’d have to lodge another person into.
As it turns out, the right person did want children, had already had one, and was game for at least one more. His approach to parenting was more intuitive, less about books and experts and psychologists and focus groups. Given to over-thinking any new challenge that comes my way, I welcomed this laissez-faire attitude.
I live in an era in which market forces have successfully translated love for one’s child into all kinds of accoutrements, including $800 strollers, $1500/hour doulas, pre-natal yoga, lactation consultants, a whole section at Barnes and Noble, DVDs, movement classes, music classes, sign language, etc. Preying on the natural anxiety that arises from trying to care for another human being, mega-baby stores have thrived.
Of course when a generation inherits a new array of technology and insight into time-honored traditions, it tends to want to “out-do” the previous generation, big time. I casually asked my mother-in-law one day about leaving my son crying in his car seat while I went to the bathroom. (I was feeling guilty about not being enough, to the point where I was feeling selfish for actually going to the bathroom!!!) Trying to encourage me to give myself a break, she said “Sometimes, you just have to put them down and let them cry.” My sister-in-law, who had given me a Dr. Sears book for Christmas, overheard this and said “I don’t think you should ever leave your baby alone to cry.” She then re-told a memory of waking upin the dark, alone in her crib. “I felt so abandoned,” she said.
The not-so-subtle guilt my sister-in-law was laying on her mother is also evident in the Sears’ books. Too often, the book I have “begs the question” when it defends attachment parenting. For example, when talking about bedtime, the book asks do you want bedtime to be a calming, comforting ritual in which parent and child bond? Or, do you want it to be a schedule forced on your child, even when s/he resists? I’m paraphrasing here, but the use of guilt in these parenting books, and in others, is pretty obvious.
So, where does an anxious mother go when she needs advice and support? Of course, I ask other mothers and fathers on the playground. Of course, I have to resort to my own instincts, and of course, my own personality (good or bad) influences every parenting decision. I have not been “remade” into Uber Mother as the commercial world would have me believe is possible.
A few years ago, a colleague recommended that I read The Red Tent by Anita Daimant because she thought it nicely dovetailed a book we both taught, The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. I read the book, and it is a nice companion to Atwood’s dystopian novel. Atwood’s novel creates a world in which women are the architects. In this world, infertile women get to be mothers, and the fertile women are slaves to the matriarchs. In The Red Tent, Diamant re-imagines a Biblical tribal world in which women have a kind of matriarchy within a larger patriarchy. The women– sisters, mothers, wives, daughters– bear the responsibility of bearing and caring for the children. In these roles, they rely on their bonds and generations of knowledge that have been gained by first-hand experience and passed-down through careful training. These women learn about raising children by watching many mothers, every day, and by being mothers to others’ children before they have their own.
Sounds romantic– I know. Too romantic, and I hate to fall prey to the practice of idealizing an older culture. But, I feel that all of the impositions of the Uber Mother try to instill what was possible when women had a real community in which to become mothers. Today, we move away from families, we buy into the “experts” ideas about how to raise our children, and we think we have progressed when we abandon whatever ideas may have gotten us through our imperfect childhoods. We approach motherhood the way we have approached doing well in school, or competing for a job, establishing a career. The idea that succumbing to some kind of shared, experiential knowledge is advanced, seems passe.
Perhaps these products and books and experts try to get us to believe we can get back to the garden, the the state of perfection, to a state of innocence, where nothing is ruined and one’s upbringing is without abandonment, anger, fear, or loneliness. That’s a lot of pressure to heap on a parent, but I know I feel it. And I hear it in others’ rationale of their parenting. Instead, I’d like to be back in that Red Tent, with my grandmothers, my mother and her sisters. I’d like us all to be muddling through. They’d tell me it’s all going to be OK, and I’d believe them.
