the former belle of east st. louis
Posted on March 30, 2007
Filed Under kids, parenting, snark, career |
A University of Maryland study issued a few weeks back, finds that today’s mothers are doing a better job parenting than the mothers of years’ past, including the mothers of the June Cleaver era. So stick that up your cookie baking arse, Barbara Billingsley. And wrap that perfect string of pearls around your “former belle of East St. Louis” neck while you’re at it because the mothers of the new millennium rock. Except for one little thing, we’re not exactly feeling like rock stars.
The study finds that while mothers are spending a total of 14.1 hours a week tending to their child’s needs, up from 10.1 hours in 1965, moms feel more inadequate now then ever before. Why are so many mothers staggeringly self critical and chronically unhappy when we are superior parents to all mothers before us?
I can only venture a guess and I call it the, “Damned if You Do, Damned if You Don’t (Work That Is) Theory. There are a lot of mothers out there feeling guilty and hopelessly inadequate in the mothering department because they work, either by necessity or by choice. AND there are also a lot of mothers out there feeling guilt and boredom and something akin to intellectual starvation because they are NOT working outside the home. I know, I’ve savored both flavors of guilt.
Thanks to Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem and the womens’ liberation movement, women have choices. The professional climate has evolved since June Cleaver’s day and now a woman can be law partner, doctor, writer, molecular biologist, president (here’s hoping), or any damn thing she pleases. This is a good thing EXCEPT…there is no balanced way to meld professional responsibilities with mothering responsibilities. There are only so many hours in the day.
While most of us are not willing to sacrifice our professional reputation OR our children, we are willing to sacrifice our mental health by pushing ourselves to extreme exhaustion in order to do an adequate job on the home front and on the job. We are left feeling exhausted and, well, only adequate, if we’re lucky.
The guilt that I felt when I was working (unable to volunteer in the classroom or take my children to end of school year pool parties or playdates or accompany the preschool class to the Dr. Seussical performance at the Northshore Music Theater) was crippling.
Now that I am a SAHM, there is new shame and guilt directly correlated to the financial sacrifices my family must make in order for me to stay at home. While I now volunteer in the classroom and take my children to end of school year pool parties and playdates and accompany the preschool class to the Dr. Seussical performance, we are no longer able to eat dinner out, take a vacation, buy new jeans or a better sump pump to help slow the flood in the basement. (Never mind about saving for college tuition and retirement and braces.) There is also the sense that I am wasting a perfectly good brain, one that was educated at some of the best schools in the country. There’s a nasty voice speaking in the back of my skull, right where my cerebellum once was before it atrophied from neglect. It’s whispering, “The longer you stay home, the less valuable, hire-able, admirable you become.” I feel guilty that Friedan and Steinem have fought this equality battle FOR ME, and I’m sitting on the sidelines, nothing but a spectator.
So it follows, that I feel a bit unhealthy. Maybe you do too? If you’re working, then you have the days when the school nurse calls you to say that Junior has spiked a fever and is throwing up all over the cafeteria. You’d love to dash home and pick him up but you just can’t break away from that meeting or you have a monumental presentation to give or you’re working on deadline and Junior has to just sit and stew in his own vomit until your work day is done. And if you’re home, you have the day when both toilets clog, the children come home with holes in the knees of the new jeans and the car won’t start. You must decide where the non-existent money is best spent: plumber, clothing, transportation? 
I believe that June Cleaver was so fucking happy because she had nothing like expectations, hopes and dreams beyond her children. She was doing what was simple, what was expected, no more, no less. (And, I like to think, she drank all afternoon.)
So I’m going to don this fancy June Cleaver apron with sweet aqua and red toile and frost a damn cake for tomorrow’s elementary school fund raiser. And then I’m going to fix myself a scotch.
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Judith Rich Harris: The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do.
By the time your kid turns 10, the kids they hang out with at school are more important than any parental one on one. It’s depressing - if your life is built around creating the perfect child - but it’s also soundly based in the study of separated twins.
Parental inadequacies are built upon the false assumption that we can infinitely mold our kids and smooth out their kinks. But do our kids care about getting in to graduate school- or is fitting in at the playground a more critical issue?
Spend time with your school-aged children. But do it because you enjoy it…
i will purchase something in the baked goods section of our grocery store–drop it off and then join you cc, for that scotch.
hey tsb, its 5 o clock somewhere isn’t it?
(cc, our husbands are together)
cce - you make me laugh. It is the drinking that makes all this mothering possible. (And the drinking that creates the need for the mothering, if you follow me…)
Chesca, hmmm, I note that your comment was sent extremely early this morning; kudos to you on your pre-sunrise enthusiasm. (I hope that you are feeling better.) BTW, the mouse is still on the loose, but I am lulling him into a false sense of security. As for 5 o’clock, I have been sooo good this week, only a half-bottle of wine — and that is stretched over 4 days so far — but it is Friday! I don’t care for scotch, but I hear a margarita calling my name….
my friends and i have long talked about starting a business that would allow us to earn decent money (at least more than we’d have to pay a good babysitter) AND offer the flexibility not to miss those important and necessary moments with our kids. i’ll let you know when we come across something realistic (i guess we’re all just too damn tired to brainstorm anything!).
as for feeling damned if we do….i don’t have any good friends who feel entirely released from that. all are tired. all are pushing themselves, sometimes at the expense of our health (mental and physical). all feel this guilt.
then we read snow flower and the secret fan (yes, book group) and temporarily feel slightly better about our own situations because women then were truly suffering.
ugh-i’m in for that drink, too.
Thanks for the book leads, GWS and Chesca. I know that gws has been trotting out the Nurture Assumption for a longggg time but it’s certainly a contradiction to the cult of intensive mothering.
And Chesca, I am always up for a book that makes me feel better about my situation.
tsb - mouse in your house? Do tell…
Ugh, I became “aware” earlier in the week that I had an unwanted inhabitant and promptly went lysol crazy. I probably should have taken a deep breath and merely set a trap to kill the thing before destroying his scent trail, but as it was in my kitchen (UGH)I cleaned first and thought later. (I am perplexed by the location of his little “gifts” as it is in a non-food area and I find no evidence that my pantry has been invaded, but nonetheless, he is here and I will have him GONE.) I am no PETA afficionado, my sentence is death to the intruder!, so I baited my spring traps and waited. In a previous experience, I learned to wrap my bait in gauze so that my little houseguest would snag his teeth in his snack, but this time I failed to wrap the gauze around the trigger as well as the peanut butter. I have since corrected my error and when Houdini comes for his catered dinner tonight I am hoping to break his little neck. I’ll keep you posted.
Wow, you have this death to mouse thing down to a science. I have act you could borrow or keep, keep being preferable.
Sorry, earlier book lead that will make me feel better about my situation was from esl…Still doing the book group thang, huh? I’ve been exiled from mine after my send up of the bureaucracy of book group. Oh well.
My morning comment was hastily made. One might read it and come away thinking that I’m somehow criticizing those who are stay at home spouses. (Gender neutral because theoretically, it could happen otherwise).
What happens is that I read or hear about mothers who are “staggeringly self critical and chronically unhappy” because their child ended up less than originally hoped for. These mothers blame themselves for all sorts of things. Schizophrenia used to be blamed on mothers who caused the disease by their coldness and rejection of their children. Mom’s that were too close would be blamed for twisting their son’s sexual orientation. It’s a load of bullshit.
We’ve so romanticized motherhood that women MUST fail.
gws- We know that intellectually. But it’s so hard to internalize on an emotional level. I heard O talk about his friend P and how much P hates his mother. Apparently this seven year old P goes around school telling his friends how much he dislikes his own Mom. I shudder to think what my kids say about me. Point is, we try so damn hard b/c that is how our society has come to define parenting. One must be Supermom or Superdad to feel, here’s that word again, adequate. And after all that, our own kids walk around telling others how much they dislike us. More scotch please.
You’re only an alcoholic if you drink gin.
I have a question. What about moms who are older, and therefore have had time to get sick of working? Do they still feel this DIYD-squared guilt?
I’m going on 30, have worked for 9 years, am now a full-time grad student and work part-time. When all this school is over (and Colin Firth consents to let me have his children), I would really like to be a SAHM because I’m one of those kids that has just started to understand her mother. Do moms in their 30s get this syndrome too?
Yes, sorry Moshizzle, but I don’t know anybody who doesn’t grapple with the DIYD squared syndrome. Won’t you feel like your not using that hard earned graduate degree if you decide to stay home with Colin Firth’s children? Won’t Colin Firth miss the intellectual stimulating woman he fell in love with once you’re home doing his laundry? Won’t you resent his handsomeness once you are relegated to glorified Nanny? There’s just no avoiding it. It’s DIYD squared no matter who you are or who you’re married to.
Great post - and I agree completely that it is really, really hard to find a satisfactory balance.
When you’ve got kids and you work (full-time, that is)- life is lived at a hectic, oh-my-god-im-late-im-late-again-that-really-isnt-good-enough-where-is-my-fucking-purse-you’ll-just-have-to-wear-the-green-hat-to-school-shit-don’t-cry-now kind of pace that it can really, really suck.
But then life at home can. be. unremittingly. dull. and. lonely.