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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