In May 1995, when I was in the final countdown of my first pregnancy, I was feeling increasingly panicked by impending motherhood.
At a party, I timidly broached the subject with a woman who had just given birth to her second child. I told her of another mom who took her children on educational nature walks and pressed the collected leaves between pages in a scrapbook.
“Do I really have to do that stuff?” I asked, with equal parts whining and terror in my voice: “Oh, for heaven’s sakes,” she said, rolling her eyes and laughing. “Just do what I do: Aim for adequate. You’ll be fine.”
A decade and three children later, I think back on what was once my favorite piece of parenting advice and wonder whatever happened to adequate.
When did the concepts of “good enough” become tantamount to failure? Perfect seems to be the only measurement that counts.
All around me I see mothers – including the one in the mirror – turning themselves inside out, day after day, exhausted, angry all the time, hating the pace of their life, yet too terrified to jump off the hamster wheel for fear of letting their children down.
The standards for what now passes as a Good Mommy have gotten so ridiculously high, it should be laughable. That is, if anyone had a sense of humor left.
Unfortunately, proper, attentive parenting has become very serious business, with an awful lot of “assistance” coming at you from the outside, often dispensed with an eyebrow cocked as if to wonder whether you are truly up for the job:
From the former pediatrician who once blamed me for my son’s illness because I put him in day care while I worked; from the music teacher who “prefers” I take notes during lessons so I can better supervise practice at home; from the letter that came from school offering tips on how to verbally support my child during standardized testing, from the dental hygenist who scolded me because I didn’t lay my 5-year-old across my lap every night to floss between her teeth. She gave me a chart to help keep me on task.
One of the new, popular notions is today’s parents are neurotic, control freaks who take some kind of perverse pleasure in micromanaging their children’s lives.
They say this is a choice we are making.
And yes, technically, they are right. We do choose to sign our kids up for rec-league sports so they experience teamwork, we do pay dearly for after-school enrichment classes to make up for all that has been cut from school budgets, we do arrange elaborate social calenders because we no longer feel safe just letting them play outside.
But what critics fail to realize is when you are swirling in the middle of this madness, it sure doesn’t feel like a choice.
As my friend Kyle, a single mother of two, likes to say: “People always tell you to learn how to say no, but they don’t mean say noto them.”
A few months ago, my boys had no school – again. This year, they have had at least one non-holiday off from school every month.
And, typically those have come with no provision for easy child care.
On this particular day, it was parent-teacher conferences.
I dropped off my daughter early at her preschool and then drove across town to a $40-per-child day camp for the boys. Then I went to work. But not for long.
My fourth-grader’s teacher required students be present at the conference to talk about goals. Which meant I left work midday, drove to the day camp, picked up the boys, drove to their school, went to back-to-back conferences, took them to lunch since they missed lunch at camp, took them back to camp, and then drove back to work to squeeze in a couple hours of work before it was time to pick everyone up.
And to truly cement my day, my son’s first-grade teacher informed me we might have a problem with his lack of focus in class, even though he was working above grade level.
Perhaps, she suggested, my husband and I could make more of an effort to create special time for him so he wouldn’t suffer from being the middle child.
I was a train wreck by the time I got home.
Waiting on the dining room table was the latest copy of Newsweek magazine.
My husband had left it. The cover story was called “The Myth of the Perfect Mother: Why It Drives Real Women Crazy”
“I thought you might want to read this,” he said gently.
What struck me about the article, written by Judith Warner and excerpted from her book, “Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety,” is how parents today feel so totally on their own.
My husband, who is a decade older than me, came of age in the early 1970s when the anthem of the day was “We Can Change The World.” I reached adulthood in the 1980s when the sensibility had shifted to “The only one you can change is yourself.”
So people my age and younger, especially the women, turned inward. When schools decline or cut programs parents aren’t taking to the streets demanding change. We just suck it up, signing our kids up for legions of private lessons and activities we can’t really afford and can’t really manage.
And sadly it has all become so commonplace no one even questions the wisdom.
Perhaps most tragic is as we run ourselves ragged in the name of our kids, we have somehow lost the joy of parenthood.
There is nothing I have done in my life as important to me than having children. Sometimes the sheer emotion I feel takes my breath away. Like last week, when, after a particularly hard soccer loss, my 7-year-old slipped his arm around his older brother’s shoulder and said, “Good game.”
That’s why you have kids.
For this Mother’s Day my most sincere wish for myself and every other mother I know is to worry less about getting it perfect and learn to enjoy it a little more.
Just aim for adequate and we’ll be fine.
One of the latest innovations for 21st-century moms is the motherhood blogosphere.
“Mothers are talking to each other day-to-day about their feelings about being a mother,” says Miriam Peskowitz, author of “The Truth Behind the Mommy Wars.”
“Part of the problem of motherhood is that it’s very isolating, both psychologically and politically. But now we have a community of bloggers, which is very important.
Anne-Marie Nichols , who writes “A Mama’s Rant” blog, lives in Firestone, which she calls “the second- fastest-growing bedroom community in the state.”
Recently, she struck up a friendship with Peskowitz, a fellow mother-writer who lives on the East Coast.
“We met through her blogs,” says Nichols. “The cool things about the blogs is that you find similar voices across the country. It’s hard to find it next door anymore. During the day, this place is like a ghost town. People are either home-schooling or at work.”
A sampling of the motherhood blogosphere includes:
The Mother of All Blogs
anndouglas.blogspot.com
Mother Shock
mothershock.com/blog
Playground Revolution
playgroundrevolution.blogspot.com
A Mama’s Rant
mamarant.blogs.com
Generation Exhausted
movershakerbirthdaycakebaker.blogs.com
The Mommy Blog
www.themommyblog.com
Resources
Activism for the 2005 Mother’s Day Campaign by Mothers & More will focus attention on expectations of how mothers “should” spend their time, and what mothers can do about it.
Visit www.mothersandmore.org for details on campaign activities, T-shirts, bag tags, and their national Day After Mother’s Day virtual event – a live, public, online survey – on May 9. It also includes information on local chapters in Denver, Boulder, Fort Collins, Colorado Springs, Highlands Ranch, Evergreen and Castle Rock. The Denver group, for example, has about 90 members and meets every second and fourth Tuesday each month.
MOTHERS (Mothers Ought to Have Equal Rights) just launched a new website called Mother’s Book Bag (www.mothersbookbag.org). They’re encouraging mothers to form book groups, using MOTHERS Book Bag as a starting point for consciousness-raising.
The Mothers Movement Online offers a resources, features, essays, books and actions for social change, including support for the Work and Family Bill of Rights and the Campaign to Strength Social Security (www.mothersmovement.org).
– Colleen O’Connor
