Mommy Wars

This is an interesting NYTimes blog, "Room for Debate"  that teases out the impossibility of being a good mom, and the divisiveness it creates.  Of the blogs, I found Ayelet Waldman's and Judith Warner's words particularly resonant.


From Ayelet Waldman.... 

The vast majority of mothers find themselves forced to make professional sacrifices. Even if they work full time, their careers are often on trajectories very different from what they’d imagined. And if one is forced by circumstance to sacrifice an ambition that one has nurtured, if one is forced to see oneself in a completely different way, then by God it had all better be worth it. 

This means that our children have not only to be happy, but to do well, to be successful, to reflect the value of our sacrifice. That also means that our decisions about our children take on fraught meaning.

Someone else’s choice becomes, at times, not just another way to do things, but an attack on us, on our choices. We can’t disagree, because disagreement means that our choices are not merely different, but wrong. And we have far too much at stake to allow that possibility. So we go on the attack, we paint one another as bad mothers, when what we are really afraid of is that we might be one ourselves. 

 And from Judith Warner...

It seems to me that this posture comes out of insecurity and an over-investment in the choices we make as mothers. It’s as though, in making decisions about vaccinations, or preschools, or the permissibility of dessert, our identities are on the line each time.

Are our identities this unstable? Perhaps this isn’t surprising at a time when many of the old certainties are gone.We’ve been liberated from the narrow life paths that mothers were expected to assume in generations past. But we don’t particularly embrace this liberation. Unlike the baby boomers before us, we don’t revel in the new possibilities of motherhood today, largely because the promises of feminism have time and again come up against a wall of political impossibility.

Our much-vaunted “choices,” in an absence of family-friendly social policies, have largely proven hollow. For most mothers, the real freedom to choose how they live their lives remains a distant dream. Many blame themselves for falling short and then buttress themselves against self-criticism by critiquing other mothers’ so-called choices. 

There would be great relief - and much greater solidarity - for mothers in realizing that just about everyone, in one way or another, is struggling to keep her head above water.