But mothers are no longer managing the world of childhood from their distracted adult perch, phone in one hand, cigarette in the other; they’re down on the floor and eye to eye with their kids, taking on the role of playmates, coaches, surrogate siblings, and all-round domestic CEOs. Mom looms large on the horizon now— even more than she did in the pre-feminist past,when children were rug rats, not tender, complex little beings, and mothers had tablecloths to iron. No one wants to roll back down the hill into that world. (Too many tablecloths.) But the reigning “child-centred” theory of parenthood may prove to be less about the well-being of the child than we imagine.
Let us not forget, the full moon of motherhood has only been visible in the sky for the past 10 years or so. The intimate details of motherhood, now so bloggable, were once considered beneath discussion. In the 1950s and ’60s,women were expected to pass through their child-rearing years as gracefully, stoically, and inconspicuously as possible; a new mother extolling the virtues of her Swedish breast pump at a cocktail party would soon find herself alone by the cheese tray.
When I had my son, in 1983,Mother Lit didn’t exist. The myths surrounding motherhood were formidable and yet not well-articulated. So the reality of motherhood, the intensity of the feelings combined with the 24-hour demands—this great reconstitution of the soul—came as a shock to the women of my generation. They had tasted some independence and didn’t anticipate the surrendering that motherhood requires. The giving in and over that is part of the voluptuous joy of motherhood ran counter to the new feminist ideals of independence and self-assertion, ideals that suggested women must be harder,more like men, and less available to others. Ironically, feminism in the 1960s neglected the spheres that most women lived in—the home and the family—to focus on careers, equal pay, and gaining entry to the working world of men. It took a few decades of guilt, conflict, and exhaustion for the women who were trying (and unavoidably failing) to balance work and family to discover that while the right to work is crucial, and for most families an economic necessity, careers, as turns out, aren’t everything. Non-workaholic men sometimes figure this out too. Money makes the world go round but it doesn’t assuage the heart.
All that has changed. The subject of motherhood is now on university curricula, alongside Hegel and postcolonialism. The first Museum of Motherhood will soon open in Seneca Falls, NY. Demeter Press, part of the pioneering Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement organization in Toronto, has published books on every possible social and cultural aspect of a topic that was once restricted to manuals on toilet training.
The great oppressor for the new mother—social isolation—has been vanquished by the Internet. No matter how far away the nearest neighbour is, she only needs to sit down at the laptop to connect with other mothers in the same boat.
In fact, the intimate nature of new motherhood, awash in all those bodily fluids and raw emotions, offers ideal material for our bare-and-share-all online conversations. Blogs and tweets are also well suited to the stolen-moment, ADHD reality of life with a new baby.
But mother blogs can also amplify doubts in the same way that symptom websites can feed hypochondria. The Internet has helped create the newly conspicuous culture of motherhood but it’s also established a kind of apartheid policy. Perhaps the blogs flourish because motherhood is still a somewhat exotic island, not yet integrated into the larger social, economic, and political picture. The fact that online mothers share this “specialty interest,” like people involved in animal rights or hang-gliding clubs, only betrays its still-questionable status.
Others would argue the opposite, that motherhood has become the bully on the block, with parents exercising a moral superiority over the childless. And what about the omnipresence of pregnancy and motherhood in the tabs, with all those arrows pointing to a possible celebrity “bump”? The actress who “puts her family first” and “loves being a mother more than anything else” has become the number one tabloid trope. Isn’t that pop culture reflecting motherhood’s shiny new status? Maybe. Or it could be just an- other way for us to obsess about women’s bodies and weight issues.
To me, a “bump”on the tiny frame of Gwen Stefani is not really about a potential child; it’s an acceptable form of fat. In the tabs, pregnancy is a Get Out of Jail Free card in the never-ending weight-loss stakes and a way for readers to track the pounds-on, pounds-off drama of “getting back in shape”after birth. A shot of a pregnant star wolfing down a bacon burger in public is not about self-indulgence but about “eating for two”—a sacrifice of her thin self to her growing baby. The pregnant movie star is an arresting contradiction in terms, like Kirstie Alley pitching a line of diet products. We want our stars to be like us (to gain weight when pregnant) but also to live in a fairy tale (to have a flat stomach three weeks after giving birth).
The apotheosis of female celebrity has now become stardom + motherhood. What is more glamorous than being Angelina Jolie or Madonna? Being Angelina with a huge brood, biological and adopted. Being Madonna with a young Brazilian guy on one arm and a black baby on her hip. Presumably, they pursued motherhood for their own reasons, not for the optics. But motherhood, once a frumpy, non-career-enhancing role, now only adds to their glamour.
This new breed of rich and famous mothers seems to look upon the job of raising children the way their own mothers might have once imagined careers—as something fulfilling, challenging, and slightly exotic. In terms of public perception, motherhood has become the Microsoft of life experiences, a respected brand of human software.
But this new status has also given birth (as it were) to a new source of anxiety. The more we invest in the mother role, the more pressure we put on ourselves to be accomplished, successful parents, raising accomplished, successful children. As boomer parents, we believe in self-expression, whether it manifests as art or narcissism. Our latest form of self-expression may be our children.
Every parent lives vicariously through the success or failures of their kids. But with more parents spending more time focused on child-rearing, the risk of over-investing in our offspring has gone up.
As usual with parental love, this has come about with the very best of intentions. Just as our own post-war parents worked hard to give us the material security and spacious rec rooms that their families couldn’t afford, we did our best to shrink the generation gap and cultivate closer relationships with our children. We wanted them to be more like us—and for us to be more like our kids.
Motherhood now enjoys a cultural currency that it’s never enjoyed before,but oddly enough our knowledge of children,what’s best for them, doesn’t seem to have kept pace. Childhood itself is a relatively recent invention; for most of the 19th century children were thought of as a source of cheap labour or adults-to-be, better “seen and not heard.” They helped on the farm or were raised by governesses in the nursery, well apart from the adult world of their parents. Children were not considered fascinating. They were spanked, rebuked, and yelled at. They were held upside down and slapped on the bum at birth or circumcised without anesthesia as infants. This was not considered cruel because no one attributed consciousness to babies. It’s only in the past several decades that we have paid attention to vital issues such as pain in children, the impact of absent fathers, or the enduring wounds caused by childhood sexual abuse. We’re only beginning to fathom the depths of childhood.
In the meantime,we are anxious parents. In the pre-dawn hours, mothers camp out in lawn chairs to get a spot in the desired preschool. They haul themselves up the park slide with the same single-mindedness their feminist mothers once brought to climbing the corporate ladder. It seemed to make so much sense at first, to work less and be there more for our kids. But now the pressure’s on, to be the best possible mom and to produce the best possible kid.
This is not the fault of mothers. I see this as a new manifestation of the same problem that bedevilled motherhood when I was new to it, back in 1983: the role of raising ki
ds, which women mostly shoulder, had been largely neglected by my generation of feminists. Gradually, some of us had children and changed our tune. Women began to write and talk more honestly about the experience of mothering. Then popular culture seized upon it and exalted it to an almost religious status, until movie-star motherhood became something even more desirable than fame. And movie-star mothers generated new maternal myths by showing none of the wear and tear of raising kids, because they’re able to pay for maids, nannies, and personal trainers. But for 99.8 percent of mothers, the job is still a frustrating, anonymous, and unglamorous one because women not only still do most of the scut work; they must also stand in for a more caring, humanist world as well.
In Perfect Madness, Judith Warner is nostalgic for the time she spent as a mother in France, with its maternal postnatal visits and free daycare. She never got over her return to America,where daycare is still as pie-in-the-sky as universal health care. In Canada, when Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced the government would cut the funding for international aid, including family planning programs, there was an uproar. Giving women the ability to space their pregnancies would probably protect their health more directly than other more expensive aid schemes. Governments in North American continue to imagine that family just happens and kids just grow, outside the frame of things that really matter.
The new chicness of motherhood is only superficial; at the end of the day, the mother often finds herself alone, mildly if unfairly resentful of her non-breastfeeding partner, and suddenly a non-player in the economy. So she works even harder at mothering, to make her job more interesting, more valuable. This can rob the family of ease, playfulness, and peace. There’s too much trying. A mother’s lucky if she has a supportive, solvent partner and a few girlfriends going through the same thing.
But the modern mother’s unsolved anger continues to be instructive, shedding light on the true valence of children and families in our world. How shocking it was to hear Barack Obama, early in his presidential campaign, deliver a speech that emphasized the importance of fathers to family life, especially for young blackmen. When was the last time a presidential candidate put fatherhood on the political agenda?
The anxieties around child-rearing have escalated at the same time that the collapsing economy has made family-friendly work arrangements less likely. The recession affected more men than women, with the result that many at-home mothers now have to seek out the more plentiful service jobs. A woman out job-hunting in the current climate is not going to insist on a flexible work schedule when there are others willing to work on any terms.
But the market is not and has never been a kindly place that cares about the well-being of families. It is a mill that grinds on, and parents are at a disadvantage. It’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a mother to finesse both a career and a family. “Having it all,”that 1990s mirage,now sounds like a ridiculous goal, part of the greed that got us into environmental debt.
There may be an upside to the Great Recession of recent years, though; unemployed and laid-off parents are spending more time at home with their children. Perhaps not in the best of moods. There has been a rise in the numbers of stay-at-home fathers too. If they can manage to keep a roof over their heads, the consequences for families might not all be negative. What children lose in terms of music lessons they might gain hanging around with mothers and fathers who suddenly find themselves rich in time.
Our generation of parents cultivated self-expression, community, and relationships in general. We travelled for years and postponed the real world. We went to therapists to shrink our superegos and took drugs to expand our minds. We were amiably alienated from our poor parents, who were only trying to create a safe world in the aftermath of two world wars and the Depression.
But our mothers and fathers didn’t sit on the couch and watch movies with us or text us twice a day when we broke up with our boyfriends. They weren’t our buddies. They were, in our eyes,materialistic, hard-working, out-of-it grown-ups who lived in a different world from us. Our values were better values, we thought, and our relationships were more authentic.
We were, in a word, arrogant. Arrogance is a blind spot; when you have it, you cannot see what you’re not seeing.
As a result,my generation of parents (I am trying to avoid the rather nautical-sounding word “boomer”here) has cultivated more intimate relationships with our kids. Along with that has come our deeper identification with our kids. We ride the roller coaster with them. We hold their hands, even when they’re 23 and law school turns them down.
One of the criticisms often levelled at boomers has been our betrayal of the optimism and ideals that we once believed in. Somewhere along the way,we gave up and got interested in granite countertops and organic wine instead. But I think our idealism didn’t go out, it just went underground, like a root fire—and when we had children, our hopes for the future were rekindled. We are ferocious in our efforts to protect our kids from the big bad world (with its lead-poisoned hockey sticks). The gap now is not between the generations. It’s between the hothouse domestic realm and the world outside of the family—the reality gap.
So parents chauffeur their teenagers to all extracurricular activities, banish potential allergens from the family menu, and sandbag the household against the rampant dangers outside. The world may well be more dangerous than it was 50 years ago, but my mother’s generation faced wars and polio epidemics without instilling fear in us.
No wonder many twentysomethings graduate from college ill-equipped to deal with rejection, self-determination, and engagement with a world that feels hostile just because it’s not patting them on the back. They are oversensitive to criticism and, at the same time, too hard on themselves when they aim high and fail.
I went to my doctor the other day and ran into a friend who was in the waiting room with her 28-year-old daughter, keeping her company. That made me feel better for having just mailed an asthma puffer to Montreal, for my coughing 25-year-old son.
And now we have no idea whether this most-mothered generation of children will benefit from all the attention—or rebound in some unpredictable way.
Although his critics on the right saw Dr. Spock as the promulgator of “permissive parenting” (the beginning of the end of civilization, in their view), in fact he believed in establishing firm boundaries between parents and children. At adult parties, children ate at a card table in the kitchen, not sitting on their mom’s lap eating crostini and salmon roe. There was an offhandedness to Spock’s advice that suggested children were sturdy, independent organisms who didn’t require constant coddling and brain stimulation in order to establish a sense of self. The worlds of adult and children had not yet overlapped and meshed to the degree they are today.
It’s hardly surprising that we identify so closely with our kids as they negotiate their twenties. The sexual revolution of the 1960s and ’70s was not about growing up faster; it was about enshrining the “inner child” and perpetuating a childlike innocence. It was about face-painting, daisies, and blowing bubbles under cloudless skies. In its more serious expressions, it was also about protesting the loss of young lives in imperialist wars. We wanted respect for the young, and for the uncorrupted child in all of us. Not growing up became a virtue.
“Much of what we do these days in the name of perfect motherhood,” Warner writes, “is really about ‘reparenting ourselves.’”
What is missing in the mother-literature is more political perspective. The real problem with motherhood is not about getting your partner to empty the dishwasher; it’s about recognition and support in a concrete way, from governments and the economy, for the job of raising children. Nothing much has changed about the experience of motherhood, it seems, except the outfits and the equipment.
Motherhood remains the Great Unraveller, the thing that sooner or later brings a woman face to face with herself. The power and joy of motherhood continue to outstrip our little
ideologies. No matter how our theories about motherhood evolve, the raw daily experience of it continues to ambush each new generation of women, in good and bad ways.
And just when you think you’ve got a handle on it, it slips through your fingers again. For mothers, graduation day never comes.
The Degree
CONVOCATION at McGill takes place under white tents, on the green lawns of the downtown campus, at the end of May. The weather can still be raw, which it was the weekend we attended. But after six years of ambivalence about university and a great deal of hard work Casey had earned his degree in history, and I thought it was something worth celebrating. Even if no one else in the family did.
Brian had spent the last few weeks in France, reporting from the Cannes Film Festival; he had just arrived back, jet-lagged and exhausted. In any case, ritual gatherings and convocations hold little appeal for him. He had skipped his own graduation, in fact. As for Casey,when I phoned him earlier to talk about plans, he wasn’t sure he wanted to go to the ceremony, or indeed what the point of it was.
Was I going to have to use a forklift to get everyone mobilized— and for what? Once again, I felt like I was singlehandedly trying to create a “family moment” in a vacuum. The train ride to Montreal with my semi-comatose husband was not very festive. There was no “Remember when he was in Miss Archer’s class and made that clever bridge out of toothpicks?”
But our ragged clan did assemble, on an overcast day with a cold wind that shivered the blossoms on the trees. As soon as we arrived in Montreal, Brian came down with a fever and a sore throat. He closed the curtains in our lovely hotel room and crawled under the covers. Casey and I had dinner in a restaurant down the street. The next day Brian announced that he was too sick to attend the ceremonies. “Being sick never kept you from showing up for band gigs,” I reminded him meanly. This father-and-son dismissal of social ritual (as I primly thought of it) was wearing thin. It also made me feel like the boring CEO of the family, trying to wrangle everyone into the stockholders’meeting.
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