Why Can't We Be Friends?

I had a book sent to me to review for Amazon, Bad Good Mother, and the cover quotes, “The Good Mother remembers to serve fruit at breakfast, is always cheerful and never yells, manages not to project her own neuroses and inadequacies onto her children, is an active and beloved community volunteer, she remembers to make playdates, her children’s clothes fit, she does art projects with them and enjoys all their games.  And she is never too tired for sex.”  

So, absolutely when mid-sentence in the book, Matthias asked if I wanted to play Battleship right now at 5 o’clock, when I should be thinking about getting dinner ready to take with us to go meet Caitlin, Zac and Freyja in Sunnyside for the evening, not reading a book or playing a game, and I had just walked in from taking Jarrett to the dentist; I said, “Sure,” and then the phone rang and it was Aileen and I hadn’t talked to her for days so, “Taite, can you take over for me in Battleship?”  The Good Mother would manage to do all that and more.

This book quotes another book, “This widespread, choking cocktail of guilt and anxiety and resentment and regret… is poisoning motherhood.”  I was intrigued.

The book’s main theme is guilt, the guilt that only a mother knows how to nourish and allow to fester and thrive.  It really got me thinking about why mothers often feel loaded down with guilt while, on the other hand, fathers are usually able to just shake it off and move on? The author, Ayelet Waldman, has the added burden of being a feminist so with the feminist agenda comes the guilt of many things that wouldn’t bother the non-feminist.  Things like the guilt of hiring another woman to clean your toilets so you can have more time to spend with your family.  The feminist can’t just hire a woman who has applied for the job, she must first flail herself for allowing another sister to do that lowly job, for having the money to hire it done, and she must mention that it is the men in her life’s fault because they are such poor aims and she owns two shaggy dogs(!?)

But getting back to the question, why do mothers attack and accuse other mothers for their choices and fathers just get the job done?  I may have been out to lunch at the time, but I don’t recall the accusatory manner that mothers today seem to have about other mothers’ choices in raising children.  The decisions mothers make may be made based on good examples of others, or some base their decisions about mothering on hours and hours of research, and still others may rely on gut instinct, but most mothers are trying to do the very best job they can with what they’ve got.  So we have taken a wonderful gift from God, this gift of children and turned it into an opportunity to war against other mothers and feel guilty about our own decisions.

Why? Perhaps one of the major contributing factors to the judgmental attitude is the absolute abundance of money and luxury of time we are privileged to have.  So many moms today have the luxury of making all kinds of decisions that, years back, weren’t even there to be made: hire help with the cleaning or do it yourself?  choose organic food, free range or the better priced regular stuff?  cloth or disposable? baby formula or breast milk?  Wean them at ten months or two years? carry the baby in a baby wrap 24/7 or leave them lying on a blanket some of the time? circumcise or not? vaccinate or not? co-sleep or get them their own crib (and room)? home birth or hospital? drugs during delivery or none?  The choices are endless and so are the combinations of the choices, none of them wrong, well, maybe not vaccinating is wrong.

More and more mothers today have the luxury of time and money and the privilege to make countless decisions based on their unique parenting style and decisions.  Unfortunately  too often, when we see other mothers not making the same choices we have made, we are very quick to condemn and find them guilty of choosing poorly  and  bad mothering.  So much thought and time goes into some of these decisions we make and they become very dear to our heart, that to not follow them is, in our eyes, to be a poor mother.

There was once a time when a mother’s work was so all encompassing that to simply feed, clothe and care for a family took all of her time.  She did not have time left over to make sure everyone else was doing right by her standards.  With more free time for mothers than at any other period in history the admonition that once applied to widows could be applicable to young mothers as well.  ”And besides they learn to be idle, wandering about from house to house, and not only idle but also gossips and busybodies, saying things which they ought not.”  Too much time to make sure other mothers are conforming to our perfect standards, is too much time.

Fathers, to my knowledge, do not go around fretting about what other fathers think about their parenting skills or what they are or are not doing with their children (unless the wife points it out) and so they just be a dad, go to sleep at night and sleep soundly.

We mothers are good enough at flailing ourselves for not measuring up to our own great expectations, we usually don’t need help.  As Ayelet Waldman writes in her book,  ”Let’s all commit ourselves to the basic civility of minding our own business.  Failing that, let’s just go back to a time when we were nasty and judgmental, but only behind one another’s back.”

Better yet, let’s all assume that each of us loves our children so much that absolutely we would try to make the best choices we know how.