[From the diaries -- Hunter]
Newsweek has an article this week called The Myth of the Perfect Mother. I have to say it hit me right between the eyes.
I don't see myself as overly perfectionistic, and my daughter is too young to have gotten me into some of the more absurd scenarios in the article. But I too was raised to believe that my life was totally under my control, that I could be whatever I wanted. So if I'm overstressed, feeling like I give short shrift to my job and my child, it must be completely my fault, right?
Instead of blaming society, moms today tend to blame themselves. They say they've chosen poorly. And so they take on the Herculean task of being absolutely everything to their children, simply because
no one else is doing anything at all to help them. Because if they don't perform magical acts of perfect Mommy ministrations, their kids might fall through the cracks and end up as losers in our hard-driving winner-take-all society.
This has to change.
I bought "Free to Be, You and Me" for my child on CD, a record I loved as a child. Now I listen to it and it makes me weep. I was supposed to Save the World, win a Nobel Prize, whatever. I'm too tired to care any more. I've had everything going for me. Whatever I did or didn't achieve is totally due to my actions and choices. What is there for my daughter? How will her life be better?
Some of the solutions presented in the article are important - a decoupling of health insurance from employment would be incredibly family-friendly, and not just for ordinary families. In my town right now there are collection boxes for a family with three kids. The youngest has liver cancer. The mother used to work for the county, but she's had to use up all her leave, paid and unpaid, to care for him. So now she's had to leave her job, and the collection is to pay the family's COBRA. I saw the story, and it made me shake with anger - that an honest, hardworking mother should have to choose between paying for the medical care her child needs and being able to actually take him to the appointments.
Perhaps we need to build more community options. When you are a career person, all your friends are at work. If they have kids, their kids live far away from yours. You're never home, or if you are, your neighbors are never home. We don't get to meet.
How can we rebuild this sense of community? Although I've never been religious, I suddenly see how valuable churches are to young families - a ready made community of friends, often a preschool attached. My local library has many wonderful free events for the kids -but there's little chance to talk to other parents. Maybe we need more free public spaces where people bring their kids to play - parks but also indoor spaces, where people might gather in inclement weather, or even during the evenings.
People talk about playdates with derision, as some sort of overscheduled pathology, but for most moms there aren't hordes of kids just out in the neighborhood for informal play. The alternative to the playdate is isolation, for mother and child.
Most people tell me that they couldn't be with their spouse 24/7 without going crazy. And yet, we expect moms to be with their infants and toddlers (who are too young to be polite ALL the time) 24/7 and survive.
The article is a call to action. How can we make America a more family-friendly place? What can we do to help women AND men make a professional contribution and yet still have time to be with their kids, in the childhood we are always told is slipping by faster than we know?