Every mom, I think, must go through these periods of thinking, "Am I good enough?" At least, I hope it's not just me who thinks that. But you want to be great. You want to be supermom and be the best employee at the office, the best pal, the best wife, and the best mom. And when you evaluate yourself (when you're me, anyway), you can always find places where you fall short.
And even when you aren't nitpicking yourself, the thought creeps in that you are not giving your all. For instance, I am sitting cross-legged on my living room sofa right now, The Cat to my left, my iPhone to my right, and my son still at daycare. Because I got home from work a little early and I decided to have some "me" time before I went to pick The Boy up. Nothing wrong with that. Except that the hissy voice of Exceptional Motherhood has been whispering to me from behind my neck, "You should have picked him up. You are being selfish sitting there on the sofa writing your navel-gazing blog post. You should be playing with your boy, not thinking about yourself."
There is a drumbeat in the modern mothering culture that, at its root, demands constant self-sacrifice by the mommy. You must breast feed. If you don't breastfeed, you are depriving your child of valuable hoosiwhatsits that will protect him from disease. You must use cloth diapers. If you don't use cloth diapers, your child will get diaper rash up to his eyeballs and there will be an avalanche of dirty diapers at your local landfill. You must feed your child organic baby food, preferable lovingly made by your own hands. If you do not feed your child organic handmade baby food, you are endangering his health. You must spend your every spare moment playing with, educating, or at least ogling your child. If you do not do these things, you clearly do not love your child as much as you should.
It may not be stated so starkly, but the sentiments are there in the culture. As it happens, I did breast feed to the extent I could. (I never produced enough milk to exclusively breast feed The Boy, unless you count the first six days of his life in which I exclusively "breast fed" him insufficiently so that he was constantly starving and lost too much weight.) I also use cloth diapers on The Boy when he is at home (but I do not impose them on his daycare). And he gets a lot of organic food (especially the dairy foods), but it's not all organic. It's not that I did not/do not do these "good mom" things to one degree or another, or even that I disagree that these are more-or-less good things to do (lest I wouldn't do them at all). But there is a subtle hiss from the mother-culture that failure to live up to its standards is inadequate mothering is just false.
The time portion of this criteria is particularly wrenching for a working mom. We really do want to spend as much time as we can with our kids. We want to work too. And, mentally, we need a little downtime every now and again. But the impulse in the culture is to spend all of your spare time on the child and none of it on yourself, which, to me seems good for nobody.
Moreover, I think that working moms can't meet these standard. Nobody can. Indeed, I'll go out on a limb, and speak about that which I do not know, and say that it is only the most haggard drudge of a stay at home mom who can be the perfect breastfeeding, cloth diapering, baby chef and educator of a mommy.
And yet, we all love our kids.
So why does the culture guilt us about these ideals of motherhood? And why are they ideals, anyway? Because they're the way it was done a hundred or a thousand years ago? Why is that per se the gold standard?
And why should I feel badly about taking an hour for myself to write this post and, literally, remove the chipped nail polish from my toes?
Is it competition? Because we want to be "the best." And if someone else shows inadequacies -- "Gasp! Is that a Huggies disposable diaper on your child's bottom?" -- then the cloth diapering purists can feel secure in their anti-diaper rash and environmental perfection?
But that's not it because, frankly, I don't really know any moms who are really all that judgy about these sorts of things. And yet, the judges are apparently out there, somewhere. Whole books are being written about the subject, after all.
For instance, Elisabeth Badinter's new book, The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women poses that modern women have submitted themselves to something she calls "ecological parenting," which involves things like doulas, breastfeeding, organic food, the non-use of epidurals, the use of cloth diapers, baby wearing, co-sleeping, constant presentation of intellectually enriching experiences etc., etc. Admittedly, I have this information from the reviews of the book. I've not read it. I have not had time to read it, nor am I sure that I have the inclination to read it, having fully committed all of my life to either work or family - save for this one hour. (Plus, I'm not sure I could sustain interest in this subject for more than the approximately 500 to 750 words that I am currently committing to the blogosphere.) But, generally, she is describing a very, very naturalistic and child-centric lifestyle (again, per the reviews).
I happen to like being The-Boy-centric. He's pretty much the greatest thing I've ever done, so I really like hanging out with him and I find it tremendously fun (except when he's screamy). And I like cloth diapering. I like the idea that not as many disposable diapers are going into the landfill. And the breastfeeding that I was able to do, I enjoyed that too. But the problem in trying to be a culturally perfect "ecological parent" is that it saps the joy out of being his Mom. Strive to be perfect and I think you will find yourself perfectly unhappy.
So I am ignoring that little hiss at the back of my neck. Shoo, be gone!
Rather than worry about whether I'm perfect according to the Exceptional Motherhood Code, I think I'll just be perfectly content to use the rest of this hour to read a New Yorker article about Kraftwerk and then go pick The Boy up at about 6:30 so that we can have a rocking good time until it's bedtime. That seems perfectly wonderful.
