Exceptional Motherhood

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.

I miss taking the train.

When I was single, and before I met my husband, I had a house in Dallas.  It was built in 1963.  It was on an enormous third-of-an-acre lot with a gorgeous oak tree in the back yard and crepe myrtles so large you could climb them. (I did.)  It was a fixer-upper with a mish-mash of floor coverings and a foundation problem.  (After over 40 years, the load bearing wall wasn't bearing the load so well anymore.)  It was too much for me.  I never fixed it up.  I did a few cosmetic things:  painting, mainly.  And my mom, dad, and I converted a screened porch with a sauna (seriously) into a screened porch with bar and a sink.  It wasn't perfect.  But it was mine, my little third-of-an-acre.

And when I lived in Dallas, before I became a suburban wife and mom, I took the train to work.  And it was awesome.  Dallas has light rail.  I have always been enamored of urban rail lines.  Maybe it's because I'm from a small town in East Texas that commuter trains seem very glamorous and modern to me.  Maybe, though, it's simply because I hate to drive.

So, even though it sort of smells, I love The Tube in London.  DC's Metro is so slick.  Chicago's El makes you feel nostalgic for a life you never knew, as you wind around the buildings at mid-level.  And the subway in New York?  Well, even though I've visited the city more times than I can count on my hand, I've never actually been on the New York Subway . . . but I love the idea of it . . . and Grand Central Station is cool.  (My husband, who did live in New York for several years, swears that he damaged his hearing on the Subway, but I digress.)

I like everything else about my life in the suburbs:  the fact that the city is small enough to walk just about anywhere, the parks, the running trails, the school district, our house.  And, of course, my family.  Even the fact that my home is far away from my office downtown makes me happy.

But we're not on a DART Rail line. So when I moved to the 'burbs, I gave up my rail pass and, with it, an hour or more of my day in which I would read books.  I would read one or two books a month on the train.  It was my decompression time.  It was my time to explore the paper world.  I felt smarter and more well rounded.  I am sure I was more interesting to talk to.

I also liked that I wasn't clogging the freeway with one more tin can, that I wasn't burning all that fossil fuel, and that I was participating in Dallas's urban-ness.  Taking the train makes you feel differently about the city you live in.  Dallas seemed smaller and easier when I took the train.  Need to get downtown?  Just hop the rail line, and you're there in less than 30 minutes with no traffic snarls or hassels with parking.  You're less likely to head downtown if getting to your destination involves a long drive on a hot and crowded freeway followed by a frustrating search for a $10 parking space.

Now, I drive to work.  I've tried books on CD to fill the dead time in the car.  It's not the same.  I'm not nearly as engaged in the text when I'm listening to a book on CD for all the obvious reasons, not the least of which is that I'm paying attention to traffic.  In fact, often, I'm not listening at all.  The book is just a sound to cover up the road noise . . . might as well listen to the radio.  And the 45 minutes to an hour I spend at the end of each day trying not to die on Interstate 35 exhausts me so much that I am less likely to do the things I need to do to be a healthy human:  cook meals, exercise, read books.  And it makes me less fun for my husband and son too.  I also feel badly about the gas, the pollution.  That's the air my boy will breath for the next, let's hope, 100 years or more.

There's a new rail line that extends to a neighboring suburb.  I would still have to drive to get there, maybe 15 minutes or so.  And then the train ride would be another 40ish minutes.  Is it worth it?  It might be.  Maybe, one week, I will try it . . . .

I miss taking the train.