If you have been brought up, all your life, being told you have wonderful
choices, you tend, when things go wrong, to assume you made the wrong choices — not to see that the “choices”
given you were wrong in the first place.
Similarly, when, for the full course of your motherhood, you live
and breathe the overheated smog of The Mess, you tend not to even notice it around you.
It came as a shock to me because, for my first three and a half blessed
years of motherhood, I knew something very different.
I didn’t realize it then, but I was in paradise.
I was living in France, a country that has an astounding array of
benefits for families — and for mothers in particular. When my children were born, I stayed in the hospital for five
comfortable days. I found a nanny through a free, community-based referral service, then employed her, legally and full-time,
for a cost to me of about $10,500 a year, after tax breaks. My elder daughter, from the time she was eighteen months of age,
attended excellent part-time preschools where she painted and played with modeling clay and ate cookies and napped, for about
$150 per month — the top end of the fee scale. She could have started public school at age three, and could have opted
to stay until 5 p.m. daily. My friends who were covered by the French social security system (which I did not pay into) had
even greater benefits: at least four months of paid maternity leave, the right to stop working for up to three years and have
jobs held for them, cash grants, after their second children were born, starting at about $105 per month.
And that was just the beginning. There was more: a culture. An atmosphere.
A set of deeply held attitudes toward motherhood — toward adult womanhood — that had the effect of allowing me
to have two children, work in an office, work out in a gym, and go out to dinner at night and away for a short vacation with
my husband without ever hearing, without ever thinking, the word “guilt.”
Guilt just wasn’t in the air. It wasn’t considered a natural
consequence of working motherhood. Neither was the word “selfish” considered the necessary accoutrement of a woman
with children who wanted to take time for herself. On the contrary, work was considered a normal part, even a desirable part,
of a modern mother’s life. It was considered something that broadened her horizons and enhanced her self-esteem —
healthy and good things for herself and her children. Taking time for herself was equally considered to be a mother’s
right — indeed, a mother’s responsibility — as was taking time for romance and a social life. The general
French conviction that a person should live a “balanced” life was considered especially true for mothers —
particularly, I would say, for stay-at-home mothers, who were otherwise considered at risk of falling into excessive child-centeredness.
And that, the French believed, was wrong. Obsessive. Inappropriate. Just plain weird.
I’ll always remember the conversation I had with my pediatrician
at my elder daughter’s five-month checkup. It was time for me to return to work in an office, and I was terrified. I
had images in my mind of my baby spending days strapped into her Maxi-Cosi rocking seat, her eyes fixed blankly ahead of her
as she sank into a mommy-less emotional void. I told the doctor I was going to start working outside of home and started to
cry. “Listen,” he said. “You don’t just have this child for a couple of months. You’ll have
her for the rest of your life. You have to have a life of your own. Because if you’re happy, she’ll be happy.
If you’re fine, she’ll be fine.”
I didn’t realize what a unique gift these words were until I
found myself repeating them, over and over, to friends in America. But back then, I didn’t realize how good I had it
in France overall. I had no real basis for comparison. True, when I spoke to my friends who’d become mothers back home
in the States, I was struck by how grim and strange their lives sounded. One friend warned, as my first pregnancy advanced,
“You’d better stop trying to have a career.” Another was spending her entire after-tax salary on child care.
And another, after eight grueling years of medical school and internships, was feeling guilty about leaving her baby with
a part-time sitter to pursue her career as a psychiatrist. All this sounded crazy to me. I figured my friends had to be bringing
their problems upon themselves. The one who wouldn’t fire an obviously inadequate nanny? Well, she’d always suffered
from liberal guilt. The one who drove herself to a state of nervous exhaustion after a year of sleepless nights in the “family
bed”?
Well, she had a problem with separation anxiety. This all seemed
very foreign. I just couldn’t relate.
And then I moved back to America.
I came to Washington, D.C., when my elder daughter was three and a
half and my younger daughter was six months old. With “child-care issues” (read: no sitter) keeping me from work,
I started spending a lot of time hanging out on the playground and, for the first time, discovered the world of stay-at-home
moms. It was an eye-opening experience.
The women around me, for the most part, lived in affluent suburban
Washington communities. They had comfortable homes, two or three children, smiling, productive husbands, and a society around
them saying they’d made the best possible choices for their lives, yet many of them seemed just miserable. One woman
told me she’d lost all interest in sex with her husband. She was just too bored. Another one said that her husband had
lost all interest in sex with her. He was just too tired — up at dawn, at work all day, at client dinners in the evenings,
and then semiconscious in front of the TV for the hour at night when she saw him. She had become obsessed with organizing
a school fund-raiser. Another mom complained of spending her weekends in her car, shuttling between soccer and swim meets
and birthday parties. And another had taken up the politics of play dates as an issue in therapy.
The women gathered in groups to let off steam and have a good time.
They staged Happy Hours together. They assigned themselves dirty books to read in their book clubs. They had a sense that
something was missing from their lives, but that something was elusive — not so easy to name as their semiabsent husbands;
not so easy to point to as their lack of work (how, where, why should they work now? they wondered). It wasn’t really
community that these women lacked; they did, after all, have one another. It was something more. A sense that life should
have led up to more than this. A nagging sort of disaffection.
It all reminded me a lot of Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine
Mystique.” The sense of waste. The diffuse dissatisfaction. The angst, hidden behind all the obsession with trivia,
and the push to be perfect. And the tendency — every bit as pronounced among the mothers I met as it had been for the
women Friedan interviewed — to blame themselves for their problems.
And yet Friedan had been writing in the prefeminist 1960s. The women
she’d interviewed — middle-class housewives, many of whom were college graduates — had real, objective causes
for their malaise. Society didn’t offer them many choices for self-fulfillment beyond perfect wife-and-motherhood. Their
employment options were limited; even more so were their chances for having fulfilling careers. The solution Friedan dreamed
of — that they could build their lives as they chose, become self-sufficient, and be fully self-realized human beings
— had ostensibly come true for the women of my generation. Yet I saw, looking around, that the form of self-sufficiency
we’d come into wasn’t really a solution.
For the working moms I knew were stressed near the breaking point,
looking tired and haggard and old. They shared the same high-level at-home parenting ambitions as the nonworking moms. But
they held down out-of-home jobs, too — and if this wasn’t enough, they also had to shoulder the burden of Guilt,
a media-fed drone that played in their ears every time they sat in traffic at dinnertime: Had they made the right choices?
Were their children well taken care of? Should they be working less, differently, not at all? Were they really good enough
mothers? Did they really want to be? It seemed to me that although they were to all appearances fully liberated from the “Feminine
Mystique” of Friedan’s time, they, like the stay-at-home moms, were equally burdened by a new set of life-draining
pressures, a new kind of soul-draining perfectionism. I came to think of this as the Mommy Mystique.
It was on the airwaves. In the parenting magazines. In the culture
all around. It was in the local press, where I was surprised to see laudatory stories of “dedicated” mothers who
spent their evenings and weekends driving to and from soccer, attending Girl Scout cookie meetings, über-momming, generally,
twenty-four hours a day. I had never once, in almost six years, met a woman in France living her life at this level of stress.
Not even my obstetrician — a woman in her forties with four children, who delivered babies at all hours of the day and
night — came close.
I had friends in France who were full-time stay-at-home moms with
three or four children, but I had never once encountered a woman whose life was overrun by her children’s activities.
I had never met a mother, working or otherwise, who didn’t
have the “time” to read a book, or have lunch with a friend, or go out to dinner once in a while. Nor had I ever
met a mother who spent what little extra time she had on children’s soccer or attending Girl Scout cookie meetings at
eight o’clock at night. Girl Scout cookie meetings? At eight o’clock at night? The idea would have been absurd.
No woman with a family life, the thinking would have run (once the laughter subsided), no woman who wanted to preserve her
family life (which, after all, was anchored around her husband) would be out doing children’s activities at night. Only
an unbalanced person would be doing something like that. A woman insufficiently mindful of herself. A woman who was, perhaps,
fearful of adulthood.
I was amazed at the breakdown of boundaries between children and adults
and the erosion, for many families, of any notion of adult time and space. In Paris, children ate in the kitchen and played
in their rooms. Living rooms and dining rooms were places where grown-ups entertained. In Washington and its suburbs, many
houses were being built or had been renovated to eliminate formal living and dining rooms altogether. Instead, the focal point
of most houses was the “family room,” where a TV and a computer occupied center stage. I saw living rooms reconfigured
as alcoves, almost afterthoughts, overrun with plastics or with no furniture at all. And very often, when children came to
visit my house (which was too small to have a designated “family” entertainment complex), they jumped on the sofas
and threw balls at the lamps.
I was angered by the continued onslaught of press reports about the
pernicious effects of day care, and the continual beating-up on working mothers. I found the pressure to breastfeed for at
least a year, to endure natural childbirth, and to tolerate the boundary breakdowns of “attachment parenting”
— baby-wearing, co-sleeping, long-term breastfeeding and the rest of it — cruelly insensitive to mothers’
needs as adult women. And I was amazed by the fact that the women around me didn’t seem to find their lives strange.
It appeared normal to them that motherhood should be fraught with anxiety and guilt and exhaustion. It didn’t seem to
dawn on anyone that there could be another way. I was shocked by the degree to which everyone — feminist or not —
seemed willing to accept the “choices” given them, even to accept the idea that the narrow paths they’d
been forced into living were choices.
The French women I knew did not have to live with the psychological
burden of such “choices.” They also did not have to do the mathematical calculations practiced by so many American
mothers in evaluating whether or not to continue working: Who would come out ahead at the end of the month, mom or babysitter,
and by how much? They did not have to buttress themselves against the psychological violence it does to someone who has striven
for a goal all her adult life to suddenly discover that her contribution is not “valuable” enough to justify its
continuation. They did not have to justify simply being who they were.
Back home in America, I began to think that the problems I’d
once attributed to my friends’ individual personalities weren’t individual, or personal, problems at all. They
were, it seemed to me now, symptoms of something much larger. And that something didn’t just have to do with the fact
that mothers in America didn’t have the kind of life-enhancing social benefits I’d enjoyed in France. It had to
do with something cultural, not just political, something so all-encompassing that it was all but invisible to the women who’d
never had the opportunity to experience motherhood differently.
***
I listened to my friends, listened to talk radio, to the mothers on
the playground, and to my daughter’s nursery school teachers, and I found it all — the general culture of motherhood
in America — oppressive. The pressure to perform, to attain levels of perfect selflessness was insane. And it was, I
thought, as I listened to one more anguished friend wringing her hands over the work-family “balance,” and another
expressing her guilt at not having “succeeded” at breastfeeding, driving American mothers crazy.
Myself along with them.
It took very little time on the ground in America before I found myself
becoming unrecognizable. I bought an SUV. I signed my unathletic elder daughter up for soccer. Other three-year-olds in her
class were taking gymnastics, too, and art, and swimming and music. I signed her up for ballet. I bought a small library of
pre-K skill books. I went around in a state of quiet panic.
