Thursday, November 16, 2006

The "Good Mother" Myth

There's something I struggle with from time to time. It flares up without warning, when I've done one too many mountains of laundry or washed one dish too many.

It's the "Good Mother" illusion. Since I don't have a paying job (and that rankles, in case you haven't read my earlier posts), I give it more focus than others might, maybe even more than it's due. Because I have chosen to stay home with my children, it is assumed in society at large that I want to spend all my time in the service of children in general. I am often asked to volunteer my time at my Quaker meeting and at school, usually in some capacity that involves working with children.

I don't mind volunteering -- these organizations survive because of the work done by very generous volunteers, and I try to do my part. But the fact is, other people's children scare me a little, unless they're little and I can just act goofy. I also can't take crowds or loud noise for very long, which can sometimes make school activities horrific for me. The truth is, I spend so much time with my own kids that I really need not to be expected to help with other kids. I never babysat as a kid, never spent time with younger children, and I was an only child. When my eldest was born, we had to ask the hospital nurse to show us how to change her diaper and bathe her, because we had no clue whatsoever. We did fine, but this illustrates my point: this sort of thing does not come naturally to me.

The thing that dogs me, though, is, what makes someone a good mother? And I do mean mother, because the requirements are completely different for a father, whether he stays home or not. Fathers get huge credit just for showing up, let alone doing housework or staying home with the kids. Mothers, though, have to work for every shred of positive feedback. My mother-in-law, for instance, considers herself a good mother because she has sacrificed everything for her children. Some of her children, however, hesitate to agree, citing favoritism and an absence of discipline in their childhood. The bottom line now, though, is that she has very little in her life. Her health isn't good because, while she prepared good food for her family all her life, she didn't eat any of it so they could have more. She has few outside interests because most of her life was taken up with the raising of children, and she fully expected to raise her grandchildren as well (which is part of her culture). She didn't plan to come to this country, or to have daughters-in-law who didn't share her views of child-rearing. The Giving Tree, Shel Silverstein's book about a tree that sacrifices all for the little boy it loves, leaves me bawling uncontrollably -- I'm sitting here crying just thinking about it -- but angry at the arrogance and disregard of the little boy, who takes everything so unthinkingly, and angry at the tree for letting him.

What I struggle with is the determination not to make such huge sacrifices. I've been exercising my "no" reflex this school year, guarding my free time jealously in order to make time to write this blog and other things, to read, to take walks, to ride my bike, to sing, to play the piano. Does this make me less of a "good mother"? I am not willing to subjugate myself, and I have to fight it every day. My son wants me to substitute in his school, like I used to. It's his last year there, and I'm tempted just for that reason. But, even if it were guaranteed that I would work only in his classroom, I just don't enjoy it enough. I love to spend time with him, to have playdates with his friends, but I don't feel the need to spend the whole day with thirty preschoolers, no matter how well-behaved they are (and they are, very).

Am I being cruel to my son? Selfish? There are many other parents who choose to work long hours and send their children to day care (I'm not talking about the parents who have to work just to make ends meet). They're certainly not volunteering in the classroom, nor does anyone expect them to. I get resentful of all the tidying up I have to do, and the assumption by everyone in the family, including my husband, that it's not a big deal because I have more time to do it in, even though it's not my mess. I'm stressed out because I feel like I bear the responsibility of household upkeep, but without a modicum of respect or appreciation for what I do. If I manage to do more, all I get is higher expectations. Lately, I say "no" to things just because I don't want to set a precedent.

So, is this just mid-life selfishness? Realism? Some sort of feminism? I have three children, and, to be honest, I find it exhausting to meet all their needs. I do the best I can, but there is seldom a time when a child says, "Okay, Mom, that's all I need. Why don't you go read a book for a while?"

I didn't used to feel this way. I was thrilled to be a SAHM, happy to be more available to my kids than my mother was to me. This year, though, is the first year that all of my kids have been in school all day. I have rediscovered my own interests and likes, and I begin to resent it when I must be pulled away from them to do mommy duty, which is relentless and underappreciated. Then I feel guilty for feeling resentful and anxious because I haven't spent my time doing housework, which desperately needs to be done.

It reminds me of my sysadmin job, where I had a customer base that had to be taken care of before I could do interesting projects. That was fine until performance review, when I was compared unfavorably to people who didn't have customers to satisfy. My support work was considered baseline, and I was judged by the work I did above and beyond that, against people who had nothing else to do but interesting projects. I couldn't win, but I could escape, and that's what I did. That's not an option here. Even if I get a job, the housework and parenting still has to be done.

So, the "Good Mother". Is she a myth? Is she a relative concept, different for each person and each point of view? Is it possible to be objective about such a thing? Our mothers are so intricately woven into our identities that I wonder if it's possible not to compare. Are the criteria different in the first person ("I am a good mother") as opposed to the third person ("She is a good mother")?

Monday, November 13, 2006

Never mind...


Whew, sorry... I had some Democratic afterglow going on when I wrote my last post. Life was rosy, and I just didn't want to let it go. Now we know it's not only business as usual, but he's not even going to hide the fact that he lies. Just imagine the workout his veto power will suddenly get. He's been saving himself for this.

And now back to your regularly scheduled programming.

Friday, November 10, 2006

Feel the love, baby!



I honestly think the last two years of Bush will be different. It's not because he's newly empathetic, or because he's seen the philosophical light. It's because he's been chastened, and he's an opportunist. He'll cozy up to Pelosi and company because it's politically expedient, and doing so might salvage his legacy. And, let's face it, that's all that matters to him now. He's gonna go clear brush after this, so he doesn't have to care about the next public job. He can put all four seconds of his focus on looking like that uniter he keeps saying he is, with the excuse to his right-wing advisors that the people have spoken.

I think we'll see a more centrist Bush who doesn't have to pander to fundamentalists and ultra-conservatives. He can tell Turd Blossom to shove it. He could actually salvage his presidency in these last two years and come out smelling like a rose. The question is, will his ol' buddies be looking out for his interests or for the Republican party's? And will he listen to them?

We know for sure they won't be looking out for the country.

Wednesday, November 08, 2006

Goodbye, Smirking Bigot!

As a Pennsylvanian, I have long been ashamed of Rick Santorum. I hate his smirk almost as much as I hate Bush's, though Santorum does at least seem to be able to string a few words together into an intelligible sentence, which gives him a leg up on both Bushes.

And now he's gone. Yippeeeee!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

But, as Crooks and Liars quoted Bill Bennett as saying, <begin poor arnold impression> he'll be back <end poor arnold impression>. Apparently some think he might run for Prez in 2008. God help us.

Oh, and check out Bitch Ph.D's picture of Nancy Pelosi. If that doesn't elicit gloating giggles, I don't know what will. It's time we had a mother of five running the House. Don't make me come up there, young man!

Monday, November 06, 2006

The Mommy Box

Bitch Ph.D. wrote yesterday about "opting out". This topic is near and dear to my heart, as you can see in my earlier posts.

I opted out four years ago, closing my reasonably successful part-time consulting business after six years. I was tired, literally and figuratively, of having my work treated like a hobby by my family except when payday came along. I felt like I wasn't doing anything really well. Everything I did was mediocre because I was spread too thin.

The irony is that I never planned to get married, let alone have children. Children used to scare me -- they still do sometimes unless they're mine -- and I couldn't imagine my only-child set-in-my-ways self living with anyone else. If I married at all, I was going to make sure it was to someone who was willing to do the cleaning and cooking -- especially the cooking. I was going to be a career woman, period.

But then reality set in. I worked in the computer industry for eight years, during which I saw just how incompetent and unfair management could be, how they rewarded political bullshit and ignored good work. I enjoyed my work, but I didn't enjoy the environment. In a word, I was disillusioned. At the same time, I was tired of living alone, and I was dating my best friend. We got married and bought our dream house. I kept my lousy job and finished my masters degree on the company's dime.

Four years into the marriage, I started a consulting business. I worked at a university for a while, which I loved, but which was an hour commute each way. Again, I loved the work, this time I enjoyed the environment very much, but the commute was more than I could handle. And I didn't want to move closer to the city. Plus, I was pregnant and determined not to put my child in day care.

What I didn't realize was how hard it would be to be true to myself and available to my family at the same time. I thought my husband would back me up on my career as he had before we had children, but alarm bells should have gone off when his reaction to my proposed business was, "I don't think you can do it." Once we had children, he put me in the "mommy box", where my role was to care for the children, clean the house, and pay attention to him, the primary breadwinner, then maybe get some work done in my "spare time". He thought my work time was leisure time for me, and that I could keep the business running by working an hour a day.

Now, I saw in the comments to Dr. B.'s post that one should avoid marrying someone who isn't supportive. I'm not so sure it's that easy. My husband supported my career and my musical hobbies until we had children. Then he expected me to give up everything in favor of parenting, an attitude that completely blindsided me. When I first joined my choir, there was another member of my section who missed rehearsals a lot because, as everyone knew, her husband resented her time away from the family. I remember thinking to my unmarried self, how could you marry someone like that, someone who doesn't support something that's so important to you? Well, I found out. Seven years later, I found myself in the exact same position, on the receiving end of lectures on how much time I spent singing, away from the family, from the man who never missed a concert before we were married.

Marriage is can be a bait and switch. I married someone who was fundamentally the right one for me, but who had some cultural ideas that neither of us fully understood at the time. He is from an Asian third-world country, and no matter how much he protested that he wasn't "like that", he still had some very traditional ideas of motherhood, ideas that were exacerbated when his mother moved in with us after we had our second child. It's taken us almost a decade to work through all that, and we're in a good place now in our relationship, but my career is kaput.

I wonder how things might be now if I hadn't closed the business. He supports me now in pretty much anything I choose to do (as long as I'm not away too much in the evenings), and I feel lucky to have the opportunity to reinvent myself. We've both compromised, but I feel like I've sacrificed more in the process. He feels the pressure of being the only breadwinner, and that's fine with me. He chose to put me in the mommy box, and, even though now he realizes that he was wrong, the consequence of that is that I no longer have a viable career.

Yes, I could revive my career, and I dilettantishly look for work that would allow me to be here when the kids get home from school. But I have a rare chance now to change who I am, to pursue the creative things that I never did before because I was so conditioned to always have a job with health benefits. Do I worry about being financially dependent? Sure. That's why I still look at the job listings. But I know that, if something were to happen to my husband and/or his career, I would be able to find some sort of work. I wouldn't be as picky, and I wouldn't feel as strongly about flexibility if I had to keep food on the table. I would survive, and so would my family.

Saturday, November 04, 2006

The New Suburban Family

I worked on the directory for my daughters' elementary school this year.

I have to admit, it wasn't pure altruism. I'm kinda nosy. I was interested to see the children's family arrangements.

The older the children got, the more creative their family arrangements were. In my database, I had given room for two parents with separate addresses, phone numbers (two each) and email addresses (also two each, though that might be overkill -- most people aren't geeks like us). Reality still managed to push the envelope, though. There were some families with a remarried mother (hence a stepfather also listed) plus a father, or vice versa. There was one family that had two children, but one of them -- only one -- had a different father to be listed. One family had a mother and grandparents. Still another listing was for a boy whose legal last name was X, but whose mother had remarried and adamantly wanted him listed under her new husband's name, Y. He got listed as John (X) Y. The most heartbreaking one was for two young girls whose single-parent mother had passed away over the summer after a long cancer fight. They now live with their grandparents in their mother's house.

I can understand how these situations come about. I've been married for umpteen years, and, when you start out, you really, truly believe that you are the happiest people in the world and nothing could ever happen to ruin it. You have children confident in the secure, bright future you'll provide for them. Then your spouse dies, or one of you must battle depression, or someone has an affair or loses a job. Suddenly life is upside-down, and your children are watching how you react. Sometimes you can rise to the occasion, but sometimes you're a human being who's just doing the best she can. That's true no matter what stage of life you're in.

I talked to some of these parents when I called to clarify information or to ask them to proofread. Some clearly had amicable relationships with their exes, some showed quiet exasperation, some were openly hostile. But some seemed a bit lost, wanting to be involved in their children's lives but feeling like they were behind a barrier erected by the custodial parent, someone they loved once, and who loved them.

I'm one of the lucky ones. We're still together, our children are pretty well-adjusted, my husband's job is secure for now. But reading that directory made it crystal clear that all that could change in an instant. This is the kind of thing that keeps me up at night. I second-guess my decision to be a SAHM rather than continue my career or work at home. I worry about my husband's job, and the health benefits that are tied to it. Our lives are so tenuous. I wonder if my own parents felt that way, or if it's a function of the times we live in.

Looking for a snapshot of suburban family life? Pick up your school directory. It's an education in itself.

Friday, November 03, 2006

Irony for the Day

I was hanging my laundry out on the line this morning when it occurred to me that this was an extremely ironic activity for November.

I hang my laundry out in order to save energy, which helps fight global warming. But why is it that I can still do this in Pennsylvania in November? Global warming.

Hmmmm.