Motherhood in the age of anxiety

When Judith Warner returned from France, none of the other moms she met seemed happy. “Perfect Madness” is an attempt to understand the phenomenon of the “anxious woman” and the forces that shape our current parenting ideals. Drawing on her experiences living and raising young children abroad, Warner explores the worries, guilt and panic plaguing so many American moms. Judith Warner was invited on the “Today” show to talk about her new book, "Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety." Read an excerpt.

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”?

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