Motherhood in the age of anxiety

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.

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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.

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