Motherhood in the age of anxiety

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.

Excerpted from "Perfect Madness: Motherhood in an Age of Anxiety," by Judith Warner. Copyright © 2005 by Judith Warner. Excerpted by permission of Riverhead Books, a division of Penguin Group Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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