I'm sick of all this mutual surveillance ? let's put a stop to the Mummy Wars | Emma Donoghue | Comment is free | The Guardian
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So how are you surviving all that quality time with your children over the Easter
break? Has it been a fortnight of violin practice, family bike rides and teaching them how to sprout bulgur? Or perhaps you checking your email while they goggle at Balamory and Charlie and Lola?
However you've got through your kids' holidays, I won't be judging your parenting skills. It's my new resolution.
It's something I wish more mothers would do: stop telling others how to mother. I'm switching from gender-neutral to gender-specific here because, although I know a lot of highly hands-on fathers, I'd be hard put to it to find two or three actually interested in having long conversations about whether they think of themselves as Tiger Fathers or Panda Dads, Furberizers or Babywearers. This particular specialist subject seems a female preoccupation.
I've been thinking a lot recently about what makes so many mothers invest not only hard-won reading/thinking/blogging time, but also so much emotional energy and their sense of identity, in the Mummy Wars. By which I mean not just the big question of stay at home, go to work, a bit of both or something in between, but all the other decisions too: from Caesareans to feeding to time-outs to toilet training, to when to start charging them rent.
It's on my mind because I'm often asked to clarify whether I intended my novel Room to promote attachment parenting or Christian homeschooling. (Argh. I didn't realize I'd written What to Expect When You're Expecting Your Kidnapper's Baby.) Also, I've been giggling my way through Tina Fey's new memoir, Bossypants. I share her inability to speak frankly to babysitters; I can't even tell ours to turn the kids' lights off at night. And I particularly appreciate her account of being guilt-tripped over breastfeeding.
When it comes to motherhood, our culture has a strange tendency to slide from the descriptive, to the prescriptive, to the proscriptive. From "Ah, look at that baby happily nursing", to "breast is best", to "if you put that bottle in your baby's mouth you'll damage his IQ". Considering that feeding a baby is a choice based on all sorts of factors (from bodies to jobs to family dynamics), it can feel oddly like a criminal matter. In the case of our family, for instance, bottle worked best for the boy and breast for the girl. (But still I couldn't help feeling agonised about the former and smug about the latter.) The same goes for all those other daily decisions. You do the best you can to guess what's going to work for the whole family
but total strangers (as well as close friends, which hurts more) are going to judge you, and even if they don't, the little voices in your head will chime in.
If you're out in public with your kids, it can feel as though the CCTV cameras are always trained your way. Every parent I know jokes about the nightmarish possibility of being reported to Child Protection Services. You can bring down the wrath of a stranger simply by failing to keep a broad-brimmed sunhat on your child or letting her race around with a lollipop in her mouth. You might think that, having defied convention when it came to conception (anonymous donor, two mothers, as I tell anyone at the playground rash enough to ask 'Is their dad tall?'), I'd be relaxed about what people thought of my parenting at the micro-level. But no, I still get that Bad Mum Blush when our daughter bloodies her knee and I not having a plaster have to improvise with an old tissue.
And frankly, I'm sick of the mutual surveillance. Surely we can do things differently without forming hostile tribes? I've got friends who bring their babies to the creche at three months, and others who breastfeed them on demand till they're five. Ones who take their kids to Sunday School or Witch Camp, all-inclusive Caribbean resorts or antiwar demos. Even one who won't vaccinate her kids. I know toddlers who nap at the same time every day or never, who spend their nights in their parents' bed or in an electric swing. And the funny thing is, all these kids seem to be growing up just fine.
Raising kids has always been hard work, but I'd bet it's never been quite so self-conscious before. The only parenting manual my mother had was Doctor Spock's, but now a book such as Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother can whip up a media firestorm, with Amy Chua's dictatorial methods called everything from the lost key to Western success to a form of child abuse. We are so tense about how best to rear the next generation that it leads to absurdities such as a ban on running in school playgrounds.
I suspect this self-consciousness about childrearing is tied to a low birth rate; when I was growing up as one of eight in 1970s Dublin, I don't think my parents were agonizing over exactly which month to introduce me to grains or citrus. It seems to me that the rarer kids are, the more we fuss over them, and allow companies to badger us into buying them more and more elaborate equipment to contain their strangeness.
It must also have something to do with the changed lives of women. Educated mothers with experience of the workplace are bringing an analytical, professional approach to what used to be the simpler business of childrearing. (My favourite scene in Mad Men is still when the kids rush in with plastic bags over their heads and, instead of showing any concern about suffocation, Betty taps her cigarette and snaps, "Have you been messing with my dry-cleaning?") This has effects both sane and silly. We read consumer reports before buying a car seat, fine
but we sometimes we bite a friend's head off for offering our baby a spoonful of non-organic avocado. So I'm going to give up being judgmental. Except
Yesterday in Toys R Us (where I went, most unwillingly, to buy the three-year-old the purple ZhuZhu Pet she craves for her birthday) there was a little girl no older than three in high heels. In fact, in a complete copy of her mother's outfit. My teeth clamped together. I was within an inch of saying, "Excuse me, do you realize you're crippling your child because you're a narcissist?" Only the awareness that it would lead to a strained silence at best, a trashy catfight in the aisles at worst, kept my mouth shut. I talked myself down: she's not beating the little girl's soles with a thorny branch. Probably the kid spends most of the day in trainers and this is just a special dress-up moment. But I was judging, all right. And what annoyed me most was that the little girl looked as happy as Larry.
The tense scrutiny of motherhood begins long before birth. When I was pregnant, I used to feel like a reckless thrill-seeker every time I had Brie (unpasteurized!) on my baguette. Although I don't drink, I was sometimes tempted to order a glass of wine just to see what kind of Cuban-missile-style crisis it would cause. In Indianapolis, Bei Bei Shuai is currently in jail because, during a breakdown triggered by discovering that her fiance was already married, she tried to kill herself with rat poison, and their baby died four days after birth. She's charged with murder, because clearly, in Indiana, a pregnant woman is not a person, just a person-carrier.
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