The Madness of Motherhood

Mr. Ibis and Miles and I walked to the library yesterday and I stumbled upon a book that I think is exactly the one I need to be reading right now. It's almost as though this book found me... it's called Perfect Madness by Judith Warner. Here's the teaser blurb on the back:

This book is an exploration of a feeling. That caught-by-the-throat feeling so many mothers have today of always doing something wrong. [...] The feeling has many faces, but it doesn't really have a name. It's not depression. It's not oppression. It's a mix of things, a kind of too-muchness. An existential discomfort. A mess.

I'm only on page 31 but already this is the sort of book that has me saying yes! yes! as I read.

The gist of it, from what I can tell so far, is that the American author had her first child in France and when that baby was three years old and her second one was an infant she moved back to the US. Moving from another culture back to ours enabled her to see something that we ourselves are unable to see because it surrounds us so completely like water to fish. This constant pressure and neurosis and feeling like you're never doing enough and never doing it right - whether you are a working mom or a stay at home mom (and she in fact presents this as a false dichotomy since the vast majority of American moms actually work part time and/or at home, like me!).

She posits that the fault lies not with the individual mothers, that they are simply neurotic and deranged, but with society. With its total lack of a support system for mothers on the one hand, and its constant messages of you're-not-doing-enough on the other. The lack of support being the impossibility of quality affordable child care, doctors (OBs and pediatricians) who don't have time to care about you, workplaces that are family-unfriendly, suburban sprawl and overscheduling that makes a walk in the park with your friend nearly impossible to coordinate. And the messages are coming from the TV and internet and all the experts, and all the interactive toys, and Gymboree and music classes and on and on.

This all strikes a bone-deep chord of familiarity to me. Lately I find it hard to enjoy my free time, with or without Miles, because I am constantly hearing this voice in my mind telling me you're not doing it right, you're not doing enough!! Is it my voice? Is it the voice of post partum depression, some electron gone awry in my brain? I'm beginning to think NO on both counts. I'm beginning to think it's all these messages that have seeped down through the media (mainly the media, since, let's face it, I don't interact with many people in real time). I can't do a single thing with Miles without hearing the voice of the opposing team in my head telling me it's WRONG WRONG WRONG. I can't co-sleep without hearing a voice telling me it's sick and codependent. I can't leave Miles in a chair talking to his toys without hearing a voice telling me it's neglectful and tragic. It never stops, and just as Judith Warner is describing in this book, it's driving me mad.

Since I don't really watch television, and when I do it's an ad-free series on DVD, my primary pipeline to pop culture is the internet. I've decided that I'm going to take a 30 day breather from the message boards. Not only the B.ump, but also the N.est because the boards I visit there can be just as bad in terms of constantly judging other people's choices. I am still a moderator on one board, but rather than throw the table in the air and quit that, I'm going to just take these 30 days and then see where I stand (I can "moderate" by scanning post titles once a day for 5 minutes). I'm curious to see whether this will help me mentally detox a little and be able to just find my own voice in motherhood and stop obsessing about what the "correct" thing is and what everyone else is doing. It's a bit paradoxical in that it will remove one of the only supports I do have as a mother, but I'm wondering whether it really is a support or something more damaging, so this will be my experiment.