Perfect Madness review

Although dense in parts (the history of feminism bits may not be fascinating to all readers), I think this is an excellent book that I wish I could give to all the moms I know. And some dads too. Reading it has been tremendously freeing for me. It's helped turn off those judgy voices in my head that would never let me parent the way I wanted to, and that worried about every little insignificant decision that I had to make during a normal day of motherhood. I have to admit that I would feel awkward actually giving this book to any moms I know, because everything to do with motherhood feels so political now and I'm rather conflict-averse, but I think at its core are some ideas that everyone can agree on. I have to tell you that as lengthy as this book review is, I am only scratching the surface, and I'm not even touching on the very interesting section on body issues and eating disorders.

The book is not organized this way but I'm going to organize my review very simply to make it easy to understand at a glance: the book outlines a problem, and it analyzes the causes of that problem.

Problem: The Mommy Mystique. Today's mothers believe that we have it as good as it gets, and therefore anything that goes wrong with motherhood - stress, anxiety, depression, time-crunches, work-life balance issues, marital problems, and anything at all that is imperfect about our children - is our fault. Therefore, we have become control freaks who let ourselves become defined by motherhood and are constantly, desperately trying to control every aspect of our children's environment to guarantee they are safe, happy, and successful, none of which is really possible for one person to do.

Reason #1: Our culture has failed us. Warner writes a fascinating, though perhaps a little obscure, sociological history of the role of motherhood and the culture's view of women as mothers. Suffice it to say this role has always been fraught. She traces it back to the Age of Enlightenment when the burden of saving children's souls from damnation was placed squarely on their mothers, to now when it's popular sentiment that your children are your whole world. Over time women were alternately targeted for being too smothering, too overinvolved, too much, or too removed, too cold, not enough. There has always been this cycle of the new trend, the backlash, the reaction, etc. The idea that you could spoil a baby came from one wave of anti-mother sentiment in the 1960s that said women were raising dependent, neurotic mama's boys. Attachment parenting arose in reaction to that more hands-off style.

Now this is interesting: did you know that Attachment Theory was developed as a result of studies done on children raised in orphanages, homeless children, and foundlings - children who experienced real trauma and neglect? Not ordinary children with ordinary mothers (working or not!). So applying their findings on "maternal deprivation" to children whose mothers are present on a daily basis is quite a stretch.

Add to this an emerging cultural interest in psychology and a change in emphasis from nature to nurture: suddenly parents - mostly mothers - were seen to be in control of a child's entire personality. Every moment spent with a child was imbued with purpose. Set this against a backdrop of an increase in women entering the workforce, and the cultural backlash that accompanied that, and you have a perfect storm amidst which can arise the cultural "knowledge" that children need to be at home with their mothers, which of course means mothers should spent every moment with their children.

Reason #2: Feminism has failed us. This is a fairly complex section but I think the meat of it is this: when Roe vs. Wade came to pass in 1973, it took over the feminist movement, perhaps largely because the backlash against it was so strong that it seemed to need constant defending. What got lost as feminism narrowed to focus on abortion rights was everything else that women had been fighting for: equality in the workplace, equality in marriage, equality in society, female empowerment, and so on. And then because the idea of being "pro-abortion" sounded so icky, feminists adopted the language of "pro-choice," which conveniently meshed nicely with our choice-driven consumer culture. If you think about the shift from focusing on rights to focusing on choice, you'll see what an important shift that was: it's not about civil rights for a whole population of women, it's about individual choice and people simply doing what they wanted in their own lives without worrying about society as a whole. Everything else we could have and should have continued to care about neatly fell away in that context: equal pay, workplaces and careers that don't sideline and "mommy track" working mothers, and marriages where women aren't seen as the de facto caregivers and homemakers.

Reason #3: Society has failed us. This is the section that I would most love for Mr. Ibis and other men to read, because it applies to all parents and not just mothers. Here Warner describes how the free-market-gone-wild society we live in is hostile to families and has squeezed the middle class so badly that the pressure has generated traditional gender roles and overparenting that are satisfying and helpful to precisely nobody. It's an incontrovertible fact that the income gap in this country has been widening at an exponential rate since the middle of last century. Take for starters some hastily googled facts: at the end of 2001, 10% of the US population owned 70% of its wealth. The bottom 40% of the population owned less than 1%. Warner points out that the rampant layoffs of the 90s were a new kind of job loss: loss in the midst of boom times that were executed simply to maximize corporate profit, as wealth essentially poured from the middle class into the upper crust - and it's only continued to do so. Meanwhile, cultural images of "normal" American life in the media were all drawn from the upper-middle and upper classes, badly distorting regular middle class people's ideas of what it took to "make" it - which they compensated for by plunging into debt to get there.

The results of all this have made a middle class life an unending struggle for families, careers nearly impossible to maintain for middle class working mothers, and overanxious parents who are so terrified that their children will end up struggling and drowning too, that they overparent their kids half to death and everyone suffers. It's not enough anymore to be an average student, grow up to be a postal worker or a secretary, and still be able to get married, support a family, buy health insurance and a house. These days such an ordinary existence is tantamount to failure, because it's unsustainable in a nation where families have no safety net and the cost of living is out of control. All the success is clustered at the top, so naturally this is where parents want their kids to be - the best at everything, no matter the cost. The result is that parents are stressed out and absolutely miserable, and so are their kids.

In addition to that, moms often find themselves facing an ugly choice: put their kids into substandard daycare that they can barely afford for 40+ hours a week, get mommy tracked out of the workforce (because if you aren't putting in overtime you're not doing enough), or drop out and stay at home, where they never ever get a break because once again daycare is totally unaffordable and generally not up to snuff. The promises of 70s feminism never did come through: we can't have it all, not because we are failing, because society isn't set up that way. Most women would like to be at home with the kids some of the time, and at work or doing other adult-oriented things some of the time, but for the vast majority of women that's simply not an option.

Men, meanwhile, are usually funneled into a traditional father role where they work the maximum number of hours possible just to make ends meet, which means they have no time to help with the children or the household and those things of course fall on the woman, with her lower paycheck and greater (though not great) amount of time. (Interesting side note: women today spend more time at work and more time with the kids than women in the 60s. Where is that extra time coming from? They no longer cook meals, do as much housework, or have as much leisure time to themselves.) This, naturally, is affecting marriages negatively, since most of these couples entered into the relationship with the intention of being equals and best friends - but the brutal reality of "making it" in this economy has made that arrangement hard to maintain.

The solution: work for change. All of the above is pretty grim, right? And the solution is kind of overwhelming: we need to work for huge, culture-wide changes. Such a prospect is so daunting that nearly all of us have rejected it out of hand. Warner says this is why we have become such control freaks: because all of the pent-up frustration and rage and desperate need for change that we should direct outward at society is much easier to direct inward onto ourselves and our small, atomic-family-sized environments. This is why we obsess over food allergies, BPA plastics, organic baby foods, antibacterial soaps, stranger dangers, etc. etc. etc. (And although she doesn't really go into it, I believe this is also why we attack other mothers - it gives us a sense of power that we otherwise sorely lack.) Because we feel we can exert a little control over those things, but we can't control the fact that corporations put harmful chemicals in baby toys and foods because it's cheaper, or that we are one of the only countries in the world that does not offer ANY guaranteed paid maternity leave, or that we have NO federal laws (only unenforced "guidelines") setting standards for daycare, and so on. Those are the things we need to focus on and fight for - and yes, that's a tall order. But look at it this way: what we have been doing up until now - beating ourselves up for not being perfect in such an imperfect world - is NOT WORKING. It's not making us happy and it's not making us good mothers. It's making us miserable, anxious, depressed, competitive, and bitchy. It's time for a change.

I have to think more on what I can do to work for that change. I hope you'll think about it too. It would be so great if ours was the generation of mothers who finally said ENOUGH! Stop pitting us against each other and against ourselves. We want more. We want change, for real this time.