Worlds Toughest Job: Tales of Modern Motherhood

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After interviewing Sheryl Sandberg for the paperback release of Lean In, she wanders around the Facebook campus. Brockes's trek towards motherhood is as arduous as its outcome twins but she is clear that it's the right choice for her. Sheila Heti is not so certain. Also nearing 40, the narrator of her story oscillates back and forth between having kids or not. At first these seem like what one reviewer has called "circuitous and discursive vacillations". This is how her book, Motherhood, initially feels, and it is somewhat self-indulgent.

But that doesn't stop it being a brilliant, philosophical study, as it charts the terrifying dilemma women in their 30s face: It's one thing to not want children, but what if you change your mind afterwards, when you're 45? No matter how many times you think it through, you can never be sure you won't feel differently when it's too late. Heti mulls this over in excruciating and intimate detail. Her friends are doing it, her mother did it. But would having a child not destroy her lifestyle and kill her art?

Why must women feel this pressure? What a great victory to be not-nice. The nicest thing to give the world is a child. Do I ever want to be that nice? Heti reaches an uneasy resolution, deciding that writing books, in place of motherhood, is her way of contributing to the world. As an answer, this seems off-key, based on a false dichotomy, since it implies both that people without children need to do something instead and that women with kids are somehow prevented from writing - something with which the eminently "not-nice" Brockes would disagree.

But Heti's conclusion is underpinned by a series of truths, and recognises that not everyone, or every woman, should feel obliged to procreate. Motherhood is a state that has long been alternately haloed and attacked. The point is made by Jacqueline Rose, a professor of humanities at Birkbeck University, in her long piece, Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty. It begins with a promising thesis. Motherhood is, she proposes, "the ultimate scapegoat for our personal and political failings, for everything that is wrong with the world, which it becomes the task - unrealisable, of course - of mothers to repair".

Rose talks about the obsession with foreign mothers in Britain's tabloids, and stories of immigrants crowding NHS hospitals to give birth to their babies. She counters this with the observation that an estimated 85, lone children and young people have come to Europe since , their mothers and fathers either dead or stranded elsewhere. It's a grand swathe of literary history, and Rose's study eddies around its subject, losing direction.

Mothers ends up too abstract and broad to have emotional weight - Rose's discussion of her own experience adopting a child in the final chapter isn't enough to give it focus. What's important and pleasing about Brockes's and Heti's books is that they take female experience seriously and articulate it intelligently, even philosophically in Heti's case. In their different ways, they write honestly about their lives. Rose is right that "mothers are almost invariably the object, either of too much attention or not enough". With these fresh accounts of motherhood, we're seeing a glimpse of how that might change.

Anne Cunningham This year saw some remarkable debuts, along with some gems, from more experienced pens. From history to politics, popular science, nature, cookery and music, it's our guide to the best non-fiction of Justine Carbery The weather outside grows colder, lights twinkle, and the little people in our life grow ever more impatient for the coming of Santa Claus. We need to use them as guideposts instead of getting stuck on them.

I also feel that spreading this idea puts unnecessary pressure on woman. Breast is best, no medication during pregnancy…. These messages can set Parents up to feel like they have somehow failed. I had a very necessary emergency c-section due to a cord prolapse, prior to which I had placed an inordinate amount of pressure on myself to have this sort of magical, mystical birthing experience.

IEVA, I certainly celebrate your birth story and am glad you gained strength from it, but this constant need to compare and contrast birthing experiences is yet ANOTHER source of pressure for many women, including myself. Lovely to read your blog again for the first time in ages. Your list is fantastic — number 24 is my special prickly one! Thank you x I deeply feel like a lone force pressing back against the negative forces of pop culture and marketing.

We can feel like the stakes are so high. What does it mean if I cannot pre-pay college for each of my children? Our culture has a very narrow definition of success and this can be hard to manage for ourselves but also hard to manage when we think about our children. So many of these are so true to me, especially the need for community when emotional, physical, and mental, as well as time resources are so low to draw from in order to create it.

I know I need elders! For example, in 17, in some ways I am getting to a point where I am not in sheer survival mode all the time. However, I feel so much more pressure to do and become more both personally and as a mother. Self-actualization seems like it should be attainable now that I can keep my head above water, but the expectation of that is overwhelming.

The podcast was great btw, and I have loved so many of your articles! I should be doing more- my youngest is now 4 and I feel I should be doing WAAAAY more but it would fell me — cooking good food and keeping everyone clean and hair brushed and the floors clean and clear.. I would add up-the-anti on food sensitivities to add EPI Pens, Autism, Plans, absent fathers, vaccination causes, court expenses and court orders for part, if not half, of Mothers. We are taking care of our parents who may be fatally ill and many are mourning the loss of a parent.

Thank you for this comment. I agree completely with your additions to the list. The effects of racial and socio-economic oppressions and inequalities on motherhood are widespread and overlooked.

WORDS FROM CRITICS

Beth, your voice has been very missed. You speak to my inner womanhood, the one that has a deep connection to all women past and present. You are a gift to me when you speak. I hope your healing is bringing you more fierce courage and inner peace. I am staying home with my 4 year old have a middle schooler too after having worked full-time since his birth. It has been one of the hardest and most isolating transitions of my life. The inner groaning is loud and heavy.

It is a constant paradox of mind and body. This is the same voice I hear from my other mother friends. We are aware but unable to make changes. That is the real next step and one that is going to take some serious gumption from all parties involved. My sanity comes in yoga practices and meditations, when there is time. All this to say this article nails the real day to day that I muck through. Thanks for the thoughts and voice.

I have recently relocated back from Bali where I have lived with my 3 children. In Bali I felt I was surrounded by warm family culture where everyone was available, made an effort, and I never felt so nourished and happy because of these deep nourishing connection. Now, I am once again in the UK which feels like such hard work on every level. High-quality widely-available public childcare, used by everyone in every income bracket Scandinavia, Canada, much of Europe makes ALL the difference.

And yet we persist and we lobby and we protest and all the things. I embrace it in ways I know how… I see myself as a trailblazer, a pioneer, a woman striving to live intuitively and authentically. Other times I find a sense of loneliness and long for connection across differences. Motherhood, tiredness, fiestiness… how do all things work together or not to create our different inclinations toward or against sex?

This seems like a ripe area for discovery and potential connection.

SPECIAL, THREE DIFFERENT SHOWS!

Your second comment hit my situation head on. I have zero sex drive. For the longest time I was afraid it was self preservation. Then I discovered I have a prolapsed bladder, which makes sex extremely uncomfortable. Another is not being able to rest when tired but having to push through. Never feeling comfortable in my body and the resulting effect on my mood and patience.

I often worry that we get our eyes opened by motherhood but are so consumed by it that there seems no chance to do anything about the systems creating these conditions. A sentiment no doubt shared by most women.

The notion of it takes a village and supporting a woman post-partum is the reason I will be staying with my mother after giving birth soon. In our modern lives, the village is missing that provides interdependence and the feeling of belonging, security, and connectedness. For me and others, this is also in the mix of our mothering minds and hearts especially, unfathomably, for mothers in Hawaii last weekend:. I am in a constant struggle of feeling overwhelmed, ill-prepared and completely inadequate to raise my two young boys. Where is the joy? Is it a new kind of joy? Motherhood is a battle.

No wonder we are all walking around in survival mode. Mother of boys ages 4 and nearly 3. There are tons of manuals. A plethora of manuals. So many books on how to raise children. But they are all different. They often contradict each other.

TALES OF MODERN MOTHERHOOD Scores An Encore Performance At United Solo Fest

Each child is different too. No one manual matches any one actual child. So we read through tons of material explaining why we are doing it wrong. How if we just did it differently, our problems would be solved. So we try the techniques, sometimes they help, sometimes not. So we read another book and try a new technique and suddenly consistency is gone. So we feel worse.

Why Modern-Day Motherhood Feels So Frustrating

As much as the sheer volume of perspectives may feel overwhelming, I find that the books that fit for me provide meaningful companionship, inspiration, and guidance on this path. So again, thank you.

I really appreciate your wisdom and your voice! As an aside, i would like to gently encourage you to take a fresh look at your use of words like tribe and blessingway in the context of colonialism and cultural appropriation. As you already know, context is so important. These words have origins that deserve respect and healthy boundaries. Oh God this resonates so deeply. Thank you thank you.

My heart breaks with the sorrow of it and bursts with the joy of knowing I am not alone in this. Thank you for this beautiful post Beth. You have described beautifully the larger landscape of frustration shared by mothers. It is a perfect place to start a conversation about the tools we already have at our disposal to resist some of the influences that grind mothers down.

For instance, we can resist the self-help industrial complex and grow more confident and feisty together by practicing intuitional self-confidence. Thank you for this article. And there is zero reason why he should not be shouldering half the load. Or she, of course.

Men and women are socialized differently. We are taught to think and feel differently about childcare, housework, etc including the crucial part: And what we have learned, we can unlearn. See the work of Andrea Doucet for starters: One of the most stressful things for moms is the second shift https: There are two adults in the home, two adults should be splitting that work.

You put in your 8 hours, he puts in his, and you split the work after that. Most men I know are cheerfully happy to do a task if they are asked. But often, they continually need to be asked. She is managing the tasks, sorting out the supplies, making sure he does it right. What needs to change is that they attune themselves to seeing the tasks, and doing them. Exactly how we have been taught since we were young girls to see and do household tasks. But how to get there? I highly suggest a domestic contract — yes, literally writing up all the work and childcare tasks, then allotting them fairly between the two of us.

Because we write up the work, we can both see what the work all actually is. Articulating it makes all the difference, as does the buy-in from both of us that the house and kid are both our responsibility. Most of us want to teach our kids to do chores, to take responsibilities in the household as they grow. Any man can cook, any woman can change a light bulb. It can be tough — men have to give up leisure time, do more of the work, and crucially wrestle with what it means for their concepts of masculinity.

But so do we — we have to wrestle with letting go, with not claiming housework or childcare as our special domain of expertise or identity. Do you even know where to start? Men learn all this — they are not born with diagrams of car engines in their heads. After three months of doing their agreement, her daughter came to her and said: I would also add time restraints.

Everything takes longer to do. We have to drive to the grocery store and have to choose between types of pasta, 49 different sauces, etc. We are drained from decision fatigue. And there are so many options now we want to offer it all. I love your article. Thank you for sharing. We are collectively taking our health into our own hands as well. The extra research and hard stand we must do in this area alone is exhausting.

Thankfully the smiling one year old doesnt mind my absence yet. My husdband is back home solo-parenting in a town hours from family. I work for and with amazing women. I feel guilty for having my dream job. I feel like a bad mom.

I feel like I owe my husband for the sacrifices he makes for me to travel for work. It feels like something has to give. My connections with girlfriends is minimal. I keep avoiding making that decision. I guess your post hit a raw nerve to say the least. CS, I wish I could give you a hug. You have an awesome job, which is to be celebrated! I have 3 young kids including twin 3 year olds and I love my job. For generations, fathers have worked and traveled and been gone from home. Did they beat themselves up about it?

These men are now beloved dads and grandpas and great grandpas. A mom who loves her job and is good at it is a great role model for any kid. Which can be achieved by moms working full time outside the home as well as those staying home. Study says quality trumps quantity. Thank you for this list. Each point would be a chapter. Agreed, an excellent list.

Parenting can only become fair and equitable when dads begin to do their share of the mental work planning, researching, noticing, remembering, and yes worrying. In my experience, this affliction seems much less common among dads. My husband feels no such anxiety none! And I am also a feminist who actually teaches this sort of thing for a living — and I still need the house clean.

Programs in our heads are the hardest to change — but the most worth it. We both have messes so we can both not care… funny how that works. Beth, thanks for posting again -i just discovered your blog and was afraid you had stopped writing: I m curious about the car-culture frustration! I feel this one very hard, but it seems like i m the only one..

I also wonder about all the increased screen time this then causes. I was a stay at home mom. This was mostly asked in reference to a paying job. My partner is a high energy, self-driven person, sometimes this question was asked in reference to what I was contributing to his current project.

I never came up with a good answer for that question. Minutiae is a big part of that equation, and explaining minutiae to anybody is a difficult thing to do. You wrote Click here to learn more. The link is a dead end. This was hard to read. It made me cringe and cry to the point that I had to walk away and come back to finish. I am an 87 year old great grandmother having raised our three children during the late fifties through the seventies.

I spent quite a bit of time tonight reading this whole article and all the subsequent replies from these young mothers and their self doubts and frustrations. I wish I would know how to help them. So there really is nothing here for me to say to them. My generation had a different lifestyle and outlook on marriage and family. Maybe we did it better and maybe we did it wrong. We just did it. We lived by the one day at a time rule. There were the good, the bad and at times the ugly…but in the end, we loved every minute of it …even when we hated it We read books like Men are from Venus and Women are from Mars….

It takes a lot of work This is too simplistic I realize. But the average American woman of the fifties did not aspire to the big house with the two car garage and the swimming pool. We made it work. We loved even the bad times along with the good. I pray that many of you can find true joy and happiness and above all peace in your lives as wives and mothers.. I think there was a song by that name years ago and it was the lifestyle I was born for. It goes by faster than you think.. I truly enjoyed reading your comment, thank you for sharing your historical perspective!

I am a stay at home mother and I agree completely, that pursuing a career while raising kids makes life extraordinarily difficult. The trouble is, in our current society most women do not even have a choice when it comes to pursuing a career. It requires two incomes for a family to survive, even without aspiring to a large house and swimming pool. I am fortunate enough to have a husband with a higher paying career, but I really feel for the women who are stuck in unfulfilling jobs and trying to parent at the same time. My wife sent this to me as a way of communicating how she felt.

I was taken back by the article as the list seem to center on motherhood as a singular action, rather than on motherhood as one half of a parenting unit. Im not arguing with a single point you made, only with the intrinsic fallacy being between mother and father, not between woman and society. Our dynamic parenting roles have created the need for dynamic, honest, and leadershipesque dialogue. I like to believe that my wife and I can parent in a way that is fulfilling for both of us, if only we form a a strong team.

My hope is that in doing so we can overcome social pressure, subsidize each others failings and I can help her be a modern day strong and peace bearing mother, while she helps me be a modern, nurturing and home making father. They like to hang back and see if she can resolve all the problem s on her own. That someone just tends to always be Mom. What is that underlying mentality that makes it seem fine to cut corners at home in a way that would never happen at work? How does believing in equality between the sexes explain why women have such a bum deal?

I really appreciate the insights here. As a mother and full-time educator, I have, until recently been beating myself up. Then I turned 50, and something amazing happened. I started, ever so gradually not giving a crap what judgy other people said to or about me. God be praised for this wisdom. In particular, i was interested in no. Thanks again for such a detailed post and for sparking discussions about this near and far.

Hi Beth, and all commenters, This speaks to a critical problem in our society I think. My family and I host a monthly-ish pancake jam for local parents we make pancakes, friends bring toppings, then we try to play music. Feel free to connect with me via http: I found this article by Revolution From Home very powerful, and I am sure it will resonate with many of you as mothers. I read all the 33 or so points. Being with the situation reduces stress. All the moms with kids of a particular age group got to connect so that they feel good and not lonely.

They all have same concerns and with the guidance of seniors will feel assurance. Every situation is supported by a set of conditions. Gender collaboration is the most important factor. What is natural in the developmental stages of human beings needs to be respected. Demanding situations will be demanding only by yielding to the demands.

Enjoying the milestones of the kids adds great pleasure of bonding which is not to be missed. The career sacrifices and being with the kids for the sake of kids are to be appreciated and the situation is only temporary. These are the stages humans need to open up another dimension of the thought process or perceptions about life. Absolutely brilliant articulation of the interior landscape of modern motherhood, and, indeed womanhood. For this, I feel very blessed, though I wish it were commonplace for all women. While we thought we were trailblazers in many ways, it saddens me to think we were an anomaly in raising our children the way we did, and that a new vision of parenthood has yet to emerge in any real and practical sense.

Our workplaces are still unsupportive, our healthcare system is brutal, our parents aging or deceased or living on the other side of the country, our communities silently competitive and self satisfied. Thank you for a wonderfully insightful and useful post. Many caregivers mothers and fathers in Australia my country of birth are in an abysmal situation, wanting to care for their child but either having to rush back to work to keep some employer satisfied, or face being unemployed — this is most often mothers. I have met extremely few fathers who have shouldered or currently shoulder half or more of the parenting load by reducing their working hours, but women do this without even thinking about it.

May mothers, it is most often mothers, devote years of their lives to part-time work or no paid work to care for children, and when they try to return to work, they are out of the market, have lost skills, are less attractive to employers as they have children who will have days when they are sick and need to be taken care of the employer assumes of course it will be the women who takes care of the sick child — why? Next point — paid leave to take care of unwell children should be introduced.

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