I've Stopped Trying to Be the Perfect Mom, and It's a Huge Relief | Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett
Flashback to NCT, and I ask our course leader Alison to go to the bathroom: "So you're saying we're not supposed to leave them unattended, ever… so how can I exactly, without stressing it too much... go to the bathroom?" baby cry so you can go to the bathroom/make a cup of tea/stuff a cold samosa into your mouth while you cry your past life as little ones well-prepared lunches. I felt guilty for doing this. My husband's return to work at four months coincided with the baby suddenly needing constant entertainment, and I started to feel guilty about that. topic too, because sometimes I would put it in the bouncer and read a book (my tight 10 minute set of politically correcting nursery rhymes having fallen flat).
Where had Did I catch this guilt? Not from my own mother or any of the older women than and I know. Not social media influencers, which I completely avoid. And no parenting books either – I opened The Wonder Weeks, looked at its literal checklist of developmental milestones, and decided it was a recipe for insanity. I had already missed the mark on the belly.
Research led me to realize that I had somehow absorbed what Judith Warner calls "motherhood of total reality". In other words, it's the cultural notion that motherhood is meant to be your life's work, with every other aspect of your identity being sacrificed on the altar of 360-degree parenthood. It seems that this pernicious ideology started in the 1990s but came to a head around the turn of the millennium. These days, it plagues my generation through bastardized, social media-filtered versions of attachment theory and soft parenting philosophies. To quote an article: "Now mothers were always to be 'active', engaged in relationships with their children that were both kinesthetic, relentlessly management-oriented, and relentless in their emotional solicitations."
Eliane Glaser frames it as the cult of the perfect mother, elsewhere it is "intensive mothering" or "conscientious cultivation". However described, it boils down to the belief that every moment should have remarkable educational or emotional value. From what I've read it's a largely western construct and it's not only bad for women, but also bad for children, who should be allowed to experience the world on their own or through play with other children. This manifests in the competitive obsession with baby classes, where everything is a learning opportunity (see also baby sensory movement). Hence, perhaps, my foolish decision (in hindsight) to take a three-month-old premature baby to baby swimming, an activity he opposed in the strongest terms. What was I thinking? And why did I feel so guilty when we quit?
Maybe it's a symptom of highly educated women being stripped of their identity overnight and who need some sort of outlet. Was that why all the other mothers in the introductory solids workshop seemed to have professorial knowledge? I started to feel bad until I remembered that I myself had been eating solid foods for many years without any problems. If I cut his food again when he's 35, I'll spend time feeling bad about making purees.
I haven't freed myself from any maternal guilt - that would be impossible - but over the past two months I have dutifully kicked less and am much happier. The baby is also happier because his mother is less anxious. None of these proponents of actually total motherhood ever seem to take maternal mental health into account. Whether it's pushing breastfeeding at all costs or telling you that any kind of sleep training will result in the same sad, neglectful silence seen in Romanian orphanages, there never seems to be any acknowledgment that a mother on the verge of depression could do more damage to her child than a bottle of formula or a little time spent learning to settle.
If you ask how I managed to purge myself of perfectionism, the answer is that I read two things. First, a research paper titled Accounting for Variability in Mother-Child Play on how mother-child play is culture- and class-specific, and in fact undesirable. Second, Pamela Druckerman's decade-old, but utterly liberating book French Children Don't Throw Food. Reading it, all my nanny memories I...
Flashback to NCT, and I ask our course leader Alison to go to the bathroom: "So you're saying we're not supposed to leave them unattended, ever… so how can I exactly, without stressing it too much... go to the bathroom?" baby cry so you can go to the bathroom/make a cup of tea/stuff a cold samosa into your mouth while you cry your past life as little ones well-prepared lunches. I felt guilty for doing this. My husband's return to work at four months coincided with the baby suddenly needing constant entertainment, and I started to feel guilty about that. topic too, because sometimes I would put it in the bouncer and read a book (my tight 10 minute set of politically correcting nursery rhymes having fallen flat).
Where had Did I catch this guilt? Not from my own mother or any of the older women than and I know. Not social media influencers, which I completely avoid. And no parenting books either – I opened The Wonder Weeks, looked at its literal checklist of developmental milestones, and decided it was a recipe for insanity. I had already missed the mark on the belly.
Research led me to realize that I had somehow absorbed what Judith Warner calls "motherhood of total reality". In other words, it's the cultural notion that motherhood is meant to be your life's work, with every other aspect of your identity being sacrificed on the altar of 360-degree parenthood. It seems that this pernicious ideology started in the 1990s but came to a head around the turn of the millennium. These days, it plagues my generation through bastardized, social media-filtered versions of attachment theory and soft parenting philosophies. To quote an article: "Now mothers were always to be 'active', engaged in relationships with their children that were both kinesthetic, relentlessly management-oriented, and relentless in their emotional solicitations."
Eliane Glaser frames it as the cult of the perfect mother, elsewhere it is "intensive mothering" or "conscientious cultivation". However described, it boils down to the belief that every moment should have remarkable educational or emotional value. From what I've read it's a largely western construct and it's not only bad for women, but also bad for children, who should be allowed to experience the world on their own or through play with other children. This manifests in the competitive obsession with baby classes, where everything is a learning opportunity (see also baby sensory movement). Hence, perhaps, my foolish decision (in hindsight) to take a three-month-old premature baby to baby swimming, an activity he opposed in the strongest terms. What was I thinking? And why did I feel so guilty when we quit?
Maybe it's a symptom of highly educated women being stripped of their identity overnight and who need some sort of outlet. Was that why all the other mothers in the introductory solids workshop seemed to have professorial knowledge? I started to feel bad until I remembered that I myself had been eating solid foods for many years without any problems. If I cut his food again when he's 35, I'll spend time feeling bad about making purees.
I haven't freed myself from any maternal guilt - that would be impossible - but over the past two months I have dutifully kicked less and am much happier. The baby is also happier because his mother is less anxious. None of these proponents of actually total motherhood ever seem to take maternal mental health into account. Whether it's pushing breastfeeding at all costs or telling you that any kind of sleep training will result in the same sad, neglectful silence seen in Romanian orphanages, there never seems to be any acknowledgment that a mother on the verge of depression could do more damage to her child than a bottle of formula or a little time spent learning to settle.
If you ask how I managed to purge myself of perfectionism, the answer is that I read two things. First, a research paper titled Accounting for Variability in Mother-Child Play on how mother-child play is culture- and class-specific, and in fact undesirable. Second, Pamela Druckerman's decade-old, but utterly liberating book French Children Don't Throw Food. Reading it, all my nanny memories I...
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