Mommy Madness

This is a long article, straight from the pages of Newsweek. And it set me OFF! What bothered me most about it is that the author seemed to be contradicting herself. And blaming motherhood for women's "less than" complexes. Or, as she says, "women who had surrendered their better selves—and their sanity—to motherhood."

Motherhood, like anything else, takes balance. Is everything equal? No, never. Something always gives. But that something shouldn't always be mommy.

Here's another doozy:

I read that 70 percent of American moms say they find motherhood today "incredibly stressful." Thirty percent of mothers of young children reportedly suffer from depression. Nine hundred and nine women in Texas recently told researchers they find taking care of their kids about as much fun as cleaning their house, slightly less pleasurable than cooking, and a whole lot less enjoyable than watching TV.

My question: How may women in Texas were interviewed? 909 out of how many? Give me facts when you spot off like this.

This article is simply too long for me to elaborate fully, and I hope you mommies out there will take the time to peruse it and let me know what you think.

My personal take is that these "super parents" are simply overscheduling their children. If my child's calendar has more activities than mine there is a definate problem. Does your child really need to go to Gymboree and tumbling? Soccer and t-ball? Dance and swim? When did childhood become so scheduled? What happened to being a kid?

And so, they don't get fired up about our country's lack of affordable, top-quality child care. (In many parts of the country, decent child care costs more than state college tuition, and the quality of the care that most families can afford is abysmal.) Nor about the fact that middle class life is now so damn expensive that in most families both parents must work gruelingly long hours just to make ends meet. (With fathers averaging 51 hours per week and mothers clocking in at an average of 41, the U.S. workweek is now the longest in the world.) Nor about the fact that in many districts the public schools are so bad that you can't, if you want your child to be reasonably well-educated, sit back and simply let the teachers do their jobs, and must instead supplement the school day with a panoply of expensive and inconvenient "activities" so that your kid will have some exposure to music, art and sports.

I'm most frustrated by her statement that middle class life is so damn expensive. In my mind it is only as expensive as you make it. Want to stay home with the kids? Don't get a new car, make due with the old one. Don't eat out so much. Forget keeping up with the Jones'. When we decided to have Brenna it was important to both Doug & I that I stay home. So we made sacrifices. My car is 4 years old. I haven't bought new clothes in I don't know how long. Many of Brenna's toys and clothes are hand-me-downs. You do what you need to do to make it work.

Here are the author's solutions:

We need incentives like tax subsidies to encourage corporations to adopt family-friendly policies.

We need government-mandated child care standards and quality controls that can remove the fear and dread many working mothers feel when they leave their children with others.

We need flexible, affordable, locally available, high-quality part-time day care so that stay-at-home moms can get a life of their own. This shouldn't, these days, be such a pipe dream. After all, in his State of the Union message, President Bush reaffirmed his support of (which, one assumes, includes support of funding for) "faith-based and community groups." I lived in France before moving to Washington, and there, my elder daughter attended two wonderful, affordable, top-quality part-time pre-schools, which were essentially meant to give stay-at-home moms a helping hand. One was run by a neighborhood co-op and the other by a Catholic organization. Government subsidies kept tuition rates low. A sliding scale of fees brought some diversity. Government standards meant that the staffers were all trained in the proper care of young children. My then 18-month-old daughter painted and heard stories and ate cookies for the sum total in fees of about $150 a month. (This solution may be French—but do we have to bash it?)

We need new initiatives to make it possible for mothers to work part-time (something most mothers say they want to do) by creating vouchers or bigger tax credits to make child care more affordable, by making health insurance available and affordable for part-time workers and by generally making life less expensive and stressful for middle-class families so that mothers (and fathers) could work less without risking their children's financial future. Or even, if they felt the need, could stay home with their children for a while.

In general, we need to alleviate the economic pressures that currently make so many families' lives so high-pressured, through progressive tax policies that would transfer our nation's wealth back to the middle class. So that mothers and fathers could stop running like lunatics, and start spending real quality—and quantity—time with their children. And so that motherhood could stop being the awful burden it is for so many women today and instead become something more like a joy.

1) We have government standards for child care. The state already does that.
2) Why is the lack of child care a government problem?
3) The economic pressures that make lives high pressured are mostly created by the individual. It just seems to me that this author is playing a blame game.

But then she ends with this:

We are simply beating ourselves black and blue. So let's take a breather. Throw out the schedules, turn off the cell phone, cancel the tutors (fire the OT!). Let's spend some real quality time with our families, just talking, hanging out, not doing anything for once. And let ourselves be.

Seriously, did you write the rest of that tripe? Because this is so far from everything else I read. And this is the only part of the article that really rings true to me.

I would really like feedback from other mommies- and daddies- about this article. Am I way off base?