Trying to explain the paradox of parental happiness

Irin Carmon of Jezebel has written an account of the same screening of the new movie I Don't Know How She Does It—and its Q&A session afterward with star Sarah Jessica Parker and novelist Allison Pearson—that was reported in a Slate post that I wrote about a couple of days ago. Like Slate's Jessica Grose, Carmon compares the event to a group-therapy session, though thankfully she avoids sneering at the other women in attendance.

Also like Grose, Carmon worries that movies like IDKHSDI—and comments by mothers at the screening—make motherhood seem, well, awful (frankly, the movie itself sounds pretty awful, but that's a matter for another post). Carmon writes, as Grose also implied, that hearing about all these problems is a turnoff for young women like themselves, who don’t have kids yet.

Childless young women don't necessarily welcome a bunch of negativity, I’ve come to realize in writing about this issue here on the blog and in an upcoming piece for Brain, Child (link to come, once it runs). They’d rather anticipate motherhood as joyful. Make it sound like a bummer, Caron and Grose suggest, and they’ll want to skip the whole thing.

"So I'm curious how do you balance being really honest about the fact that it's really challenging, with scaring younger women?" Carmon asked the celebrities, during her turn at the mic.

Parker, Pearson and some woman in the audience tried to explain that, however much it sometimes sucks, parenting overall is nonetheless wonderful.

Parker and Pearson discuss "I Don't Know How She Does It."

Honestly, it’s no wonder Carmon and Grose were dismayed.

The hassle/happiness balance of parenting is unquestionably a paradox, one that’s tough to discuss even with another parent who totally gets it, let alone someone who hasn’t experienced it. Just last night, in a conversation in Real Life®, a friend and I were exchanging motherly rants about how our children drive us nuts. We noted that our childless friends lead more serene existences—they get to choose what to do after work, don't have to clean up after anybody but themselves, never are nagged to buy stuff they can't afford, never (or at least rarely) have to helplessly endure the wrath of planeloads of strangers. Yet we also agreed that, despite everything, we’re still glad we have kids. Not only because we love our specific kids, but also because it’s an experience we wouldn’t want to have missed.

But why? Here we grasped for the right words. Because it’s, um, a challenge? Because kids make life unpredictable and variable? Because what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger? Yes, sure, all of those things.

Except that those don't sound all that fun, either.

What parents feel, I think, is not reducible to simple concepts like “happy” or “fun.” Those words are vague enough themselves, let alone when you try to stretch them to cover an experience that, let’s face it, involves its share of heartbreak, worry and swearing. Hence the bewilderment, not only of Carmon and Grose, but of journalists trying to explain all those studies finding that parents are less happy than non-parents.

Maybe satisfaction in parenting is a primitive animal reflex, hardwired in our brains by evolution, enhanced with washes of hormones. Maybe it's some other mysterious emotion entirely, one that exists independently of those modern comforts we usually associate with enjoyable lifestyles—concepts like “plenty of free time” or “adequate sleep." Or maybe, speculates the Atlantic’s Megan McArdle, “we are simply sentimentalizing the whole ordeal to keep ourselves from rooting out our unused passports from the sock drawer and dashing off to Europe, never to be heard from again.”

In any case, try to describe any of this to people who haven’t experienced it and you may sound inane. You may even find your efforts described on someone’s blog as “bizarre baby proselytizing.”

One more thing puzzles me about this episode. Why should anyone care whether Carmon and Grose want kids—or whether they’re driven instead, as Grose suggests, to “consider sterilization”? That is, aside from whatever larger, demographic concerns we might have about building a sufficient work force to subsidize our future Social Security and health-care requirements.

Personally, I’m not desperate enough to sugarcoat things with an eye toward securing my monthly checks. And there’s no point in snaring women into parenthood with false promises of paradise, like 19^th century land speculators luring unwitting Easterners west to what turned out to be harsh prairie homesteads.

I say we lay out the realities for not-yet mothers as honestly as possible, then leave it up to them. Having children is an act of faith, its consequences unpredictable. If they have kids, most likely, they’ll be glad they did it, despite the challenges. If they don't, most likely, they'll be content also.

If young women like Carmon and Grose think the risk of dissatisfaction is too great, as far as I'm concerned they should feel free to skip the whole thing.

Toxic comments on the "mommy" essay

Yikes. I just got through skimming the comments on the WSJ essay I extolled in my last post.  With the exception of a few shining jewels of polite or even enthusiastic agreement, they are overwhelmingly critical and in many cases downright nasty.

Which, God knows, is not atypical in anonymous internet comments, especially in connection with articles about child-rearing or motherhood (more on that in a moment). Anyway, after reading them I was moved to dwell on this issue yet again to point out three things:

1.) Approximately half of the comment posters missed the essay's point entirely. They seemed to think Brodesser-Akner was complaining about her children calling her "mommy." Which I thought she made clear was not the problem. Her complaint involved the frequent use of the word by other adults to describe her, themselves, mothers in general, or any activity (blogging, working part time, bickering about work-family balance) in which mothers are, or supposedly are, involved.

2.) Those who, after reading an article, are going to take the extra time to log onto the site, compose a comment, and then post it, probably should not have the comment read, "This article was a waste of time." Why not waste a little less time by not adding a comment which is yet another waste of time?

3.) I can understand why, to many people, it may seem no big deal whether a woman with children is referred to (stressing again that we're talking by people other than her kids) as mommy, mother, mom, mama, ma, female parental unit, person of maternity or member of the child-rearing community. And sure, compared to, say, what’s happening in Japan, it isn't. But then, neither is probably 99.999 (add a bunch more 9s) of what's on the internet and only a slightly smaller proportion of what's reported in the WSJ, or any publication.

Still, the words we use to describe things actually are important. Media depictions of people and their roles are important. Those things shape our culture and influence the way we view each other and our contributions to society. Try this experiment: Say you're an employer, evaluating two comparable candidates for an important position. Both of their resumes indicate they're currently not in the paid workforce. In the interviews, you ask each what she's been doing. One says, "I work at home, caring for my children." The other says, "I'm a mommy."

All other things being equal, which one are you going to hire?

As I said in my last post, women's roles in business and politics have changed dramatically over just a couple of generations. Women's roles as mothers still lag behind. Mothers pay a wage penalty in the workplace compared to non-mothers with comparable jobs and backgrounds (including women without children and men either with or without children). Women still do the bulk of childcare and housework. As a culture, we're trying to figure out how to reconcile these things, still trying to work out the bugs. That's a big deal, and as we go through that process, the issue of what words we use, along with any number of other details, is indeed important enough to write about.

Dismissing mothers' concerns as "whining" or "overwrought" or "a waste of time" or "silly" or "trivial" or "yeah, yeah, we get it already" is incredibly common—even among people who are otherwise sympathetic to feminist concerns—for reasons I am still trying to understand. I hope to write about this, too, someday, because writing about something is often the best way to make sense of it. (If anyone can suggest a way to, say, google "whining" and determine how often words like those are used to apply to mothers compared to everyone else, I would greatly appreciate it.)

In the meantime, if we want people to take mothers' issues seriously, it doesn't help to refer to them as mommies' issues.

Welcome, "Here and Now" listeners/website readers!

My interview NPR's "Here and Now" program finally aired today (it had been bumped a couple of times earlier for breaking news in Egypt). If you missed it, you can listen to it here. (Click the button near the top of the page.)

For those of you who are visiting after hearing the broadcast, welcome! This is a good place to discuss work-family balancing, the financial hazards of stay-at-home parenting, pressures on mothers, and other life choices women make and the cultural context in which they make them.

Feel free to suggest topics, or just write your thoughts. Glad to have you here!

P.S. If you like the "Here and Now" segment, you might also enjoy a call-in program I did recently on Minnesota Public Radio with law professor Joan C. Williams, director of the Center for WorkLife Law and author of Reshaping the Work-Family Debate: Why Men and Class Matter. You can hear it here.

I may have overplayed the James Franco card

ME (to 16-year-old son): Did you hear that James Franco made it to class at Yale at 9 a.m. the day after hosting the Oscars?

SON (with no apparent enthusiasm): He's a diligent boy.

Yale Daily News via New York Times

ME: It's not so much that he made it across the country. Of course it's humanly possible to get from LA to New Haven overnight. What's interesting is, that's how important he considers his education -- he didn't even use "I just hosted the Oscars" as an excuse to skip class.

SON: Mm-hmm.

ME: And did you know he's also earning a master's at NYU?

SON: An ambitious young man.

ME: That's a full-time program, you know.

[silence]

ME: And just think, meanwhile he also starred in one movie, appeared in several others, wrote a book, had an art exhibit at the Museum of --

SON: -- and learned heart surgery, yadda yadda yadda. OK!!!!!!!

Hmm. Is it possible I overplayed the Franco card? Maybe I should have added that my son would have done a better job as Oscar host.