Why even mothers with beachy hair might have a point

I have pulled myself out of blogging hiatus and its accompanying guilt spiral to discuss this post on Slate's "XX Factor" blog, in which Jessica Grose reports on a special screening of the new working-mother comedy I Don't Know How She Does It. The event included a post-viewing Q&A with star Sarah Jessica Parker and Allison Pearson, author of the best-selling novel on which the film is based. Grose writes that she was so unnerved by the mothers in the audience—their post-viewing questions turned the event into something resembling a 1970s-style "group therapy session/modern consciousness raising circle"—that she fled before she was forced to "consider sterilization" (Grose has no kids, but apparently intends to someday).

Sarah Jessica Parker and Allison Pearson speak at the screening.

For what it's worth, I haven't seen the movie (and didn't finish the book). Judging from the trailer, it doesn't look very good, and I suspect my own reaction will resemble Mary Elizabeth Williams' review on Salon. But that's probably beside the point here.

I have an essayish article coming up in the fall issue of Brain, Child (I'll link to the actual piece once it goes online) about the phenomenon of feminist, progressive writers—people you’d normally expect to support women's choices and viewpoints—turning critical and contemptuous when the women in question happen to be mothers expressing some discontent with their lives. Surprisingly often, writers trivialize mothers' complaints, casting them as excessive or overwrought or whiny or merely First World problems of privileged women.

My essay offers a handful of illustrations (including, sad to say, a couple from "XX Factor"). Grose's blog post, having just appeared yesterday, long after my deadline, isn't one of them. But it could be.

Let me interject that I respect Grose as a writer. And that we've all been in groups whose aesthetics, opinions and so forth didn't match our own. And that it's possible there's something she's trying to convey in the post—some truly eye-roll-inducing aspect of the event she attended—that I'm just not grasping.

But. Come on.

... (T)he crowd did not look much like journalists: It was almost exclusively women (I counted two men), and almost all of them had the perfectly set "beachy" waves that are meant to look tousled but clearly took at least an hour with a curling iron and various products to create. When the heavily made-up moderators (one in fetching leather pants) got on stage to announce the movie, I realized that this was an event for mom bloggers ...

Could we feminists agree to avoid pointing to the scarcity of men at an event to implicitly undermine the event's seriousness (when the real reason might have to do with the nature of the event itself, or possibly even with men's obliviousness to a legitimate issue)? Could we, further, declare a moratorium on discrediting what women say based on their hairstyles, makeup and clothing? Is it really all that odd for women to spend some time on their appearance before sitting on a stage next to celebrities, including one who is famous for her stylishness? Please bear in mind that I am a person who has never owned leather pants and whose hair would only be described as "beachy" not in the “curling iron and products” sense but in the "she obviously spent all day at the kids' swimming lessons and hasn't been near a comb since" sense.

Grose's description of the session is laced with implicit contempt. The woman introducing SJP "squealed with delight." The moderators' questions were "somewhat coherent." Audience members engaged in "bizarre baby proselytizing" and spoke of their lives in a "groovy '70s emotional mode." The actress and writer "did their best to relate to the women, to soothe them" (not, Grose suggests, because the stars genuinely empathized or agreed, but because SJP has good people skills).

As she listened, Grose found herself "saddened" because the attendees "were clearly in need of some outlet for their discontent." And because the poor things were deluded enough to think they'd find "a satisfying answer" from ... well, an actress who starred in a movie on the subject and frequently publicly discusses her own family life, and an author who wrote a whole book about it and has undoubtedly talked to thousands of mothers since then.

As for the attendees’ actual statements, I have read through Grose's post numerous times and still can't for the life of me figure out what she found so ridiculous or out of place about them. A stay-at-home mother of five said she often feels trapped and envious of working friends (and vice versa). Another woman feels guilty about leaving her son with his grandmother rather than taking him to play dates. Another is annoyed at friends who wanted to bring their children along on a group trip.

These are individual predicaments, but they touch on some of the very real problems that many mothers experience: isolation, envy, guilt, the often-thwarted need for respite.

Instead of making fun of these squealing women in their overdetermined hair and makeup, I think it makes sense to consider the extent to which their feelings might be shared by many other contemporary mothers, including those with suitably unstyled hair and pants made of cloth, and to wonder whether these potentially widespread problems just might be of interest from a feminist perspective.

Take the at-home mother who feels trapped. One wonders whether 21st century mothers are particularly subject to this sort of isolation, restlessness and envy, as well as to cultural pressures that would lead an intellectually active woman to choose staying home over a career in the first place. Might there be structural and institutional causes for—and possible solutions to—this dilemma?

Grose's post links the term she herself chose—“consciousness raising"—to a Wikipedia entry defining that dated-sounding phrase. It describes groups, common in the '70s, in which ordinary women discussed problems in their own lives and learned the ways in which these represented more universal issues. They're one of the ways feminist ideas initially spread from writers and intellectuals to women across the country. From Wikipedia:

Early feminists argued that women were isolated from each other, and as a result many problems in women's lives were misunderstood as "personal," or as the results of conflicts between the personalities of individual men and women, rather than systematic forms of oppression. Raising consciousness meant helping oneself and helping others to become politically conscious. Consciousness raising groups aimed to get a better understanding of women's oppression by bringing women together to discuss and analyze their lives, without interference from the presence of men.

The term is a good fit here. Grose describes an event in which women discussed and analyzed their lives, by chance without the presence of (more than two) men. But she missed its real significance in this situation. Instead, she categorized her subjects’ problems as personal rather than political, the "sad" needs of overdressed "mom bloggers" rather than potential evidence of systemic forms of ... well, some might consider "oppression" too strong a word, but you get the point.

It's too bad Grose didn't take her own analogy more seriously.

Welcome, New York Times Motherlode blog readers!

Visits to this blog have spiked over the past day or so, no doubt thanks to the discussion on Motherlode, the parenting blog in the New York Times. A couple of weeks ago, writer Lisa Belkin launched an online book club, and chose as the inaugural book "TORN: True Stories of Kids, Career and the Conflict of Modern Motherhood," a collection of essays by mothers writing about working, caring for children, and a bunch of other subjects. One of them is an essay by me.

(By the way, it's obviously been, ahem, a while since I last posted here. I'd have probably managed to return from the lapse a bit more subtly had I not chosen to headline my previous post with a reference to, um, Mother's Day. Turns out that working at a new job, single parenting two teenagers, maintaining a house, doing a bunch of freelance projects and taking care of spring planting and lawn maintenance is more time consuming than you might think. I'm going to try to do better.)

Anyway, thanks for stopping by! The Motherlode discussion has generated some interesting comments, roughly half of them negative (approximately the same proportion I saw on Salon in response to my essay). The negative ones in particular share some common themes, and in the next few days, I'd like to consider at least a couple of those topics them in more depth. Meanwhile, I'd love to hear your opinions.

First up, the issue of "whining." Why are women so often charged with whining when they discuss the challenges and/or internal conflicts they face trying to balance career and motherhood? Is voicing any sort of complaint intrinsically whiny, or is it a matter of tone? Are there any situations when men are commonly accused of whining or, if not, why not? Why is the accusation of whining so often paired with a description of the supposed whiner as "privileged"? What exactly constitutes privilege, and is there some socioeconomic level at which negative thoughts about motherhood and career can be expressed without seeming to whine?

Let me have your thoughts, whiny or otherwise!

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.

Let's give "mommy" a rest

There's probably a German word for this: the experience of reading something that precisely expresses some inchoate feelings that have been floating around the edge of your consciousness for a while without your having fully explored them, even though you do intend to do so at some point and maybe write an essay about them, which you now realize is impossible because this other writer has managed to describe said feelings so articulately that even though you're kind of disappointed at the loss of your own essay you go, "Yes! Yes! This!!" and click immediately to your blog to link and post about it. I suggest, Readingfeelingtheregoesyouressaybloggenfreude.

That's the experience I had upon reading Taffy Brodesser-Akner's "Time for a War on Mommy" in the Wall Street Journal's online blogs.

Brodesser-Akner complains about the ubiquitousness of the word “mommy” to describe women with children—especially as a modifier to “track,” “wars,” “blogger,” etc. The label, she argues, does a disservice to everyone involved: to the particular women in question, to mothers in general, and even to their children—who do not, contrary to conventional wisdom, necessarily benefit from growing up under the impression that their maternal parental units’ lives revolve entirely around their existence.

Photo from momlogic.com

Let me just pull a quote or two to give you the gist:

Why are we grown women calling each other Mommy? Is being a mother such a silly avocation that we have to baby it up, stringing it with the hormones and gushy feelings of what our children call us? Does it strike anyone that calling a woman who has had a child Mommy is demeaning and infantilizing? Does it strike anyone that calling philosophical disagreements Mommy Wars is no different than screaming “GIRL FIGHT!” as two strippers go at it in a mud pit?

And

Maybe you think I’m taking this too seriously. But consider this: When we allow our children to name us, a name they use before they can speak, and then we go by that name in the world, are we doing them any favors? When our children see that we are first and foremost a mother, and a mother in their terms, I believe they suffer.

I have long hated the use of the word "mommy" by anyone but my kids (who, sadly, haven't uttered it for at least a decade, and in fact now often upgrade to the crisply mature “Mother”).

As someone who longs to dignify the role of motherhood—to spread the idea that although, yes, we often spend an inordinate portion of our days watching cartoons and managing poop, caring for children is ultimately an important project, one among many important projects in which we are engaged—I find the word “mommy” demeaning and condescending. To me, it sends the message that a being involved with children is silly and trivial and babyish. And so, it implies by extension, am I.

By the way, like Brodesser-Akner, I wrote a Salon essay that ran under a headline with the word “mommy” in it. But in that case, the subject’s mommyishness was the whole point—I was talking about a phenomenon (schmaltzy mass-emails about motherhood) that in itself was demeaning, condescending, trivializing, etc. etc. I was fine with that.

So I disagree with Rachel Larimore who, writing for Slate's XX factor, half agrees with that "mommy" is overused but pooh-poohs Brodesser-Akner's annoyance as overwrought. Larimore skirts the edge of arguing that what words we use to describe things don’t much matter. Which seems a strange position for a writer to take.

“And really, aren’t the terms mommy wars and mommy track largely creations of the media?” Larimore asks. Well, yeah. Is someone who writes a blog for an online politics and culture magazine seriously arguing that if some term’s widespread use is confined mainly to the media then we can safely ignore it, confident that it has zero effect on anybody's actual lives or their perceptions of things?

Larimore also notes that fathers "don’t sit around wringing their hands about it all or devout thousands of column inches to the issue." Right. Maybe that has something to do with stay-at-home mothers outnumbering stay-at-home fathers about 34:1, with even mothers with full-time jobs still doing the lioness’s share of work at home. Maybe it is related to the fact that, although fathers are unquestionably changing more diapers than they did a generation or two ago, in that same time many many many more mothers are working outside the home (sorry, too rushed to look up statistics; might actually be more than three "manys") while still struggling to get their domestic lives to catch up from 1963. In any case, are a few thousand column inches here or there really too much to ask, considering they're analyzing one of the most dramatic social changes of all time?

By the way, I noticed, among the comments, one by a poster named Taffy forlornly asking, “Was my comment removed for a reason?”

I don’t know if that’s THE Taffy, as in Taffy Brodesser-Akner, the author of the WSJ piece. I don't know if Slate actually removed Taffy's comment, or why. But I'd like to let The Taffy know—as well as, really, any Taffy, along with people not named Taffy —that your comments (including, needless to say, comments defending any and all uses of "mommy") are welcome below!