Guardian article on the cult of the perfect mother

Men need to start stepping up here. Both to preventing crime and to being active parents. Talking about "society," minimises the problem and enables the men that do these things to carry on with it.

I'm not sure what you mean by "society as a whole" but it sounds suspiciously like expecting feminists to clean up mens mess

‘Call a spade a spade. Men have largely abdicated their responsibilities, not society.’

Well indeed, but I think the response to that should be one of society as a whole. Rather like men commit most crime, but society has a responsibility to deal with that crime not just ignore it.

[quote Verbena87]@AliasGrape want to join me in starting a Ragged-Fannied Philantropist movement for teaching the useful bits of hypnobirthing without the smug misogynist ideology that makes out that accepting help from experts so our babies don’t die is some kind of moral failing? Honestly: fuck that shit with bells on.

You will come to terms with it (though I’m still cross nearly 4 years on).[/quote]
I’m in!

@AliasGrape want to join me in starting a Ragged-Fannied Philantropist movement for teaching the useful bits of hypnobirthing without the smug misogynist ideology that makes out that accepting help from experts so our babies don’t die is some kind of moral failing? Honestly: fuck that shit with bells on.

You will come to terms with it (though I’m still cross nearly 4 years on).

I breastfed my youngest till he was 2, he still gets in bed with me every night and he's 5, I'm a SAHM.
I also let them have unlimited screen time and drink wine in a beer garden while they play because it makes my life easier. Doesn't have to be one or the other!

The reason mothers feel guilty is because the well-being of children is extremely important, but society has largely abdicated its responsibility and dumped an impossible yet essential task on to mothers
Call a spade a spade. Men have largely abdicated their responsibilities, not society.

And I'm sure most men do care about their children, they just don't care about "mothering" then.

I think women get judgy/competitive/whatever because they spend so much time doing this work and they want recognition/validation for it. In the same way those of us in paid employment have to do performance appraisals where we show what a great job we are doing. I think its innate in humans to keep us working together.

I don't see it as a failing in women that they have parenting standards. It's a failing in (some) men that they don't care about parenting and the patriarchy supports that.

I-put-my-kids-to-bed-in-their-day-clothes, I mean, obviously

Hmm, this didn't all resonate for me, but a lot of it did. I don't like so-called extended breastfeeding (biological norm to wean from breast is probably around aged 5) and bedsharing being lumped in there. They're only a problem when motherhood is seen as something which is holding us back from real-life.

I find it bizarre that there is this fetishisation of being the perfect mother while at the same time the most successful mummy-bloggers etc are all about being "Slummy Mummies" - gin o clock, I-put-my-kids-to-bed-in-their-pyjamas, "cleaning and dusting will wait for tomorrow"... It's just so very stark, the constrast between what we say we want (to be laid back parents flicking the Vs behind our feral children's backs) and what we're all actually doing.

Men don’t judge how well you are mothering for the same reason they don’t care about provision of high quality childcare - they don’t care that much about children.

The reason mothers feel guilty is because the well-being of children is extremely important, but society has largely abdicated its responsibility and dumped an impossible yet essential task on to mothers.

Motherhood complex, apologies
melissahogenboom.com/book/
Could be a good bookgroup read

This really hit home. I’m feeling it a lot today. The guilt, the comparison, the not feeling good enough, the tiredness, the sadness, the feeling responsible for every bloody bad thing that happens, the constant worry that they are going to turn round in 15years and blame me for all their issues and rightly so. I barely notice any of it, it’s my normal. Guilt is the air I breathe.

Coincidentally read this on the Radfem Collective FB page:
www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20210518-the-hidden-load-how-thinking-of-everything-holds-mums-back
The Motherhood Manifesto sounds like a good book, I might buy it

Thanks for this Arabella. Interesting article. On a personal level, one bit really struck me:

In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir pointed, in fact, to the dangers of self-sacrifice: mothers who try to be good all the time “give up all pleasure, all personal life, enabling them to assume the role of victim”, she wrote in 1949. Their “displays of resignation spur guilt feelings in the child” which are “more harmful than aggressive displays”.

My mother made me feel guilty about everything, seriously struggled to hear my opinions and was very invalidating. I commented on it once as a late teen, and she was appalled, telling me how this was how her mum made her feel and she had no idea. I think a lot about it in my parenting and despair when I’ve heard my 5yr old say things on occasion like ‘it’s all my fault’, and get distressed. When I get really stressed with them I can hear myself saying ‘this wouldn’t happen if YOU hadn’t done xyz’ - it’s all so emotionally loaded for them. I am working on it and think I mostly do away with the worst of it, but reflecting on how much these behaviours are the result of that sense of me being at the bottom of the pile, that’s when the kids’ needs seem so selfish and unreasonable. When I’ve had a rest I’m so much more patient. And yes to how we berate ourselves and then moaning with other mums who feel the same is such a tonic. As soon as I had kids, friends who said everything was amazing and didn’t moan, had to go. I had no time for what felt like such bullshit! But maybe not everyone has the same hard time.

And more structurally, I was thinking about Norway, where every train has a soft play type carriage. Their early years workers are a highly trained and respected profession. As a society they have invested in the knowledge that parenthood is important and fecking hard, and build structures to address that.

I’ll stop there - could chat about this one all day!!

The problem with motherhood is that the judgement is from other women, not men. Men couldn’t care less usually, as long as the kids are healthy and reasonably happy.

I had an awful time and even had a “friend” avoid us because we were supplementing breastfeeds with formula - PCOS probably to blame, didn’t need to for second baby.

Where does this judgement come from? Where does feminism come into this side? I can see the need for better maternal care and funded nursery, I gave up work as it was too expensive, I would’ve preferred to work. But I’d like to understand better why there’s a mothering competition and judgement from other women. It happens on MN something rotten. I’ve also seen it with feminists - you can’t be a feminist if X Y or Z.

Actually bloody birth plans have a lot to answer for because they make you feel you have some control. Then things don't go to plan so you feel like you've failed.
It might be better to call it "statement of wishes" or similar. A guide that can show what your preferences are if you are too busy birthing to talk, but isn't a plan and can change in response to events.
I really would love to meet the woman who wrote "I want an epidural, episiotomy and ventouse please" in her birth plan

I wish I could be a bit more like that.
You can be! Pick one small thing that you want to do differently and do it. (Feed DD a jar of baby food, start sleep training, use a disposable nappy, whatever it is). The world won't end. When you're happy with that, pick another.

My children are older now, we have ups and downs, I've seen my friends kids grow up too. Parenting style really makes very very little difference to how they've grown up.

I also had 3 different births, one with all the drugs Inc epidural, one with nothing at all, one ELCS. The one with no pain relief didn't really hurt apart from burning when she crowned. The one with all the drugs was agony from the outset. No labour's are the same and it irritates me beyond belief that the hypnobirthing crowd are so smug. They just got lucky. I know because I did too.

You sound like a very empathetic and caring mum. That's the most important thing. You are doing a great job.

Arabella Thank you - yes I’ve had some support luckily and I’m getting to grips with it all now.

My own mother died in childbirth - very rare even then, and the result of a specific set of health issues and circumstances - but it definitely contributed to me being hugely anxious about childbirth myself. I found hypnobirthing hugely helpful in keeping calm during the second half of my pregnancy, and actually throughout the birth itself. I’m not faulting it for that.

It’s just that it seemed to come with a whole heap of stuff about choice and it turned out I didn’t have a whole lot of choices in the end - but because the narrative is all about how you DO have choice and can be empowered etc (with a strong subtext that the more natural the better) then I really did feel like I’d flunked the course somehow, I hadn’t thought positive enough, hadn’t stayed calm enough, hadn’t pushed back against the medical professionals enough etc.

I never produced any milk, it wasn’t just delayed it simply never came. That ‘failure’ compounded the previous ‘failure’ to give birth naturally. I was terribly worried about the microbiome because she hadn’t come out naturally (that’s something I could easily have done without ever knowing about looking back but seemed a huge deal at the time). And then she wasn’t getting my antibodies from breast milk. And we were in a pandemic! It seemed like such a huge deal, such a catastrophic failure.

I remember reading the gentle sleep book and sobbing because there was something in there about probiotics - I can’t remember the ins and outs but basically there was a list of why children would need them and my daughter hit everything on it - c-section, IV antibiotics from birth, formula fed etc etc. I can’t even remember why I thought it was such a big deal then but I definitely thought I’d broken my baby, ruined her for life.

It’s still apparent in the fact that I’m still going with contact naps and cosleeping etc nearly 10 months down the line. It did work for us for a long whole but it’s not particularly working now, but trying to change it scares me because this was my one way of getting to feel like a natural/ attachment/ responsive/ gentle whatever you want to call it - perfect instamum basically.

Her comment about bamboo weaning bowls and organic homemade purées made me laugh too, I’ve bought into all that as well. On some level it’s my way of atoning for the breastfeeding thing.

I’ve got a friend who was very ‘just give me all the drugs’ when she had her children, went back to work full time early on (her husband is a SAHD), goes on holidays without them regularly, just does not engage in all the perfect mummy bullshit, makes parenting decisions purely based on what makes the most practical sense for all the family including her and refuses to engage in any handwringing about it - her children are happy and loved and thriving. I wish I could be a bit more like that.

Thank you for sharing. So much of this rang true for me - it’s helped me to get a handle on something I’ve felt for a while, that ironically I’d probably have coped far better with my traumatic birth and EMCS had I not bought into all the ‘empowering’ hypnoborthing stuff beforehand. Something that was supposed to empower and embolden me left me feeling like a complete and utter failure in the end, and has dogged pretty much every aspect of motherhood since.

Most of the world’s work is done unpaid by women.

I have no idea what it must be like to be a mother now. It seems much more hidden away than it used to be.

I'm inclined to think that caring should be assigned a monetary value somehow, to help flag up how much work women actually do. Caroline CP talks about this in "invisible women" and I entirely agree.

I think that social pressure to be "the perfect mother" is the patriarchal response to women having more time as labour saving house work devices were invented. God forbid women should spend that time doing things for their own needs. Nope, they should spend it on mothering