The Common Denominator for Mothers? Guilt.
In her new book, “Screaming on the Inside,” Jessica Grose unpacks the heavy burdens that arrive with the birth of a child.
By Kim Brooks
A funny thing happens when you write an honest book about motherhood. Whenever I go to a place where there are other mothers who know about my work, someone, usually a woman in her late 30s with small children, heavy eyelids and a telltale tightness in her jaw, asks if she can talk to me in private.
In hushed tones, she tells me how her kids are great and her husband is great and she knows she’s lucky to have them. She loves her kids and she loves being a mother and most of the time everything is wonderful and joyful, except that sometimes, since becoming a mother, she feels as if she’s dying or is maybe already dead. I’ve had women confide that they feel as if they’re drowning or falling or being buried alive or holding up a car with one hand while whisking eggs with the other, and these women are just wondering whether I think this is normal or if there’s anything they can do.
Before I can respond, the women backpedal, assuring me that they wouldn’t trade motherhood for the world, it goes without saying. It always goes without saying that motherhood makes women happy, and yet they keep saying it. They say it to me and I say it to them, and we all say it to one another as though something bad will happen if we say something else. It’s hard work, which is maybe why some of us have stopped saying it.
The latest to stop is Jessica Grose, whose fierce, timely, unflinching chorus of woe, “Screaming on the Inside,” seeks to tell the complicated truth. Grose has spent years writing about parenting as an essayist and journalist; she currently covers the subject for The New York Times. Her book is equal parts memoir, journalism, cultural criticism and manifesto, and it would make an excellent holiday gift for a loved one who is considering having a child and really shouldn’t. The loved one may still take the leap, but they’ll be doing so with open eyes, having read from Grose what she (and most of us) have learned the hard way: “It’s been obvious for 40 years that you need to be on stimulants and never sleep to accomplish all the things expected of a modern American mother.”...
She points out incisively that “the marginalization of topics like parenting in larger media organizations is just a microcosm of what happens in American society. Whenever something gets associated with women, no matter how vital it is to the world, it is seen as frivolous and nonessential.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/06/books/review/screaming-on-the-inside-jessica-grose.html
SCREAMING ON THE INSIDE:
The Unsustainability of American Motherhood
By Jessica Grose
https://www.harpercollins.com/products/screaming-on-the-inside-jessica-grose?variant=40985951338530