Guardian article on the cult of the perfect mother

[ArabellaScott]

www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/may/18/parent-trap-why-the-cult-of-the-perfect-mother-has-to-end?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other&fbclid=IwAR1sWl3_y6uulvXAeX99eVj8jjdnkuM72FWttwZYDrzGQAsciV22oCsuSlk

Quite a long and interesting article. I definitely don't agree with all of it, but increasingly I think the summation of it is entirely true:

'Motherhood is feminism’s unfinished business.'

Thanks, I really enjoyed this.

Thanks for sharing. "Half of all mothers in the UK experience a mental health problem before or after birth" - bloody hell, thats dreadful. Old style feminism shouted very loud about maternity leave, financial support, affordable nursery care, job security and decent pay for women etc - has all this stuff got left behind? Also, when I talk to younger friends they speak of how expectation to be the perfect mum and respond to your childs every action and emotion all the time, has become quite oppressive. Is this just a perception or was it a bit more relaxed twenty or thirty years ago?

great article, thank you for sharing.

has all this stuff got left behind?

Sometimes I think it's the translation into economic terms that messes things up. Nursery provision in Scotland is about to be enormously expanded, but many early years experts are warning that this could cause issues in the long run, adn many mothers would like to know why they will be paid to leave their children with other women but not paid to look after them.

Thats a fair point @ArabellaScott, the changes which took women into better qualifications and jobs had some minus points too, and I was very lucky in being able to share childcare with a partner with both of us in part time work so we got the best of both. Wonder how affordable that would be now.

Really interesting, and I entirely agree.

I was nodding at this If anything, feminism’s longevity compounds the problem: the dial hasn’t shifted, but we want to move on. Calls for affordable childcare or flexible working are met with stifled yawns. See that at work all the time. Womens issues are old hat now. It's all about "inclusion".

When I had my kids twenty years ago the shift to nursery care was coming in. There was a lot of debate about what the consequences of nursery care were going to be.

There seem to be data coming out of Sweden saying the children became more socially conforming and had higher cortisol levels. Now it seems we don’t talk about it anymore - it is taboo to discuss the consequences.

And yet we’re all scratching our heads about why gen z are so different and assuming it is due to the internet.

Austerity has also had a huge consequence for mothers. There’s an epidemic of DV.

as for parenting being more relaxed - I don' tknow, I think it could be hard to measure, I suspect there have always been standards and expectations and the relentless drudgery and demanding nature of parenting small children can't ever have been really easy.

What I think might have shifted is our connections to other mothers - varies, but I have lived in areas where very few mothers were about, most having gone back to work. So it maybe is more isolated? And the deluge of judgement certainly lends itself to social media - although there is also of course the chance to connect online.

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

Yes, absolutely and entirely.

Recall how Spanish grandparents went on strike and the whole country ground to a halt. Unpaid care is conveniently invisible.

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.

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.

Alias, I'm so sorry, and I hear you. It does almost seem like setting women up to fail, somehow.

I think many aspects of our life are so hidden, now. Birth, death, breastfeeding, etc. All hived off and kept out of sight and the province of medics. I don't mean we don't need medics to help with the processes, but I hadn't ever really held a baby until I had one, I don't think. Certainly not cared for one, spent time around small kids, etc.

Have you had some help to process all those difficult experiences?

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.

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.

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

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.

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!!

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

I struggled in the early years. Had a terrible birth, etc etc. Finally dtermined that I had to fix my mothering, gritted my teeth and looked out some of the 'positive parenting' stuff. Expecting to have to do the impossible to fix my child.

But when I got the book 'calm parents, happy kids' by Markham, this was at the very beginning: You cannot parent well if you are hurting, unsupported, in pain. The very first thing to do to help your children is to help yourself.

Talk to people about it, your family, friends, strangers on Mumsnet. Do something that makes you happy, everyday. Get out for daylight and exercise.

Compassion for you, Alias. There's nothing at all wrong with contact naps and cosleeping (I coslept my kids til they were much older!). I'm sorry you feel it's scary and that you're not in charge. It'll be fine to keep doing, it'll be fine to gently change direction, it'll be fine to stop altogether. You can't make a 'wrong' choice, here. I mean, some things might not work and you might need to readjust, but there's not a decision that's intrinsically right or wrong, if that makes sense. You are obviously a mother caring for her young baby while also trying to process all the stuff that goes along with childbirth. Such a life changing event in so very many ways.

And wrt your friend - she sounds great as a mum. And so do you. You don't have to do it as she does, and vice versa. We're all just muddling through as best we can.

Thanks, Quentin, I am looking into that book.

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.

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

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.