March 30, 2005
temporary insanity
I decided, in what I’ve been referring to as a moment of ‘temporary insanity’, to forego all structured child care this summer in favor of swim lessons. My week currently looks like this: Henry goes to preschool five mornings a week, from 8:15 to 11:15. On Mondays and Thursdays, Charlie goes to Mother’s Day Out (sort of a cross between nursery school and day care) from 9:00 until 2:15. So right now, I have two four hour blocks of childlessness each week, and then three mornings alone with Charlie and two afternoons alone with Henry.
Oh, and I did I mention that I can’t find a babysitter who is both reliable and available on a regular basis? I have one of each: the Reliable Adult Sitter (a teacher at Charlie’s school) who works three jobs and can only babysit on Saturday nights, but not every Saturday night, as she has a boyfriend who she only sees on (you guessed it!) Saturday night, and the Consistently Available Pre-Teen Neighbor, who is a very nice girl–so nice, in fact, that the boys figured out within five seconds of my backing the car out of the garage the first time she came to sit that she wasn’t going to enforce any of the rules and they could just go ahead and start throwing steak knives at each other. Oh, and she talks on the phone. THE ENTIRE TIME SHE IS HERE. Even when my kids are awake and running wild through the house.
So, with school providing my only consistent break from my role as Responsible Adult, I have decided, after much thought to keep everyone home with me this summer. Which brings me to Judith Warner.
Warner’s new book, Perfect Madness, is pretty much everywhere these days. Warner’s thesis (at it’s broadest) is that women of my generation and social class are driving ourselves crazy trying to be perfect mommies. She considers a variety of reasons for this, most of which have to do with growing up in the post-feminist Reagan 80s, and most of which I find plausible if not compelling. I think this is a book that could have done with some more rigorous editing, and I wish Warner had offered more than broad generalizations about how our culture needs to change (yes, accessible, affordable day care would be wonderful, as would more part-time work opportunities, but HOW DO WE GET THEM? I don’t know, and neither, sadly, does Judith Warner).
This books real strength, to me, was in Warner’s often startlingly perceptive assessment of the kind of quiet desperation many (most?) upper-middle class mothers are living. Warner has gotten a lot of bashing for her rather dark portrait of mommyhood in the well-manicured suburbs, but I am inclined to think that she is right, and that she’s not overdramatizing for effect. I think I am part of a generation of well-off women who gave birth and settled in to enjoy whatever version of Life With Baby we had chosen (working, not working, working part-time)–and then realized, somewhere down the line, that this life had some real drawbacks. And of course it’s hard to complain when, after all, we CHOSE this path, and we aren’t poor or anything, and we have these lovely children. But still . . .
Warner wants this book to be a call to arms, a first step in a revolution, one that will end in better, more accessible daycare and better, more accessible work options for women like me. Fine. But the really interesting (and important) part of this book is the whole notion that we are driving ourselves crazy trying to Do It All and Do It All Better Than Everyone Else. Warner would say that my decision not to put my children in school this summer is not just an episode of temporary insanity, but that the culture we live in pushes me to a kind of constant insanity. The factors that influenced my decision–the startling cost of daycare, the lack of available sitters, my concern that my kids would somehow be missing out if they were in school during the summer ‘vacation’, my own desire to enjoy every moment with my kids at the same time that I know they will drive me berserk–all of these things, Warner would say, are part of the larger problem: that being a 30-something mommy right now is all about being perfect, and doing it without any help from anyone.
I like to think that I’m not that mommy, but so much of this book was familiar to me. I think that’s why it has garnered such strong responses–I’m not sure anyone wants to acknowledge that the good life sucks sometimes. And, worst of all, it sucks because WE LET IT.
Whew. So that’s why Judith Warner made me cry.
Posted by Susan @ 8:08 pm • Uncategorized
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