More on the ugly secret of working moms

Last updated on: June 10, 2016 at 9:55 am by Jennifer Woodruff Tait

More on the ugly secret of working moms 2016-06-10T09:55:53-05:00 Jennifer Woodruff Tait

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An article on this just came out in The Week, capturing very clearly a lot of what I’ve felt for a while (and written about previously on this blog.)

From the moment I became pregnant with my first child, who graduates high school this month, I’ve had the unshakable sensation that I’m faking big chunks of my life, playing the part of a competent and confident mother and professional — but in fact always shortchanging someone their due. Arriving late to work after delivering a forgotten lunchbox to school, darting out of a too-long meeting to arrive at the school awards ceremony 30 seconds after they call my kid’s name, emailing with the college counselor when I’m supposed to be watching that IT training, or grinning robotically through my son’s trumpet-lesson story at the dinner table when my mind is on that proposal I need to finish by morning.

I offloaded some of this guilt during a recent conversation with Katrina Alcorn, a working mother of three and the author of Maxed Out: American Moms on the Brink. My confession didn’t surprise her.

“We’re expected to do our jobs as if we don’t have children — and then raise our children as if we don’t have jobs,” she said. “If you think about the model of the ideal mother, it’s the person who sacrifices everything for her child. The ideal worker is someone who can drop everything and go on a business trip at a moment’s notice, and who can stay late — not leave at 5 o’clock to pick up kids. So if you’re trying to be both, then you are faking it.” Read more.

Folks, the modern workplace is unsustainable, and our modern culture may pay lip service to valuing families and may push middle and upper-class people to (as a friend of mine recently memorably said) “curate” the lives of their children….but the system overall thinks we can care for our families as atomized individuals. We won’t survive if we don’t figure out that parents are best supported, and children thrive best, in community. Not that we all need to move in together in a monastery, but we all need to support one another in slowing things down to a pace that accomodates the smallest and most fragile among us (not only children, in fact, but anyone whose physical or mental abilities prevent them from keeping up with our frenetically efficient pace. So says the woman who just spent a weekend walking around an academic conference with a cane.)

If you don’t believe me, go read P.D. James’s Children of Men. My husband checked it out of the library a few weeks ago. I couldn’t finish it because it was so harrowing. In lots of ways, but one was the way in which a society not focused on raising a future generation, on caregiving and care-sharing, turns in on itself. And because I am a huge Tolkien fan, it reminded me of a phrase from The Lord of the Rings:

Death was ever present, because the Númenoreans still, as they had in their old kingdom, and so lost it, hungered after endless life unchanging. Kings made tombs more splendid than houses of the living, and counted old names in the rolls of their descent dearer than the names of sons. Childless lords sat in aged halls musing on heraldry; in secret chambers withered men compounded strong elixirs, or in high cold towers asked questions of the stars. And the last king of the line of Anárion had no heir.

Having and raising kids is really, really hard. It’s also, if we want the human race to survive, really, really necessary. Don’t make it harder on the folks who are trying to do it by superimposing expectations of perfectionist curating of our lives, work, and children.

As you were.

Image by Pixabay.

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