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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Judith Warner is making me wonder: Am I stressed out enough to be a good mother?
Apr 21, 2005 | Generally speaking, I am not a mellow person.
I update my checking account daily on Quicken, sometimes printing out spreadsheets so my husband can see the precise percentage of our income that goes to Target and CVS. Instead of old copies of the New Yorker, my bathroom reading of choice is the Merck Manual, which I scan for lists of symptoms -- just, you know, to be on the safe side. While sitting in the subway, I've already gotten my $2 ready to purchase a grande coffee at Starbucks; in the line at Starbucks, I'm already searching for my work I.D.
So when I first got pregnant, I anticipated spending most nights nervously craning over my child's crib to check if she was breathing, and studying milestone charts with the rapt attention of a Benedictine monk. I actually looked forward to having the freedom to obsess frequently, loudly and without shame. Then something unexpected happened: Once my daughter Bryn was born, I found that she was the one thing in my life I didn't worry myself sick about.
Finding this oasis of calm couldn't have happened at a less appropriate cultural moment. Although it's long been an axiom that good moms worry, it's only lately that anxiety has become a requisite part of the job description. More than ever, your success as a mother -- as judged by everyone but your own offspring, anyway -- appears to be directly proportional to the intensity of your hand-wringing. On TV, "Desperate Housewives'" Lynette Scavo (played by Felicity Huffman), supposedly the most relatable mother of the bunch, is neurotically fixated on what private school her kids attend and which parties and play dates they're invited to. Michelle Herman's new memoir, "The Middle of Everything," details how her perfectionistic mothering may have contributed to her daughter's having a nervous breakdown by the age of 6. And, of course, Judith Warner's bestselling book, "Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety" -- which was deemed enough of a bellwether to be featured on the covers of both Newsweek and the New York Times Book Review -- chronicles the impressive diversity of maternal angst, ranging from big-picture worries over child care and an increasingly winner-takes-all society to, well, the undeniably pressing question of birthday party decorations.
Why so many worries, both large and almost insanely trivial? "All of these things we do bespeak a terrible anxiety," Warner writes, "that our children simply will not be able to make it through life if we do not perform totemic acts to keep them on the path toward self-perfection, and keep their lives pure and unfettered by distracting emotion, personality foibles or less-than-ideal experiences." Frankly, despite the book's good intentions -- Warner never endorses anxiety, and in fact she repeatedly exhorts women to chill out -- reading it gave me the same deep fish-out-of-water unease as I had when I'd tried (and failed) to learn Lamaze breathing. By not hyperventilating over my child, was I the lunatic on the fringe?
