Natural Mother

There is nothing natural about motherhood.  The ideal of motherhood many women internalize as the standard has been termed the "motherhood mystique."[1] The motherhood mystique captures the popular belief system in which being a mother is supposed to be "natural, easy, and always enjoyable, and that optimal child development requires a full-time mom." ... Right. Raise your hand if your motherhood experience fits that description. Better yet, send me an email- I want to interview you for the book.

I was an idiot about motherhood before I became a mother. Take a conversation, repeated on more than one occasion with multiple people:

                                                                                          

                Them: "So, are you going to breastfeed?"

                Me: "Well, yeah. It's the healthiest thing."

                Them: "Okay, well have you read up on it/ engaged a lactation consultant/ some other research about breastfeeding?"

                Me: "Um, no."

                Them: "Well, don't get discouraged, it's always difficult the first time."

                Me: "Why does everyone keep saying that? I'll figure it out. We're mammals. It's in the name. By definition we are required to be good at this."

(All the mothers in the audience groan.) Like I said, I was an idiot.

Popular media perpetuates and exacerbates the motherhood mystique by the use of almost universal portrayals of "happy, calm and competent mothers,"[2]  Good mothers are patient, nurturing, kind, soft-spoken. [3] Take, for example, a content analysis study of mothers in Parenting magazine:[4]

"the images do not reflect the stressful nature of parenting. Stories about difficult situations were typically accompanied by blurry photos or drawings in which the mother's face was turned away from the viewer, thereby erasing her emotions. Visual portrayal of mothers' negative affect was limited to cartoons, which trivialize the anger, stress, and frustration inherent in managing difficult children or situations by provoking laughter.”

Motherhood is supposed to come naturally, it is supposed to be easy. Any woman who is impatient, loud, annoyed or otherwise at the end of her rope is seen to have something wrong with her. To break the code of silence on this is to be labeled a "bad mother." Some women break the silence with reckless abandon, see Nikki at momswhodrinkandswear, my new favorite site. But breaking the code of silence is dangerous, and she regularly has to remind readers that her site is humor, even then she has many detractors. Even I have been guilty of the bad-mother reaction. While pregnant for the first (and thus far only) time, I ran into a woman with a two year old. She started asking me about my maternity leave, etc and made the following statement:

"I love X more than anything in the whole world. But let me tell you, by the end of my maternity leave, I was ready to get back to the office."

My reaction: bad mother. What a horrible thing to say. What mother wouldn't want to spend every waking moment with their child? But by the end of my maternity leave, I was pulling-my-hair-outready to get back to the office. That woman and I have since become best friends.

One of the base level disconnects that creates the environment in which women feel failure is the unintentional conspiracy of silence with regard to the difficulty of mothering.  An integral part of this project is to break that code- to acknowledge that the challenges we face are difficult and complex. We, both as women and society, tend to minimize the difficulty of the challenges we face, both interpersonally and professionally. By minimizing the problem, we magnify what we perceive to be our failure to overcome it.  

In short, this shit's hard, and that's okay.

---

[1] Hoffnung, M. (1989). Motherhood: Contemporary conflict for women. In J Freeman (Ed.) Women: A Feminist Perspective (4th ed., pp 157-175) Mountain View, CA: Mayfield

[2] Chrisler, J.C. & Johnston-Robledo, I. (2002) Raging hormones? Feminist perspectives on premenstrual syndrome and post-partum depression. In M. Ballou & L.S. Brown (Eds.) Rethinking mental health and disorder (pp. 174-197). New York: Guilford.

[3] Chrisler & Johnson (2002)

[4]Molina, C., Johnston-Robledo, I., & Babler, A., (2000) Images of women in Parenting magazine. In J.C. Christer (Chair) Sociocultural images of women and their possible effects of life goals, self-esteem, and self-efficacy. Symposium presented at the meeting of the Association for Women in Psychology, Salt Lake City, UT.  Following description taken wholesale from Chrisler, J.C. 207 Presidential Address: Fear of losing control: power, perfectionism, and the psychology of women. In Psychology of Women Quarterly, 32 (2008) (pp. 1-12) Blackwell Publishing.