Why Are Moms Such a Bummer?

Welcome to "Threeway," a regular Double X discussion feature in which three contributors dissect politics and culture from distinct points of view. Our first discussion among Hanna Rosin, Stephen Metcalf, and Meghan O'Rourke is about three recent parenting memoirs. This is part 1. Read part 2 here [2], part 3 here [3], and part 4 here [4].

Steve,

Apparently, moms complain and cry a lot. Dads go to the Princess Park and have fun.

I'm not starting this way because you're a man and I'm a woman. I'm starting this way because the gender split in this latest crop of Bad Mommy (and now Daddy) books—Ayelet Waldman's Bad Mother, Dooce-blogger Heather Armstrong's It Sucked and Then I Cried, and Michael Lewis' Home Game—is hard to ignore, at least on the surface. The books are part of the usual wave of parenting books that appear around Mother's Day every year. Waldman's is about the "mother police" who judge her "maternal crimes." Armstrong dives into her post-partum depression. Keeping up with the moms, Lewis dutifully makes a few stabs at exploring his inadequacies as a father. But it's a half-hearted attempt, and he quickly moves on to the fun parts.

You and I both know that parenting has its joys and agonies, etc. So why is it that in the public forum, it's become routine for mothers, in particular, to self-flagellate? And where did the concept of the "mommy police" come from? Historically privileged women complained about many domestic duties, but parenting wasn't really among them; it was just something you did between the honeymoon and retirement. Even when women tuned into their reproductive cycles as a source of oppression, the real enemy was the sexist boss or the condescending male pediatrician. Now it's other women, judging your every move. Does Lewis' book—and Sam Apple's American Parent out later this month—signal that dads are the new moms? That there will be daddy wars soon?

Somehow I don't think so. On the face of it, Lewis and Waldman would seem to have similar lives; both live in the Bay Area and are well-known writers married to famous people. Their experiences as parents, however, feel utterly different. In Home Game, Lewis writes about parenting as one big fabulous adventure. Whisk my daughters to Paris! Bermuda! Now off to the racetrack! Even when things go wrong—Mickey Mouse scares the kids, no one can fall asleep in the tent—the incident is so hilarious in the retelling that it all seems worth it. The judging parents appear in his stories for comic relief, a scowling chorus to his dancing bear. Waldman's life as portrayed in Bad Mother, by contrast, is about as fun as the gulag. She drags herself through boredom, depression, a harrowing abortion. Other mothers harangue her at work, at the store, on the Internet.

Part of this tension clearly has to do with women's confusion about roles. It's uncomfortable to be just a mother and maybe better to be a "bad-mother," which has a connotation of "bad-ass" mother, as Waldman has said in interviews. Waldman describes how her own mother cottoned to Betty Friedan in the '70s and told her not to stay home and raise children. Waldman was a lawyer when her first child was born; her husband took care of their child. This would seem to be an ideal set-up, but she became antsy, jealous of her husband and daughter's blissful domestic routine. She quit her job to join the party, but then soon became bored and miserable. With gender roles shifting so quickly, women have no place to settle—and they can always second-guess their choices.

This all doesn't explain, however, why women have shifted the blame onto other mothers. Friedan asked women to look inside themselves. Waldman points a finger at the mythical "Good Mother," who

Remembers to serve fruit at breakfast, is always cheerful, and never yells, manages not to project her own neuroses and inadequacies onto her children, is an active and loved member of the community who volunteers, she remembers to make playdates, her children's clothes fit, she does art projects with them and enjoys all their games. And she is never too tired for sex.

Waldman develops this caricature with some degree of hostility. But why even bother feeling hostile? I've never met such a mother, and I bet you haven't either. Such a person doesn't exist, and if she did she'd also be ordering matching mother/daughter Pooh pajamas from the Disney catalogue and be really, really boring. So why do we modern mothers need to create her? And why does the culture devote so much attention to arguments between "good mothers" and "bad mothers"? Do you think it's because all of us are a little unsure where to stand, so we need clear markers—octomom, bad; Angelina Jolie breastfeeding, good?

Often with Waldman's stories I can't tell if she is seriously doubting herself or just looking to stir up trouble. At one point, she declares herself "fallible" because her kids watch TV on the weekends. As in, only on the weekends. If that's a sin in her world, then she's either living in a rarefied circle or she's digging for praise. She also tells a story about when her fourth child was six weeks old and she was having trouble breast-feeding. She was in a bakery and gave him a bottle. A woman came over and said, "You know, breast is best," and Waldman burst out crying. It is amazing that 12 years and four children later she could have so little faith in her own judgment. To me, one of the great pleasures of having a third child is that by now, I've figured out most of it doesn't matter. Breast-feed or don't, watch TV on Tuesday or don't—none of that will determine who they are in the end, or how they talk about you to their future psychiatrist.

The Armstrong book grows out of Dooce, the author's extremely popular blog, where she chronicled in minute detail her pregnancy and life with a toddler. In a different era, Armstrong would have been writing a light, amusing column in Ladies Home Journal or Redbook. She has a way of making normal domestic routine seem full of surprises and a good sense of comic timing. But in her book she seems to feel compelled to douse every joke with her tears. She is always crying, sometimes because she's deep in depression and sometimes because she's just bored. There are some tender lessons there, but the whole picture does not make parenting seem like any fun. This is even truer for the confessional copycat blogs. Read the latest hot one, True Mom Confessions [5]. It's a terrifying read I screamed at my kid. I hurt too much to have sex. I'm so bored I want to die. If I were still childless, I'd get neutered.

Lewis' book grows out of a series of columns he wrote for Slate. In a different era, he wouldn't be writing this book at all, as parenting books by fathers were a rarity. He opens the book by grappling with some with the shifting demands on men. His own father was pretty much "absent," he writes. He ducked out of chores and ignored Michael until he was in college. Now, he writes, "the glory days are over." But Lewis is not really all that serious about the "glory days" part. Not three pages later, he has embarked on his first rollicking adventure. The family is in Bermuda when four boys bully his little girls out of the kiddie pool. Pretty soon, his 3-year-old is thrusting out her chest yelling "YOU JUST SHUT UP YOU STUPID MOTHERFUCKING ASSHOLE!" Many antics ensue. Who needs the old frat boys when you have a daughter like that?

At moments, I found myself bored. But I was delighted to be bored, because Michael Lewis is never boring, and the fact that this book can be means he's making the same mistake women always make: He overestimates how funny kid stories are. When I knew Lewis in the '90s he was a handsome, glamorous, serial husband. Now, he's racing from Gymboree to Fairyland to the 2 a.m. diaper change, worrying whether he has enough wipes. This is progress, and fabulous news for womankind.

Here is where the gender gap between Waldman and Lewis starts to disappear. When men ask Waldman how to reignite the erotic part of their marriage she tells them: Unload the dishwasher. As some readers may recall, in an infamous Modern Love essay, she wrote that she loved her husband more than she loved her kids [6]. Her own husband unloads the dishwasher, changes diapers, the works. The women she knows are seething because their husbands don't do any of that, and the bad feelings follow them to the bedroom. Last week, Rebecca Traister did a perfect comparison of the Caitlin Flanagan model vs. the Waldman one [7]:

Where Flanagan flogs her formula for marital bliss, which is that if you serve your husband hot meals, keep his house, raise his kids and give him blow jobs, he will repay you by remaining faithful and caring for you through illness, Waldman's considerably more appealing equation is that if your husband cooks a hot meal, does a load of laundry and shoulders his half of the childcare, he will get a blow job.

Amen to that. Somewhere in there, I feel, is a way out of these manufactured mommy wars. Child-rearing will become more gender neutral. Men and women will divide the joys and agonies equally The artificial womb will be invented, health care will be free, and peace will reign on Earth....

Seriously, though, what do you think, about why we prop up these guilty miserable moms? Is it identity confusion? Are dads starting to get confused, too? And does that mean that in a couple of years we'll have daddy wars? Do you unload the dishwasher? Lament the golden days of absentee fathers?

Read Steve's response to Hanna here. [2]

Michael Lewis from ”Authors@Google” still from YouTube

Photo of Ayelet Waldman by Stephanie Rausser.