What’s The Real Reason All These Moms Argue With Each Other?

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 3. Read part 1 here [2], and part 2 here [3].

Steve, Hanna,

You ask how these "mommy"-and now "daddy"-confessionals hit the ear of someone without kids. Most of the time I'm struck not by the substance of the debates—which, frankly, can seem trivial—but the vigor with which the debates are staged. Pages and pages (or hours and hours) of sparring about how to "have it all," how long to breast-feed, how to dispatch one's feelings of guilt about failing to bring homemade cupcakes to the school bake-sale. At times, witnessing intelligent women using their minds to busily judge other mothers, the nonparent simply shrugs her shoulder and thinks: Thank God I don't have to be in seventh grade again, this time as a 30-year-old. On the other hand, of course I understand: Mixed up in all these petty complaints are profound questions about the value of parental work, the indubitably complicated fact that we know so much more than ever before about the dangers that face children—the realities of their little bodies and brains—as well as the lack of clear script to follow. Add in the fact that most parents are older now, all too aware of the problems, and you've got a surefire recipe for anxiety. My young parents were too busy getting their act together to have time to worry at this level.

But here's a slightly offbeat take on your question about anxiety [3], Steve:

Listening to all these obsessive debates about largely minor issues makes me feel that they must mask a much deeper anxiety about life and death in a time with very little spiritual certainty. My own mother just died, so my thoughts have been morbid lately. But when I hear Waldman wring her hands about TV and breast-feeding, it reminds me of people in mourning who focus on who bought the more plush coffin, or nicer flower arrangement. Parenthood is surely a profound experience. Having watched my mother die, I find it difficult to believe that producing a life does not bring with it a profound sense of the fragility of existence. Yet as a genre these books hardly seem to capture the magnitude of feeling you describe, Steve. Instead, the writers get fixated on the trappings of experience rather than its deepest vulnerabilities—or metaphysical difficulties. That's one of the reasons I so loved Judith Shulevitz's essay about time [4] from the Double X launch this week; it goes beyond the petty mommy debates and starts to get at the real anxieties about child-rearing today—profound questions about time and experience that we haven't processed yet as a culture. Sometimes I feel there's a similarity between how our culture handles grief (that is, by trying to look away from it) and how it handles the monumental shift posed by parenthood.

Confronting mortality—a child's, not mine—is one reason I've always been ambivalent about having kids in the first place. I feel I'd be in the position of God, afflicting a new life with the burden of its own death. And there's no sane way to talk to children about that (except to explain to them the real meaning of all those lullabies—"Then down will come baby, cradle and all."). Of course, in these books, parents often write about how having children makes them feel their own mortality: The writer feels her life story is over and now she has to invest in someone else's. But that's not what I mean.

So, what do you, the actual parents, think of this theory, Steve and Hanna?

And on a less dark note: In an essay this week on Slate, Ann Hulbert aptly identifies [5] bad mom memoirs thusly: "These days, naughty-mom blogging [6] seems to have become a parenting accessory almost as essential as Baby Björns to the with-it-mother set. "Don't you dare judge me; I'll incriminate myself, thank you-now pass the margarita." Do you think this means that the mommy war virus is mutating and-perhaps-weakening? Is the pandemic on the verge of dying out?

Meghan

Read part 1 of this three-way conversation here [2], and part 2 here [3].