Motherhood, Madness and the Media

by Suzanne Poor

I read in Newsweek that today’s moms are stressed out, tired, overwhelmed and losing sight of who they are. It doesn’t matter whether they’re professional women working in large corporations or stay-at-home parents. They’re complaining that motherhood isn’t at all what they expected.

Somehow they’ve become victim to the onslaught of messages sent from heaven (read “media”) that they need to wear certain clothes, feed their children certain foods, enroll them early on in expensive pre-K schools, register them for organized sports at three years old and generally expose them to the world of art and history before they’re five.

Writing in the February 21 issue of the magazine, Judith Warner outlines the results of research for her recent book, Perfect Madness; the cover story in the New York Times Book Review of February 22 discusses the book as well. And in the same issue of Newsweek, Anna Quindlen describes how she raised her three children and avoided the stress.

The other day after a family afternoon of ice skating at the Clary Anderson ice skating arena in Montclair and prior to our being aware of Ms. Warner’s book, one of my sons wondered out loud if he should enroll his seven-year-old son in soccer this spring. All of this got me thinking about how his father and I dealt with him, his brother and sister in a changing culture.

Educated but not wise
As a very young mother, I knew nothing about babies, although I’d majored in physiology in college. I was scared, relying for the first few months on my mother-in- law’s expertise, which, believe it or not, was the same as her mother’s and her mother’s before her. I found a book by that famous baby doctor, Benjamin Spock. Not only did I read it cover to cover, I followed every word and piece of advice until the day the first born threw up his milk in an arc that crossed the room.

Terrified because Dr. Spock described that kind of upchucking as “projectile,” which meant something was terribly wrong with the baby’s insides, I worried and worried. The kid kept on doing it but seemed healthy enough. So I threw the book in the trash.
And ever since that moment, during two more pregnancies and 25 years of dealing with the trying trio, we operated on instinct and gut. We paid no mind to the media messages that directed us to this toy or that dress or that organization. We exposed our children to art, sports and music, took each to the circus when he or she was five and generally let them explore their environment, challenge their own minds and form their own opinions. Products of public schools, they all attended the top colleges and graduate schools. One is a professor at Princeton, another is a computer programer for blood centers around the country, and the third is a certified landscape architect in New York City. A step-daughter holds an executive position in a prominent Manhattan advertising agency. Of the two other step-kids, one is a physician and the other an expert engineer.

Then the grandchildren came
When they began having children, we realized something was very different. “I will not allow my baby to sleep in the crib you saved from when your children were young,” all the new mothers said. “The slats are too wide.” I didn’t buy a new crib, but one of the young mothers never allowed her infant in the old bed. It wasn’t until the mother of another young mother told her daughter in no uncertain terms (apparently she’d saved the old crib too) that either the baby slept in the old crib in her house or else.
My comment was silence but we suspected that the new rules for crib slats was a boon to the furniture manufacturing industry. There were many other similar instances, which we dealt with in more silence.

A freedom unknown today
Anna Quindlen apparently did the same. “There was a kind of carelessness to my childhood,” she writes. “I wandered away from time to time, rode my bike too far from home, took the trolley to nowhere in particular and back again. If you had asked my mother where I was . . . she’d likely have replied, ‘She’s around here somewhere.’”

The same was true of my childhood — I was always out in the woods playing house or ball or riding my bike or climbing trees. And for my children who lived across the street from a school yard, there was a wall. For hours and hours, they’d play Kings there — a kind of handball using a big red India rubber ball. Today kids playing alone and unwatched is impossible.

Quindlen goes on to say that we live in a perfection society now . . . “We believe in the illusion of control, we manipulate our faces so the lines of laughter and distress are wiped out.” She cites a perfect storm of trends and events as the cause. She did not enroll her kid in after-school soccer, opting for weekends with her children playing with each other. When she asked them what they remembered most about her mothering, one replied, “What I remember most: having a good time.”

Warner wants more day care and health care for kids. Quindlen wants us to stop turning motherhood into martyrdom.

As products of media manipulation, even though we are in thrall to it, we should advise young people today — those post baby boomers struggling with mommy madness — to hang loose and let kids be kids. Pay no mind to the “never-ending spin cycle of have-tos.” Maybe the child really doesn’t want to play soccer after all but would rather “have a good time.”

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