“My mother never made me French toast during the week.”
My husband said this to me last night when I was deciding what to make my two kids, ages ten and eight, for breakfast this morning before they went to camp. I have a hectic work day today but for some crazy reason I didn’t consider just throwing the kids some bowls and cereal. I was contemplating taking pans, eggs, vanilla, cinnamon, bread and Crisco out.
“I’m going to tell the whole world you’re a supermom,” he threatened me. “You rail against moms who do too much for their kids and you’re just as bad.”
This statement could have been cause for an epic Andy-and-Eve battle, but last night I had a moment of lucidity and I realized he was absolutely right. This realization didn’t just happen out of no where. Yesterday I read the cover story in New York magazine titled: “I Love My Children. I Hate My Life,” and it got me thinking.
Basically it was about why parents are unhappy and allow their kids to suck every molecule of joy from their lives. The answer is pretty clear: We parents, especially working parents, suck.
My mom’s first reaction when I told her about this article was shock. “Why do they have kids if they don’t want them?”
But what the author of the piece, Jennifer Senior, tries to convey goes way beyond this. She makes a case that many parents love their kids, want their kids, but are so overwhelmed that they want to pull their hair out; often can’t get along with their partners, friends, etc., as a result; and many are constantly bitching about their lives.
Woe is me!!
Here’s an excerpt:
From the perspective of the species, it’s perfectly unmysterious why people have children. From the perspective of the individual, however, it’s more of a mystery than one might think. Most people assume that having children will make them happier. Yet a wide variety of academic research shows that parents are not happier than their childless peers, and in many cases are less so. This finding is surprisingly consistent, showing up across a range of disciplines.
If you get a chance, read the piece and share your thoughts on its premise. My thought on why parents hate their lives — and I don’t think they really “hate” their lives as much as they are just overwhelmed — is because we’re so consumed with stuff we really have little control over. Kids will become what they’re destined to become because they want to become it. We can help guide them, give them support, but if we think beating our kids into submission so they can get into an Ivy League school or make it in Hollywood, or rule the world, is smart, or even possible, then we’re probably pretty dumb, right?
What if we encourage them to become something and then they end up unhappy? Talk about a parent guilt trip.
Come to think of it, my dad never encouraged me to be a journalist; he actually discouraged me from becoming a journalist; but I became a journalist. And look what happened to me.
But more importantly, the New York magazine makes one big, salient point. Working parents are so wrapped up in the parenting grind that we can’t even help ourselves.
All of us, men and women, constantly bitch about how there’s no work-life balance in the work world; how Corporate America and our nation have yet to catch up with dual-income households.
It makes for great conversation when we’re at the water cooler, on playdates, or at the Y pool. But are we getting off our parenting butts to really do something about it?
There is no mandatory parental leave in this country; and we are one of the only industrialized nations without federally mandated sick time. And forget about good affordable child care. But who the heck is fighting these battles?
Not working parents. We’re too damn busy to focus our attentions on things that will really make our lives better. Even Michele Obama, who promised to promote work-life balance for families, figured a White House garden was easier than taking up a big hoe to fight the flex-time-for-parents war.
Where are the protests? Where is the outrage?
This quote from the New York magazine article was key:
“We’ve put all this energy into being perfect parents,” says Judith Warner, author of Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety, “instead of political change that would make family life better.”
So what do you all think? How did we all go so wrong? Is it time to get our happiness back? And why the hell am I making French toast for my kids during the week?
Maybe dad should make the French toast:
July 12th, 2010 at 12:15 pm
The french toast quandry cracked me up! That is a perfect illustration of the unnecessary demands we put on ourselves…. and I have done that EXACT thing just recently. I had actually read the article you reference yesterday and was discussing it with my husband just last night. The line that summed it up for me was “children have gone from being our staffs to being our bosses”.
One thing I take issue with is the idea that “flex-time” is the golden bullet to fix everything for everybody. I am fortunate to work remotely in a mid-level, corporate position, which gives me a good deal of flexibility when I’m not occasionally traveling. What I’ve found that I do is expect to not only manage my job in a 100% professional manner but also to handle parenting in the same way that a full time stay-at-home mom would.
In other words I can’t decide who I want to impress the most - the corporate world or all the other stay-at-home moms — of my sons’ friends, I’m the only mom with a job.
We are terrified our kids are going to miss something and it is going to wreck them for life or even worse … affect their self-esteem. This causes us to make ourselves crazy.
I would encourage everyone to go out and read the article - but read it all the way to the end. It nails the tedium of parenting and the stigma of acknowledging that. However, toward the end there is a nice analysis of the difference between moment-by-moment pleasure and events that are truly rewarding in the long-term.
July 12th, 2010 at 12:20 pm
You are so right Meg, it’s not the golden bullet. Even if we had all the time we needed life as a working parent would still be a balancing act.
And you are so right about that line…children are our bosses. My husband and I try hard not make sure our kids know their place, but too often I see parents who let the kids run the show all the time. What kind of life is that?
July 12th, 2010 at 3:29 pm
I believe this goes beyond working parents. My wife is a stay-at-home mom by choice, but she feels the same pressure. Our societal expectations have changed from what they were 30, 40, or more years ago. There’s a lot of pressure to program each week so that kids have formal “play dates”, structured activities, and minimal downtime. To me, that just sets kids up to have the expectation that they will be constantly entertained, and they have a hard time adjusting when they are expected to be still (and be unplugged). Unless more of us buck the trend and start letting our kids learn and explore more on their own, while simultaneously realizing that we don’t need to make everything “perfect” for them, we’ll constrain ourselves until our kids are gone, and will have established a poor precedent for the next generation.
I’m not suggesting that making a special meal before the kids go away is a bad thing. That’s one of the kinds of things my wife and I enjoy doing. When things you enjoy suddenly feel like obligations, they move from being acts of love to being acts of compulsion. In such cases, it’s wise to leave them by the wayside.
July 12th, 2010 at 5:29 pm
But they loovveee French toast. Only kidding.
Very good point HikingStick!
July 12th, 2010 at 7:47 pm
I don’t know if I just grew up in a different household or what, but I have always had working parents and grandparents. And I’m 25. My grandma worked 40 hours a week until she was 81 and they let her go b/c of budget cuts. She is still sad she doesn’t work anymore at 87. I always joke that I come from a family of work horses, but I have always grown up with the understanding that my parents work and I grown up proud of them for doing so.
In my own family I try to remember that we’re a family unit. My husband and I are a team set on taking care of not only our daughter, but the two of us as well. My daughter is a member of the family so she has to work just like the two of us do. Even at the age of 20 months she helps us put away dishes and pick up the living room. Of course it gets destroyed five minutes later, but who cares?! I work part time (for right now in a library) and am a full time student. My husband works a full time job and our daughter will grow up knowing that is just how it is. Too many kids grow up with an expectation that life is about them and become horrible adults as a result of it. Societal pressure will be there no matter what you chose in life. I feel just as much from being a working/student mom as I did as a stay at home mom (which I did for exactly 3 months).
Just do what you need to do to keep your family healthy and semi-happy (happy is a relative term remember)and since moms and dads are a part of the family they need to be taken care of too. I always remember from my Medical First Responder class that you, the rescuer, have to be okay for you to save someone else. If working mom or dad isn’t okay neither is your child. Send the kids off to Grandma’s and sit down with your spouse and have a margarita.
July 12th, 2010 at 7:57 pm
It really is a different world Mandalynn252.
But alas, sending the kids to Grandma isn’t always an option for working parents…even though many of us wish it were.
Your grandmother sounds like a great woman!
July 13th, 2010 at 3:11 pm
Aye–my wife and I are six four hours from the nearest grandparent of our children (my father). My wife’s folks are six hours away and because of our own differences in birth order (she was the eldest in her family while I was second youngest in mine), my father is the age of her grandparents, and her parents (our kids’ grandparents on that side) are only as old as my eldest brother. They’re too busy working to interact with our kids, even when we visit.
That’s the only thing I really miss about how separated our society has become–fewer of us live close to our extended families any longer.