Deep Thoughts on Mommyhood (or, "Shove your bubble bath, Chatelaine")

Good work in keeping to the chosen theme, right? I know...but frankly, y'all should just be grateful that I'm not waxing philosophical about poop and lactating and oooh BabyGap just e-mailed me a 20% off coupon and zomg what should I buy?? Because these are the things I fill my husband's ear with every.single.day. I have correctly surmised, however, that he's more interested in those things than what Maureen Dowd or Arianna Huffington have to say today.

Today's topic is in a way the flip side of last week's. Or actually, in a way, its necessary complement...the yin to its yang, sorta kinda. I, again, have a bone to pick with my fellow moms and perhaps it is the mirror image of the mommy guilt issue: since when did motherhood become some kind of sick competition to see who can out-martyr everyone else??

Okay, yes, that was entirely rhetorical. I think we can all figure out when this happened. And that is, uh, the beginning of time, in a way. Good, virtuous, socially-sanctioned femininity has always been synonymous with self-deprivation and the suppression of self. You don't show off your smarts, lest you make others uncomfortable. You don't ask for much, lest you look greedy. You don't talk about your accomplishments, lest you appear self-aggrandizing. And when babies arrive on the scene? Sayonara, former self.

I guess I just didn't realize that this attitude was still in fashion. I stupidly believed that we'd moved past the motherhood as sublimation and self-denial era - thought it was as passe as wedge heels and wood beams, actually - but now I realize that that's just a high-larious trick we've played on ourselves. It's all smoke and mirrors, right alongside the magazine articles that tell us, "There there...mommies do so much...you should really do something for yourself! Like, take a bubble bath! Yeah! That'll recharge your batteries, and get you all revved up for your next 24 hour shift of servitude!"

UHHHH...excuse me? I didn't sell my personhood for a bubble bath and weekly glass of wine, thank you very much.

My sociology professor taught us that the main characteristic of a status symbol is that few people can attain the coveted object: essentially, that once it becomes mainstream, something new, exclusive, difficult to attain and expensive takes its place. I feel like martyring motherhood is like the new status symbol. It's not enough to avoid alcohol and tobacco during pregnancy: now, you must fanatically avoid defiling yourself with sushi, chocolate, mayonnaise, Caesar salad and relaxing hot baths. It's not enough to breastfeed for a year and then introduce your regular old homogenized milk: now, you must breastfeed until the baby "self-weans" (oh, which apparently doesn't happen for at least two years! enjoy!), cut out dairy and spice and everything nice, and then search high and low to provide goat's milk (nutritionally superior to cow's, don't you know anything?). It's not enough to take a few months or even a year off with your new baby: now, you "belong" at home into perpetuity because your children "need" you. What kind of evil mother would entrust her baby's care to a STRANGER? Or even worse, deposit her child at the germ infested cesspools they call daycares? Never mind that you once had ambitions. Never mind that you had goals of your own. You will have to wait. 

It's a race to the unattainable ideal...and the more you elevate everyone else's needs above your own, the better. Because your babies are only small once and you can always go back to work later and become a world-renowned concert pianist at age 45, right? No harm, no foul.

The obvious question that I'm sure arises from this rant is...well, who cares? Who cares what other people choose to do? If they want to play the who's the better mommy chicken, why does that matter to me? Well, besides the fact that my inner Gloria Steinem is screaming, it's a simple matter of setting norms. It becomes the standard against which all women's behavior is measured and reinforces a certain mode of femininity as ideal. Anyone falling outside those parameters is "weird." A little Googling will demonstrate all too clearly how women marginalized in this way - who don't act in accordance with our ideal of womanhood - draw the short stick. Consider women who dare to, say, run for public office when they have small children at home (Sarah Palin); don't break down and sob for the cameras in the face of unthinkable tragedy (Kate McCann); or who don't play nice with the big boys (Hilary Clinton; Joan of Arc; you get my point). They have to contend with much more than just the judgmental glares and disapproving clucking of other mothers. Society throws the book at them.

And ultimately it does also circle back to the issue of mommy guilt. As much as I say I'm not going to play ball, these new norms worm their way into your head and surface to make you feel like crap when you're already doubting yourself.