Why Is Modern Motherhood Only Magic or Misery?
In the first few episodes of Netflix’s new motherhood sitcom, The Letdown, the heroine, Audrey (played by Alison Bell), attends a mothering support group where she’s shamed for her breastfeeding technique until she runs out of the room; her husband flakes on childcare duty on the night she’s supposed to reconnect with her friends, who then ditch her because she’s brought a screaming baby to a restaurant; she breaks down and declares herself a bad parent after every known sleep training technique fails; and, finally, she goes to a child-friendly movie screening with another mom, who has to flee the movie theater in tears after childbirth injuries cause her to pee her pants. Ha… ha???
It’s not that any of these scenarios are unrealistic. (The sleep training episode, in particular, was a little too real.) And that’s likely in large part because show is created by a mother (Sarah Scheller) and actually treats mothers like adults with senses of humor, instead of the ditzy ‘50s housewives most parenting media still seems to be aimed at. As of 2017, attachment parenting bible The Baby Book, by William and Martha Sear, still scolds mothers with postpartum depression for not doing their hair: “If you look good, you’re more apt to feel good,” they write. “Invest in a simple, easy-care hairstyle to get you through the early months.” I mean, I hear anti-depressants also work, but sure, get yourself a bob. Meanwhile, What to Expect in the First Year recommends that young mothers enhance their self-esteem by doing leg lifts while pushing their stroller, and empathizes with mothers who feel they are falling out of touch with “everything: cleaning, laundry, dishes, literally everything.”
But watching The Letdown is also an unrelentingly bleak experience. The show is part of a wave of smarter mothering media: Sheila Heti’s new book Motherhood, Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, Meaghan O’Connell’s And Now We Have Everything, and Emily Gould’s excellent newsletter Can’t Complain, among others. By bringing feminist and literary sensibilities to parenting, this media aims to elevate the work of care, making it a subject of serious consideration.
It also aims to humanize the mothers themselves; “Alison [Bell] and I were disillusioned with how motherhood was portrayed on screen. It never seemed to go beyond the stereotypes," Scheller told Aussie publication If.com. “We wanted to explore the less stereotypical other notions of motherhood, such as not living up to expectations and what that meant for a woman and for her relationship.”
But right now, two unrealistic and stereotypical images of motherhood still dominate: The glowing, selfless Madonna who spends every minute in rapt contemplation of her child’s perfection-the woman who breastfeeds on demand, wears her child all day, and sleeps next to him or her all night, all the while filling the child’s every waking moment with healthy role modeling and stimulating educational activities-and the harried, frazzled, three-days-without-a-shower woman who tromps through life in sweatpants covered in baby urine and milky spit-up. The “shitty mom” aesthetic reads less as a cri de coeur than a typed-out shrug, an affirmation, that yeah, this sh*t s*cks-but what can you do?
The Letdown’s star and co-creator, Alison Bell, has acknowledged that motherhood is portrayed as “Bliss or post-natal depression. The joyful yet difficult, confronting, confusing in-between was rarely acknowledged.” But that nuanced in-between place-as full of joy and tenderness as it is of angst and anxiety, often with both occurring in the same moment-is hard to get to. And the factors that make it so are seldom directly addressed.
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The “I hate parenting” genre of parenting lit is going through its own boom at the moment. I see it every time I pick up a new sleep guide on Amazon, in the form of books with titles like Sh*tty Mom and Toddlers are A**holes (It’s Not Your Fault) and I Heart My Little A*holes, and, of course, the defining text of the much-asterisked genre, Go the F*ck to Sleep. It’s in a variety of adorably bewildered, frazzled, viral tweets from parents, suitable for aggregation in end-of-the-year articles or single-serving accounts like @ReasonsMySonIsCrying. It’s a whole genre of stories about nonsensical child meltdowns and thrown food and sleeplessness and toys found lodged in the toilet; not unreal, per se, but certainly a schtick.
I get the need for this stuff. For the past two hundred years, the role of “mother” has been so thoroughly idealized that it barely corresponds to any real woman’s experience, and high-intensity techniques like attachment parenting or long-term breastfeeding have become a status symbol. The result, inevitably, is female shame. When women become mothers, their self-esteem takes a measurable dive, which can last for up to three years. If women can’t talk about what they experience, the isolation can be overwhelming.
Telling women that parenting will fulfill them or solve all their problems has undeniably been a disaster. But telling them that parenthood is inherently rotten won’t help much either.
One reason parenting is so stressful for women is that society-and families-are built around the expectation that women will be the only ones to do it.
“I really found myself breastfeeding all the time and thinking, this is why women are oppressed,” Meaghan O’Connell recently told Electric Lit in an interview about And Now We Have Everything. “I figured it out, in this visceral way that was undeniable to me… I was running around the track, my boobs were full of milk, and and I knew I had to be home soon, and I was like, this is it, this is the core of all of it. If women didn’t give birth, we would probably be equal.”
As a writer who’s done all of her writing for the past year in compressed, pre-scheduled two-to-four hour windows, because that’s exactly how long I can be away from the baby, I concur. The sheer fact of being physically bound to someone who needs constant attention gets entangled with the social expectation that women are “naturally” better at nurturing, until what is created is less a bond than it is a leash. Lack of support takes what should be a joyous connection and turns it into a means of keeping women confined to the private sphere.
But the leash isn’t purely biological, or just a matter of family dynamics. It’s a matter of policy. In the above-quoted interview, O’Connell also mentioned the economic coercion that kept her tied to home: “This comes down to math - how much daycare in Brooklyn costs and how much I can earn while [my son’s] away from me. That system was built for one parent, aka the woman, to stay home.”
It’s also not a system that can feasibly support single-income homes for any but the most well-off families. Hence the bind; hence, the stress. The system we have now creates massive gender inequity between men and women-the much-vaunted gender pay gap is actually a gap between mothers and everyone else-but it also aggravates inequalities between women. The pay gap between white women and black women is the fastest growing gap there is, and domestic service industries, like child care, are still mostly staffed by women of color-many of them mothers themselves, for whom “work-life balance” is much farther out of reach than it is for the middle-class and upper-class white women who hire them.
Maternal joy, like everything else, is a consumer product: Great if you can afford it, but out of reach for the rest. And stressful mothering is less about stepping on Legos than it is about the double binds of a society in which caring about your baby more than your job makes you a bad worker, and caring about anything at all more than your baby makes you a bad mother, a bad woman, and a bad person. It’s not about individual women’s failures, but a system that is set up to fail women.
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Back, then, to The Letdown. The show does grapple with some of the inequities built into parenting. In particular, it reserves some bracing, bitter humor for the sexism that creates much motherly suffering; Audrey’s husband takes a meeting with a (male) boss who tells him to “encourage breastfeeding” because, if they switch to formula, Audrey will expect him to get up and do some of the night feedings. In another episode, her husband’s childcare efforts-he takes the baby to a sports bar-end in him being nearly arrested because he’s found in the women’s restroom. The men’s room doesn’t have a changing table for the baby because, well, men aren’t supposed to change diapers. (Our President, as a reminder, has five children and claims that he’s never touched a diaper.)
That the show doesn’t go further than this is attributable to a few things-one, that it’s probably not the place of a sitcom to make public policy recommendations, and two, that the show is made in Australia, where childcare policy is evidently downright paradisiacal compared to ours. One character’s plot line, for instance, revolves around her getting “needs-based child care.” (This is something the U.S. also has, in theory - but only in theory.) She’s comfortably middle-class, but she is still seen as entitled to publicly funded childcare, solely because she’s a single mother. It’s hard to imagine anyone here winding up in the bleak situation of the working mother in a 2017 Bryce Covert piece for ELLE.com, so bankrupted by the cost of daycare that she winds up living out of her car.
Still, I can’t help but think that a deeper statement about motherly ambivalence and nuance is possible-maybe even possible in a second season of The Letdown, should we see one. The common complaint about most parenting manuals and mommy media is that it infantilizes women, treating them like cuddly, empty-headed mumsies so dim that authors are required to use the written equivalent of baby talk (your baby, for example, is never “your child,” or even “the baby,” but simply “Baby,” the way God is simply “God”) and who have no priorities outside of doing domestic chores with their children strapped to their chests. But I’ve started to wonder if the anti-parenting lit doesn’t infantilize us in a different way-treating us like incompetent, poo-smeared dopes who are routinely outwitted and emotionally broken by people who are, after all, too small to vote, drive, or reliably use toilets.
It’s not all dirty diapers and screaming and peeing yourself in a theater lobby. There can be moments of great peace, and beauty, and meaning in parenthood. There just aren’t enough, and more vulnerable mothers get less of them. To admit that parenting is not inherently awful can be a motivating statement. It can force us to ask why we aren’t all getting that once-in-a-lifetime experience of being happy with our small children-and what we can do to make sure the joy of parenting is within everyone’s reach.
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