"The Conflict"
Note: This post has been written as part of PAIL's August Book Club. If you don't know about PAIL, check them out here.
I recently read--with great interest--"The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women" by Elisabeth Badinter. (As an aside, sitting in our backyard after the kids are asleep, drinking a beer in the warm evening air and reading an actual book has been such a huge treat...it's the first time I've done this since the babies were born.) In a nutshell, the author claims that today's "natural" parenting ideal makes it impossible for women to have a life outside of being a mother, which in her opinion is a bad thing.
There's a positive and a negative that have stayed with me:
The Positive
This is the first I've read of the current ideal being held up for motherhood (breastfeeding, attachment parenting, home with the kids instead of working, co-sleeping, etc.) just being one way of looking at things, not gospel. That maybe there are other ways to be a good mom, and it's not just do it that way, and everything you do that comes up short is a failure on your part.
This is something I've been thinking about in regards to the feminism I grew up with: that to deprioritize/postpone a family in favor of a career (which is what I was encouraged to do) is not the only path to take.
I am very susceptible to these types of messages, apparently. With the whole feminism bit, I felt like I had to put my career first, even though that's not what my heart wanted. And now with the kids, I've been feeling bad about where I come up lacking in the motherhood department because I have chosen to work (part time, from home), but maybe I don't have to buy into all the dogma the second time around. Buying into the whole feminism thing has caused me regret; I don't have to go through that again with not living up to an ideal of motherhood I don't 100% agree with, anyway.
(Another aside: Can I just tell you how much I hate the preachiness of the natural/attachment parenting crowd? I like a lot of their ideas, I am with them in theory and a lot of my parenting follows their advice, but, for example, I tried everything humanly possible and can't breastfeed my twins 100% of the milk they need...and I'm sick of being made to feel guilty for that, because it wasn't my choice...I'm doing the best I can with what is physiologically possible...I hate all the messages that I'm short-changing my kids because they are not exclusively breastfed.)
The Negative
It's not just this book, but why does everyone, especially feminists, always assume that women don't WANT to be home with their kids 24/7? That given a choice, every woman wants to work? The author of this book makes it seem like staying home with the kids is the easy, expected (although undesirable) choice, when in reality it often seems to be an unaffordable/unsupported luxury. I'd love to stay home with our kids and not work, but my husband and I want a standard of living that necessitates me working at least a little. (We could live on my husband's salary--many people make it work on a lot less--but we want to be able to take the kids on trips, for example. And be able to save for college. And retire at some point.) And the way I've been able to work isn't that onerous (I'm not working that many hours, and half the time I have a kid on my lap). Besides the money aspect, in my crowd (college educated, successful, urban professionals), there is plenty of support for returning to work after having a kid or two, pretty much zero for wanting to be a stay-at-home-mom.
Bottom Line
This book made me feel better about some of my choices, about what I feel in my gut is right for me and my family. I guess that's where the value in reading was for me...in me doing a better job of recognizing that just because somebody says I'm supposed to raise my kids a certain way, it doesn't mean they know better than I do about what's right for my life and my family.
XOXO
