MUM IS NOT THE WORD

We have become narcissistic mommies, obsessed with our parenting choices and defensive when confronted with others

The mommy wars are killing me. Raise your children however you’d like. Just please — please — stop telling me about it. Do whatever you want: stay at home with your kids, wear gym clothes all day, work 60 hours a week, communicate with your children via BlackBerry. Breast-feed your kid till he’s 17! I’m a single working mother, and should be interested in all this, but I’m not.

I am bored to death with talking, hearing and reading about motherhood. I’m tired of Yummy Mummies, Alpha Mommies, Rock-Star Mommas, Momzillas… I’ve begun to dread mommy-lit novels, including the latest entry, Slummy Mummy.
Newspapers chronicle every maternal skirmish the way sportswriters follow Barry Bonds’ home runs. Stacks of non-fiction books appear each year. Important? Absolutely. Interesting? Well, that’s debatable. Which is making it hard to tackle this summer’s crop of mommy-lit novels. Back in 2002, I got a kick out of I Don’t Know How She Does It, by Allison Pearson. The travails of protagonist Kate Reddy, a hedge-fund manager and mother of two who “distresses” a pie she’s supposed to bring to a school event so it looks homemade, were pretty amusing. Then, there was Babyville (a 33-year-old TV producer decides she needs a baby and becomes obsessed with getting pregnant); The Yummy Mummy (a new mother gets a makeover from a West London “friend” who reminds her of the importance of groomed eyebrows), and Shopaholic and Baby (the Brits have a lot to answer for in this genre), to name a few.

And now, in case there’s a mother left on Earth who doesn’t know that toddlers pee in the darnedest places, we have Slummy Mummy, by Fiona Neill. The book’s heroine, Lucy Sweeney, gives up a big career as a TV news producer to stay home with her three sons. She bungles her way through one domestic disaster after another, losing her credit card 11 times in a year and sending an e-mail about sex with her husband to every parent in her son’s class. Lucy takes a hard look at the lives of women around her — and eventually decides hers isn’t so bad.

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My mother’s generation didn’t have the time to obsess. They plopped their toddlers down in playpens while they cleaned their own houses, cooked their own meals and tried to save money.

Some of our current anxiety is justified, of course. By the 1990s, nurture seemed to have trumped nature, and researchers began to focus on how experiences in a child’s first years of life could affect his or her later development. It wasn’t long before marketers trumpeted the message that children’s success in life would be largely determined by how frequently mothers ate salmon during pregnancy or how often they played Mozart in the nursery.

Today’s mommy angst makes perfect sense, according to Camille Paglia, professor of humanities and media studies at University of the Arts. Younger women today, Paglia says, are simply rebelling against the legacy of women who prized their professional roles at the expense of family. They want to talk about how to balance work and home. A lot.

As long as women keep having babies — and writing about it — we’ll have something to wring our hands about. Dana Gers, a senior vice president for marketing at Ferragamo USA and mother of two girls, 9 and 6, said she was depressed by the overwhelmed heroine of I Don’t Know How She Does It. Still, Gers says she just might pick up a copy of Slummy Mummy. It’s nice to read something that “gives us permission to be worse mothers,” she says. Permission granted.
(Newsweek)