mommy wars – Rebecca Cuneo Keenan

This card popped up in my Facebook feed last week.

Yeah okay sure, I thought. I remember what it’s like to have your first baby. I remember when any piece of well-meaning advice, any tidbit of info, felt like a sneering admonishment. I remember how I absorbed all and any criticism or suggestion into the very core of my insecure, sleep-deprived psyche where it would echo for weeks to come, feeding my bottomless anxiety.

So that is a good promise to make. And well-meaning ~~intruders~~ advisers really would be wise to think twice before offering up unsolicited tips to a new mother.

But, come on. That’s not going to happen. The world is full of judgmental busybodies. And even people who really mean no harm can accidentally say something that strikes a nerve with new parents. I’m sure I’m guilty of doing that myself.

A commercial for Similac is also making the rounds this week. It shows all the stereotypical mom types hanging out in cliques at the park like some sort of “back to high school” nightmare. There’s the breastfeeding moms, the formula feeding moms, the baby wearers, the yoga/fitness moms, the working moms and the stay-at-home dads. Then a baby carriage starts rolling down a hill and everybody chases after it with nothing but love and concern in their hearts because we’re all parents first, you see. Brought to you by the Similac Sisterhood of Motherhood.

Lest my readers mistake my fast and flippant tone for serious criticism, I think it may be time to lay forth some basic Playground principles. One is that this is not a blog about how to parent well or properly. I don’t pretend the circumstances of my life have somehow landed me at the pinnacle of parenting know-how or that I have any universal knowledge on the topic at all. Most of my understanding of children and child-rearing is drawn from my own personal experience as a mother of two, big sister to three, first cousin to twenty-some-odd, and very brief foray into the world of professional nannies. This is augmented by countless books, articles, websites, and blog posts about pregnancy and childbirth and childrearing. So I speak the language; but put me at the corner of Pacific and Dundas with my own screaming toddler and newborn baby and I have no idea what to do.

This is a blog about how it feels to be at that corner. About what I’ve tried and what works and what doesn’t. About what’s going on in the wider world that might impact our lives as parents. About what kinds of stuff might be worth getting and what’s garbage. I’ll complain about my kids and I’ll brag about them. I’ll bitch and whine and gossip. Blogs are of a transient nature and what’s bugging me one day might not bother me in the least the next.

Still, insofar as all the content is filtered through my perspective it might behoove me to make clear any biases I have. I am not interested in any stay-at-home versus working mom arguments. (Though I thought I might be for a short while; it is all so stupid. Here’s the best rant I could find on the internet on the subject and it’s not even written by a mother.) I think any suggestion that women should participate less vigorously in the workforce than men, for whatever reason, is complete nonsense. But choosing to work at home caring for the children is just as admirable as working anywhere else. I do not have a fulfilling and promising career to return to. I probably wouldn’t even be able to get a job (especially in this market) that pays much more than full-time childcare for two kids costs. I enjoy taking care of the kids and I generally dislike work. But I cannot, simply cannot, bring myself to identify as a stay-at-home mom. For one, I’m almost always working some part-time gig or another to make ends meet. (I even worked full-time throughout the last half of my pregnancy; note the complete lack of blog posts during that period.) But it’s mostly because I want to work. Not full-time for now while the kids are young, and not doing menial tasks for someone else. But I need some external validation and a role to fill when the kids begin to need me less. I am jealous of both worlds: the moms who tuck their children in and fold the rest of the laundry and go to sleep satisfied that their day’s work is done, and the moms who love their children just as well all while contributing to the working world and the family’s finances. There is no right way.

Other biases include a procrastinating perfectionist’s attitude to housework. If it’s not going to be done right, then don’t do it at all, I say. That isn’t working around here so well these days as nothing is really getting done. If cleanliness is next to godliness, then I’m on the highway to hell. There is absolutely no moral rectitude involved in scrubbing your bathtub; if you can afford to have someone else do it, by all means. I tend to be fiscally left-wing, but a social libertarian. I think I might be agnostic, but still identify as Catholic. I have no ethnic identity, though, beyond my Canadian-ness. I drink a lot, a lot, of tea. And I have lately started to wonder if I shouldn’t have kept with the Latin and become the definitive modern voice of the classics. Puer puellae rosas dat. The boy gives the girl the roses. A boy is giving roses to a girl. You see? There’s so much room for interpretation … this will undoubtedly cast the longest shadow across my blog.