from bindi of the epossums blog

Susanne wrote recently of a mother's guilt. Her post has given me cause for reflection for a couple of weeks. Today my ideas crystallized...

I have been working hard this week. I am lucky in that my husband will take the children to school in the mornings and cook dinner in the evenings if I can't. Today I left as he was making the school lunches using pita bread from the freezer.

“Oh, no fresh bread!”, I remarked. “I hadn't realised we were close to running out because I didn't make the lunches yesterday”.

Notice here that my comment was motivated through guilt. Usually, stocking up the pantry is my domain. The result of my guilt-motivated comment was to subtly shift blame from myself onto him. The implicit message is, if you knew we were running low why didn't you buy some more bread, or even inform me? It is not my fault.

His reply was, “Yes, you have been absorbed in you own world lately”.

How did his comment make me feel? Slightly angry. It definitely fed my guilt.

As I drove off to work, I decided not to let his comment touch me. In my heart, I know he thinks I'm a good mum. The comment was pitched at the perfect level to push my buttons for the sake of argument, and that is all. It was a response to my attempt to redistribute my guilt. He is excellent at fighting fire with fire.

... I agree with Susanne. Guilt affects us all. However, what I hope to illustrate in my example above, is behaviour motivated by guilt. I think it is important to be able to make choices about the way we live.

Understanding how guilt motivates us is the first step towards being able to make the choice to live a different way.

from susanne of creative.mother.thinking

I know I have written about "mommy guilt" before but I want to try to put it together this time. For years I had thought that I wasn't suffering from it. After the first few months of being a mother where I was feeling guilty for going to work and not participating in any mother-and-baby-groups, or baby swimming or not massaging my son every day, I decided I had enough of that, that he just had to live with his life as it was and that he at least wasn't growing up being totally dependent on me. And so I proudly announced that there was no mommy guilt for me.

Only I did still feel guilty from time to time. Because I'm not the mother I want to be, because other mothers do different things with their children, and because - to be frank often I try to sneak away and do something on my own. Like computer things. And when you're a mother that's Wrong.

I read about mothers feeling guilty all the time on blogs even if the mothers I meet in real life rarely talk about it. But even if they don't talk about it you can feel it. Every time when two or more mothers meet you can sense it. And it isn't triggered by competimoms only, every single, innocent remark can, and probably will, trigger someone's guilt. "Look, we made cupcakes and decorated the room." someone says, and the likes of me think about how they never bake anything, and that their method of decoration is to give their children paper and scissors and afterwards saying, "That's really nice, of course you can tape it to the fence." On the other hand I then say, "Oh, my son isn't going to music class, but he likes to bang on the drums and piano, and walk around with the guitar pretending he is a rock star." and immediately all the other mothers feel guilty for not creating such a stimulating creative environment for their children, while I feel guilty that my son who is the son of two musicians grows up without any musical training. The list can go on and on. Someone says, "Oh, we go to the playground every day." and I feel rotten because I never go to the playground and my poor son has no peers to play with, and then I say, "Oh, we just open the door and let him out in the garden." and the other mother feels rotten because her son has to grow up in a tiny apartment without his own sandbox and swing.

In the end we all feel rotten, those of us who bake cupcakes, those of us who grow their own food, those of us who let their children watch TV, those of us who don't, those of us who work, those of us who stay at home, every single one. Every mother who cares about her children (and I'd say there are only very few who don't and they probably don't blog about it) feel guilty and like she isn't doing enough or doing things wrong.

I recently read a post by Chris Jordan on this: "The Modern Mother". She quotes her mother-in-law who said being a mother was easier fifty years ago. It might have been but I recall the stories my mother and my mother-in-law tell and they always had the feeling that they were not good enough as a mother somehow, plus they were feeling rotten because they wanted to work outside the home, and they couldn't.

So, I don't think that going back fifty years is the solution (and neither does Chris Jordan, by the way). I just think that when every single mother in the Western Hemisphere (or maybe only most of them) feel guilty about the way they are treating their children, this is not a personal phenomenon, this is social. And it is always a good thing to remember that societies are made by human beings and that the rules therefore can be changed by human beings too.

I have been reading the sentence, "I better start saving for my child's therapy bill because I ..." (yelled at her, lost my temper, have let my child down in any way) so often. And every single time I'd like to write a comment and say, "Cool down. If that's the worst that ever happens to your child it is very fortunate indeed." All this implicates that mothers should be somehow superhuman. Patience personified. Never making mistakes. Never treating their children unfair. We all have this image in our heads of the loving mother surrounded by her children, nurturing always. At the end of the day she sits in the midst of her children who all are smiling with perfectly brushed teeth wearing their hand-sewn pajamas, and reads them stories before tucking them in their beds. Do you realize that this is propaganda that is more than a hundred years old? Propaganda that got resurrected in the 1950s and that's still sitting in our heads? Only now we have to be hot, sexy, intelligent, self-reliable and making money too.

In 2005 I read "The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined All Women" by Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels and it opened my eyes. We all have this image of the ideal mother in our heads, and it is blasted at us from all media too. Imagine a celebrity saying that she is overwhelmed by new motherhood! Somewhere inside of us we secretly still think that becoming a mother is the most fulfilling and joyful thing we can ever achieve. And in a way it might be but then we don't always feel fulfilled and joyful all day long. Blogs are giving us the opportunity to see real mothers in real life who also talk about the less joyful aspects of it all. Still we think that nothing we can ever do will be enough. Still we think that we are the key to our children's happiness. That we alone hold their fates in our hands.

Well, it's time to stop this. Our children are their own persons. They determine their own fates as much as the people around them. We should always be grateful that we live in places where we have the energy and time to worry about whether it's good for our children to have swimming lessons or too much cake. All the children of the people who read this have enough to eat, a roof over their heads, clothes to keep them warm and mothers and/or fathers who love them and care for them. Mommy guilt is a luxury problem that harms us and our children.

I have a little task for you: every time you catch yourself thinking, "I'm a bad mother." or "My child will need therapy because of me." or something similar, replace it with, "I love my child and trust him (or her) to turn out okay" or "Being myself is all I have to do.".

Okay, I don't seem to be good at making new slogans against mommy guilt. I'm afraid you have to help me out here. What will you be replacing your old mommy guilt phrases with?

from charlotte of charlotte’s web

I’ve just finished reading Nineteen Minutes - Jodi Picoult’s version of the American school shooting phenomenon, in which she attributes the shooter’s act of vengeance to years of systematic bullying. Picoult spins a good tale, broad, encompassing, but never deep. Lionel Shriver’s novel We Need To Talk About Kevin, deals with the same subject matter - what makes a teenage murderer, how a community responds, how parents of a murderer feel - but far more provocatively and urgently. Her tale of a mother who fails, despite every good intention, to love her unlovable child, is chilling. If I had to choose between the two, I would recommend the latter. I admire Shriver’s brutal honesty and her determination to tackle deeply unpleasant topics.

Shriver’s story posits that Kevin, the teenage murderer, arrives on the planet evil. This alone, without the story’s horrific denouement, is hard to digest. We want to believe that babies are innocent, until we slowly imprint our weaknesses on them. We want to believe that the parents of an amoral child did their best to teach him. And we certainly want to believe that such a child might take revenge his schoolmates but never on his own family.

The murderer in Picoult’s tale starts out as an ordinary child, perhaps one who is more sensitive than most. On his first day of kindergarten, the bullying begins and it never stops. Each day at school is one of humiliation, shame and beatings. One part of the story I found hard to accept is that the adults around him, his parents and his teachers, are never aware of the extent of the bullying. His parents try to make him more acceptable to his peers by forcing him to play soccer, but continually compare him to his brother Josh who is socially competent, academic and sporty. Josh also teases his brother at school, calling him a “freak”, and how this fails to pan out in the family is never addressed.

In comparison to Shriver’s meaty broth, Picoult’s novel is a thin gruel, competent but never entirely satisfying. However, it did make me think a little more about bullying and how children loathe difference. When Lily arrived in her little German school class last year, she was swiftly dumped by the one child from her own kindergarten (they have since reconciled) and was left to face the hordes on her own. After two weeks of hearing that no-one wanted to play with her at break-time, I went on a playdate offensive, inviting children round, baking welcoming muffins and letting them see that while Lily may be a little different from the German norm in that she comes from an English/South African background, she is loved and cherished just like they are. Now she has lovely little friends, from whom she remains slightly independent, as is her way. Had I left it, perhaps she would have managed on her own, but perhaps she would not have. I’m just glad I acted swiftly.

However, with bullying on my mind, it was interesting that she came home today with list of rules for good behaviour at school. The children have cut them out and stuck them in their work books, and they are discussing them in class with their teacher. The rules are:

We listen to each other, and to the teacher

We don’t laugh at anyone when they make a mistake

We don’t blame each other

We help each other

We don’t run in the classroom, only in the playground

We speak politely to each other

We let each other finish our sentences

We keep our desks tidy

We work quietly, so as not to disturb each other

We solve our conflicts without violence

We wait our turn quietly

We put up our hands when we want to speak

I don’t know if this is school policy, or just the policy of Lily’s teacher, but I think they are a great set of principles, ones according to which I’d be happy to raise my children.