As discussed in a previous post, the self-help
genre has capitalized on the insecurities that often accompany pregnancy and
parenthood for decades, creating a long list of texts by “experts” providing
advice to women as they become mothers.
These books are often fear-invoking, didactic how-to manuals that
prescribe “correct” ways to raise children.
Recently, a wave of mommy-crafted texts has surfaced to counter these
“one-size-fits-all” professional perspectives.
(Or at least this is what they claim to do.) This essay discusses
various mother-written (and often comedic) self-help books alongside of
motherhood memoir and fiction novels to see how these contemporary texts are
redefining motherhood and responding to ideological messages concerning
parenting.
I was
originally eager to read these “mother”-written texts as a response to these
fear-invoking self-help books and hoped to find them operating in very
different ways (with vastly different to the “expert” texts, the similarities
between these two groups are problematic and telling. These texts do often critique the self-help parenting
texts that came before them, suggesting that mothers embrace their own
parenting styles and choices, and they most definitely offer more honest
portrayals of parenting, but at times they fall into the same traps as the
other groups of texts: they promote the
author’s specific parenting preferences and make assumptions about mothering
that rest on the outdated notion of a universal women’s experience. But, to be clear, there is much to celebrate
in these texts and I will discuss some beneficial motifs that circulate
throughout them.
Arguably,
what the mommy-authored texts analyzed here do best is respond to the
literature that came before them (sometimes directly and more often
indirectly), by countering parenting fears and encouraging women to reject the
impossible societal expectations placed on contemporary mothers. For example, in Confession’s of a Slacker Mom, Muffy Mead-Ferro discusses how “moms
or moms-to-be in these information-awash and overachieving times” often feel as
though they have “become everyone else’s property. Wards of the state. Imbeciles” due to the way women are depicted
and spoken to throughout the majority of circulating parent products and advice
columns (2). Currently, a simple “Goggle search of the
phrase ‘parenting advice’ produces more than a million matches’” (Mead-Ferro
130). Rather than acting as a tool and
comfort to most mothers, this slew of information is heightening anxieties and
sparking confusion. The authors of
these mommy-written self-help books consider the detrimental effects of this
information-overload. Mead-Ferro
writes: “I wonder if we’re giving our
children the chance to really perform, if we’re giving them and ourselves
enough credit, as we pore over our parenting magazines and reference
manuals. I wonder if we’re getting in
the way rather than out of the way, as we get sucked into the trap of competing
with other parents to raise the most exceptional child” (133). Many of these texts express nostalgia for
bygone eras when parenting, although free of the fancy gadgets and endless
options that parents have today, was not entrenched in all of this
propagandistic merchandise. Mead-Ferro
muses:
Mothers of an earlier generation
had it easier in a way. Because the glut
of child-rearing
news
articles, books, and equipment that we modern-day moms have to contend with is
truly dizzying, even for the most
clear-headed of us. The biggest problem
isn’t the confusion though, it’s the seduction.
We’d just love to believe that someone’s discovered a secret formula
that will give our children and us a guarantee of success. (134)
However,
the problem with this wealth of information is that it is as contradictory as
it expansive (Mead-Ferro 136-7).
Stefanie Wilder-Taylor, author of Sippy
Cups are Not for Chardonnay and Other Things I had to Learn as a New Mom,
discusses her experience of turning to such texts when she first discovered she
was pregnant: “Under the avalanche of
information, I started worrying more rather than less. Was there really one right answer? Every book seemed to think so” (xv).
The
effects of these expert-written self-help books are explored in motherhood
memoir and fictional novels as well.
Suzanne Finnamore’s The Zygote
Chronicles is a faux memoir – a fictional novel written as a diary by one
woman to her unborn son. Although it is
a fictional narrative, Finnamore evokes the second-person tone of the self-help
genre and often gives advice (albeit to her forthcoming child). Finnamore’s main character recounts her
experiences with parenting advice books:
Here in bed, I am dressed in a
tattered U.C. Berkeley T-Shirt and a pair of your father’s boxer
shorts,
surrounded by my bibles. They are:
The Mayo Clinic Complete Book of
Pregnancy, The Columbia University College of Physicians
and Surgeons’ Guide to Pregnancy,
Having a Baby: A Complete Guide for the
Mother-to-Be, What to Expect when You’re expecting, The Complete Book of
Pregnancy and Childbirth…, The
Girlfriends’ Guide to Pregnancy, and A
Child Is Born, which is mostly photographs.
Whenever I have a question, I look up the answer in each book, which all
have conflicting information and wildly divergent facts, and then I listen to
the answer that I like best. (25,
emphasis added)
Although
the character initially navigates through these “bibles” quite well – picking
and choosing the answers she prefers – later in her prenatal journey she finds
them more disturbing: “I must say the
parent’s literature is depressing. It
describes how after the baby is born, marriages get strained and often fail,
about how your life will never be quite the same again, and that it’s still
good just different, all very vague and disturbing. I cannot believe this is true, but then why
do they write it in books” (Finnamore 89).
Karen
Maezen Miller’s Momma Zen: Walking the Crooked Path of Motherhood is
a pseudo memoir, or, perhaps more correctly, a memoir-advice book blend. The book follows her through the last stages
of her pregnancy, her delivery, and through the first years of her daughter’s
life, offering advice based on her own experiences and her spiritual
practices. Miller discusses the value
she found in parenting advice texts but explains how one ultimately grows out
of them (therefore subtly encouraging such growth):
There
comes a point when you stop reading the books and resign yourself to what you
don’t know. This is precisely how you
come to know it all. When a single,
stray cough in the middle of the night tells you that a cold is coming in the
next twenty-four hours: nobody tells you, but you know. When your child says her teeth hurt and you
instantly suspect an ear infection: it
seems farfetched, but you know. (137)
She
continues later in the text:
I read less. For certain, parenting manuals were essential
companions in the beginning.
At
every turn I needed to know so much. Not
long ago I glanced up and saw these books, propping up dust on the shelf of my
closet, and realized that many pages and stages had gone unread. So much kindhearted advice had gone
unconsulted. It had been years since I
sought answers there. No matter, because
I remembered the awesome essence of what those books had taught me. Through fevers and rashes, teething and
tantrums, those guides had told me to watch and listen, to intuit and discern,
to worry less, to wait longer, to trust my child first and to trust myself
always. I only hope I’ve done as little
for you. (Miller141)
Miller
provides the most positive depiction of parenting advice books found within
this group of mother-written texts.
Beyond
referencing the parenting literature directly, most authors express frustration
concerning the fear-evoking climate that produces them. Mead-Ferro notes: “Whenever I feel like I’m getting caught up
in the modern neurosis that seems to accompany child-rearing, I just ask
myself, what if I’d had my babies in an isolated Alaskan fishing village and
didn’t have access to the breast-feeding counselors or toddler-fitness
classes…” (14). Wilder-Taylor
vents: “I can’t stand those people who
love to issue ridiculous warning before you have kids. You know the ones: They feel the need to let you know how tough
having kids is on a marriage – with the old ‘loss of freedom,’ ‘no alone time
with your husband,’ and ‘say good-bye to your sex drive.’ Blah, blah, blah” (136). Similarly, the fictional expectant mother in
The Zygote Chronicles reflects:
It is expected for women to
breed, but the moment you do, they come at you with reams of
information
pronouncing doom, crippling stress, and general malaise. And what’s maddening is how even though I’m
almost forty years old, they all know so much better than I do. I’m the first-time pregnant village
idiot. If one more parent says, ‘Do it
now. This will be the LAST TIME EVER you can _____,’ with that
ominous hypernegative tone, I am going to scream. If I were you, baby, I would be very upset and
up in arms. I would be picketing with
little Popsicle-stick pickets. MEDIA
UNFAIR TO BABIES. (Finnamore 90)
What
all of these mommy-written texts do is capture the “fear” surrounding pregnancy
and motherhood through vignettes that help to alleviate said fear (or help
readers to feel less silly about such unjustified fears). Take for example this passage from Anne
Lamott’s memoir Operating Instructions
discussing her first car ride with her baby as she took him home from the
hospital: “The first time we hit a
pothole, I thought, well, that’s that, his neck just snapped; we broke
him. He’s a quadriplegic now. But we did get him home safely” (22).
As
many of these texts explain, many of the fears surrounding parenthood stem from
unrealistic societal expectations placed on parents, or, more specifically,
mothers. One of the mommy-written
self-help books in this study, Anne Dunnewold’s Even June Cleaver Would Forget the Juice Box: Cut Yourself Some Slack (and Still Raise
Great Kids) in the Age of Extreme Parenting, continues this
discussion. This text is perhaps the
most “academic” of the grouping, touting the fact that it was written by a
Ph.D. on the front cover while advertising
“Workable Solutions to the Mommy Madness” in the air of the self-help
genre. In this text, Dunnewold, a
practicing psychologist, provides a literature review on motherhood studies and
recounts stories from her patients’ lives.
She boils the problem down to “The Three O’s of Extreme Parenting: overperfecting, overprotecting, and
overproducing” (Dunnewold 10). In a
similar text, I Was a Really Good Mom
Before I Had Kids: Reinventing Modern
Motherhood, Trisha Ashworth and Amy Nobile explore these same issues. Their
text is interspersed with the products of their research: interviews with over a hundred women across
the United States. The first chapter of
their book, titled “The Fake-Cupcake Problem (Why We Needed to Write this
Book),” deals with the unrealistic expectations placed on mothers (for example
the need to provide home baked goods for school events). It also evokes the opening passage of Allison
Pearson’s fictional novel I Don’t Know
How She Does It. Pearson’s novel,
which is focused on the life of Kate Reddy, a fund manager in a male-dominated
profession and mother of two young children, was adapted into a Hollywood film
in 2011. The novel opens with the following scene:
1.37am. How did I get here? Can someone please tell me that? Not in this kitchen, I
mean in this life. It is the morning of the school carol concert
and I am hitting mince
pies. No, let us be quite clear about this, I am distressing mince pies, and altogether
demanding and subtle process…. (Pearson 3)
The
main character is forging fresh baked goods in order to avoid the judgment of
other mothers that she believes will incur if she simply drops of store bought
desserts.
Regardless
of whether these mommy texts are fiction or non-fiction, they all contain two
characteristics that separate them from the traditional parenting self-help
books written by so-called experts: they
are incredibly honest and humorous in their depictions of motherhood. These
texts capture real moments that women experience throughout pregnancy and
childhood and present some unflinchingly honest, and not always flattering,
depictions of how women survive through them.
For example, Finnamore’s character, who early in the novel admits to
having called her fetus a parasite (20), provides a realistic portrayal of a
woman reacting to the news that she was giving birth to a boy (when she had
hoped for a girl):
I have to admit something to you
now. For the past couple of days, I have
been wrestling
with
a terrible, shameful feeling. This
feeling came right on the heels of joy and huge relief that you were all
right. It came about two seconds after
that. You see, you are to be our only
child. And I have always wanted a girl,
I had the hallowed girl names all picked out.
I saw myself downloading all my feminine information on to you, passing
it along like a very ornate bejeweled baton….I was going to create you in my
own image…. That night, after happily announcing your sex to everyone, I
wept. I am thirty-eight, and know now
that I will never have a daughter. A
daughter s a precious and secret dream I have carried with me since I was
five. Your father heard me crying and
said I was crazy, and that he had no sympathy for me. He said I was hurting his feelings because,
lest I forget, he was a boy, too.
(43-44)
She
also later expresses unease at not being an ideal mother, “the perfect, young,
spry mother, the unblemished canvas” her son deserves (Finnamore 68). She admits in her dialogue to her unborn
son:
I
have been fired three times, have been to jail once in New Jersey for four
hours, and have had twenty-two lovers.
Also I have several gray hairs, which I secretly pluck from my temples
while sitting in parked cars outside McDonalds.
Maybe I should have had you when I was younger. I should not be telling you any of this. I should be strong enough to keep it in. But I am not, or if I ever was, I am no
longer. Pregnancy trips off the veneer,
the protective casing. It husks the
soul. (Finnamore 68)
In
I Don’t Know How She Does It, one of
the most honest moments comes at a point when Kate admits, via an email to her
best friend recapping a holiday trip, how her children make her feel:
Dearest
debs, how was it 4 U? All the elements
of the traditional English Xmas here:
sausage rolls, carols, subtle recriminations. Mother-in-law busy preparing emergency food
parcel for song neglected by callous City bitch (Me). You know that I always say I want to be with
my children? Well, I really want to be
with my children. Some nights, if I get home too late for Emily’s bedtime, I
got to the laundry basket and I Smell Their Clothes. I miss them so much. Never told anyone that before. And then when I’m with them, like I am now, there
need is just so needy. It’s like having
a while love affair crammed into a long weekend – passion, kisses, bitter
tears, I love you, don’t leave me, get me a drink, you like him more than me,
take me to bed, you’ve got lovely hair, cuddle me, I hate you. Drained & freaked out & need to go
back to work soonest for a rest. What
kind of mother is afraid of her own children? (Pearson 52)
In
the end the honesty is too much and she cannot complete the email: “I am about
to hit Send, but instead I press Delete.
There’s only so much you can confess, even to your dearest friend. Even to yourself” (Pearson 52).
The
fictional text provides a convenient space for this honesty as it is not necessarily
a confession of the author’s own thoughts on childhood. What is at times more surprising, and
impressive, is the moments of complete honesty that surface in the nonfiction
texts. In her memoir, Lamott shares many
of her less-than-blissful postnatal thoughts.
From small diatribes on how she hates expressing milk and on how much
babies cry to how on some days she cannot even manage to get her teeth brushed
or how she had to dose her baby with a hint of Tylenol to ensure he would be a
model baby at his baptism (6, 66, 67, 117).
Some of the most truthful moments come when she admits to having
negative thoughts about her own child:
“I was just hating Sam there for a while. I’m so goddamn fucking tired, so burnt beyond
recognition that I didn’t know how I was going to get through to the morning”
or “Last night at midnight it occurred to me to leave him outside for the
night, and if he survived, to bring him inside in the morning. Sort of an experiment in natural selection”
(Lamott 39, 48).
Buchanan’s
Mother Shock, also contains moments
that detail the negative thoughts that accompany motherhood:
One
night when I couldn’t sleep, I lay awake planning in detail my escape: I would pack a small overnight bag and slip
out at 3:00 a.m. No note, no message. I’d just leave. I would go to the ATM and take out as much
cash as I could. I would walk over to
the bus station at 11th and Market and take the bust hat went
farthest. I couldn’t go to New York, nor
New Jersey nor Boston nor California; those were all places my husband would
think to look for me. I would go
somewhere nameless, faceless, some small town in the middle of some unheard-of
place, where I could have no identity and just start over. I would get a job waitressing. I would live in a motel. I would do whatever it took to make some
money to live on, and I would sleep all night.
My time would finally be my own.
I drifted off to sleep, eventually, lulled by the fantasy of
escape. In the morning, I remembered my
midnight plan and told my husband, laughing at how ridiculous it sounded in the
light of day. I expected him to be a
little horrified, but when I finished telling him my secret scheme all he asked
was ‘Were you going to go by yourself or were you going to take the baby?’ (57)
In
sharing this personal anecdote, Buchanan sets the example for what her book is
trying to encourage women to do – to admit, as the book’s subtitle posits, that
they love every other minute of
motherhood, the entire experience without exception.
Although
not always in the context of an overarching narrative, the more self-help
focused mommy texts also shatter the illusion about the perpetual happiness
that accompanies motherhood. These texts
cover the doubts mothers are plagued with, failures to bond with newborn
babies, postpartum depression, being jealous of one’s spouse’s attentions to
the new baby, the inability to breastfeed, and so forth. Many of these texts also contain
“confessional” moments. Dunnewold’s book
compiles a list of Naughty 9 Bad Mom Thoughts that she had heard through her
therapy sessions: “I hate my life; I
can’t believe I traded sleep for this; This kid is a brat; I cannot stand to
play Barbies (or read Goodnight Moon,
or play Legos….); I now understand how a parent could throw a child against the
wall; This kid has ruined my life/my body/my marriage; I want to run away –
alone; If that kid does not stop crying, you’ll have to check me into the funny
farm; I’d rather be at work during busy season than with these kids” (89). Likewise, Ashworth and Nobile’s texts
includes anonymous excerpts from their interviews in little boxes throughout
titled: dirty little secrets. The most absurd being the following
admission from one woman: ““My life is
so crazy and I practically live in my car.
I’m mortified to admit this, but there are some days I don’t even have
time to pee… so I wear Depends!’” (Ashworth and Nobile 158).
Quite
often these moments of honesty are recapped humorously, although much of the
humor comes into play when the authors of these texts are mocking the self-help
books they follow in the steps of. An
example of this can be found in Christie Mellor’s chapter on “The Childproof
House: How to Know When You’ve Gone Too
Far” in The Three-Martini Playdate: A
Practical Guide to Happy Parenting.
After recounting a story about how once at a social occasion she could
not use the bathroom facilities because a friend had installed a safety latch
she could not figure out on the toilet, she rants:
Can it possibly be true that an
untold number of toddlers are actually drowning in the
toilets
of America? Might it not be a good idea
to explain to one’s two-year-old that she mustn’t put her head in the potty and
leave it here? Has anyone thought that
perhaps a simple hook on the door to the bathroom might be the answer to this
silent epidemic? An entire industry has
sprung up based solely upon the fears of the new parent, that of
‘childproofing;’ one’s house. (Mellor 23)
She
later makes fun at the childproofing advice that parenting manuals
include:
One may find helpful hints for
the new parent in every book on child rearing, usually
with
the suggestion that one crawl around on the floor in order to see the house
form the child’s point of view. This can
be a delightful activity to undertake with one’s spouse, as it often leads to
horseplay and intimate rolling about while you search for electrical outlets
and any frayed bare wires. (Mellor 24)
A
great deal of the humor in these texts stem not from the content of the material
but in the way these texts strategically borrow from the self-help genre in a
satirical fashion. Examples include
amusing checklists (like one houses items that can affect child bonding
including serious and non serious items next to one another: baby’s health, uncertainty of father’s
identity, colic, OB’s breath) (Wilder-Taylor 7); funny charts (one such example
is what books say your child should be able to do versus what they really are
doing) (Wilder-Talor107-108); humorous quizzes on “does this sound like you”
asking questions such as “you consider a trip to the dentist your special
“alone time” (Ashworth and Nobile 11), and random bits of information such as
New Mom Pick-Up Lines (Wilder Taylor 144), Questions Not to Ask Your Husband
(Wilder-Taylor 144), Names that will ensure your child stays a virgin until
they’re thirty (Wilder-Taylor 195), the contents of a Do-It-Yourself-After
School Enrichment Program that includes activities like weeding for fun (Mellor
120), helpful hint sections with titles including Etiquette for First-time
Parents and Fiscal Planning and Your Tooth Fairy (Mellor), a Comeback Chart for
Snarky Comments People May Make when Judging You (Ashworth and Nobile 70), and
– the most sarcastic inclusion – lists of drink ingredients, such as “Our
Little Tot’s First Martini Recipe” (Mellor).
Although
there is quite a bit of similarity between the various books in this study –
their use of humor, honest content, critiques of parenting trends, etc. –
studying them together does reveal a few things about how the genre they take
on affects their overall message. A
continuum might be envisioned where the mommy self-help books (filled with
advice based on scholarly research, interviews, or just plain opinion) are
found on one side and the fictional novels depicting motherhood (through the
lens of one character) are found on the other.
In the middle on each side respectively would rest the memoir/self-help
blends (texts such as Momma Zen),
memoirs (like Operating Instructions),
and the faux memoirs (fictional texts deceivingly taking on the memoir style,
e.g. The Zygote Chronicles).
The Textual Continuum:
Non-Fiction/Self-Help
-----Memoir-Self-Help-Hybrid-------------------Memoir------------------Pseudo-Memoir/Fiction
INFORMATIONAL/NON-NARRATIVE------------------------------------------------------------------------NARRATIVE
I Was a Really
Good Mom I Don’t Know How She Does It
Even June
Clever Would Forget the Lunch Box The
Zygote Chronicle
Sippy Cups Are Not For
Chardonnay Operating Instructions
Three Martini Playdate
Mother Shock
Confessions of a Slacker Mom
Momma Zen
|
As
was mentioned earlier, the fictional texts do a better job of countering fears
through their narratization of events:
providing windows into the minds of characters who wrestle with the same
unjustified fearful thoughts. Although
all of the texts aim for honesty, the fictional ones (and all the ones on the
memoir/narrative side of the continuum) are able to tackle issues more honestly
and often with less “political correctness” as they are not taking on an
authority position on matters. All of
the texts include humor, but at times the manual-type texts find their punch
line at the expense of parenting strategies or motherhood personas that the
reader might align with.
This
latter type of mommy-texts, which claim to be different from other self-help
books, often fall into the same trap as those that came before them and
advocate certain parenting choices over others (ones aligned with the author’s
preferences). These are more
touchy-feely than standard parenting manuals – and they aim to foster positive
self-esteem and promote spiritual happiness within their readership –these are
not aims of the fiction books. The
non-narrative texts aim to discuss motherhood; the fictional books aim to
provide a snapshot of it.
Regardless
of format and genre, there were some issues within these texts that warrant a
brief discussion. These mommy-texts
often read like Betty Friedan’s Feminist
Mystique published decades ago. They
operate under the false notions that plagued 2nd wave feminists:
that there is some universal women’s or mother’s experience. These texts rarely acknowledge the impact
that differences such as race and class might have on one’s parenting
decisions, or more correctly, parenting options. (Of the texts studied here, only Lamott’s Operating Instructions addresses this.) Many of the books assume a white,
middle-to-upper-middle class readership comprised of stay-at-home mothers or
professional working mothers. Chapter
titles like “Stroller Wars,” with anecdotes about 700 dollar strollers and
sections on “Park Politics” where socializing with other mothers is compared to
navigating through high school cliques, demonstrate this fact. That popular women’s literature and self-help
manuals are so unaligned with contemporary feminist thought is noteworthy.
Another
problem that exists within these texts (the fictional and non-fictional ones
alike) is that they perpetuate gender stereotypes. This is especially the case when it comes to
the depictions of the husbands/fathers.
Countless passages exist where men bear are the punch line of a joke or
the subject of a long rant. Explanations
about the different parenting habits of men and women evoke John Gray’s
problematic text pop-psychology text of the 90s, Men are From Mars; Women are From Venus. Therefore, like the majority of the cultural
texts analyzed in the previous chapters, these texts subtly (and more often
overtly) instruct women on how to play the role of mother, and these
instructions rest on unquestioned assumptions about what it means to be a woman
versus a man. So, in the end, these
texts are both friends and foes to expecting and new mothers.
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