House of the Burning Prairie

The other night, after I got home from work, Mr. Prairie and I watched “Making Over America With Trinny and Susannah.” There are no words for how much I love them. Trinny and Susannah are bold and funny and are apparently bringing their brand of makeover to the U.S. While I often feel that “makeover” shows are all about sucking every ounce of individuality out of people and making them adhere to a socially acceptable, conventional beauty, I don’t get that from T & S.

But I digress. In this special, they were making over a very cute mom/waitress from New Jersey. Off the clock, the New Jersey mom, Denise wore baggy boring clothes. She wanted something different for herself, but like all moms, put herself dead-last on her list of priorities. Denise didn’t think of herself as pretty, she referred to herself as “plain.” And she had body issues as a result of the changes that come along with having two children.

While listening to Denise disparage some body part or the other, Mr. Prairie exclaimed, “What is wrong with her?!” Then he looked at me and said, “You know, I blame Hugh Hefner. Because of him, men think they should have some perfect, airbrushed girl that doesn’t even exist in real life! And women wear themselves out trying to be like that!”

My jaw dropped, in a good way. “You get it! You actually get it!” Then I said, “You know what this makes you, don’t you? A feminist!” He laughed, because he’s been one all along.

The next night we watched another show, this one about a wedding. The bride’s father talked about the ceremony representing the passing of his authority over his daughter to her new husband, who then has authority over her. Hubby asked me, “What did I just hear?”

I answered, “You just heard a wedding being described as a transfer of property between the father of the bride and the new husband. And the property is the bride.”

He said, “That’s twisted.”

It would never have occurred to Mr. Prairie to ask my dad for permission to marry me, because I was a grown woman. We told my folks, together, that we were getting married. It never even entered our minds that my father had authority over me as an adult and that the non-existent authority could be transferred to someone else. I told the pastor that I wouldn’t promise to obey anybody and he’d better leave it out of the vows or there would be a very awkward silence in the ceremony. And I told him to leave that submission crap out, too. Marriage should be a partnership of equals who love each other, not a master-and-servant arrangement.

So I asked Hubby, “You weren’t laboring under the mistaken idea that you have any authority over me, were you?” He started laughing and said, “Are you kidding me?”

You see, he believes that marriage is a partnership of equals, too. Because he’s been a feminist all along!

Well, bless his pea-pickin’ little heart! I was browsing the CNN website this morning when I came upon this little article, Working from home: Not for every ‘Mr. Mom’ by Josh Lubin.

He correctly points out just how difficult it is to accomplish anything remotely like work while caring for a newborn. That’s because caring for a newborn is work.  He gets first-hand experience in just such when he agrees to work from home for a few hours while his wife goes to an unspecified early appointment. In the midst of his work requirements, other requirements pop (or poop) up: diapers need to be changed, tummies need to be filled, crying needs to be interpreted.

Then he says this:

“I realize that the ability to work and be a nanny simultaneously is a skill requiring practice.”

Did he just say “…be a nanny…?” Why yes, he did! Does he equate parenting with being a paid help? Does he consider what his wife is doing, presumably on her maternity leave, as nanny-ing? Obviously, judging simply by his choose of words, he considers caring for his child being a nanny, while I consider it being a parent.

I don’t deny that different parents have different parenting styles, but I find this tendency to refer to those times when fathers care for their children by themselves as “babysitting” or in the author’s case as “be(ing) a nanny” infuriating to say the least.

And what of articles that praise the massive amounts of time (6.5 hours per week) modern fathers spend with their children, relative to their own fathers (2.6 hours per week)? Well, Arlie Russell Hochschild’s book The Second Shift neatly puts them in perspective. When mother goes back to work, the majority of parenting and household tasks will be her responsibility. But no one will ever consider the performing of her responsibilities as being “a nanny” or a housekeeper; no one will ever give her a cookie for doing her duty.

Not that Mr. Lubin is asking for a cookie. I just hope that this instills in him a measure of appreciation of the shear amount of hard work his wife will face in the ensuing years and inspires him to contribute his share during that second shift.

And I would love to tell him that this, too, shall pass. More quickly than he can imagine, and sooner than he wants, his child will grow up. He might want to re-address the idea of working from home in a few years. Eventually, she will be able to sit on the potty by herself and get her own snacks from the kitchen. Then, before he knows it, it’s off to school and, inevitably, she will be all grown up and he’ll be wondering how it happened so fast. Wasn’t it just yesterday that she cried in the middle of his conference call and cracked everybody up?

Enjoy it now, Mr. Lubin, this time will not come again.

So, the Motrin™ Moms are all in a tizzy about a commercial that was on the intertubes. And drunk with the mighty mom power they exerted to force Motrin™ to remove said offending commercial. Please.

As always, I wanted to see what the shooting was all about and watched it. It cracked me up.

I wore both the kids in one of those front carriers and hauled the youngest around in a baby carrier that detached from the base of her car seat. And you know what, hauling kids around hurts, which ever way you choose. Back, neck, arms, shoulders–they all hurt. I swear some days even my hair hurt.

One child liked the front carrier more than the other, but I’m not going to debate the relative merits of attachment parenting versus any other kind. And that’s not what Motrin™ was doing. And despite the baby-wearing-specific rancor that the commercial stirred up, I don’t believe that the moms’ reactions have anything to do with that aspect.

The problem here is ambiguity, the ambiguity that is inherent in modern motherhood. And it has been my experience that most people can’t handle ambiguity. Ambiguity, grey areas, uncertainty, don’t sit well with most folks. We want the world and all of its myriad experiences categorized, listed, corralled, classified, organized, neatly put into little labeled boxes. Why do you think home organization is such big business? Not to keep our houses uncluttered, but to keep our souls uncluttered. We long for simple answers in a world of increasingly complex questions.

Motherhood is one of those increasingly complex questions. And it didn’t use to be that way. Used to be that if you were a woman, married, and physically capable of having children, you did. It was a given, a certainty, just the way of the world. Then various, reliable means of family planning were developed, giving women and their partners the ability to have children or not according to their own schedules. Motherhood was no longer a given, but a choice. And since having a choice between two options, have a child or don’t have one, is more complex than having no choice at all, one layer of complexity was added to motherhood.

Then there’s the issue of mothers working outside the home. This used to be a no-brainer–if you needed to work, you did. If you needed to stay home with your kids, you did. And nobody thought anything of it. This notion of being a stay-at-home-mom by choice is a relatively new thing.

Throughout history, mothers have worked, usually at jobs that earned them little or no recognition, for paltry compensation. You’ll often hear social conservatives decrying the feminist-inspired influx of women into the work-place, with the resultant taking of jobs meant for white, christian men. But that’s just stupid. Women have always worked: on farms, in factories, in the family business, in other peoples’ homes, in one-room schoolhouses, in hospitals, in restaurants. And even women who didn’t receive paychecks worked, behind-the-scenes, doing all the hard, tedious, thankless tasks that keep life running smoothly.

Of course there were wealthy women who never had to lift a finger; women with housekeepers and nannies to do all the slog-work of mothering. Doubtless these wealthier women had a much different experience of motherhood that did their poorer counterparts.

It has always been thus, and thusly, it ever shall be.

Now we have a largely manufactured mommy war, bitterly waged by who exactly? The average mom, of the working or stay-at-home variety, does what she has to do to keep her family running. Working moms work outside the home because it makes sense, economically, to do so. No splurging on luxuries, the average working mom works to put food on the table, clothes on backs, and gas in tanks. For the average stay-at-home mom, staying home with the children, for at least a few years, also makes sense economically. We found out that almost my entire salary would be eaten up by childcare costs, so it made sense to stay home. Now I have a part-time evening job that makes sense, because I can carry the Prairie Family’s health insurance.

No, the combatants of the mommy war appear to all be women of above-average earning potential. We have one camp accusing the other of sacrificing family and farming out motherhood to strangers. And on the other side, we have accusations of betraying the feminist cause by giving up lucrative careers. But these are all women most of us are never likely to be able to emulate financially.

So how does this manufactured war affect the rest of us? And, more importantly, what does it all have to do with Motrin™? We are stuck in the cross-fire. Pow pow, we should all have rewarding careers. Pow pow, we should all be spending every waking moment making our children’s lives more enriching. Pow pow, betraying the cause. Pow pow, betraying our children.

No wonder most of us feel beat up. We are trying to live up to standards set by women with impeccable safety nets. Nannies, housekeepers, private schools, private tutors, spa days. It’s an impossible standard to meet, but being mothers we blame ourselves. There must be something wrong with us if we can’t be all things to all people.

Motherhood should be all-fulfilling, dammit! We should be blissfully happy all the time, dammit! Nothing should ever pierce the veil, dammit!

And when something comes along, like that commercial, and reminds us that motherhood is not going to make us all happy, all the time, then we get uncomfortable. We get belligerent, we join together to shout, “HOW DARE THEY!!!!!” But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Once you embrace the ambiguity of motherhood, you’ll find this commercial as funny as I do. Once you realize that the responsibility for your happiness cannot be dumped on your children’s shoulders, you and your children will actually be happier. Once you understand that the complexity of motherhood has no simple answers, then the better off you will be. Too bad there’s not a pill for that.