Much Ado About Motrin
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.