Writers seek to expose ‘The Mommy Myth’

In Allison Pearson’s popular 2002 British novel “I Don’t Know How She Does It,” Kate Reddy is in the kitchen at 1:37 a.m. doctoring store-bought mince pies. Hoping to pass them off as homemade at her daughter’s Christmas concert, she gets rid of the evidence, lest the nanny discover the forgery and spread the news that Kate is one of those moms. Moms Who Cut Corners.

Throughout the book, Kate stands trial in “The Court of Motherhood.” Her crimes: overindulging her children to compensate for not being home enough and not knowing whether her daughter likes broccoli.

The court is, of course, a figment of Kate’s neurosis. Like many women, she’s plagued with guilt that she just doesn’t measure up to society’s mommy standard. And she can’t. The standards are unattainable.

These standards are the result of what authors and mothers Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels call the New Momism, “the insistence that no woman is truly complete or fulfilled unless she has kids, that women remain the best primary caretakers of children, and that to be a remotely decent mother a woman has to devote her entire physical, psychological, emotional and intellectual being, 24/7, to her children.”

Douglas and Michaels encourage readers to reject the New Momism with an indignant, “Excuuuuse me?” In their recent book, “The Mommy Myth,” Douglas and Michaels write that society has been granted carte blanche to indict mothers for using formula, using jarred baby food instead of homemade organic or pushing infants in strollers instead of “wearing” them in slings. And the worst offense of all? Not loving every minute of it.

The authors give readers a better understanding of why moms of the new millennium feel so guilty. They identify several cultural and political movements of the past three decades that have spawned the New Momism.

“In the early 1970s, there were maybe four or five new books published a year on motherhood,” said Douglas and Michaels. Today, a search on amazon.com for parenting books will yield more than 45,000 results. As for parenting magazines, there are now at least 18 in print.

Too often these books and magazines contradict each other, said Douglas and Michaels, confusing moms more than helping them. Pacifiers good. Pacifiers bad. Feed on demand. Feed on a schedule.

Karen Gillooly, a mother of two boys in Cleveland, said, “All the information out there leads you to believe that everything is earth-shattering. Having my second one now, I know better what to ignore.”

Women’s magazines also have contributed to the idyllic vision of motherhood by featuring celebrities waxing poetic about the euphoric, supreme experience of motherhood. And those stories don’t always hold up. For instance, in 1983, Marie Osmond appeared on the cover of Good Housekeeping with the headline, “Happiness Is Having a Baby.” But it was years later that she spoke honestly about her experience with postpartum depression and how difficult she found motherhood.

The authors contend that as expectations have risen, support has been removed. Society is more mobile, allowing fewer moms the ability to rely on extended family for support.

“Mothers are supposed to be resigned to the fact that the government has plenty of money for weapons and corporations, but none for our kids,” they said.

One of the goals of writing “The Mommy Myth” was to “rip the veneer off these idealized images — to tell mothers the truth about them,” Douglas said in a telephone interview.

“I wanted to remind mothers that there is a reason so many of us feel guilty and stressed. We’re never doing enough.”

Another goal she had in writing her book was to get mothers to be political again; “Motherhood remains the unfinished business of the women’s movement.”