Posts Tagged: Mothers
Friendship casualties and lonely mothers
Part 2 in a 3-part series on parenting
Friendships have been, for me, a sad casualty of this career. My friends without children don’t enter my life. I mostly see the mothers of children my daughter likes. If I am lucky, we enjoy each other’s company, but rather than sharing tips or woes, parents often hide their struggles with their kids because these struggles are now failures of career proportions.
Isolation from friends, in turn, takes a terrible toll on marriage. Women turn to their husbands for the sorts of intimacies we relied on from other women. Suddenly this one person, already so different by gender alone (I did not count men as my friends before I married) is supposed to be everything. Which is, of course, impossible.
Women are lonely. I hear it everyday. My personal fantasy is Sex and the City. But not the shopping or the brunch. It is sharing confidences of a daily nature with someone real, live. Watching that show, I remember how much zest is gained by laughing or confiding in others.
If you look at who is blogging, a lot of them are mothers; I suspect that many blogs exist because women are lonely. We miss the sort of confidences we used to share with real friends and now tweet and text to whomever might be listening.
When I realized I really was in this strangely alone, stopped asking and reading I asked myself what I thought I wanted Penelope to have: Resiliency, a sense of agency, and the belief that the world was a safe place which would welcome her.
Behavior and character do not come from magic. They come from a multitude of opportunities, from temperament and shaping. This is where my training as a psychologist helped me get through childhood. I know that I can only hope to get it right, at best, some of the time. I know that being ‘good enough’ is really not very complicated. In fact, it is quite simple. But it is hard and repetitive work and requires a great deal of self-forgiveness.
To be continued…
5 Books Every Mother Should Read
Quizzes abound: What Disney princess are you? Which Downton Abbey character are you? These questionnaires are found everywhere. This new fad of quizzes tells me that we yearn for rules and definition the more we feel unclear. Books on mothering and motherhood are everywhere. As an academic (lapsed) and a haunter of libraries, there’s no better way to master a situation, I thought, than research. So, when I realized I was going to be a mother, I started reading.
I started out with What to Expect When You’re Expecting. In about 10 weeks, that book was obsolete. I was on bed rest and nothing went as “expected.” My reading also went far off the beaten path. I roamed about in fiction, poetry and mass market self-help. I have emerged 11 years now, with 5 books that are my guides. I turn to them and recommend them to others with the eagerness of a zealot or a convert:
1. Perfect Madness, by Judith Warner
2. I Don’t know How She Does It, by Allison Pearson
3. Operating Instructions, by Anne Lamott
4. The Bitch In The House, by Cathi Hanauer
5. Mothers Who Think, by Camille Peri
None of them, in fact, are self-help books. These are decidedly anti-selfhelp books. I prefer books which repeat passionately that predictable rules just won’t help in this sort of situation. These authors are the women who “get it,” get me, get the whole “wow I’ve really got this thing down … whoops, I have no idea what I’m doing” feeling, and shore me up. Thank goodness that women who write and reflect are as baffled as I was by the strange careerist role of being a mother in this time.