I have limited time today as I write and speed toward my deadline marked by the time when I need to go pick up my kiddos from daycare and preschool. Maybe I need to employ some time-saving mom advice, which leads me to my point today….
Why is it that so much advice for moms is inane, ridiculous, impractical and unrealistic, overly simplistic and all around useless? And I should add, almost all comprised of additional work for moms to figure out, implement, or solve. I have not systematically or randomly sampled from all possible sources of advice for moms, so perhaps my perspective on this is somehow skewed by having come across an unusually unrepresentative sample of what’s out there in the media and culture. I’m skeptical that is the case, though. As a mom who, in the depths of exhaustion and work-life time crunches of the most severe kind, has mined the depths of mom advice during many desperate moment, I feel I can say I’ve certainly sought and found a great deal of mom advice. Nearly all of it has been absurd on many levels.
In the future I’d like to explore the idea that so much of what we discuss in the world about how to resolve those truly wicked, vexing problems of work, family, shared childcare and parenting, etc, focusses on what moms can do to solve the problems that are making their lives difficult and in some cases nearly unlivable. Darcy Lockman’s work in “All the Rage: Mothers, Fathers, and the Myth of Equal Partnership” has convinced me these life-deranging stresses are nearly ubiquitous for women who are moms. We hear about frameworks moms can set up with partners, workplaces, etc, as if our already deeply fractured time isn’t pressed upon enough, as if the hypocrisy of telling us to simply read this book and convince our husband to write down all of our childcare tasks along with all the conception and planning steps on index cards and…I’m exhausted and frustrated just alluding to this and let’s be honest- who will be writing out all those index cards? I want to spend a whole post, a whole series, exploring this fascinating and enraging issue.
Beyond this strong tendency toward messages and so-called solutions that put undue onus on already beleaguered moms, I also see a tendency for mom advice to reduce and oversimplify in ways that defy my understanding. I can’t figure out why this is- is it an attempt to mollify the aforementioned enraged, exhausted moms by assuring them that with these simple tactics you can find balance and calm amidst the myriad demands of life? This cannot be serving women. How can facile suggestions, that will rarely if ever help, serve women. Does this oversimplified advice imply that women who complain about the challenges of child-rearing, balancing career and family demands, are simply exaggerating, merely clueless, having been unable to see the obvious 10 easy ways to solve your time crunches and sleep deprivation? Is this the way a misogynist society wants to paint motherhood and the complaints women may have about shared parenting roles and responsibilities, workplace demands, and other challenges? Let me be clear, I’m not someone who is inclined to leap to the conclusion that the explanation for so many stresses in my life is some kind of misogynistic, patriarchal cabal of men trying to keep me down….But, there is something about the way advice to moms is often colored and shaped that hints to me that something is deeply amiss, that something larger than just some bad ideas getting circulated is at play.
What kind of advice am I talking about? Sleep when the baby sleeps, don’t worry about doing the laundry, cleaning up, etc. Don’t worry, your kids don’t need clean clothes for daycare or preschool. Or clean sheets in their beds and cribs, or for their daycare cribs or sleep mats. Don’t worry, you don’t need to keep an eye on cleaning shared surfaces (i.e., during a pandemic no less?) even though you’re kids bring home and spread germs from daycare like superspreaders, and being sick while trying to tend to little kids and babies is no fun. One of my favorites: If you’ve got a breastfeeding baby and you feel sleep deprived, simply pump so your partner can do night feedings and somehow miraculously you can sleep through the night. Does this simply not work for just me? Maybe this works for some women. For me this was agonizingly frustrating advice. I pumped every 2-3 hours during the day so I could provide milk to send to daycare for my son. It felt like a full time job. There was no way I was able to pump several extra times then to put toward night feedings by dad. Moreover, if the baby was feeding at night, my breasts would fill and if I did not express milk I’d wake up with plugged ducts and mastitis. Also, If I didn’t feed or pump at night, eventually my supply would decrease due to the change in demand- I would not produce enough for night feedings, whoever was doing the feeding, if I didn’t express or nurse at night. So how on earth is this stupid advice supposed to work to help me catch up on sleep? It doesn’t. It oversimplifies. Why? Why so much oversimplifying advice, as if women’s deep, intense challenges in the face of often unbalanced child care demands can simply be solved if they would only be smart enough to implement these simple tricks and tips, silly. I, like many women to my knowledge, havent set out to see the world through a lens of feminist cultural critiques. But sometimes life gives you little choice. It’s hard not to see this phenomenon as a small manifestation of this tendency to minimize the concerns of women and put the weight of solutions to inequities on them, to imply their strife is easily solved not by socio- cultural conversations about men’s roles in the family or about engineering work/career arrangements and policies to enable women to survive childbirth and childrearing with their physical and mental health intact without penalties- expressed or implied- but rather can be solved by embracing aphoristic advice.