Media & Motherhood

Maybe because it’s winter and I’ve been watching too much TV, maybe because Michelle Williams shouted about how she needed to kill her baby to win her last award, or maybe because trying to watch a show with my 12-year-old daughter has ads for every kind of female empowerment message EXCEPT being a mother, I am just over what the TV has to tell me about motherhood.

It’s not a new problem. On the first Monday morning after I dropped out of my PhD program in Philosophy to stay home with my then six-month-old oldest son, I was jumping into the shower as the women on the morning news talk program was spouting her book, The Feminine Mistake, and said that the worst thing a woman could do was to stay home with her children and stop being able to earn an income. Because men leave, they die, they get fired, she said.

Sure they do. And women have this working apparatus in their head that is capable of overcoming fear, problem solving, and has an uncanny capacity for knowing exactly what her family needs the most at that moment. I already knew why I was making the decision to stay home: our family would have no family time if I continued. But for someone who wasn’t sure of their decision, her fear mongering tactics equated staying home with your kids as being one step away from the homeless shelter.

The cultural waters we swim in talk about all the things a girl can be except a mother. If someone already made the choice to be a mother then there are two avenues to talk about it. Either a) complain about how unfair it is that women have to do all the work (re: every podcast calling for daycare like Denmark) or b) parade your kids as a lifestyle accessory (see every celebrity mother in People magazine).

But when they aren’t doing these things, the only discussion of motherhood is based on fear.

I’m just wondering when the narrative we are being sold is going to get old for everyone. When I think about the characters on Sex and the City, Girls, Fleabag, and the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel the outcomes for these characters are so…depressing. That scene in the hotel where the only other woman who traveled with the band told Mrs. Maisel how to have one-night stands with dirty men “if you really need it”, to carry a gun, and not to worry about your kids never seeing you for months a time because you can at least say you led an ‘interesting’ life? That one’s such a heartwarming tale. I have two year old twins trashing my house as we speak and I would rather have that then what poor Mrs. Maisel is facing. Or how about Fleabag when she looks down at her ex-boyfriend (literally the only human she wouldn’t have sex with was the white male she was in a relationship with) for having a child? The take away is she is SO much more superior than him, but in the span of 3 television hours she’ll feel the need to make out with a woman and have sex with a blind date and the next night right after the blind date came to her door after her bidding she has sex with a priest. #empowered

From magazines to movies to shows there is this maxim that if you own your circumstances, no matter how horrible they are, if they are ALL YOURS and you’re not beholden to anyone who might hold you back, then that is all that matters.

I can’t help but think that this is why motherhood is so hard for someone like Meghan Markle. Sure it’s a shift for every mother to realize just HOW much you have to give, but if you have been told to live for your own advancement, for pleasure, for power, for hustling to get ahead, then all that sacrifice and set back comes as a pretty big shock. We have been conditioned to enter into marriage and motherhood with this playbook: I’ll do this family thing because it’s what I want at this point in my life. I own my circumstances. Once they get into it, the reality that they have to be self-giving, self-sacrificing, pour themselves out for others, in order to make it all work is totally against their code. They want to change the system, change their husbands, control all the variables because the fact that the answer might be to love hard is too hard to bear.

Why aren’t we telling girls that women who love are beautiful, and giving our lives as a gift to others is the most powerful thing we can do with them? It might be hidden, yes. It might not give you a lot of social cache, or attention, or money, but it will give you a chance to get out of yourself and that is where meaning and true beauty are found.

This is a hard sell these days. I can’t help but think it’s because all the hustling and achieving are so loud and glittery, and mothers doing this noble work do it without cameras or applause or awards. They are quietly loving and cleaning and kissing booboos, only to crash into bed and then get up again and do it the next day. But what they are pouring into their families will last generations. What could they do that is even remotely as impactful as building a family? The last powerful example of this type of gift in the media that I can remember was in Charlotte’s Web, who called her babies her magnum opus.

Andrew loving on baby Michael

Why can’t we say to girls that being a mother is noble and beautiful and can be considered a magnum opus? And like any great work it’s filled with sacrifice.

Last night at a cycling class, one of the girls said that she was too afraid to become a mom because her child might be just like her and she was also afraid that it might also be just like her husband, which equally horrified her. We can laugh and be entertained by these jokes, these shows, but even the ideas we know are ridiculous (Carrie Bradshaw, I’m looking at your whole relationship with Big) are trickling down into the water and our girls are drinking it.

I don’t want my girls to be afraid to become a mom.

There is so much anxiety, fear, need to control things, worry, and insecurity in women today. Just read the message boards. When we step back and try to trust that we’re working with God in this motherhood gig, because it turns out he loves our kids too, it gets a lot easier. And more fun and beautiful. It doesn’t stop being hard but the hard gets woven into the beauty and makes it even more beautiful.

So that’s why even though I am in one of my hardest seasons of mothering yet with a new teenager and a double dose of two year olds, I want to shout from the rooftops about how I am still struck all day long by my love for these humans. I want them to feel deeply loved. And I want them to see me loving my husband well too.

That’s my gig. That’s what I signed up for. Loving and being loved sure beats the heck out of a closet of stilettos.

p.s. Does anyone else worry about Gloria Steinem being all alone when she dies? Does anyone know if she has life alert? Oh what joys she missed.