Balance, Not Perfection

Jill Miller Zimon — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 11:10:00 -0500

The Plain Dealer published this op-ed, written by me, on May 5, 2005. I don't think I state any more clearly why I believe parents should share with other parents, "how they do it," and particularly a parent who is holding out that status as a qualification for being second in line to the United States President.

There's no shortage of documentation about how mothers feel crushed between simultaneous responsibilities. Earlier this year, Newsweek published a cover story based on Judith Warner's book, "Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety," which explores women's feelings when their career woman role collides with being a mother. A New York Times piece, called "Mommy (and me)," detailed the explosion in online chronicles of parents' angst. And a new industry — parent coaching — seeks to capitalize on the critical mass of worry.
Unfortunately, this type of sympathy perpetuates the very assumption we need to attack: that integrating motherhood into our lives can and should be performed perfectly, without anxiety and in harmony with all other desires. I say this as a mother whose family would nominate her to be the poster child for Warner's book faster than she could speed dial the pediatrician.
We need to refocus the debate and affirm a mother's efforts without applying a win-lose analysis to them. We need to stop pandering to the belief that a mother can function perfectly if only she watches enough episodes of "Supernanny," digests enough parenting manuals and increases the memory in her PalmPilot.
Take me, for example.
By the time I turned 30, I'd earned two graduate degrees, gotten married and was pregnant with my first child. Over the course of eight years, I took three maternity leaves and worked a variety of schedules at a large, mental-health agency. For the last three years, I've worked 10 to 15 hours weekly from home. I circumnavigate the same six streets up to nine times a day as I take my kids to and from school, dance, art, friends' homes and birthday parties. I volunteer in the schools and attend a variety of monthly meetings in the evenings.
What's not perfect?
Well, I've had multiple fender benders, locked my kids in the car and locked all of us out of the car (both inadvertently), blown three tires in four months by driving over a stroller, a bungee cord and a curb (I was late to the carpool pickup line), mailed thank you cards two months after receiving the present and, this year, I sunk to a new low: preschool guests at my son's birthday party received candy-filled Chuck E. Cheese goody bags because I was too lazy to scour stores for politically correct items like puzzles or inexpensive books.
Heck, I've consumed three brownies in five minutes just exposing these flaws.
And still, I don't view myself as a slacker (loser) mom or a super (winner) mom.
Why not? Because no matter how many trips I take to the body shop or how many gallons of gas my car guzzles, my situation isn't tough, or even undesirable. I'm lucky, and my kids are lucky, too.
I'm not single, unemployed, financially poor, in my teens, or physically or mentally disabled, and none of my kids require assistance beyond my means or abilities. To rant about my life as difficult, when thousands of mothers who bear the burden of these special circumstances live within miles of me, would be insensitive and insulting, to say the least.
I've also always expected that motherhood would demand that I drop a ball or two in order to catch others, no matter how big or heavy they got.
Where did I get this idea?
From my own mother, who married at 19, had three kids by 26 and viewed millions of fruit flies as a lab researcher. Her intellectual passion occasionally kindled embers of ambition, like when she studied at night to take the law school entrance exam. But my father's home business consumed her talents, the family needed her job's health benefits and her law school plans flamed out. Yet, at 66 years old, she still rejects the label of martyr.
When beliefs about how mothers should fulfill numerous roles clash with reality, we need to correct those beliefs. We must not settle for merely educating others — through our complaints — about the pain or impossibility of role integration. Rather than cater to the unattainable and destructive goal of perfection, we need to change it. Through our actions and our words, we must model a balanced and achievable image of motherhood.
How else will our children learn to value it?
Zimon is a contributing editor and columnist for Cleveland Family magazine.

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Balance, Not Perfection