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Being a mom is one of the most confusing job titles some women will ever carry. Of course, once you add just a word or three in front of the word mom, you are dealing with an entirely new set of questions. A mom? Oh? Are you a stay-at-home mom or a working mom? (And, yes, all moms are working moms, but go with that phrase for the time being to mean women who work outside of their home as well as within it.) I have watched over the years as shots are fired from one camp into the other time and again. I have had a great seat for these events? How did I get faboo seats? Simple. I have never been fully immersed in either world for very long. I get restless and try to jump from one to the other.
I was working and in college when I got pregnant with my oldest son. We decided that we would tighten the ol' financial belt so that I could stay home with our son. I tried so hard to fit in with the other stay-at-home-moms that I knew. But the truth of the matter was they scared me senseless. I didn't make my own baby food, use cloth diapers and was a miserable failure at breastfeeding. Though, I was among them, I felt like an outsider looking in most of the time. It wasn't long before I was looking over the fence with jealousy at those amazing women who left the house in nice clothes without baby snot or food on them. That looked perfect. By the time I reached a point of turning myself inside out over whether to work outside the home or not, I became pregnant with my younger son. The offer was off the table.
Over the years I became more confident in myself and worried less about whether or not I was Good Enough to be a stay-at-home-mom. Time and experience--as well as seeing that other moms are not necessarily better off or for that matter better than I was. It took quite a few knock-downs before I realized that.
And it is those knock-downs that to this day rub me wrong and set me off. Why is it that other moms who fail somehow make us feel better? Is it the solidarity of knowing that we are not the only ones that make mistakes? Or is it the silent voice in our head that says At least I didn't do that! that keeps us feeling less like failures?
Ayelet Waldman discusses in the most recent issue of New York Magazine the phenomenon of the Bad Mommy Brigade. She touched on a few ways we cope when we feel as if we perhaps are The Bad Mommy and how we some moms make themselves feel better about the guilt and feelings of not being good enough.
One way to find consolation in the face of all this failure and guilt is to judge ourselves not against the impossible standard of the Good Mother but against the fun-house-mirror-image Bad Mother. By defining for us the kind of mother we’re not, the Bad Mother makes it easier for us to live with what we are. We may be discontented and irritable, we may snap after the 67th knock-knock joke, our kids may watch three hours of television a day, we may have just celebrated the second anniversary of the last time we had sex, we may have forgotten to pack a snack, or, God forbid, bought one replete with partially hydrogenated vegetable oils, we may yank on our daughters’ ponytails while we’re combing their hair, but at least we aren't Britney Spears.
She goes on to say:
Another strategy some of us have come up with to deal with our sense of failure and guilt is to rebel, to embrace the very identity we are afraid of. We bad moms vociferously resist and resent the glorification of the self-abnegating mother. We snarl at the mention of Dora the Explorer and loathe the wannabe Good Mothers with their aggressive school volunteering, their Bugaboo strollers, and their Petunia Pickle Bottom diaper bags.
I have seen myself do both, if I am going to be honest. Not to look at a celebrity per se in comparison, but to look at another mother that I feel
