On Sunday morning I clicked on a piece by Jane Caro, she shared her opinion on over-mothering. I really enjoyed the piece, it was something I identified with and I thought about its context for a few moments. I wondered how Jane would go now if her children were 3 and 5, as opposed to being the adults they’ve grown into. Who knows? I scrolled on.
The Huffington Post screamed out at me in bold that I could really learn a thing or two from “lazy French mothers“. I read it, and wondered if it were possible that I was actually French. I didn’t think too much more about it, and scrolled on.
I gave up on the article URGING pregnant women to give up coffee after I reached this sentence “because the study was based on observations, it is impossible to be sure that caffeine is the cause.” So what was the point of the article? Oh I see, you were just warning us, just in case. I scrolled on.
And then The Mom Strategist (I’m not making that up, that’s her trademark) told me the truth about motherhood. Uh huh, who knew my car would be messy, and my husband and I would need to find time for ourselves. Motherhood is stressful? Really? I’m sure someone told me last week that it was easy? Someone else said it wasn’t for wimps, someone else talked about when it truly began, and someone else saw someone who wasn’t doing it properly – I know this because she wrote an opinion piece on it.
I skipped past the 10 things I needed to tell my daughter and the reasons mothers were giving their children autism. I felt guilty about not saving the chord blood from birth. I winced when I read the headline about how mothers were killing their babies by not breastfeeding them. I didn’t bother making the plastic garden spade out of the 2 litre milk carton, an exercise I’m told would have shown my children that I was a responsible environmentalist. And I didn’t invest in the supplements that were advised for making my children smarter; which is good, because maybe they’ll be too dumb to notice how lazy and irresponsible I was.
And that was just on Sunday.
I don’t know why all these mothers worry about mothering, I mean there’s so much good advice out there. 😉
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Not a mother, but I LOVE this post! So much in-your-face advice out there, so much judging and criticizing. Guess you’ve got to laugh about it, or go a little crazy (or both, if it comes to that).
Bahahaha! Thanks for the laugh 😉 It’s like that some days, hey?
“Lazy French Mothers” That’s my kind of mothering. I own a book titled “French Children Don’t Throw Food”. I bought it just a couple of years ago (my kids are already in their 30s) and as I read I was nodding and thinking to myself, I did things this way or that way too. I had no mothering books back then, I just winged it, and found that running a household and raising four kids was really easy. They each had attention, they were polite, I had plenty of “me” time. The kids certainly weren’t neglected, but I didn’t spend every minute of the day fussing over them either. My older daughter has raised her two the same way, they are delightful almost adults now at 17 and 19.
Great post. How nice would the world be if the only piece of advice we were given after giving birth was to be kind and tolerant and non-judgmental to other mothers.