Mother Madness

Erica Jong is best known for her book, Fear of Flying, but in the Wall Street Journal she talked about the fear of mothering....

"Unless you've been living on another planet, you know that we have endured an orgy of motherphilia for at least the last two decades.  Movie stars proudly display their baby bumps, and the shiny magazines at the checkout counter never tire of describing the joys of celebrity parenthood.  Bearing and rearing children has come to be seen as life's greatest good.  Never mind that there are now enough abandoned children on the planet to make breeding unnecessary.  Professional narcissists like Angelina Jolie and Madonna want their own little replicas in addition to the African and Asian children that they collect to advertise their open-mindedness.  Nannies are seldom photographed in these carefully arranged family scenes.  We are to assume that all this baby-minding is painless, easy and cheap....

"... today it's assumed that we can perfect our babies by the way we nurture them.  Few of us question the idea, and American mothers and fathers run themselves ragged trying to mold exceptional children.  It's a highly competitive race.  No parent wants to be told it all may be for naught, especially, say, a woman lawyer who has quit her firm to raise a child.  She is assumed to be pursuing a higher goal, and hard work is supposed to pay off, whether in the office or at home.  We dare not question these assumptions...

"In truth, nothing is more malleable than motherhood.  We like to imagine that mothering is immutable and decreed by natural law;  but in fact it has encompassed such disparate practices as baby farming, wet-nursing and infanticide.  The possessive, almost proprietary motherhood that we consider natural today would have been anathema to early kibbutzniks in Israel.  In our day motherhood has been glamorized, and in certain circles, children have become the ultimate accessories.  But we should not fool ourselves:  Treating children like expensive accessories may be the ultimate bondage for women....

"Is it even possible to satisfy the needs of both parents and children?  In agrarian societies, perhaps wearing your baby was the norm, but today's corporate culture scarcely makes room for breast-feeding on the job, let alone baby-wearing.  So it seems we have devised a new torture for mothers — a set of expectations that makes them feel inadequate no matter how passionately they attend to their children....

"In the oscillations of feminism, theories of child-rearing have played a major part.  As long as women remain the gender most responsible for children, we are the ones who have the most to lose by accepting the "noble savage" view of parenting, with its ideals of attachment and naturalness.  We need to be released from guilt about our children, not further bound by it.  We need someone to say:  'Do the best you can. There are no rules.'"

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