This article is one of the best descriptions of that emotional terrain that I’ve read. It’s from Drew Magary at Deadspin with “Never Give Your Child a Cold Shower: Advice From the Worst Dad on Earth”:

“WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?! YOU ARE NOT RESPECTFUL! YOU WILL STAY HERE ALL NIGHT OR I SWEAR TO GOD YOU’LL BE SORRY.”

I wanted her to be frightened. I wanted her to cower before The Voice. I thought about my father yelling at me when I was a kid and, oh, how I hated it. One time, I tore down a shower curtain and he yelled so loud at me that I thought my hair was gonna fall out. It scared me to death. I would have done anything as a child to not get yelled at. Even now, though I’m much older and love my father dearly, I dread it when he raises his voice. It causes me to snap right back to adolescence. I looked at my daughter and expected her to crumble, just like I did. I expected her, at long last, to give me some goddamn RESPECT. That’s what all parents desperately want, and that’s what drives them batshit crazy when they don’t get it. Surely The Voice would get me the respect I craved.

“Faka.”

And she kept on laughing. I couldn’t see her anymore. I couldn’t see the beautiful, intelligent, funny little girl that I knew she was. All I could see was this horrible animal. And all I could think was, This is the moment. This is the moment when my relationship with my child turns permanently toxic. I had always believed that you could raise your child in any number of ways and, so long as you loved them unconditionally, you could always remain on relatively good terms. Children are born good, that’s what I believed. They’re born good and if you love them enough, they stay that way. You hope that love is all that is required to keep your son out of jail and your daughter out of the pornography industry. But now the girl was laughing like a demon and I was terrified that things would get no better than this, that this was where the permanent rift between us would begin, the five previous years of love and—let’s face it—hard work that went into raising her rendered pointless. The idea that I could love her and do my best and still get it all terribly wrong was unbearable. I was scared that the fighting would never end, that she would never calm down and just be, that this would be the entirety of our relationship from now on.

And I was pissed. So fucking pissed. I tried my best to lower my voice.

“Please,” I told her, “I’m very close to hurting you right now. Please don’t make me hurt you. Why don’t we, I dunno, talk about dinner? What would you like for dinner?”

“Candy.”

“Not candy.”

“Candy!”

The Voice returned. “GOD DAMMIT, NOT CANDY!” I smacked the floor hard enough to break my hand. Still no fear in her eyes.

“Faka.”

“Fine,” I said. “You want me to spank you? Here we go.”

I jerked her up and sat down on one of the little kiddie chairs in her bedroom. I laid her across my lap as she alternated between laughing and shrieking. This was my first time performing an attempted spanking. I looked at her backside and tried to figure out a course of action. Do you pull the pants down? You don’t pull the pants down, right? That would just be weird. How hard are you supposed to spank? Is it supposed to really hurt? It’s gotta hurt, right? If it doesn’t hurt, then they don’t get the message. I gave a gentle test blow and nothing happened. Then I spanked a little bit harder and she kept on laughing.

I felt like a fucking idiot. I don’t even know how spanking became the go-to method of corporal punishment. It’s bizarre. All I could think about while spanking her was that it wasn’t working, and that the only thing spanking does is set your child up for a life of sexual deviancy. The creepiness of the whole enterprise is right there, out in the open. I took my daughter off my lap and tried to play nice.

My favourite parenting meltdown confession, ever, is Anne Lamott’s in the Mothers Who Think anthology/Salon, with “Mother Anger: Theory and Practice”:

At the same time, if you need to yell, children are going to give you something to yell about. There’s no reasoning with them. If you get into a disagreement with a regular person, you slog through it; listen to the other person’s position, needs, problems; and somehow you arrive at something that is maybe not perfect, but you don’t actually feel like smacking them. But because we are so tired sometimes, when a disagreement starts with our child, we can only flail miserably through time and space and the holes in between; and then we blow our top. Say, for instance, that your child is 4 and going through the stage when he will only wear the T-shirt with the tiger on it. With a colleague who was hoping you’d come through with the professional equivalent of washing their tiger T-shirt every night, you might
be able to explain to them that you were up until dawn on deadline, or you’ve got a fever, and so did not get to the laundry. And the colleague might cut
you some slack and try to understand that you simply hadn’t had time to wash the tiger shirt, and besides, they’ve worn it now four days in a row. But your child is apt to — well, let’s say, apt to not.

They can be like rats. I mean this in the nicest possible way. But they may still be drooling, covered with effluvia, trying to wrestle underpants on over their heads because they think they’re shirts, but in the miniature war room of their heads, they still know where your nuclear button is. They may ignore you, or seem troubled by hearing loss, or erupt in fury at you or weep, but in any case, they’re so unreasonable and capable of such meanness that you’re stunned and grief-stricken about how much harder it is than you could have imagined. All you’re aware of is the big windy gap between you, your lack of anything left to give, any solution whatsoever.

 

Motherhood, writes the sociologist Joya Misra, is now a greater predictor of wage inequality than gender in the United States.

This quote is from “Progress at work, but mothers still pay a price” by Stephanie Coontz in The New York Times. Then read this in The Washington Post, “Answering Harvard’s question about my personal life, 52 years later” by Phyllis Richman.

These women struggle with all the challenges of being both a breadwinner and a woman, such as the sacrifices that must sometimes be made to advance in careers; giving up control of the household to male partners; and needing to forcefully advocate for themselves on the job (for instance, asking for raises, which research shows women are still reluctant to do), among other issues.

They also are struggling to advocate at home: A breadwinning friend recently described a conversation with her husband in which both had meetings at the same time, and she was surprised to find herself telling him: “My job is more important than yours to this family, and therefore you need to move your meeting.”

If we’re not raising girls to anticipate these tensions and issues, we’re not preparing them for family life in the 21st century.

The Wasp Factory is one of my favourite novels. It’s a wonderfully dark story and an absolutely fascinating exploration of misogyny.

Farewell Iain Banks.

I sometimes wonder the extent to which the much-celebrated Katz’s Deli “I’ll have what she’s having” scene in Nora Ephron and Rob Reiner’s 1989 When Harry Met Sally affected the sex lives of the Joe and Josephine Popcorns, if you’ll excuse the phrase, who have seen it over the years. The scene is a classic for a reason; Meg Ryan’s Sally hoists Billy Crystal’s Harry by the petard of his own sexist presumption but good. But one reason the movie is as cozy a concoction as it is has to do with the fact that after the punchline, it never returns to the topic of female orgasm; the discomfort Harry feels after initially sleeping with Sally and then fleeing from her prior to the inevitable fateful facing of facts and return to romance has nothing to do with this particular facet of sexual or emotional exchange. Someone might expect, in the depiction of their growing intimacy, a query from the acceptably neurotic Harry along the lines of “how do I know you’re not faking it with me?” But the viewer is left to presume that they’ve worked that all out. Actually, given the way the movie progresses to its conclusion, my feeling is that the filmmakers were/are hoping that you’ve pretty much forgotten about the whole thing. This is When Harry Met Sally, not The Mother And The Whore. The viewer is meant to feel pleasant feelings, not particularly complicated or uncomfortable or unpleasant ones.

This idea as it pertains to comedy, and to romantic comedy, is changing—see Girls on the one hand, and the Hangover movies on the other (what they share in common is the view that pretty much all sexual relations are somehow predicated on hostility)—and it’s also changing as it pertains to drama, and romantic drama. The ideas change, but the issues of representation remain just as fraught. Next to race, the depiction of sexuality on screen is about the most fraught thing ever, and right now it is as fraught as  it ever has been. And critics, depending on their ideological perspective, direct and/or unique experience, or just plain contrarian pissiness (to name just three of what could be dozens of factors) will unpack a given work dealing with this representation in sometimes wildly divergent ways.

 

Thanks to JE for the link.

This is from Lauren Sandler’s “The secret to being both a successful writer and a mother: Have just one kid” (as an aside, I think they might be right about the ‘one child’ thing) in The Atlantic:

Like many women, Hardwick found motherhood grueling, though rewarding. When writing about Sylvia Plath, who saw new motherhood as her muse, Hardwick coldly dismissed the notion that women somehow become infinitely more productive and creative upon the birth of a child. It surely didn’t help that Lowell himself was wrestling with psychological problems of the most dogged kind, living in and out of institutions as Hardwick attempted to raise young Harriet. When Harriet was three, and Lowell was in no state to parent alone, Hardwick found friends to care for their daughter while she took a two-month trip to Europe. She couldn’t abide the notion of canceling the trip in service of maternity, but she did feel an inner conflict. “I’m very excited about the trip, but very reluctant, nearly ill really to leave Harriet, and very reluctant to be flying about everywhere, risking her orphanage,” Hardwick wrote in a letter. “It is more myself, my own missing her, and wanting to get back safely that bothers me.” Harriet was fine. Hardwick never wrote about herself—overtly—after her doomed marriage to Lowell. Instead, she chose to discuss how other women writers were perplexingly shortchanged by domestic concerns. Its Hardwick’s literary criticism that exposes her frustrations with “the text of the family.”

Quintana once nailed a list of “Mom’s Sayings” to the garage door that read: “Brush your teeth, brush your hair, shush I’m working.” In reviews of Blue Nights, “shush I’m working” became a symbol of Didion’s maternal negligence. What’s wrong with “shush I’m working?”

And this is from an interview with Martha Wainwright by Alan Pedder in Wears the Trousers (thanks to Karen Pickering for the link):

With Arcangelo keeping you on your toes in the last couple of years do you feel like you’ve been forced to focus or write in ways that you maybe hadn’t done before?

What happened right after my mum died and we came home with Arcangelo, whenever I would try and pick up the guitar I would end up in a puddle on the floor because it was just too intense. After several months I knew I needed to get started with writing, because I always wanted to make another record relatively quickly. I didn’t want to be off the scene for too long after having a child. There is always a danger that a pregnancy might stop you from doing a lot of stuff, so I knew that I needed to keep working. I hired a babysitter to come in for three or four hours a day, just so I could go upstairs and make that separation. It was really enjoyable actually. I could just become who I was before, you know. I would light a cigarette and it would be like I was twenty-five again, sitting on the couch with the guitar being myself. And then I would go downstairs, make dinner, and that was that; like, “Now we’re doing home time.”

More from Wainwright:

There are a couple of songs on the album written from the perspective of a woman overcoming problems in her marriage, and knowing how honest you generally are in your songwriting people will no doubt assume you are singing about your relationship with Brad. Has it been hard for you to find a balance between being a mother and a wife and an artist?

As hard as for anybody else, even if I do sometimes say that other people have it easier [laughs]. Brad has always been behind me whatever I wanted to write, sing or talk about. With the first record, and even the second record to an extent, I was writing songs about other men – previous loves and things like that – so he’s sort of used to that level of honesty. I mean, to the extent that an artist will say whatever she thinks or feels. That being said, although he had heard some of the songs before, when I was writing, I don’t think he really played the record that much before we started doing shows for it. Then during one of the first shows we did together – he was playing bass with me on stage –I think he realised just at that moment that he was a little bit sad and a little bit freaked out about some of the lyrics. So I recognised that I had to talk to him and make sure that we’re alright, and that this is alright. I know that he doesn’t want to put any constraints on me, but it’s also very important for me to cherish and nurture the relationship. I think because we’re both children of divorce we’ve always wanted to stay married, but staying married is a challenge for a lot of people – to just stay in a relationship is difficult. So I think that’s what I am singing about. I’m sort of saying, “Yes, this is tough,” and it’s something I need to be able to do in my songs because I think if I were to feel as though I had to edit myself in my songs…well, you know.

And this is from a favourite old post of mine, ‘Though Hawaii sounds like fun’:

I’ve also just read a fantastic essay written by the late Marjorie Williams (she died in her 40′s with relatively young children), called Mommy at Her Desk. Try as I may, I can’t find a link to this essay on-line so if you’re interested you’ll have to buy her book. The essay is about seeing a picture her young daughter has drawn called – “Mommy at Her Desk”. As Williams examines the drawing she concludes that while the drawing could be viewed as an affirmation of her daughter’s awareness of women’s lives, that they are more than simply ‘mothers’, that they also have pursuits entirely of their own.. it is more likely that the picture represents an accusation – that her daughter, in fact, resents the time her mother spends working at her desk and consequently being unavailable to her.

Williams explores an inescapable trade-off for women between career and family goals and her own battle with the guilt that manifests. Her discussion climaxes with the quietly devastating but strangely liberating line -

 ”… I finally realized, my task was not to find out the one answer, but to learn how to live with the knowledge that in pursuing my work, I am in some degree acting selfishly.”

Maybe I never will resolve my guilt about being a working mother, maybe my family and I will grow through this stage of our lives before we ever sort it out. Maybe I have to suck it up, I’m a big girl now.

As Nora Ephron says (quoted also in Mommy at Her Desk) – Children would rather have a suicidal mother in the next room than a happy mother in Hawaii. But this doesn’t mean women shouldn’t ever be selfish either. Fathers are selfish at times and mothers should be able to be, too. Anyone experiencing resentment knows that selfishness, on occasion, can be a very healthy trait.

If you are a child, and your writer parent is scolding you for failing to do your homework, and then he or she suddenly stops, blinks twice, and tells you to go spend the rest of the afternoon playing video games and eating Pirate Booty, then he or she is actually working.

To allow our loved ones to know that we are working when we are supposed to be engaged in the responsibilities of ordinary life would mark us as the narcissists and social misfits we are. And so we have invented “writing time” as a normalizing concept, to shield ourselves from the critical scrutiny we deserve.

Let’s start with a quick overview of my opinion on Abbott’s parental leave scheme because apparently my thinking can be quite “muddled”.

For the record, I don’t think the scheme is the highest priority for working parents right now. It’s progressive in that it equates parental leave with sick leave (and this is important when parental leave is too often described as a ‘holiday for mums’), but in doing so it is tilted towards higher income parents.. However, I do think more generous parental leave is better than paltry parental leave, and a scheme based on minimum wage is, let’s be honest, very modest, particularly in light of international comparisons. And if we’re going to be debating parental leave, then I’m predicting there will be plenty of accusations that it is all a complete waste of money and if that happens then let it be known that I disagree strongly.. and the economic data supports me.

Now, on to Gilmore’s article. For starters, I’ve spoken to Gilmore and we’re both of the mind that it is something to celebrate when this topic gets discussed and we’re both enthusiastic participants in that discussion. I enjoy Gilmore’s writing a great deal, and there’s plenty I agree with in her piece, too.

The way forward for so many problems in terms of equity, including inside the workplace and inside the home, is more flexible working conditions for both men and women. I am in full agreement with that statement. That to make a difference flexible working conditions need to be offered to more than white-collar professionals and that they need to be taken up by senior levels of management too, for them to be seen as truly acceptable. Complete agreement. That flexible working conditions should be championed by everyone, not just parents, because everyone has important shit to do in their lives. Complete agreement.

And to some degree, I also agree with Gilmore that juggling work and family responsibilities is seen as a women’s issue and that this both stigmatises the topic and also means that men get to remove themselves from a sense of responsibility for the solutions. It also makes it difficult for those men who are already attempting to take on a more equitable share of child rearing and paid work in their families to do so.

I’d go further than Gilmore’s piece and suggest that if we’re thinking feminist revolutions we could do more than thinking about legislating this stuff just for the public sector.. for instance, introducing something legislatively stronger than the right to request part-time work upon returning to work after a baby for everyone would be a game changer.

Now, here’s where my views differ significantly from Gilmore’s.

Unlike Gilmore, I believe parental leave is, in part, a women’s issue and I think parental leave is about a range of objectives including, but not limited to, “closing the gender pay gap”. Parental leave is about broader goals than just workplace participation and some of the measures include not just outcomes for women but also for children. Giving birth, establishing breastfeeding and forming an attachment with an infant require time and rest. They’re all standard aspects of reproduction (and they all have economic benefits), and it says something about how patriarchal our society is that such standard aspects of reproduction are not catered for when we organise the commercial marketplace.

I suspect a critical difference in Gilmore’s and my feminism is covered in this post, “Why we should be careful taking the ‘maternity’ out of ‘parental leave’”, quoting Julie Stephens:

This, however, taps into a productivist ethos entirely consistent with the demands of the neoliberal marketplace, with caregivers replaceable or interchangeable in much the same way as employees in workplaces. In addition, a feminism promoting gender neutrality (in the name of equality) denies the bodily experience of women after they have given birth. Though a boon to the productive workplace, the breast pump may not necessarily protect the emotional needs of women and babies. To deny that baby leave is a women’s issue, to decouple ‘maternity’ from ‘leave’, is also to conceal human vulnerability and dependence. It reproduces what Iris Young has called ‘the normalising but impossible ideal’ that we are autonomous, unencumbered self-sufficient individuals, somehow beyond human dependency.

However, parental leave as public policy is obviously also about keeping women attached to the workforce. This goes some of the way towards ensuring long-term security for women but by no means can a single policy turn back the entire tide of structural inequality for women, and I think it is unfair for Gilmore to use that as its measure. No individual policy will “keep women in the work place and support their earning capacity”, it is always going to require a combination of strategies. And I note that Gilmore’s path to equality is predicated on the assumption that women must be participating in paid work. There is no mention of institutional changes that could benefit women’s financial security when they specialise (by choice or otherwise) in unpaid care.

Gilmore believes for equality to be achieved that the responsibilities of child-rearing need to be shared and I agree with her. In her article, Gilmore refers to data indicating that unless countries legislate for some of the parental leave to be used by fathers then regardless of other benefits of maternity leave, women tend to get stuck on a ‘mummy track’. (There’s an implicit assumption here I’m uncomfortable with that financial earnings, rather than work life balance, is the key to fulfillment, but I’ll leave that aside for the moment). The ‘mummy track’ includes not just taking parental leave when babies are born, but also opting for career-limiting moves, like taking part-time, low-level jobs and being the parent to take ‘sick leave’ when children are home ill. This becomes a long-term problem because one parent’s career progresses while the other’s stalls, and eventually it can appear pointless for a household to do anything other than rally resources behind furthering the higher income parent’s career. Split up and the consequences can be disastrous for women.

For the record, I support the case for generous parental leave schemes to include legislated time-sharing between men and women (it normalises care work in the workplace), and I agree that such schemes accelerate progress towards more equitable divisions of child-rearing and income-earning responsibilities. But by no means does this imply that parental leave for mothers is “nothing more than a feminist cause celebre that makes a symbolic nod to the significant gender differences in wealth”.

Gilmore takes particular issue with the fact that I focused my article around parental leave as an issue for women rather than one for both women and men. I understand this criticism. I considered preemptively addressing it in the article but subsequently decided I couldn’t afford the ‘words’ given there was a tight limit and I already wanted to cover a number of angles on the topic of Abbott’s parental leave scheme.

Although there are plenty of instances where I have talked about  ‘work and family juggling’ as a topic involving both men and women, none the less, this concern comes up quite a bit here. I realise that some feminists (including many readers of this blog) feel strongly that the discussion should be gender-neutral and I have a lot of sympathy for that opinion; however, I remain of the view that while this juggling act dominates women’s lives I will often address the topic with women as the focus. And as I mentioned above, I have some concerns with seeing women and men as completely interchangeable parts in the experience of parenthood.