(no subject)

[glorious_spoon]

When I was pregnant with my first kid (who is almost five now, holy shit), I signed up on BabyCenter, since I'm one of those people who has to obsessively research everything when faced with a new situation, and I never bothered to delete my account, so they still send me weekly updates on developmental milestones and shit for my kids. I don't really mind; some of the articles are interesting, and both of my children are what is gently termed 'strong-willed'--basically, a pair of pigheaded energizer bunnies who don't believe in sleep or food or the laws of men, so any suggestions I can get for keeping them alive and myself sane are more than welcome.

....but holy shit, some of the things they post aimed at stay-at-home parents (let's be honest: stay-at-home mothers) make me so incredibly fucking glad that I am not one. It's not just that I'm temperamentally unsuited to it, although I am, and it's not just that I love my job, although I do, it's this whole steaming clusterfuck of compulsory femininity and social isolation and the bizarre phenomenon of 'choice feminism' that blocks us from criticizing how deeply fucked our social support structures for parents, and mothers in particular, are.

Comments

[sheron]

I agree with the general sentiment completely!

Do you have some choice examples though? Curious. :)

[glorious_spoon]

This was the one that kind of set me off. It's not even actually particularly egregious; the advice is mostly good, although there are some bits I cringe at. It's just that there's this built-in assumption of profound social isolation and aimlessness that's really sort of chilling to me, even as a fairly solitary person.

[sheron]

Yeah that advice is kind of sad! I think it's the tone of "try to remember what you used to like before you became a mom".

[Make a list of interests and activities you enjoyed before your baby arrived.]

???

I mean, I get that they're probably looking at it from the angle of "make a comprehensive list of all the things and see which ones work for your schedule now" but it sure sounds depressing.

[glorious_spoon]

Yeah, it's sort of that, "Remember! You used to be a person!"

... I mean, especially with a first kid, the first few months do tend to totally overwhelm all hobbies and free time, but the baseline expectation that mothers will just like... lose all sense of self, or something, is really off-putting to me.

[minoanmiss]

(icon!)

Yeah, it's been terrifying watching these attitudes arise as my friends have kids. (aNd ugh, "remember you used to be a person" is at least better than "how dare you want to still be a person, you are now a Mother and that is Your Destiny". Which is horrifying to even say.)

[glorious_spoon]

I've been really fortunate to not encounter that attitude very much irl, which I kind of suspect has something to do with the fact that I don't know a lot of people irl who have enough money for one parent to stay at home full-time (as a choice, I mean: I know a lot of people who are underemployed and staying home with the kids because daycare is a crapshoot). But I see a lot of it online, or in social groups I'm peripherally attached to, and it really is just chilling.

(I have a whole separate rant about how this attitude links back to the vilification of adult women in fandom and the whole way we conceptualize the personhood of mothers, but I am probably not coherent enough to actually write it out right now)

ETA: ICON!!! my god i still fucking love this little dragon. I need to get a paid account so I can put the rest of them up :D

[sheron]

I thought it was an awesome angry pufferfish.

[glorious_spoon]

I mean it basically is an awesome angry pufferfish. With wings!

[rosefox]

Everything about that article is so sad from the headline on down.

When I'm doing my writing advice column and people ask me about dealing with "the boring parts of the book" or say "I try to write this story/section but then I get bored and switch to something else", I always assume that "bored" means depressed or anxious or exhausted or avoidant or overwhelmed. I want to ask this "bored" stay-at-home mom what else is going on with her. The advice is okay but it doesn't remotely get at the underlying issues, and when it's coming from a therapist on a parenting site, that's really disappointing.

[glorious_spoon]

It's so terribly sad.

So much of it seems like the way I dealt with chronic depression as a teenager who didn't really know what was wrong with my brain (distract! distract! have a schedule and stick with it! don't think about the Pit of Despair! d o n 't t h i n k a b o u t i t).

Like, I feel like if this was someone who wasn't a SAHM, the advice would have taken into account, like, you're not supposed to feel like you're chronically mired in existential despair in general, but if you're a SAHM that's just to be expected and you need to work around it. It's awful.

[rosefox]

Right, exactly! It's all Band-Aids on the gaping wound.

I don't mean to medicalize a little ordinary boredom with the parts of parenting that are in fact boring, but if you're at the point where you're asking someone else for advice on how to deal with being bored, something else is going on. When I get bored while my kid is painting intently or repeatedly building things and knocking them down, I read a book or play a phone game, same as when I'm hanging out with anyone else who's doing their own thing. Then we do something fun together and it's lovely and fine. Something about the question as phrased sounds more like "What do I do when I have lost all zest for life or ability to think beyond the present moment" and the answer is "You get your ass to a therapist".

[glorious_spoon]

Yes!

And also.... I feel like so much of this isolation and misery is just baked into the mainstream conception of parenthood. There's this idea that, hey, this is just your life now, you have no hobbies other than what you can cram into the 45-minute window after your kids go to bed, you don't get to prioritize yourself ever, et cetera. It's a really fucked-up paradigm.

And I'm a really solitary person who's fairly socially isolated by choice. I don't have a huge group of friends or an active social life... but if that was something that was important to me, I'd find a way to make it happen. I feel like for a lot of SAHP's I know (in my relatively rural locale, at least), the social network just isn't there unless you really work hard for it.

[rosefox]

We're in a city with multiple friends within walking distance and it's still very isolating to be the parent of a young kid, unless you push hard to change that. All three of us are trying hard to break out of the idea that we don't get to prioritize ourselves, and we can only manage fun adult time as often as we do because of our 3:1 parent:child ratio and available funds for babysitters. Most of our socializing happens on Slack.

(God, I can't wait until my kid's old enough to share hobbies with me. We're alllllmost there. That will be a game-changer.)

[glorious_spoon]

It was such a game changer with my older kid. The younger one is 1.5, so he's still at that age where he's pre-verbal but highly mobile, which is tough sometimes. But with my older one, the relationship has gotten much more... I guess reciprocal would be the word, in the past year especially, in a way that's really cool to experience.

[sheron]

This!

[yalumesse]

Yuck.

[wanderingnork]

I'm not a mom, but my mother was/is in this mess with my sister and I. We're trying to help her grow out of it, but it's...painful.

This does make me wonder about the complaints I see floating around about parents disengaging as soon as their kids are old enough to drive. If THIS is your early reality as a parent, it's almost unsurprising.

[glorious_spoon]

My mother was a SAHP, largely by choice, and while she was always a really great, involved parent, it's pretty obvious in retrospect that she was desperately unhappy for good chunks of my childhood. Now that my brothers and I are well into adulthood, she has a much more lively and active social life. My dad was worried that she'd get empty nest syndrome when my youngest brother moved out, but it's really been kind of the opposite.

[wanderingnork]

I'm really glad she's doing so much better! That's an awesome development.

It's also really good that you're aware of this and can take care of yourself in a different (hopefully better) way than our mothers did.

[cadenzamuse]

Oh man, yeah. The assumption that the soul-sucking isolation and lack of support structures and subsuming of any interests into Motherhood is normal is terrifying. At least as a working parent (well, "working," I'm currently a grad student parent), I am not only allowed but required to prioritize something else in my life in addition to Anime Eyes. (Balancing the priorities is impossibly difficult, but at least it's a *different* set of deeply fucked societal expectations? Heh.)

[glorious_spoon]

Yeah, there's pretty much no version that doesn't involve deeply fucked societal expectations, but I'm glad I picked this one.

(Also, lmao at 'Anime Eyes'. That's awesome)