Redefining Motherhood

I was barely paying attention to the radio when a a chance phrase jolted me to attention and caused me to evaluate modern motherhood.

"A stressed-out mom..."


That was it, an oft used phrase stuck in the middle of a long list of stereotypical descriptions of members of all levels of our society.  I had heard these words strung together countless times in various discussions before, but this time, I cringed.  I paused.  And then I got just a little bit mad.

It has been said that people live up to our expectations of them.  If this is true, I'm at least mildly perturbed with our culture for holding such crummy expectations of mothers.  By promoting the image of "a stressed-out mom," running every which way as she tries to balance marriage, children, career, and self-fulfillment (not necessarily in that order), the media and society at large have given us a model that is frankly not worth emulating.  Nor is this model fulfilling in any way.  She has no peace.

I don't deny that the modern mother is stretched like the gum on her seven-year-old's fingers as she juggles her roles as wife, mother, worker, and woman.  Nor do I deny that it is hard, much harder than any of us imagined when we stared at our first positive pregnancy test.  I'll be first to admit that motherhood is filled with challenges, and that I often fail royally in every single one of my roles.

But I resent the notion that motherhood and lack of peace go hand-in-hand, and I wonder if the prevalence of this notion in media - radio, television, film - sets real-life moms up for more difficulties than they need endure.  Motherhood is undeniably full of challenges, but challenges don't require us to lose all sense of peace and order.  The mother we see on television and in movies and hear about in the occasional radio commercial is not handling those challenges particularly well.  She is, as they assure we notice, stressed-out, and I wonder if that might seep into our own ideas of how we ought to live.  After all, if the model of the modern mom is stressed-out, we must be doing something wrong, missing some huge, crucial element of motherhood, if we don't feel the same - and those mothers who do exude serenity must be doing something "extra"to experience the peace the model mom and we ourselves find so elusive.  At the least, the stressed-out model makes the frazzled condition seem normal.  This is what being a mom looks like.  I'm pulled in a hundred directions, scrambling to keep up, and I need...  a latte, a glass of wine, chocolate, a night out, a manicure, a massage.  I need something to ease the pain of being a woman with offspring who just can't do it all.  She might lead a mom to think, "This is normal.  This is motherhood.  I'm just going to have to live with feeling stressed-out for the next eighteen to eighty years."

I think we can do better, and many do.  I know what it is to be "a stressed-out mom" and how much support, encouragement, and rest such a mom needs and craves.  I don't want to downplay the very real pressures facing the modern mom or the emotional turmoil those pressures stir up.  They're real.  We can't ignore them.

But I also know that this mom gig isn't all that bad and that plenty of moms handle challenges beyond what I can fathom with amazing grace and tranquility.  Whatever our situations, I'd say most of us are pretty good moms who, despite the occasional crummy day or crappy week, have learned to do what we need to do - and to do it pretty darn well.

I want to hear more about these moms and see them more on television and in movies.  (They aren't entirely absent).  I want culture to celebrate moms who smile at the end of a long day, not because they finally get the peace and quiet of which the day has deprived them, but because they were able to create and cherish moments of peace in the midst of the busyness of the day.  Because they know their day has been well spent.  I don't want to hear about "stressed-out moms."  I want to hear about moms who are facing the challenges of motherhood head on, with grace, dignity, and peace.

Among breastfeeding advocates, there is a move to alter the language of breastfeeding.  In this article, Diane Wiessinger argues that if breastfeeding is to become more socially acceptable, people - from moms to physicians and everyone in between - must stop speaking of the "benefits of breast-feeding" and begin speaking of the "risks of artificial milk."  The reasoning is that if we speak of breast-feeding as the baseline (i.e. the standard by which all options are measured) it ought to be by virtue of being the biological norm, (that which woman was designed to do and the means by which the babies were designed to receive nourishment), then breast-feeding would regain its rightful normalcy and popularity.  (Not "jump up and shout" popularity, that is...  I mean "it's the thing to do" popularity).

I say peaceful motherhood, as much as if not more than breast-feeding, needs to regain normalcy and popularity.  I don't know how we can do it, except by real-life mothers refusing to settle for media's image of a frantic, stressed-out mom as the norm.  Let us refuse to fulfill society's (and sometimes our own) expectations of mental exhaustion and chaos.   Let us choose to say "no," to forgive ourselves when we can't get anything together, and to celebrate when we do have it all together - even if just for a moment.  Let us willfully choose to create peace in our own lives and spread it wherever we go. Let us, and especially those of us who claim to belong to and follow the Prince of Peace, make peaceful motherhood the norm.