On motherhood
May. 13th, 2012 04:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
blogcutterWhat was the best advice your mother gave you? Was it "Mind your manners" or "Eat your vegetables" or "Always wear clean underwear"?
One thing that my mother used to say that echoes through my brain from time to time is "It'd be a dull world if we were all alike". The other thing, somewhat related to that, which she would say to me if I came home from school with some lengthy tale of woe about real or imagined injustices done to me that day was, "You know, you'll just have to learn to take people the way they come." Good advice but, like a lot of good advice, hard to follow, especially when you're a kid and think everything's all about you.
I think by the time I came along, over eight years after her penultimate child, my mother was frankly a bit tired of the motherhood thing. Conscientious and experienced, yes; enthusiastic, not so much. But then, childlessness was seen as an aberration in her generation; only with my generation and the ready availability and acceptance of contraceptive pills and common-law relationships did motherhood come to be regarded as just one choice amongst many other equally valid ones.
While I certainly would not want to turn back the clock to an era when women had few options in life, I do think that nowadays, there is enormous pressure on women who have opted for motherhood to be Supermother. Not to mention a successful career woman and preferably a corporate executive as well! After all, she CHOSE this lifestyle! Who does she think she is to be exhausted after a few months of sleepless nights?
I HAVE seen some progress between my generation and my daughter's - improvements in parental leave and benefits, for example, and gradual changes in overall social attitudes - but there's still a way to go.
One thing that my mother used to say that echoes through my brain from time to time is "It'd be a dull world if we were all alike". The other thing, somewhat related to that, which she would say to me if I came home from school with some lengthy tale of woe about real or imagined injustices done to me that day was, "You know, you'll just have to learn to take people the way they come." Good advice but, like a lot of good advice, hard to follow, especially when you're a kid and think everything's all about you.
I think by the time I came along, over eight years after her penultimate child, my mother was frankly a bit tired of the motherhood thing. Conscientious and experienced, yes; enthusiastic, not so much. But then, childlessness was seen as an aberration in her generation; only with my generation and the ready availability and acceptance of contraceptive pills and common-law relationships did motherhood come to be regarded as just one choice amongst many other equally valid ones.
While I certainly would not want to turn back the clock to an era when women had few options in life, I do think that nowadays, there is enormous pressure on women who have opted for motherhood to be Supermother. Not to mention a successful career woman and preferably a corporate executive as well! After all, she CHOSE this lifestyle! Who does she think she is to be exhausted after a few months of sleepless nights?
I HAVE seen some progress between my generation and my daughter's - improvements in parental leave and benefits, for example, and gradual changes in overall social attitudes - but there's still a way to go.
