creative.mother.thinking

explaining my life to strangers

parenting

Mommy guilt is not personal

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I know I have written about “mommy guilt” before but I want to try to put it together this time. For years I had thought that I wasn’t suffering from it. After the first few months of being a mother where I was feeling guilty for going to work and not participating in any mother-and-baby-groups, or baby swimming or not massaging my son every day, I decided I had enough of that, that he just had to live with his life as it was and that he at least wasn’t growing up being totally dependent on me. And so I proudly announced that there was no mommy guilt for me.

Only I did still feel guilty from time to time. Because I’m not the mother I want to be, because other mothers do different things with their children, and because – to be frank often I try to sneak away and do something on my own. Like computer things. And when you’re a mother that’s Wrong.

I read about mothers feeling guilty all the time on blogs even if the mothers I meet in real life rarely talk about it. But even if they don’t talk about it you can feel it. Every time when two or more mothers meet you can sense it. And it isn’t triggered by competimoms only, every single, innocent remark can, and probably will, trigger someone’s guilt. “Look, we made cupcakes and decorated the room.” someone says, and the likes of me think about how they never bake anything, and that their method of decoration is to give their children paper and scissors and afterwards saying, “That’s really nice, of course you can tape it to the fence.” On the other hand I then say, “Oh, my son isn’t going to music class, but he likes to bang on the drums and piano, and walk around with the guitar pretending he is a rock star.” and immediately all the other mothers feel guilty for not creating such a stimulating creative environment for their children, while I feel guilty that my son who is the son of two musicians grows up without any musical training. The list can go on and on. Someone says, “Oh, we go to the playground every day.” and I feel rotten because I never go to the playground and my poor son has no peers to play with, and then I say, “Oh, we just open the door and let him out in the garden.” and the other mother feels rotten because her son has to grow up in a tiny apartment without his own sandbox and swing.

In the end we all feel rotten, those of us who bake cupcakes, those of us who grow their own food, those of us who let their children watch TV, those of us who don’t, those of us who work, those of us who stay at home, every single one. Every mother who cares about her children (and I’d say there are only very few who don’t and they probably don’t blog about it) feel guilty and like she isn’t doing enough or doing things wrong.

I recently read a post by Chris Jordan on this: “The Modern Mother“. She quotes her mother-in-law who said being a mother was easier fifty years ago. It might have been but I recall the stories my mother and my mother-in-law tell and they always had the feeling that they were not good enough as a mother somehow, plus they were feeling rotten because they wanted to work outside the home, and they couldn’t.

So, I don’t think that going back fifty years is the solution (and neither does Chris Jordan, by the way). I just think that when every single mother in the Western Hemisphere (or maybe only most of them) feel guilty about the way they are treating their children, this is not a personal phenomenon, this is social. And it is always a good thing to remember that societies are made by human beings and that the rules therefore can be changed by human beings too.

I have been reading the sentence, “I better start saving for my child’s therapy bill because I …” (yelled at her, lost my temper, have let my child down in any way) so often. And every single time I’d like to write a comment and say, “Cool down. If that’s the worst that ever happens to your child it is very fortunate indeed.” All this implicates that mothers should be somehow superhuman. Patience personified. Never making mistakes. Never treating their children unfair. We all have this image in our heads of the loving mother surrounded by her children, nurturing always. At the end of the day she sits in the midst of her children who all are smiling with perfectly brushed teeth wearing their hand-sewn pajamas, and reads them stories before tucking them in their beds. Do you realize that this is propaganda that is more than a hundred years old? Propaganda that got resurrected in the 1950s and that’s still sitting in our heads? Only now we have to be hot, sexy, intelligent, self-reliable and making money too.

In 2005 I read “The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined All Women” by Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels and it opened my eyes. We all have this image of the ideal mother in our heads, and it is blasted at us from all media too. Imagine a celebrity saying that she is overwhelmed by new motherhood! Somewhere inside of us we secretly still think that becoming a mother is the most fulfilling and joyful thing we can ever achieve. And in a way it might be but then we don’t always feel fulfilled and joyful all day long. Blogs are giving us the opportunity to see real mothers in real life who also talk about the less joyful aspects of it all. Still we think that nothing we can ever do will be enough. Still we think that we are the key to our children’s happiness. That we alone hold their fates in our hands.

Well, it’s time to stop this. Our children are their own persons. They determine their own fates as much as the people around them. We should always be grateful that we live in places where we have the energy and time to worry about whether it’s good for our children to have swimming lessons or too much cake. All the children of the people who read this have enough to eat, a roof over their heads, clothes to keep them warm and mothers and/or fathers who love them and care for them. Mommy guilt is a luxury problem that harms us and our children.

I have a little task for you: every time you catch yourself thinking, “I’m a bad mother.” or “My child will need therapy because of me.” or something similar, replace it with, “I love my child and trust him (or her) to turn out okay” or “Being myself is all I have to do.”.

Okay, I don’t seem to be good at making new slogans against mommy guilt. I’m afraid you have to help me out here. What will you be replacing your old mommy guilt phrases with?

Housework for Children

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So I promised to wrap up the comments you all made to my post about “Children and Responsibility”. All of us agreed that it is a good thing for children to learn how to be responsible, and to take part in the daily chores. Since most of our children are rather small the tasks they can do tend to be things like picking up and sorting.

One of the most helpful comments to me was the one Anne wrote. Sadly there are no posts in her blog. I hope there will be. She also addressed several ways of asking a child to do something. I like her emphasis on teaching the actual skills versus the chore aspect of this. Obviously meno’s daughter has the most things to do which isn’t surprising since said daughter is about 16. Sober put it best when she wrote:

All the things that Anne said – not actually being responsible for a task, but learning alongside, taking turns doing things that he can do and watching you do the things that require the precision of an adult.

In addition to your comments I have done a little thinking on my own and pulled out a copy of “Kinder fördern im Alltag.” (Petra Kunze, Catharina Salamander)“. So, a preschooler like my son should be able to do the following:

  • pick up his toys
  • dress and undress himself
  • set the table (in our house somebody else will have to get the dishes because he can’t reach them)
  • fetch things from the fridge
  • help to peel and cut vegetables
  • rake leafs, help with yard work like watering (my son has his own little rake and watering can), pull weeds, put seeds into the ground, pot plants
  • pour juice, milk, or cereal
  • sort laundry
  • put dirty laundry in the hamper
  • put fresh laundry away
  • load and unload the dishwasher
  • help with grocery shopping, fetch things that are on low shelves, take a little shopping cart and push it through the store (my son also often gets to decide which cheese we’re buying, which fruit or vegetables
  • put the groceries away when home
  • put his own things back where they belong
  • clean up spills

So there are a lot of things that even a preschooler can do. My next question of course is, “How do I motivate him to do any of this?” I’m a little reluctant to make any of this things his “duty”. This is not how our family works. While there are things that one or the other of us does more frequently (I do most of the shopping and errands while my husband cares for recycling, for example.), mostly everybody does everything as needed. Sometimes on of us cooks, sometimes the other, sometimes both or all three. Sadly our son isn’t interested to join us. He’d rather sit and draw a picture or look at a book. (Yes, he truly is his mother’s son.)

As a friend pointed out to me, “After a while it just isn’t fun anymore.” Well, I didn’t know housework was supposed to be fun, I just know that it has to be done regardless of how you like to do it. And I definitely know that spreading it around and doing it together helps in making it more fun.

I have noticed that my son is especially reluctant to help if he thinks he won’t be able to accomplish the task. So sometimes all it takes is to show him that he can do it. He’s very eager to try things like make his own sandwiches. And when I get him to help he is always very pleased with himself. Like today I put everything that was needed to set the table out and he did the rest himself. After a lot of whining, “Why do I always have to do so much?”, and us pointing out that there are people actually doing more than him, he was perfectly happy to have set the table on his own.

Housework isn’t such a big deal but it’s the first and easiest way our children can contribute something to family life. And everybody has to learn how to care for himself or others.

Thank you for all your helpful suggestions. After reading your comments I kept thinking of more and more ways to involve my son. He doesn’t appreciate it now but he sure will in the future. As Hel wrote:

I hated doing chores as a child but now I am able to create a pleasant living space free of old crusty pieces of bread and unwashed cups.

On the subject of responsibility and hovering parents I might have to write another post soon.

Children and Responsibility

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This time I don’t want to talk about the responsibility that comes with having children. I want to talk about the responsibilities our children have. Or maybe should have.

For the past year or so my son has been really moody. Sometimes aggressive, sometimes depressed a little. We were fighting so much that we asked the preschool to switch from him going only in the afternoon to almost the whole day. (Yeah, that’s right, I put my son in daycare because we (him and me) were fighting so much.) When I approached his teacher, telling about my difficulties and the constant power struggle in our house, she said that she didn’t see any of it in school. And that maybe it had to do with him being around adults all the time. At home he is always the weak one, the little one, and the one who isn’t allowed to decide on his own. So I’ve been thinking about ways to make him feel more independent.

The other thing I have been thinking constantly about is how many of my students seem to be incapable – and unwilling – of doing anything on their own. It often seems to me that their parents still hold their hands at an age where they should be almost grown-up. And I think that this makes the students (and maybe the parents too) unhappier and doesn’t help building self-esteem

So maybe our children need more responsibility. I’m not talking about child labour here. I’m talking about having to stand up for the consequences of their own actions. Since most of my students come from rather privileged families, I have seen children sent to boarding school when they were about to fail a grade. I have seen parents doing homework, I have seen parents making up for everything their children screw up. Lost a coat? You get a new one. Forgot your homework? Your mother’s doing it. Have to go anywhere? Your parents are driving you everywhere you want. Even in the middle of the night. You don’t know what to do after high school? Well, just sit around at home moping until you find out.

They have nice parents, do they? (Of course, not all parents and students are alike. I do have students who have to be quite self-sufficient too.) But I can’t shake the feeling that these young adults have the deep feeling that they are really dependent on their parents. And that they won’t know what to do when on their own.

While responsibility might be a burden, eventually each and every one of us has to take responsibility for himself and his life. Well, there even might come a time where our children will have to be responsible for their children or, gasp, even us, their parents. With responsibility comes a sense of accomplishment and capability too. It’s not all bad though there are a lot of young adults out there who shy away from it. Who never learned it.

Young adults who grew up thinking that it was their parents they were doing their homework for. Interestingly they started failing school the minute they were old enough to realize that their parents don’t have any real power over them. When I had talked to those parents earlier and said, “Well, let him go to school without his homework then.” The parents had answered, “But then he will have bad grades!” Yeah, he will. Maybe that’ll teach him to do his homework.

I’m not talking about not helping. I’m the first one to explain something for the umpteenth time, to say, “Maybe you should try this.” But today my son refused to get dressed and then had a tantrum about his breakfast (“What do you want for breakfast, müsli or bread?”, “Müsli.”, “Are you sure?”, “Yes, Müsli.” – “Here’s your müsli.”, “But I dooon’t WAAANT MÜÜSLIIII!!!). So I told him if he didn’t get dressed he could walk to preschool naked. Then he dressed. And then we left for preschool. No breakfast. For him that is.

But I’m still behind what I thought I would be doing before I had a child. Back then I thought that a four year-old should be able to dress himself, pick up his toys, and help with housework. Very funny. Right now my son’s responsibilities are: dress and undress himself, know when to use the toilet, and unpack his backpack. Sometimes, very rarely I ask him to put his plate on top of the dishwasher after meals. One reason for this is that housework around here mostly happens when he is at preschool, but maybe we should change that.

Children of his age that are visiting Montessori school already learn how to cook a little, they brush their hair, they brush their teeth and they know how to sweep the floor and cut vegetables. They certainly have to pick up their toys.

So I’m thinking about which responsibilities to introduce next. I don’t want to end up with a boy who’s 16 and who comes home, drops his shoes in the middle of the floor, slumps into the next chair and says, “I need something to eat.” And who then expects me to cook something for him. I definitely don’t want him to grow into a man who says that housework is for women. A man who never will move out because he doesn’t want to be without room service and clean laundry.

I’d like to raise my son with the knowledge that actions have consequences and that he will have to face them on his own someday.

So, what are your children responsible for?

Cloth Diapers

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There was a time when this blog was called “Diapers and Music”. That’s why there still is a pile of diapers on he piano in my masthead. Since that days of diapers are long gone in this family, I don’t think about them very often. (And some time this year there will be a new picture on the blog, I promise.) But then I read Crunchy Chicken, prompted by the Just Posts. And I thought about “low impact” again. I started using dish towels instead of paper towels for my (almost) daily swish through the bathrooms. I tried out HagRag-pantyliners. Very comfy (and so smooth), and she sent me one with guitars on it as a sample, can you believe that. She doesn’t even know I’m a musician. And I ordered a mooncup, which has yet to be tested. (I opted for a mooncup instead of a diva cup because it came from the UK instead of the US, so it arrived faster and I didn’t have to pay tax on it, and it came 10 € cheaper.)

But I wanted to write about cloth diapers. I only realized how much I care about them when my husband’s cousin had a baby a couple of weeks ago; she took all the baby stuff I had left and when I forgot that the cloth diapers were still sitting in a closet in my bedroom, and told her I’d bring them over, she just made a vague noise and shrugged it off. And since then I have been wanting to force the cloth diapers on her. And to persuade her to use them. But I can’t. And I know perfectly well that most of the people reading this blog don’t have children of diaper age, or are well set in their ways. Nonetheless I’d like to tell you why I like cloth diapers so much:

1. They don’t smell as much.
Really. When my son went to play group the teachers there often didn’t realize that his diaper badly needed changing because there was not that much stink. On the other hand, when – for travel reasons or such – I had to use disposable diapers I kept thinking that he had a poopy diaper when in fact he hadn’t.

2. You don’t need to haul immense amounts of diapers home from the super market.
And

3. You don’t need to pay insane amounts of money for diapers.
When I first contemplated the cloth-or-not-cloth-issue I stood in the diaper aisle of the grocery store thinking, “Oh, they aren’t that expensive.” And then I started to do the math. Let’s take an average of 4 diapers a day for 2 1/2 years, and let’s say one diapers costs about 25 cent (which it doesn’t in the grocery store, I just found a discount price on the net right now), and then you’ll pay 912.50 € for diapers. At least. (That would be 1.234.25 $. But then I don’t know the cost of diapers in the US.) And I know that washing things also costs money, and cloth diapers cost money, but not that much. Which brings me to the next point:

4. You often can get used cloth diapers very cheap or for free.
Most of the diapers I have been using for years were given to me by a friend. She used them for about two weeks and was very glad to give them away. I have bought some new diapers over time because some were worn out, and I have been using disposable diapers from time to time, but the money I spent was nowhere near 900 €.

When I was pregnant I read tons of books about pregnancy and babies. In one of them the author said, “Imagine yourself on the balcony, folding nice clean diapers with your baby in a sling, while everybody else is stuck in a traffic jam because they have run out of diapers and have to get new ones in a panic.” I thought she was a little cuckoo. But really, some of my fondest memories of my son’s first year indeed involve me hanging up or folding diapers while carrying him in a sling. Of course I don’t think that much about the days when I had to do everything wearing him in a sling while he screamed on top of his lungs, and I had to rush around, sterilizing my milk pump and washing diapers. (And I am a sling fanatic too. Not that I practiced Attachment Parenting, but I really have to stop myself from pressing a sling on every new parent. It literally saved my life. I even volunteered to teach people how to use them. If you’re anywhere near Munich, drop me an e-mail, come to my house and I’ll show you.) I seem to be a bit of a missionary at heart. Sorry.

5. Cloth diapers are better for babies with sensitive skin.
My son developed a rash every time we went on vacation and he wore disposable diapers more than two days in a row.

So now about the things that people don’t like about cloth diapers:

1. You have a bucket of smelling, dirty diapers sitting around all the time.
Yep. True. Make sure to get a small bucket with a fitting lid. Contrary to popular belief you don’t have to swish them in the toilet though. Or iron them. You don’t even have to touch them after changing, or soak them. Just get a laundry net, hang it in the bucket like a trash bag, roll the used diapers up, and put them in there. Close lid. When the bucket is full, take it to the washing machine, grab the net, close it, toss it in the machine – well done. You have to clean the bucket once in a while, though. Think of it as training for when your child uses the potty.

And really, a diaper bucket doesn’t smell more than a cat litter box. And trash cans with disposable diapers in them smell too. Unless maybe you use those thingies that wrap each and every diaper in plastic, and really how environmental unfriendly do you want to get because of a little poop smell?

2. Your babysitter, day care person, or some such, won’t know how to use them.
Well, most people can be trained. And there are cloth diapers that work like disposable ones. The only two things people have to keep in mind are: a) don’t throw the cloth diaper away, and b) most types of cloth diaper require a kind of cover since they are not water-proof per se. In our family the challenge was to prevent my babysitter from putting a diaper cover on my son when for some reason or other she had to use disposables once in a while.

At first when my son was in play group (without mothers), I put him in disposables to make it easier for the teachers. But since they never changed him anyway, I just put a little plastic bag in his backpack with a fresh cloth diaper and a big handwritten sign saying: “Please us this diaper. Please put the diaper cover over it, and please put the soiled diaper in the plastic bag.” Voilà. No problem.

3. It is too complicated and time consuming.
Again, look at this:

or this:

4. They leak when the baby gets older.
Well, yes. I almost gave up when my son was about nine months old. Then I bought a couple of extra layers like these:


And there was – no more leakage.

5. But who wants to do all that laundry?
Come on. You’ve got a child. You’re doing laundry all the time anyway.
I was surprised at the amount of laundry we had after having a child. And I only changed his clothes about twice a week or so. Since then I made peace with the five loads a week concept. (Of course now I have less laundry than when I still had to wash the diapers. That’s true.)

Have I forgotten something? I stole all the pictures from the excellent shop “Wickelkinder” by the way. I can only recommend it. For Germans anyway. What do you think about cloth diapers? Have you tried them?

Pink – the third

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justpostmay2007

I know I have milked the subject of pink shoes or socks enough already, but – today is the day of the May just post roundtable and there will be some new readers coming over to read the story of my son’s pink socks. All because I didn’t write anything else remotely social or just for the whole month. And those new readers – and the old ones as well – will then think that my poor son still suffers and maybe cry a little for him.

(And for those who are new to this and too lazy or pressed for time to follow the links: my son wanted to have pink shoes which I didn’t buy because I was afraid that he would be made fun of at preschool. Then I bought him pink socks. He wore them to preschool once and after being laughed at never wanted to wear them again.)

I’ll continue to be angry at gender inequality, I promise. And right now I have the feeling that maybe little boys don’t have as much choices as little girls. And then they will grow up and become men. And maybe they will be grown men in a society where they still earn more money than women, and do less housework. They might live in a world where a mother has to come home from an important meeting immediately because her child puked so she can mop it up, even when the child is with his father at the time. If said child’s father on the other hand were to be – let’s say – going out with his friends for a couple of beers, and the child got sick, there might be a fat chance that he heard about the incident only the morning after. “Oh, by the way the child will be staying home today, it got sick in the evening.”
(Disclaimer: This is not to be confused with the situation at creative family where master guitarist and creative mother share childcare duties and mopping up. Each of them is considered to be a fully grown parent without need of further assistance.)

So maybe I should shut up about the pink socks. And I will. I only want to write this post to assure you all that my son isn’t sad any more about the pink socks or shoes. He has forgotten the pink shoes entirely. For a four year old he has a remarkable memory so this shows it hasn’t been that important to him. It was important to me. Because I chose to use my powers of persuasion to change his opinion. And though I use my powers of persuasion all the time with my son this time felt a little immoral. Only I didn’t want to have to buy another pair of shoes.

So. His social standing in the preschooler community obviously didn’t suffer much. One boy who had laughed at him because of the pink socks invited him to his birthday party just last week. The little girl who had said to her mother, “The boy is wearing girly socks.” did so not in malice or ridicule but in curiosity. She found it odd and remarkable but not alarmingly so.

I won’t talk to the teachers about this issue because I doubt that there is anything they can do about it. The children already know that they shouldn’t make fun of others. They still do occasionally. They are just trying to figure out how to be social animals. Friendships are forged and broken. At least in this school the atmosphere is very friendly. When we go through the door in the morning there are children shouting, “Hello Leo.” right and left. The children are nice to one another. Unlike my memories of preschool, girls and boys play together often. A boy can play with the dolls or in the doll kitchen without being stigmatized. When I was four years old there was a boy in my preschool who liked to play in the doll’s corner. He never recovered from that. And I went to school with him until fourth grade. I don’t think that something like this could happen in the school my son attends.

Also his teacher told me that she admires my son for being quite independent. She said, “He plays nicely with others though he is quiet and a little shy. He has no problems. And when he has enough or doesn’t want to play what the others are playing he goes away and plays alone.” That made me quite proud. My son is independent and self-reliant. He won’t let himself get coaxed by peer pressure. At least for now.

Those of you with preschoolers and kindergarteners probably know that this is one of the most rigid and conservative phases in life. These children are setting out to learn the rules, and so they like people to stick to them. They try to understand what being male or female means. They try to understand what being a child and an adult means. They try to see the big picture, how people work, how one does things.

So my son goes back and forth between his likings. He declared, “I no longer like pink, I like black and brown now.” a couple of weeks ago. When I told him that one can like all three at once, he said no. You can’t. Just yesterday he declared, “I don’t like black and brown any longer. I like pink better again.”

My son’s biggest ambition right now has nothing to do with clothes but with his deep desire to be master of his own fate. He wants to be grown-up and be able to do everything he can imagine. He just starts to see how rich the world is and what range of things and activities are available to human beings. He wants to grow his own food, make his own clothes, build a space shuttle and travel to the moon, become a knight, have children, and cook.

His most persistent fantasy is that of building his own submarine, build an ocean in the backyard and then live there on his own. So that nobody can tell him what to do. He will be staying up all night, wear his pajamas the whole day and have robots who manufacture everything he desires. (No, he never saw a James Bond movie.) He plans to move out at his fifth birthday, but we can come and visit him. He even told me that I could stay with him in the submarine to travel to Brazil. Or maybe Italy. Or both.

Why it was right not to buy pink shoes for my son

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You might recall that my son had wanted pink sandals some time ago. And I decided not to buy them and to convince him that blue-beige ones are much better. And I felt rotten for it. And angry. Why can’t my son have pink shoes if he likes them? Why do I have to fear that he will be made fun of? To compensate I bought him pink socks. With horses. And hearts. He loved them. He couldn’t wait to wear them to preschool. But, alas, they had to be washed first. So he had to wait for three long days.

He dressed up with his cute socks and jeans and his new sandals. He told me, “But you will have to buy a pink t-shirt to go with them, you know. I have to have a pink t-shirt.” Okay.

He went to preschool. When I asked him in the evening, he told me that everybody loved his pink socks. That he really needed a pink tee. Have you ever tried to find a pink t-shirt without ruffles or something? Just a plain t-shirt. Not too girlish? Not too expensive, too, since I didn’t know how long he would like to wear it. What I saw in the department store made me glad to have a boy. There was not one t-shirt that I liked. (And I remembered why I keep buying my son’s clothes out of a cataloge. It’s not only the girl’s clothes that are ugly.) So I tried the second hand store. And found a pink t-shirt like this for 2 €:


Of course this had to be washed too so he couldn’t wear it the day after I bought it. But he had his socks. The next day we arrived at preschool, late as often, and a little girl sat down beside him. She told her mother, “The boy is wearing girlie socks.” And he showed her, proudly. In the evening he was very sad to learn that his socks had to be washed since they were very, very dirty. A few days later I told him they were ready to be worn again and that he could wear his new pink tee with it. He had loved the tee when I showed it to him. Then he said, “No, I don’t want to wear the socks or the t-shirt to preschool.” “Why?” “L. and F. made fun of me.” It turned out that a couple of kids had laughed at him because of the socks. And that everybody had been talking about it for days. Obviously a boy wearing pink socks is a very hot topic for preschoolers.

And that was it. He didn’t even want to wear the t-shirt or the socks on weekends. They are tainted with the laughter of his peers.

This makes me sad. I’m even sadder because I saw it coming. Of course I could have prevented this but then I thought, “Maybe it’s not that bad.” And that everybody should be able to wear the color he or she likes. I’m still angry that I’m living in a society where people can’t wear the colors they like. Not even when they are only four years old. I knew that preschoolers and kindergarteners are highly conventional. You can’t really blame them, they learn their values from the adults around them. Women do housework, men can work with computers, women are bad at math, men can’t sew, women always want to be pretty, men don’t care how they look, blablabla. As if there were no individuality.

Or am I the only one who thinks that gender inequality is creeping back?

(Edited to add: Since there were so many comments on this post where people felt sad for my son I wrote yet another post on this to round it all up: Pink – the third)