This article captures something I’ve always felt about motherhood:
The rhetoric of the NBAC was hyperbolic, but it reflects a pervasive cultural view that mothers must assume the responsibility to protect their children from any conceivable risk. In an era when the populace seems consumed with eliminating all kinds of risks, a cultural message has developed that mothers not only must protect their children from immediate threats but also must become experts in everything their children might encounter. Mothers are held uniquely responsible for predicting and preventing any circumstance that might interfere with their children’s putatively normal development, and they are exhorted to optimize every dimension of children’s lives, beginning with the womb. This moral code, a vision of “total motherhood,” is frequently cast as a trade-off between what babies and children need versus what mothers might like.
Man, this is SO TRUE. Somehow we mothers are given the responsibility for every aspect of our child’s life. If we eat feta cheese or take a hot shower while pregnant, if we choose not to breastfeed, if we choose not to feed them organic food, to take them to enriching classes and experiences, socialize them properly, if we do or do not work, if we fail to know which vaccines to give them and which to avoid, to choose the right school, the right hospital, the right doula, the right extra-curricular activities, to let them explore on their own to build self-confidence, but not TOO much or they might get kidnapped… it never ends. Every fault the child has is because the mother didn’t do something right.
Obviously I don’t agree that this is right; of course it’s not all up to the mother. But a lot of times it feels like society thinks that way.
