Why Mom is miserable
Nobody warned of the inequities she'll face, at home and elsewhere
BY JESSICA VALENTI SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2011
Almost 50 years ago, Betty Friedan wrote the groundbreaking book, "The Feminine Mystique," about "the problem that has no name" — the everyday domestic drudgery that made a generation of women miserable. Today that problem has a name, and quite often, it’s poopy diapers.
A study in the latest issue of The Journal of Marriage and Family says new mothers become less happy in their marriages — in large part because of the unequal division of housework once the baby arrives. Even marriages that were once egalitarian skew toward the traditional once couples become parents. Equality gives way to diaper duty, late-night feedings and breast pumping. (If you’ve ever had the misfortune of using one of these contraptions, you know that the repetitious nipple pulling that leaves you feeling like a dairy cow would make anyone depressed.)
The truth is, women have lots of reasons to be unhappy and dissatisfied — and not just in their marriages. Unfairness at home is just the first in a long line of inequities mothers will face, and parenthood — even with all its joys — also brings with it a litany of unhappy statistics, particularly for women.
Financially, we’re screwed. We all know women suffer from a wage gap, but that gap widens once women become mothers — even more if they have the audacity to be single mothers, or non-white. A Cornell University study showed that a child-free woman is twice as likely to be hired as a mother with an identical resume, and is offered about $11,000 more in starting salary. We’re the only industrialized nation without paid maternity leave, and national child care costs are through the roof. At home, it’s not much better. According to a 2008 study from the University of Michigan, when you get a husband, you also get seven extra hours of housework a week (whereas when men get married, they lose an hour of housework), and mothers do on average of 18 more hours a week of housework than fathers.
Then, of course, there’s the social pressure: Are you breastfeeding? Co-sleeping? Baby-wearing? (Though so long as you’re not Tiger Mothering, you may be safe.)
Is it any wonder that nearly 20 percent of new mothers report symptoms of depression?
In addition to the stark realities that mothers face, the answer may lie in how Americans’ view of marriage and family has changed over the years.
In the study in The Journal of Marriage and Family, professors from the University of Virginia and Utah State University suggest that new parenthood is more likely to cause unhappiness in marriage than in years past because modern couples take a more "expressive" approach to marriage — we’re not getting married out of duty or tradition, we’re getting married for love. As the researchers point out, "nothing threatens the reverie of contemporary soul-mate marriages like the arrival of a bawling, hungry infant." We expect romance and an equal partnership — so when women are faced with more housework and less help at home and at work, it makes sense that we’re unhappy. (Perhaps this explains, in part, another study that claimed marriages have less conflict when parenting roles are more traditional and Dad takes a backseat — in families where there’s no expectation of fairness, there’s not much to get disappointed over.)
And in the same way that we now marry for love, we parent for love as well. Gone are the days of reproducing to have an extra pair of hands at the farm or family store. We expect our children to be our soulmates as well — we have them to make our lives and our families complete. When these sweet (but pee-covered and crying) little beings who are supposed to be the center of our universe don’t manage to fulfill our lives completely, we feel that thing that is perhaps the most overwhelming sentiment of mothers across America: guilt. If our kids are our world, how could we be so heartless as to hate the drudgery that comes along with them?
This isn’t to say we should revert to traditional marriages where ignorance of equality is bliss, or to stop having children for love and a sense of family completeness. But we should get real about our expectations. Children don’t exist to make us happy, and treating them as such will just make them — and us — miserable. But if we can manage to beat back the guilt and sense of personal failure that so many women buy into — and feel no shame when we admit that child-rearing can be a tedious and thankless undertaking, despite the love we feel for our kids — then we can start to take on the broader social and political issues that are really what chip away at the joy of parenting.
Credit: The Daily (www.thedaily.com)
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