Have you ever bagged out your boss? Criticised your
husband?... or your mother-in-law?
What about that bitchy mum who parks across
two bays at school so no one scratches her precious car? I bet everyone has
broadcast a dig at the PM or some other public figure.
Have you ever complained about your kids? Publicly? And how
did that work out for you?
How come it is perfectly acceptable – even encouraged - for us to trash talk other adults but the minute
you say anything other than love and bunnies about children you are publicly
maligned?
And god forbid you are a mother who complains about an aspect of parenting:
suddenly you are the epitome of evil.
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| Bad mothers are as evil as Joffrey, image from http://gameofthrones.wikia.com/wiki/Joffrey_Baratheon |
Last year I blogged about not liking playing with my kids. Rather
benign really. I don’t really like playing tennis either but no one really
cares about that. I didn’t write about locking them in a cupboard or starving
them of food, or beating them when I was angry. I admitted that playing
imaginary games with my daughter drove me nuts. I wasn’t the first mother to
ever admit this, and I am pretty sure I won’t be the last.
It was re-posted on mega site Scary Mommy and while there was a collective sigh of relief from hundreds and hundreds of mums admitting they felt the same way, there was a seam of comments from people accusing me of being a bad mother and questioning why I even bothered having kids if I wasn't going to play with them.
Society doesn’t like it when mothers admit truths like
this.
Mothers are meant to remain perfectly happy and grateful for their
fortunate position.
Society trashed British mother Isabella Dutton when she
admitted that she didn’t love her children and regretted having them. Admittedly,
calling them parasites in the national tabloid where they – and the entire
world – could read it, might have been a judgement in error, but she cannot
have been the first women to have children to please her husband and then spend the
rest of her life wishing she hadn’t.
When US mother Lenore Skenazy let her then nine year old son
catch the subway home by himself, she was quickly vilified as America’s worst
mom. Why? For publicly admitting that she felt the way we currently parent
our kids was stifling them.
Throughout history there have been bad mothers. There have
been ambivalent mothers. But it is primarily in recent years with the rise in
blogging and greater access for the average person to find a platform that
suddenly we are able to talk about things that women have been thinking about
for years. Topics that were once considered taboo are finally being talked about – albeit slowly: miscarriage, post-natal depression, gender disappointment. Genuine discussions
about difficult topics that people find challenging to talk about and confronting
to listen to.
And where we should be celebrating that opportunity to air
some of our grievances, it would seem you cannot find a more judgmental crowd
than a group of mothers. Every time a woman admits that she is not as fulfilled
as she thought she might be, every time someone divulges she perhaps was a
better employee than she is a mother - instead of letting her have the
opportunity to fess up to what is probably a major source of angst, she is attacked.
Why aren’t parents, and in particular
mothers, allowed to admit their flaws?
What are we afraid of?
