why did Lenny's mother feel guilty?
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A few weeks before Halloween, an acquaintance of mine posted a Facebook comment expressing how guilty she felt about not sewing her four-year-old's costume from scratch. She framed the post as a "confession," like it was some shameful secret that her kid's panda-bear getup came from Target. This is a woman who works full-time at a demanding, high-profile job. She and her husband don't live near family, and both of them travel for work, so a lot of her posts are about being sleep-deprived and stressed out. She doesn't even like crafting, she took pains to point out.
Reading this, I wanted to reach through my screen and shake her. Why did she think that hand-making her child's costume was a worthy use of her precious free time? Had she been forced to watch marathons of Martha Stewart Living with her eyes pried open, Clockwork Orange style, in her formative years? Did the shame of failing home-ec continue to invade her anxiety dreamscape deep into her adulthood?
I expected her other friends to push back on her guilt — to tell my pal that her four-year-old didn't care and wouldn't remember if she made the costume from scratch, that it wasn't a priority in her very busy life, that she shouldn't do truly optional things that she actively hated. But instead, I remember many affirming her guilt. One said something along the lines of: Every year I make myself miserable making a costume out of some weird sense of obligation.
This paralyzing sense of obligation is something I've observed in many of the mothers I know. It doesn't seem to be coming from one particular source; it's the entire ambient middle-class mommy culture that surrounds them. We're in a moment where, theoretically, we should feel free to establish our own standards of good motherhood — we're accepting of the fact that families come in all different formulations, and we laud women for rising to greater and greater heights in their careers.