03.30.09

I finished yet another book...it probably only took me over a month, but I've done it :) ha!

This one was a very funny and practical book on motherhood and I can relate to so many stories in here and its good to know other moms feel the same way every now and then! Here's a few paragraphs from the book that I like:

"Actress Felicity Huffman, wife of actor William H. Macy and mother of his children, spoke for a lot of us when she recently turned a question back on 60 minutes interviewer Lesley Stahl:

Stahl: Is motherhood the best experience of your life?
Huffman: No. No, and I resent that question. Because I think it puts women in an untenable position. Because unless I say to you, "Oh, Lesley, it's the best thing I've ever done with my whole life," I'm considered a bad mother.

"So let's be unfront about it: motherhood can be humbling, inspiring, rewarding, exhausting, boring, banal, dirty and up-and-down. It's also way too out-of-control an experience to disucess in unnuanced, romanticized terms. Motherhood is a great joy and also a great burden. It does not leave us all consistently happy or completely fulfilled. Futhermore, we're tired of the notion that motherhood should make us happy, and we're tired of trying to live up to the ideal that "good moms are happy moms." Because if we've agreed that the only way to be a 'good' mother is to be having the best experience of our lives, how can we possibly have an honest conversation about what it's liek to raise kids?

Another mother really summed it up when she said, "I love being a mom; I just hate doing it." Let pause here. This is an amazingly honest thing to say- I love being a mom, I just hate doing it. And it's all the more amazing because it resonates with so many of us. Why? We love our children, and we love being their mothers, but sometimes we just hate doing "it" because 'it' as we've defined it, is an impossible job. We're not talking about the indignities of wiping up runny noses or runny diarrhea- we expected that much. We're talking about the crushing exhaustion, gerbil-on-a-flywheel feeling of every day. We're talking about the failure we feel when we can't bring ourselves to make a Halloween costume, even though that very day we rushed out of work early to make it to a Mommy & Me music class. We're talking about the sinking feeling we have when we finally get to bed at night, knowing that we've failed to perform competently (according to ourselves) on yet another day. Those parenttheses are very important: we're labeling our own selves failures. Which raises some interesting questions: Like, why did we give ourselves such impossible standards? And why are so many of us- smart, sensible women- having such a hard time managing one of the most primal occupations on earth.

Another fun thing in the book, is every now and then they have quotes from real moms, and I found this one really true: "Motherhood is one of those things that's totally impossible to picture until it happens to you. You think it will be a certain way-you won't yell at your kids, you'll have infinite patience, you'll sit on the floor for hours reading to your kids, you'll divide the parenting duties fairly with your husband- and then, boom, your baby arrives and your whole world turns upside down. I mean, I always pictured myself with kids, but I didnt' expect to barely be keeping it together 99 percent of the time. The days just flow together, and I'm suppose to cherish it all."

So, all you new moms, seasoned moms and whoever else is interested, I highly recommend this book: "I was a really good mom before I had kids-reinventing modern motherhood", by Trisha Ashworth and Amy Nobile