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August 4, 2004
August 4th, 2004
A BAD DOSE OF PMS (Perfect Mother Syndrome) …
I have decided that Freud has a hell of a lot to answer for when he declared that all neuroses had their roots in the first five years of life. Yes, it is those same five years that a child receives her most concentrated dose of mothering, when the child is, in fact, usually in mum’s full-time care! Freud had it in for mothers and deposited on our lap great responsibility for the emotional sickness of the human species. Well, thanks very much Dr Freud but this feminist has two or three choice words to say to you in reponse: “Bugger off dickhead!”
I am sick to death of the ‘Perfect Mother Syndrome’ (yes, another ‘PMS’ to strike fear into our feminine hearts!). I suspect this generation of mothers has it bad. I know I do. Every little mistake I make, every little fuck-up, every day that I’m in a bad mood, every time I even think about yelling at my girl, every time I make a poor parenting decision, every time I use an authoritarian disciplinary tactic, I get struck down with the symptoms of PMS! Yes! My body becomes flushed with the burning fever of mother guilt, I slump on the couch with head-in-hands, my temples pounding with the deluded thought that I am A BAD MOTHER! Argh! The mere words strike fear into the heart and soul of this mother. I can hear Freud admonishing from the grave, “You, penis-envying feminist bitch, are A Bad Mother!”
Well, I’m sick of it! Sick at heart with it! Fed up, pissed off, and wised-up to it! Yes, the problem with mothers of today is that we are expected to be fucking Perfect! We have swallowed whole Freud’s misconception that mothers are solely responsible for the world’s neurosis; yes, swallowed without chewing it over, swallowed without properly digesting, and now we have a massive case of heartburn! Well, I’ve had a gut-full of it! (Oh please forgive this string of poor digestive metaphors!) It’s time we took an antacid or two, pulled ourselves up, and screamed out, “Enough is Enough!”
You see, lately I have been wracked with the terrible feeling that…well…I don’t really like my daughter all of the time! *GASP* What a bad, bad mother I am for even thinking that, let alone writing it down in black and white. But I’m afraid I have days where Pixie Bella drives me insane with her constant prattle, where she drives me into bursts of annoyance because she seems incapable (as I’m sure most children are) of comprehending anyone else’s feelings or needs. Maybe I have been ground-down by too many pre-7am winter morning wake-ups! One dark cold morning she even woke me up at 5am! And the thing about Pixie is that once she’s woken up, she simply cannot go back to sleep. Pixie has two settings: active or asleep. There is nothing, simply nothing, in-between. When she wakes up in the morning she comes into our bed and talks and talks and talks…Jay, Scarlet and I are all asleep, but Pixie will jump in our bed, and start a full-volume conversation with us until we wake up. If we moan, and try to roll over to escape her prattle, she will get rough, grabbing us and pulling us around and trying to poke us in the face with her fingers. And it drives her two tired middle-aged parents over the edge!! Both Jay and I have lost our temper with her more than once over these early morning antics, and no matter what ‘disciplinary’ approach we take (encouraging her to stay in her room to play, giving her a clock and telling her she can’t come in until it says 7, promising her a special ‘treat’ the next day if she stays in her own bed, begging, pleading, and finally yelling!) nothing has ever worked. We are trying acceptance, but it is painfully difficult when you’re old and tired, it’s the middle of winter, you’ve been up during the night feeding the baby, and basically would consider 8am a grand sleep-in!!! *SIGH*
And, to top it all off, I suffer the constant pangs of PMS over it! I am wracked with feelings of guilt because I can’t bounce out of bed in the pre-light of dawn every morning and greet my daughter with joy and enthusiasm! Yes THAT, I tell myself repeatedly, is what the Perfect Mother would do, and I am nothing but an abysmal old cranky mean-natured failure!!!! I worry endlessly over what affect it will be having on ‘poor’ little Pixie’s self-worth, if every day she is greeted in the morning with a grimace and a groan which basically says, “Fuck off back to bed Pixie!”
And this, fellow comrades, is not the worst of it. No, I’ve been known to be a mean cranky old hag on-and-off throughout the rest of the day as well. Pixie pushes me up against the wall a lot of the time, testing me, annoying me, demanding a lot of attention; she butts in to every conversation Jay and I ever have, and suffers repeated separation anxiety to the point where she threatens me with a meltdown if I want to go for a 30 minute walk by myself on the weekend. She has a meltdown when Jay goes to work in the morning because she doesn’t want him to go. She can be rough with Scarlet, rough with Jay, she has frequent meltdowns over trifling things, injures herself at least 4 times a day and screams the house down over it, and basically all of this builds up until I break into cranky little outbursts on a regular basis. I TRY to be understanding, I try to be compassionate, I try not to over-react, I try to be extremely careful how I ‘manage’ her day, but after the fifth meltdown of the day I find there is no ‘try’ left in me. I am tired. I am exhausted by her emotional instability. And then… enter Freud’s ghost, stage left. PMS sets in. I begin to question myself. Maybe I’m just not cut-out for this motherhood gig? Surely the Perfect Mother would know exactly how to handle this in a way that was healing and calming for Pixie! I begin to scratch around, trying to work out what ‘I’ have done to make her this way, and what ‘I’ can do to help her. Was it because I didn’t bond properly with her as a baby? Is it because I yelled at her when she was a ‘high maintenance’ toddler? Maybe I have been too strict? Maybe I am just cranky and unreasonable and expect too much of her? Maybe I simply don’t love her enough!!! Maybe it harks back to the trauma of her birth? Yes, I have even been known to hark back to the details of her conception….and wonder !!!
I TRY to be the Perfect Mother, and some days I can fake it, but other days ALL I want to do is sell my eldest daughter to the gypsies, then run away to live inside my head. Yes, it’s an affliction I’ve been cursed with, I LOVE to think. I think all the time. I love to write. I love to read. I love to tousle with ideas…the bigger the better! And let me tell you, THIS particular little tendency is NOT on the Perfect Mother’s resume. Oh no. The Perfect Mother doesn’t have enough time or space to think. She is too busy playing with her children, listening with great interest to their monopoly of every conversation, singing songs to them, knitting them little wooly hats, making them hand-sewn dolls, baking a sugar-free banana cake, sweeping the footpaths, planting herbs and flowers in the garden, and preparing perfectly healthy but delicious meals and setting the table beautifully for dinner-time. Yes, I am in love with this vision of the Perfect Mother, but I could never BE her. In my heart I am an introverted intellectual who simply wants to bury herself deep in the shelves of the national library and not utter a single word until sundown. And knowing this about myself makes me feel like I am A Bad Mother. It makes me feel like I’m not ‘designed’ to be a mother, that my true self is not compatible with the qualities needed to mother. I’m not ‘talented’ at mothering, I have no aptitude for mothering, that it simply doesn’t suit me!!! And because I am such a ‘poor’ excuse for a mother I feel constantly guilty and fear that I will rob my children of a perfect childhood. Argh!!!!!!!
I know, I know, it is completely insane to think like this! But you see, I’ve got PMS reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeal bad! And I’m holding Freud responsible. If he wasn’t dead I’d consider suing! He started this whole Perfect Mother fiasco, and I’m stuck wrestling with it. If I wasn’t so scared that my ‘imperfect’ mothering was going to somehow damage or deflate my child’s personality, then perhaps I could accept a few things…. Like:
1. I was an Individual first, a mother second. That my individual quirks, skills, abilities, likes and dislikes, will make me mother very different from the Perfect Mother, but what I can offer to my daughters is my True Self, faults, foibles and all. No, I won’t be able to jump out of bed at 6am and EVER feel bouncy about it, but perhaps I can instill in my daughters a great love of books and ideas.
2. That Mothers come in all shapes and sizes, with different strengths and weaknesses. If my daughters grow up to be intellectuals then I may very well be the Perfect Mother for them then. Just because I am incapable of playing ‘let’s pretend’ 500 hundred times a day and listening with patience to constant kid-chatter without completely losing my mind, doesn’t make me A Bad Mother!
3. That I am a mother, but I am only human. I am not my children’s God. I cannot be all things to them. I cannot be ‘perfect’. Children can and will try the patience of a saint. I am not a saint! I will lose my temper. But I am pretty damn good at saying sorry.
4. That PMS is a sickness, and like bacteria, the image of the Perfect Mother needs to be wiped out! I must be ruthless and dismember her and quietly bury her in the back garden.
5. That mothering is a feminist issue of the utmost importance. As mother’s we must fight for our rights. Our right to make mistakes on the job while we’re learning, without being forever flogged over it. Our right to have our individual needs met without it somehow ‘lessening’ the value of our mothering. Our right to have a bad day. As mothers we need to proclaim that we will not be held responsible for all of our children’s problems and faults. If the million and one small things we do as mothers were valued more highly, perhaps we wouldn’t be haunted by the image of the Perfect Mother, thinking we have to embody her every single quality before we are worthy of the highest praise and value for the job we do! That this mothering job, is, (everyone repeat after me) THE HARDEST JOB IN THE WORLD!!
6. That breaking these points into numbered bullets makes no sense whatsoever and may well be the last time I ever depart from long over-drawn paragraphs and tousle with point-format! I have no talent for it whatsoever.
Now please don’t write to me and tell me I am a good mother, because
a) I won’t believe you because you’ve never seen how grumpy I can get,
b) I AM capable of making the same mistakes over and over again, like this silly bullet-format, so you are wasting your breath, and
c) It will just make me feel even more stupid and incompetent as a mother, because it will demonstrate that I don’t believe in myself!!
Argh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Hmmm.
Despite my flippancy, I suspect that the Perfect Mother Syndrome is a real problem for mothers in today’s world, and that any self-respecting feminist needs to get on her high-horse and enter into battle against the Perfect Mother. Jousting stick in hand we need to poke her in the eye and blind her, so she can no longer look back at us ‘poor’ imitation mothers with her mocking self-righteous glare. Every mother who is committed to ‘trying harder’ is a good mother, no matter what mistakes she has made on the job. We can’t all be perfect all of the time, and any fixed idea of what makes a ‘good’ mother needs to be challenged. I think we should strive to be ‘better’ parents all the time, but I don’t think we should expect to be ‘perfect’ and not make mistakes! Mothers all over the world are different. I might read a shit-hot bedtime story and cook a damn healthy dinner, but I will lose my temper on a regular basis despite the fact that I am ‘working’ on it. I am simply human, and I have some serious faults. So be it. Let me mother to the best of my ability and stop feeling guilty about all the times I fuck up. Let’s try and be REAL mothers. Let’s accept that we have strengths AND weaknesses in our mothering skills and let’s stop crucifying ourselves over every little mistake.
Maybe, just maybe, our kids are tougher than we think!
Yes, I am having a BAD MOTHERING DAY! Don’t we all????
E~
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