Judith Warner Quotes

We seem to feel as though the life our children have
that we have built for them
is just a delicate house of cards, held together by the most intricate balancing of all its carefully selected components, and that the slightest shock, the slightest jar to all our perfect orchestration, will bring the whole edifice crashing down.

I experienced a devastating loss of self ... But in the same moment, I also recognized that a profound commitment had taken root inside me, and it was beautiful. I felt a duty that ran deeper than any I had known before. I had lost my old self, but in return it felt like I gained a life imbued with new meaning.

Remember: You're not alone.

I realized, listening to the silences that fell sometimes in my interview groups, that there are things that are sayable and unsayable about motherhood today. It is permissable, for example, to talk a lot about guilt, but not a lot about ambition. You can talk a lot about sex (or its lack) but not about the feelings that are keeping women from sleeping with their husbands. You can talk about society's lack of "appreciation" of mother's and the need for more social validation
but not about policy that might actually make life better. You cannot really challenge the American culture of rugged individualism.

Too many of us now allow ourselves to be defined by motherhood and direct every ounce of our energy into our children. This sounds noble on the surface but in fact it's doing no one-- not ourselves, or our children -- any good. Because when we lose ourselves in our mommy selves, we experience this loss as depression. When we disempower ourselves in our mommy selves, we experience this weakness as anxiety. When we desexualize ourselves in our mommy selves, it leads us to feel dead in our skin. All this places an undue burden upon our children. By making them the be-all-and-end-all of our lives, by breaking down the boundaries between ourselves and them so thoroughly, by giving them so much power within the family when they're very small, we risk overwhelming them psychologically and ill-preparing them, socially, for the world of other children and, eventually, other adults. Nursery school and kindergarten teachers are already complaining that our children are so indulged, made so royal at home, that they come to school lacking compassion for others and with real problems functioning socially.

what's really unique about maternal anxiety today is our belief that if something goes wrong with or for our children, it's a reflection on us as mothers. Because we believe we should be able to control life so perfectly that we can keep bad things from happening.

There was something almost sacred in the self-sacrifice that I felt was required of me as a mother, caring for this child.

The Mommy Mystique tells us that we are the luckiest women in the world
the freest, with the most choices, the broadest horizons, the best luck, and the most wealth. It says we have the knowledge and know-how to make "informed decisions" that will guarantee the successful course of our children's lives. It tells us that if we choose badly our children will fall prey to countless dangers
from insecure attachment to drugs to kidnapping to a third-rate college. And if this happens, if our children stray from the path toward happiness and success, we will have no one but ourselves to blame. Because to point fingers out at society, to look beyond ourselves, is to shirk "personal responsibility." To admit that we cannot do everything ourselves, that indeed we need help
and help on a large, systematic scale
is tantamount to admitting personal failure.

I found that when women were able to act in line with their natural inclinations and ambitions
whether to work or stay at home
they were generally happy, and generally felt that their children were happy too. Whereas those whose natural inclinations and ambitions had been thwarted
whether they were working or stay-at-home moms
were sure that they and their kids would be better off if they changed course, and either went to work or went home. The morality of the situation
whether they felt it was good or bad for their chidlren
derived, not from some external sense of the morality of their "choices," but from the amount of happiness generated by any given arrangement.

Something is missing, and it's something not so easy to name as semiabsent husbands, not so easy to point to as a lack of work, or too much work, or a lack of adequate child care. It's the sense that life should have led up to more than it has. A sense that after all the hard work, for all our achievements as individuals and as a "postfeminist" generation, life should be better than this.

The American middle class, it seems to me, is looking to politicians now to satisfy a pretty basic - and urgent - level of need. Yet people in the upper middle class - with their excellent health benefits, schools, salaries, retirement plans, nannies and private afterschool programs - have journeyed so far from that level of need that, it often seems to me, they literally cannot hear what resonates with the middle class. That creates a problematic blind spot for those who write, edit or produce what comes to be known about our politicians and their policies.

If things are better for women there, it is due to a profound and enduring social consensus that life should be made livable based on who they are and not on an abstract moralistic notion of how they ought to be.

I tried to do it all myself: be mommy and camp counselor and art teacher and prereading specialist (and somehow, in my off-hours, to do my own work). I tried my absolute best. And like so many of the moms around me, I started to go a little crazy.