Anticipating Mothers Day

May 7, 2006

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Prayer

Mother’s Day has been a national observance in this country on the second Sunday of May since 1914. Mothers’ Day is next Sunday, when we have our annual Coming-of-Age and Bridging Services with our youth. And so today we are anticipating Mothers’ Day.

Let us join in an attitude of prayer:

We give thanks for mothers, whether they gave birth to the children or adopted them;

For mothers who have lost a child, through miscarriage, abortion, adoption, or death, and who still feel the loss.

For those who have never had children but who miss being mothers, and who are mothers in their hearts who express their nurture in other ways;

For our own mothers, and theirs, as far back as our living memory will carry us;

And for all who have lost their mothers, and still feel that loss.

In anticipation of Mothers’ Day, let us remember all the varieties of mothers in all of our lives in gratitude and prayer.

And let us remember in prayer those other names, which we now speak aloud or in the silence of our hearts.

Amen

SERMON

This sermon came about because one of the mothers of young children in our church asked for it. At her suggestion, I arranged for a series of three lunches with a total of twelve mothers of young children, read one book I was assigned, and a long chapter in another book. Both the books and the live women brought up almost exactly the same subjects. Much of it was new to me, and some of it was almost painful to hear and read. (The books were Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety, by Judith Warner, 2005; and Naomi Wolf’s 2001 book Misconceptions, from which I read only the chapter “Calling it Fair.”)

Still, my sample – the live mothers as well as the book-mothers – is very limited. It’s only dealing with women married to men, even though there are many more kinds of motherhood. So this is a small start on a big and important subject. I’ll be mixing together the stories from live mothers and from book-mothers, which were all pretty similar, though the books went into more detail.

One of the most positive things in all the discussions was that there was almost no man-bashing. These women were grateful for their husbands’ love, care, and help. They all spoke of them as very good fathers.

One woman who couldn’t attend a lunch sent her comments by e-mail. “Having my first child,” she wrote, “filled me with a love I had never even imagined before, and it made me big enough to feel all that love. It opened me up to the whole world. And that big love is still with me. It didn’t disappear with the bottles and diapers. Many years later, it dawned on me that my own mother must feel that same love for me. (I still find comfort in this revelation.) I don’t think you have to have kids to get this “big love.” I’d like to think I would have gotten there on my own. But I do think having kids got me there a lot sooner.” The live mothers all shared this mother’s love for their children, the sense of expanded love it brought in them and a new appreciation for their own mothers.

Both the live mothers and the mothers reported on in the two books were mostly women born in the 60s and 70s. Some of them said one of the great things about growing up in an age of women’s rights with men who were sympathetic to the goals of feminism was that when they married, they felt that they married their best friends. It was an egalitarian marriage, where they were able to negotiate in a wider range of areas, both personal and professional, than their mothers or grandmothers had.

They developed a sense of Self, both in school and in their careers, that had been out of reach for most women before them.

Then the baby comes, and everything changes

One study says that one of the most likely times for a marriage to fall apart is following the birth of the first baby, when almost 70 percent of couples reported a decrease in marital happiness. (Wolf, 227)

One woman said she could remember reading in all those books how some mothers in the first six weeks never got dressed and forgot to eat. She wondered what kind of women these were? How could anyone forget to eat, not find the time to take a shower or get dressed? It sounded as if these were some slovenly, preposterous women. “Then,” she said, “I had my first child and was completely overwhelmed by it, and didn’t find the time to eat or take a shower or get dressed.” (Wolf, p. 240)

Another said, “I always imagined that I would earn a graduate degree in early childhood education and begin teaching college or open my own day care after having my own family. In reality, I quit working a few months before my daughter was born. And I have never reentered the workforce on a full-time basis since that time. I found that earning enough to pay for day care was impossible.” (Warner, 50)

Many of the live- and book-mothers reported this sense that they might lose the dreams the feminism of their youth had given them. But the notion that motherhood can undermine personal ambitions isn’t new. I have a story of it from my own family – from my namesakes.

My grandparents, Grace Davidson and Clement Loehr, met as college students at the University of Iowa, around 1905. Clement was preparing for the Presbyterian ministry, but it was unusual to find many women in college a century ago. Growing up, Grace’s siblings (who were our favorite great-uncles and great-aunts) allowed as how, while both Grace and Clement were bright and good people, Grace had the quicker mind, the richer intellect, and was more ambitious.

My younger half-sister Grace once spent a year or so researching the life of her namesake, who died when Grace was a child. She found that after the birth of Grandma Gracie’s fourth child, she had a nervous breakdown. She realized that she would never be able to pursue her own ambitions: that she was simply going to be a mother, and a minister’s wife. She had seven children in all, pretty much ran the family, and – in her 60s by the time I remember her – a hard edge. At the time, I didn’t like her. Looking back, I see her hard edge as having been honed by spending all her adult life suppressing the anger – or fury – of losing the dreams that first drove her to graduate from college, and my heart goes out to her.

Author Naomi Wolf put it this way: “The baby’s arrival acted as a crack, then a fissure, then an earthquake, that wrenched open the shiny patina of egalitarianism in the marriages of virtually every couple I knew.” (Wolf, 226)

When the husband of one of Naomi Wolf’s friends’ started taking Fridays off to help with the baby, the women celebrated him as a demi-god. To the other husbands, she began to realize, the fact that he could afford to take Fridays off meant his job wasn’t that important. To the men – these egalitarian, pro-feminist men – he was a loser. (Wolf, 227)

The mothers all said it was a 24/7 job that at times just seemed overwhelming. They had no time for themselves; they lost themselves. Nursing an average of every two hours made them sleep-deprived. They had no idea it would be this all-consuming.

I thought of this last weekend while driving through New Hampshire, following a black SUV with a personalized license plate that said KIDLIMO, and a single bumper sticker that read, “Every Mother is a Working Mother.”

Perhaps it’s not surprising to find that “Mother’s little helpers,” by a few years ago, had become drugs, especially methamphetamine, or crystal meth, which in 2002 was named the drug of choice for supermoms. (129) Nobody can do it alone – it’s hard enough for a couple. Generations ago, many people lived within extended families, where grandparents lived nearby and were available when the parents needed some parenting, comfort, or reliable babysitting. What a blessing it could have been to have some people around who loved you, had been through all this themselves, and were able and eager to help out!

One woman said an image that kept coming into her mind was of a teapot, tipped over, with the last drop hanging from its lip: “Tip me over and pour me out”. Other times she imagined herself to be a little generator with another tiny appliance plugged into her, sucking energy. And yet her own power source had been disconnected. (Wolf, 247)

Both in the books and at the three lunches, women said they had little hands all over their body all day, and by night many found they were “all touched out” and just wanted their body left alone. “Being touched related to being needed, and I was giving all I had to give to the baby. There was nothing left for Daddy.” (Judith Warner, p. 127) All of this is often a very unpleasant surprise for their husbands. It redefined sexiness in unexpected ways.

For instance, one sociological study found that “Women find men’s willingness to do their share of the housework erotic.” (Wolf, 243) When I mentioned this at one of our lunches, the response was “You bet! You want some loving? Do the dishes! Do the dishes, put away the clothes I washed, and I’ll be all over you!” For men, this is a whole new, and strange, definition of foreplay!

When I asked our mothers here what kind of gifts they wanted for Mothers’ Day, the question didn’t get an immediate response. Then one woman said, “Time! Eight hours alone! Even four hours alone!” Another said the greatest gift she received in the first year after the birth of her child came from an older woman friend, who gave her permission to stop breastfeeding, and use formula!

Another mother had given a gift to herself. When she returned to work, she reclaimed the Self she had had before motherhood, as an attractive, competent, professional woman. She kept a pair of high-heeled shoes in her car, and when she left home for work, put them on, to help enter her other persona. At night, driving home, she’d change back into her low-heel Mommy Shoes.

And you can’t talk about mothering today without mentioning the word “guilt.” All the women spoke of feeling guilty, and of “competitive mothering,” of being judged by other mothers, other women. They were expected to be perfect, and they often felt that they were struggling just to be adequate.

And some of the books on child-rearing just add to the guilt, without empowering the mothers. There are books with terrible advice in any field, but it was a little shocking to be introduced to some of the “experts” in the field of child-rearing, where the “scientific” fads change with every generation.

T. Berry Brazelton, one of the country’s leading authorities on how to care for infants over the past thirty or forty years, wrote of mothers in the highlands of Mexico, who breastfeed up to 70 to 90 times a day. He added, “That’s being “there” for the baby!” And none of this – none of the going and cooing and crawling and bonding and talking and singing and Popsicle-stick-gluing – would work, would mean a thing, he and others wrote, if it was not done with absolute joy, with “great delight and pleasure,” at each and every moment in the day.” (Warner, 71)

Is it any wonder that 70 percent of mothers surveyed in 2000 said they found motherhood “incredibly stressful”? (Warner, 71)

Earlier, Perhaps Saner, Child-rearing Models

It wasn’t always like this. In fact, never before in America – not even in the much-maligned 1950s – has motherhood been conceived in this totalizing, self-annihilating, utterly ridiculous way. (Warner, 71)

The experts of the 1960s held that mothers should set limits on their children’s behavior and on their own level of maternal enmeshment. (79)

The experts (in the 1970s) agreed that unhappy mothers produced unhappy children. (Warner, 84)

The majority opinion in the 1970s was that the key to maternal self-fulfillment was work outside the home. Some experts even opined that working mothers were better mothers than stay-at-home moms. Child psychiatrist Bruno Bettleheim, for one, said that the enforced selflessness of stay-at-home motherhood was ill-suited for educated women – or their children. (Warner, 85-86)

In the 1970s and 1980s, many mainstream baby boomer women prided themselves on breaking with the sacrificial roles that they saw their mothers having played. (Warner, 83) The 1980s were about “self-actualizing, self-fulfilled motherhood.” (Warner, 88) By 1986, a majority of all women with children under age three were in the workforce. (Warner, 89)

By the mid-1980s, mainstream women’s magazines were citing studies showing that working moms were happier, healthier, and less stressed than nonworking mothers. And then, somehow, everything changed. (Warner, 90)

Suddenly, as the 1980s turned into the 1990s, the word “guilt” was everywhere in the magazine stories on motherhood. It was guilt about working, guilt about not being there enough for the children. Working mothers were no longer heroines. They were called villains, selfish and “unnatural.” (Warner, 91)

One woman writing in a 1994 book even compared leaving a baby in a daycare center to the trauma of a child whose mother had died! (Penelope Leach, Children First) (Warner, 99) Against the long history of child-rearing ideologies in our society, this reads – to me, at least — like irresponsible, hysterical, drivel.

Though leaving children in a daycare center is a far more expensive option than most couples can afford, and getting high quality childcare workers is even harder.

And that’s because the US is “the only industrialized country without national maternity benefits, paid leave, or a coherent day care policy.” (Wolf, 230) The Family Leave Act we have lets women take off three months, but without pay. Not many families can afford to do that. You can’t talk about the pressures on parents without talking about the anti-life priorities of our economy.

And daycare is only the tip of an ugly iceberg. The women who provide daycare often do so by putting their own children in even cheaper, less adequate daycare – or leaving them behind, thousands of miles away. As Naomi Wolf put it:

Meanwhile, the children of the army of private and day care caregivers are watched by worse-paid baby-sitters, or by grandmothers, or by relatives in countries far away – in Ecuador and India, in the Caribbean and Central America and the Phillipines. (Wolf, p. 257)

I learned that if I sat in the park with our baby and chatted with an immigrant nanny who was wiping the drool of a white baby, or teaching a white toddler to share, within minutes she would show a photograph of her own children far away, whom she may not have seen for years. And her eyes would fill with tears. (Wolf, p. 258)

When it came to who would take care of the kids, capitalism happened to the women’s movement, and a real gender revolution did not. (Wolf, p. 260)

Last week, USA Today carried an article called “Till Debt Do Us Part,” about how the tensions created by debt may be the biggest single reason many marriages end. (USA Today, 29 April 2006)

And yesterday’s New York Times had a story that talked about a 38 percent increase nationally in home foreclosures in the first quarter of this year over the same period in 2005. Florida had the second-largest number of foreclosures in the nation during that period – 29,636 – behind Texas, which had 40,236. We’re Number One. (From NY Times 6 May 06, “Statistics Aside, Many Feel Pinch of Daily Costs,” by Jennifer Steinhauer.)

Once again, to repeat the quote we can’t hear enough times, the US is “the only industrialized country without national maternity benefits, paid leave, or a coherent day care policy.” (Wolf, 230)

Maybe you think we”ve just never cared about families, or that figuring out how to support them is too hard. But in fact, we did all this during World War II. And we did it quickly – almost intuitively, it seems – and well.

In order to help women join the workforce, the government provided “services – from shopping to laundry, cleaning facilities, a catering kitchen, and child care centers – in each neighborhood clustered as close together as possible and supplemented by family health and recreation facilities.” There was even a mending service for the kids’ torn clothing; and on the way home, the tired mother could pick up a nourishing hot meal, prepared and packed for her at the center, to bring home along with her children! (Naomi Wolf, Misconceptions, p. 232)

After the war, the men needed their jobs back” and this elaborate, smoothly-operating and highly successful solution to the work-family problem was simply shut down. Not even a memory remained in most history books to give women a blueprint with which to agitate for a comparable solution, nor to remind all of us that such a thing could be done. (Wolf, 232)

But we don’t have to wait sixty years to forget important facts. The current often hysterical crop of child-rearing gurus seem to have forgotten that there’s no proof that children suffered in the past because their mothers put them in playpens. There’s no proof that children suffer today because their mothers work. None of the studies conducted on the children of working mothers – in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s – have ever shown that a mother’s work outside of home per se has any impact upon her child’s well-being. (The quality of care a child receives while the mother’s away, on the other hand, has a major impact on that child’s well-being, but that’s a whole other story.)

Studies have never shown that total immersion in motherhood makes mothers happy or does their children any good. On the contrary, studies have shown that mothers who are able to make a life for themselves tend to be happy and to make their children happy. The self-fulfillment they get from a well-rounded life actually makes them more emotionally available for themselves, their children, and their husbands. All of this research has been around for decades. (Warner, 133) So has research suggesting that women are happier and healthier when they follow their own needs, whether to work or to be at-home mothers. The message seems to be, if you feel that you should be a stay-at-home mother, then you probably should be. If you feel that you need to return to work, whether full or part-time, then you probably should.

It’s like the instructions in airplanes. When the oxygen mask drops down, put on your own mask first, then help others. Children need happy mothers, not obsessive ones. So do the mothers, and so do the husbands.

And so it’s the Sunday before Mothers’ Day, and we have a week to anticipate the actual day. What can we say, what can I say, to the mothers of young children in the church and elsewhere?

First, thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Motherhood is harder than I knew, harder than many of us know, and because we live in the only industrialized country without national maternity benefits, paid leave, or a coherent day care policy, the weight of raising children falls on parents, and especially on mothers. So thank you.

And about the guilt. The guilt that follows you like a buzzard because there’s too much to do, and you can’t do it perfectly, the guilt that’s always with you, either in the foreground or the back of your mind – my God, you’re forgiven! You’re forgiven! Don’t accept that guilt. Every mother I know is doing about all she knows how to do, and that’s enough! You are being treated like the scapegoats of a society that will not put its money where its mouth is, a society whose behavior and economic priorities show how brutally and completely it ignores the services needed to support a healthy and happy family life in our country. And so all the failings are often dumped on you, and they can drive you crazy. Don’t let them. You’re doing the best you can, and that’s enough. You’re forgiven.

Now we have one week in which to anticipate this year’s Mothers’ Day, a week to consider the high human costs of living in “the only industrialized country without national maternity benefits, paid leave, or a coherent day care policy.”

And a week to consider what gifts we might want to offer – to our mothers, our wives, our friends with children, and to the economic priorities of our greedy country.

So much to think about. So many mothers who could use a gift. So much time. In the meantime and in anticipation of that time – Happy Mothers’ Day.