No regrets: Why I won’t hedge my child’s psyche to safeguard my future comfort

The latest buzz on the interwebs ingniting the fizzling “Mommy Wars” with a new spark comes from journalist Katy Read who regrets “opting out” of her career years ago to raise her sons, now that she’s divorced and can’t find much good work. In her Salon piece, not only does she tell her woeful tale, she warns new mothers against making the same mistake she did. “So if some young woman with a new baby were to ask me about opting out…I would warn her not to do it,” she concludes. She’s honest, she does mention the mixed feelings, the good times with her young boys, but in the end, it’s not worth it.

Many voices analyzed the piece, most echoing its sentiments. Two Babble bloggers discussed the piece, one a SAHM, the other a former SAHM, both clearly in the cautious camp. Some rightly hone in more on the divorce angle. And a dad blogger gives what I think is a smarter perspective. Right now, we’re in a recession. It’s just as easy to stay at work after having a baby, so better safe than sorry, right? I guess hindsight is 20/20 and one “never knows.” Feminists generally emphasize women’s need to be financially independent in case their husbands divorce them and act like its a fool’s game to stay home with small children for a few years because of the hit a career could take.

I say, one should live their ideal life, prudently, of course, if they are able and should not settle for less in order to hedge their bets against an unforeseeable future—certainly not when it comes to the well being of one’s children. Sure, there is no argument against the reality of the numbers that if you’re at home with kids and not working for money, or if you are working part time for less money, that you are going to take a financial hit. I am contributing less to my retirement fund, yes. Do I care? No. Am I unique in my confidence that my husband won’t leave me? I don’t know. I just know that’s not how I life my life. I believe in prudence, of course, which perhaps has given me the luxury of having the choice to stay home and run a low-key business for a few years while my child is young. We saved, we don’t spend wildly now, we have simple tastes, and of course we are blessed that my husband has a stable, well-paying job. I understand that other people have different circumstances and I’ve learned (mostly) not to judge. I do have a problem with the advice to young mothers from this person who has experienced the bad-end failure to do something different based on her individual circumstances.

I tend to believe that if you hedge against staying with your husband forever, that very act of hedging alone chips away at the commitment and bond. If you have the “just in case” idea poison the purity of your vow, then, there’s a crack in the foundation. This is why its so important to choose your partner well. If you work because you want to work, you’re embracing life and living it. If you work because you’re thinking maybe your husband will leave you, that’s not feminist. That’s presupposing the standard is that you’re supposed to be “taken care of” and you don’t trust that you’ll get that. If you approach marriage as a partnership between equals, the choice to stay home and raise your children (who are your husband’s children, too) is you doing that part of the partnership that you and your partner together decided was a good way to run your family. The bond has to be there and I don’t think it’s healthy for the bond to make contingency plans. (This is very different from life or disability insurance, to me.) Its recognizing that raising your children is as important as paying the bills (at least!).

The real problem here is divorce, I think. I strongly believe that if a couple has children they should really, really make the most valiant of efforts not to divorce. I don’t believe that a full half of people in marriages commit such heinous crimes that divorce is warranted. People. Work it out. You’re not that hot on the market. You need to find your happiness in your own soul, not chasing the next great thing you hope will come along, not cutting the dead weight you think is your spouse. Get it together for your kids, seriously! Men who leave women with kids in bad situations are reprehensible. Women that leave men over small things and then moan that it’s such a struggle to raise kids on their own, I don’t wanna hear it!

I believe it is best for infants and small children (preschoolers) to be cared for at home by their own mother. Yes, I know about tribal cultures and villages where many cared for the babies and youth of the tribe. The children were passed around, everybody had a hand in it and played their role very fluidly. I respect and admire those cultures, and such an arrangement may well be good for children, but that’s not the reality of the culture we live in today in the West and using daycare is in no way even a close approximation of that way of life. (It’s a common line quoted to defend daycare…”it takes a village!”) You can believe what you want about early childhood. But, given what I believe, and given that I have the means to do it, I feel absolutely compelled to stay home til my child is in school (we’ll see what the next transition will bring in a couple of years) and no fear of my future earning potential could waiver my resolve or make me regret my choice.

I scrabbled a life together for myself for many years when I was young, before getting a degree, before getting married, and I have confidence in myself that I could do it again. I hold raising my daughter as the most important job I can do. These two sentences, to me, encapsulate more of what feminism should be than the weakness and fear the one won’t be good enough later and that one doesn’t matter in their child’s early years.

In defense of the Disney Princess (sort of)

It’s a common theme in fairytales and fantasy that if you believe in something strongly enough, it can happen; conversely if you don’t believe in, or give power to, an “evil,” you will be unharmed. These concepts probably aren’t very useful in many real-world situations of oppression where countries are run by militant warlords, women are routinely raped, there is no rule of law, and people are generally depraved. However, in the West, when dealing with matters of cultural and consumer warfare, I think the “not believing in” strategy can go a long way toward “protecting” ourselves against things we deem detrimental.

Consider the Disney Princesses.

Much has been made of the evil of Disney Princesses in contemporary feminist discussion. One blogger notes, “Arguably one of the toughest things about being a woman today is living in the shadow of all these fictional women we have been brought up to idolize.” Another speaks of Disney’s far reach “This is what little girls all over the world are watching.” And the well-known, scholarly Barbara Ehrenreich spoke out against the princesses back in 2007. Most recently, a mom and educator said in a guest blog on a “feminist” website (tongue-in-cheek, but with real complaints to back it up) that “Disney Princesses should come with warning labels.“

Now we don’t really do Disney in our house. Not in this way. We have some things that happen to be Disney. I know they took over Pooh. We have some old books with Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse and the crew that we bought at the thrift store. But we don’t have princess stuff. It’s not so much that I would be troubled by the messaging because I honestly think that all the subtext feminists are reading into it is beyond most three year olds (the age of my girl) and if they are attracted to princess stuff its because they really just might like pretty things. I don’t have princess stuff in my house or watch the movies because I don’t care for the aesthetic and I think the stories are boring and stupid. I wouldn’t mind so much the aesthetic of the old-school Snow White, but I think watching a full-length movie is too much screen time at once, uninterrupted, for a three-year old anyway. Other Disney movies I like: Bambi, Dumbo, Fantasia. To me, it’s about aesthetics. I don’t like the way people or anything else really looks in the new digitally-animated, hyper-stylized Disney animation. But, I’ve digressed.

What bothers me most is the assumed power this media has over children. Last time I checked, I controlled what my 3-year-old consumed—both in terms of food and media. And, shouldn’t this be so for all parents? Both the highly-educated, high-minded Barbara Ehrenreich and the local, home-grown person I’ve never heard of on The Feminist Breeder (TFB) blog act like they can’t exert any control over their preschool children.

“In faithful imitation, the 3-year-old in my life flounces around with her tiara askew and her Princess gown sliding off her shoulder, looking for all the world like a London socialite after a hard night of cocaine and booze… it may be old-fashioned to say so, but sex–and especially some middle-aged man’s twisted version thereof–doesn’t belong in the pre-K playroom.” Ehrenreich says.

The other blogger write of how she sends her boyfriend (not the child’s father) to get a gift for the child and he goes to the Disney store. (Two big “whys” in that sentence right there…) He gets the “wrong” toy and when she takes her little darling back to exchange it she “begrudgingly paid the $2.50 to the Disney Store clerk to ‘upgrade’ my daughter’s gift from the rejected Sally plush to the Belle plush…” and she then realizes she “will probably never win the battle of Jill vs. the Disney Princesses.”

Ehrenreich surrenders, too, saying “Let’s face it, no parent can stand up against this alone…”

And truly, both the Ehrenreich piece and TFB piece are semi-satirical, but the underlying notion that we, as mothers, can’t control what our preschool children watch and do, at so young an age, is hugely problematic to me. It should be no surprise, I suppose, when so many preschool children spend their days in the care of someone other than their own mothers and have been in such a situation since infancy. Still, the women writing these articles are themselves smart and educated and vocal. If they can’t exert control, I mean, who can? What’s the problem? Is it laziness? Is it wanting to pass the buck to “society”…a “big corporation” like Disney? Is it just so they can have something “interesting” to complain about within the notions of what “feminism” should be?

I don’t know. But my experience shows different results and while I think some of it is attributable to my girl’s individual personality, some of it is attributable to my influence, as well. I myself am pretty “tomboyish.” I’m athletic. My girl is well aware of me going running. She knows this is one of the things I do when she is in preschool. She knows this is what I do on Saturday morning when she and Daddy go grocery shopping and play. I don’t wear (much) makeup or none unless I’m going somewhere beyond preschool drop-off or the grocery store. I don’t speak frivolously or act frivolously or put undue emphasis on things being “pretty” or “not pretty.” This isn’t really because I make a conscious effort here, it’s just how I am. I speak loudly and firmly to my husband when the situation requires it. I sweat, I dig in the dirt, I lift heavy things. My daughter sees all this and this is how women are to her, right now because to her, I am the archetypal woman.

And this is the key. A mother has to be her daughter’s strongest influence. Certainly at age 3! Hopefully much longer than that, although I do realize that it is healthy to be influenced by other people and things as they get older. I think far too little weight is given to appropriate bonding with children. This isn’t just making sure they are well-fed and feel loved. Bonding is about planting the seeds in a family that they belong to you, you belong to them, there are certain ways our family is, that is us. Very hard to do (though not entirely impossible) when a child spends most of their waking hours being cared for by someone else the first three or four years of their lives when they are so very impressionable.

My daughter is very attached to me, having had me as her primary companion and caregiver these few short years she’s been here. I nursed her for about 33 months. We co-slept and still do a kind of semi-co-sleeping arrangement now, as well, that is agreeable to all family members. She does get out into the world for playdates and preschool, although I did not leave her with anyone til she was 2 and a half. At preschool (3 half-days a week) she is exposed to other girls, girly-girls who do princessy things. My daughter does like to be pretty and recognizes things she likes and doesn’t like in terms of styles and colors, but she’s not obsessed about it or into any deep story lines.

At a get-together of some families of my daughter’s preschool class, we parents were talking about our girls. Many of the moms were going on about how their daughters were into the whole princess playing thing. One said that the girl talks of how she will get married someday and calls this certain boy she knows her “prince charming.” I smiled politely but inside this made me gag. Not even so much because of feminist reasons, but because it is so boring, predictable and dead-end in terms of imaginative play. And because these girls are ONLY three. I was so pleased that my daughter was over in another corner playing Play Doh with the only boy at the get together (someone’s 5 year-old sibling) while the little girls were doing their princess thing. Not that there’s anything “wrong” with it, my girl’s just not interested.

Does Disney really try to push these princess characters as role models and if so, are you buying? I can’t say whether they do because I am just not all that well-versed in them, but my sense is that they are just pretty, shiny things meant to sell toys and movie tickets. There is not any “agenda” behind them other than selling stuff (a whole other post). That said, isn’t it up to the adults in the house to use their “power of the purse” then and not buy things that don’t echo their family’s values, if, in fact, they find these princesses so very offensive? I mean put “crack cocaine” in place of the Disney princesses. Wouldn’t you think someone a little crazy if they said “But my girl loves crack cocaine and all her little friends are into it…its everywhere…there’s nothing I can do…”

Now, I’m not the one equating Disney with crack, but some feminists act like it’s pretty damn bad. Let’s go back to the one who said “Arguably one of the toughest things about being a woman today is living in the shadow of all these fictional women we have been brought up to idolize.” Really? That is the hardest thing about being a woman today? Not the fact that across the globe women and children are being trafficked? Not even that the economic climate of today dictates that many women feel they have to place their infants in daycare so they can feed and protect their families, while giving up the bonding and influence they know deep inside is so important? Not a pay gap? Not figuring out how to breastfeed while working full time away from your baby? And who has brought us up to idolize these fictional women? Our mothers? Not my mom. She stayed home and took care of me when I was very small and was a strong influence in my life.

I think real feminism and real strength is manifested in actually being there for our daughters, actually exerting the control over what they consume, especially at so young and age, and shaping how they view themselves in the world—not just throwing your hands up and acting like you can’t help things. Is that powerful? Nobody is taking your power in this area, moms, you seem to be giving it up freely. Now lots of commenters and the blogger on TFB do talk about how they are going to turn dangerous princess exposures into “teachable moments” and I agree that’s good and important. But I have to question why 2 and 3 year olds are watching feature-length films to begin with and why instead, if you must give them media you don’t give them something else at this point in their lives? That’s a personal decision, of course, just don’t act powerless and call yourself a feminist…and expect my respect.

Just believe in yourself as a mother and don’t give Disney or its evil princesses the power you don’t want them to have and be your daughter’s heroine.