Brain Fertilizer

Good Lord. What an exasperating woman.

You know, the thing that jumps out at me is that she seems to think that life ought to be a whole hell of a lot easier than it actually is. I've seen this same disillusionment around me so much (and felt it myself from time to time), this upset that feminism didn't deliver what it promised (or what they think it promised), this being crushed by the fact that there are only 24 hours in a day and you have to choose how to use them...and that not all of the choices are between ice cream and candy...sometimes they're between broccoli and brussels sprouts...

It makes me sad, this utter unwillingness to acknowledge that the fact that you have *choices* means that by definition you can't have it all...this author (and I think a whole lot of women) expects fixing society to fix her life, and when it doesn't work out that way she wants to embark on another round of "fixing" everything but her own ability to live in reality...not that we shouldn't find ways to balance our lives, but that it's unhealty to try to live in the world we *wish* we live in...

No, I haven't been thinking about any of this as I adjust to motherhood. Not at all.

Another thing that struck me in retrospect is how they think they are staving off failure and disaster through mental stimulation alone.

Are they doing devotions with their children? Taking them to church and Sunday School? Praying with them?

Good grades and intellectual development don't prevent someone from being an alcoholic. Being smart doesn't keep you from giving up on the world and living in the street. Having a large vocabulary and getting into the best schools doesn't mean you don't go bankrupt and lose everything.

The people who fail the biggest in life are the ones who think academic achievement is all you need. Dealing with stress and overcoming setbacks is more important than solving differential equations in your head. It's when someone expects to get everything they want that they despair and give up when they don't get it immediately.

These women are setting their kids up for failure.

And then their solution is to recreate society to help mothers more?

...this is getting silly...

Good point, Nathan, and one I was trying to make in my own post on the issue. We think we're doing our kids a favor by creating this bubble of success and achievement and information around them, when life really isn't like that. We're giving them an inaccurate preparation for reality, and it seems like we ourselves have an inaccurate perception of reality as it is.

It takes a change from within, a re-setting of goals to align with those that God has set out for us, rather than those we artificially adopt from our surroundings. It's too much to expect the godless MSM to ever really get that, I suppose.

Kris,
Once I leave for work, I can't access blogspot or typepad blogs until I get back home, so I wasn't able to see what you actually said... :(

Amen, Nathan! This happy-happy, let's not have competition so all our kids have high self-esteem crap makes me crazy. My little boy is intellectualy gifted. At 7 and in first grade, he's reading fourth-grade books and doing third-grade math. Great, right? Not so much, actually; the kid doesn't have to work for anything, and that worries the hell out of me.

The only way for kids to develop self-esteem (the *real* kind, not the kind that we now try to give them just for taking up space and breathing) is by hard work coupled with results. Because daily life is not presenting my son with much in the way of challenges, I enrolled him in karate: self-discipline and hard work rolled into one! And he loves it, but he's not very good at it, so it's a great way for him to build self-esteem as he works at it.

If we shield our children from challenges and hard work; if we insist on keeping them entertained at every moment; if we focus every ounce of our attention on them at all times, we're doing them a great disservice, and they'll be paying for it into adulthood.

Your blog is the first one I've seen that seems to be where I'm at. Below is a cut and past from mine.

Response to Mommy Madness

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6959880/site/newsweek/?GT1=6190

I just read the article Mommy Madness by Judith Warner of Newsweek. She tries to paint a bleak picture of what happens when women choose motherhood over profession. Her portrait of American mothers who lose there identity is based on 150 interviews throughout the US. She appears to be confused about what motherhood is. She confuses individuality of not being a mother with responsibilities of being a mother.

She said she read somewhere and quotes statistics about how mothers are depressed and so forth. I read a statistic on depressed women who chose career over family and now regret it. The point is we make our bed and have to sleep in it. Many tried the career path and in the end did not like the outcome. Some did.

I have one more statistic that we are all familiar with. It was called the National Election of 04. The majority of this country chose an agenda that followed along the lines of Family Values. Yes the "F" word that some don't want to acknowledge. This value crossed all social, economical, religious, and racial lines.

She attempts to find blame for these depressed mothers. The lack of part time child day care and other lacking social programs such as tax breaks for companies. She suggests that we use "...home-grown American solutions.." Then she uses France as an example to model part time day care. Do we really want to go the way of France?

The writer fails to recognize that life gives us individual problems. We live in a country of the free. We choose our own paths and how to live it. As a country we saw the women's revolution in the 70's. More women bought the idea that they could be a professional worker and our children could be raised by someone else. The 70's was also the "Me" era. Remember the phrase, "I know this will hurt you but I have to think about me." It was the battle cry of Therapists and people willing to spend $50 an hour to buy that drivel. I got news for you, that social experiment didn't work.

The article has a woman sitting amongst a crowd of children in a sing along. The caption states that this women is well educated from Dartmouth and is stressful, lonely and tired. Please! What does having a higher education have to do with motherhood? Get off of your social snobbery! Should she have known better because she has a degree in something? Was it in motherhood?

Does somehow having a college education make someone above others? I find it difficult to equate a college education with real life experience of raising children. I went to a college and found that it was mostly Professors with little life experiences claiming to know the answers. I found the real world to be very different from College. It can be unforgiving and sometimes cruel. You get what you put or not put into it. Reality Check.....parenthood is a learning experience that cannot fully be taught in a classroom.

If you ask that women if she had a chance never to have the child you know what her answer would be. Quit trying to blame your desperation on others and the government. It is time we take on our own responsibilities for our decisions. Handouts is not the answer.

From my little corner of the country I see the following. I'm surrounded by working class blue collar women. The women who choose to have children will quit their jobs provided they can afford to be a stay at home mom. Why? Because they choose to. The ones that can't usually long to be at home with their children. Why? Because that is human nature.

It does not have to be forever. Once the children get into school you can go back to your profession if you choose. The rewards of being the foundation outweighs the personal achievements in any given profession.

My wife chose to be a stay at home mother. It's not because I wanted her to. It's because as a couple we decided it was time to set path towards parenthood. We made sacrifices to accomplish this. The obvious is the smaller income. Did we lose something? Sure, sometimes money is tight. Did we do the right thing? You bet. We know this every time our children make the right decisions based on the foundation we gave them by having a stay at home mother!

Our kids are not going to be raised by a Village as some would like us to believe. Our children will be raised by parents who were willing to make the changes and won't look back and cry about it. The outcome will be children who will grow up to be responsible citizens.