Salon.com > Katy Read

Regrets of a stay-at-home mom

Thu, 06 Jan 2011 02:01:00 +0000

We had wonderful times together, my sons and I. The parks. The beaches. The swing set moments when I would realize, watching the boys swoop back and forth, that someday these afternoons would seem to have rushed past in nanoseconds, and I would pause, mid-push, to savor the experience while it lasted.

Now I lie awake at 3 a.m., terrified that as a result I am permanently financially screwed.

As of my divorce last year, I'm the single mother of two almost-men whose taste for playgrounds has been replaced by one for high-end consumer products and who will be, in a few more nanoseconds, ready for college. My income -- freelance writing, child support, a couple of menial part-time jobs -- doesn't cover my current expenses, let alone my retirement or the kids' tuition. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single woman in possession of two teenagers must be in want of a steady paycheck and employer-sponsored health insurance.

My attempt to find work could hardly be more ill-timed, with unemployment near 10 percent, with the newspaper industry that once employed me seemingly going the way of blacksmithing. And though I have tried to scrub age-revealing details from my résumé, let's just say my work history is long enough to be a liability, making me simultaneously overqualified and underqualified.

Does self-help breed helplessness?

Thu, 05 Jul 2007 11:08:00 +0000

Jennifer Niesslein was living the kind of life people have in mind when they talk about the American dream. At age 32, she had a nice husband, a son, a big new house, a creative career and a growing business as co-editor and co-founder of the alternative parenting magazine Brain, Child -- and enough money that, well, her family didn't have to worry much about money.

Still, she wasn't quite satisfied. The house was a mess. She found herself overreacting to trivial things. Her kid had typical kid problems. She hadn't given much thought to retirement planning. She thought she could stand to lose a few pounds. It wasn't that she was unhappy, exactly -- but was she really, truly happy?

In search of an answer, Niesslein did what many Americans do when their lives need a few tweaks or an all-out overhaul: She turned to self-help experts. A slew of them, in fact, including personal-finance guru Suze Orman; natural health advocate Dr. Andrew Weil; relationship advisors Drs. Phil McGraw and Laura Schlessinger; and the granddaddy of self-help himself, Dale Carnegie, author of the 1936 "How to Win Friends and Influence People."

Trying to control the controller

Thu, 07 Jul 2005 18:27:00 +0000

"I just killed somebody!" I scream.

"Sweet," says my 9-year-old son, beside me on the sofa. "I haven't killed one person yet."

I fire another round. I haven't played a video game since Pac-Man was big, never so much as held a controller except to vacuum under it. Now, two minutes into "Star Wars: Battlefront," and I own this game. There's me, a white-helmeted battle droid, sprinting through a hail of bullets on the planet Naboo, blasting away at robots and clone troopers.

"Just kill everyone in sight, Mom," Jack advises.

Until now, I've never had any interest in playing a video game. Like many parents, I regard them with a queasy tolerance. I'd prefer my sons spent more time reading, playing outside, interacting with the real world. I've heard the warnings: video games are violent, addictive, that playing them makes kids fat.

But I have also wondered whether the experts' misgivings -- and, for that matter, my own -- stem from simple middle-aged skepticism toward the newfangled, suffused with nostalgia for lower-tech childhoods of the past.

Mommy madness

Wed, 23 Feb 2005 20:24:00 +0000

Playing Mozart to fetuses. Waving flashcards at infants. Indulging preschoolers with back-straining, eye-glazing "floor time." Hauling school kids around to a dizzying whirl of extracurricular lessons and activities. Tossing everything else aside in order to shower children with nonstop attention and encouragement and enrichment and self-esteem enhancement and, and...

Have today's mothers gone crazy?

Yes, in a way, according to Judith Warner's buzz-generating new book, "Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety." Warner warns, on the basis of media reports, sociological studies, historical analysis and her own interviews with 150 women, that middle- and upper-middle-class mothers have gone off the deep end trying to do everything right. Whether they're working in paid jobs or staying home with their children or some combination of the two, the overwhelming pressure of trying to orchestrate an ideal upbringing exhausts women, messes up marriages, and spoils children, she says. It leaves women feeling "a widespread, choking cocktail of guilt and anxiety and resentment and regret."

Yes, I’ve had tarry bowel movements! So what?

Wed, 29 Sep 2004 19:34:00 +0000

One day back in eighth-grade social studies, my teacher told the class to set aside our usual work because we'd be taking a special test. We were handed several pages of bizarre, intrusive, out-of-nowhere questions that seemed unrelated to social studies or anything else. Perplexed but obedient, we filled in the answers. As far as I recall, we never saw the results or knew how they were used.

Reading Annie Murphy Paul's new book, "The Cult of Personality: How Personality Tests Are Leading Us to Miseducate Our Children, Mismanage Our Companies, and Misunderstand Ourselves," I gathered that the baffling test I was given years ago was the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, or one of its many variants. The MMPI is the world's most widely used clinical personality test, administered to an estimated 15 million Americans each year. The original version (it was revised in the late 1980s) contained 504 true-or-false statements, many of them even stranger than I remembered. "I believe my sins are unpardonable"; "Everything tastes the same"; "Often I feel as if there were a tight band around my head." Then, Paul says, there's one that many who take the test can quote word-for-word years later: "I have never had any black, tarry-looking bowel movements."

Beyond Harvard and the SATs

Thu, 05 Aug 2004 17:10:00 +0000

Beth Kephart, a literary nonfiction writer, loves reading so much that she devours several books a week. But her son, Jeremy, did not automatically follow suit: He preferred listening to Kephart read aloud to doing it on his own. At 9, he was unimpressed by the novels his mother had loved as a kid -- classics like "Charlotte's Web" -- preferring instead to read nonfiction about knights and cars and airplanes.

"I didn't mind, I just wanted to broaden him," Kephart says. She sees literature -- along with music, art and other creative fields -- as a way kids can learn to understand life's large issues, "to ask the big questions and to look to themselves for answers." So she gave Jeremy ample time and gentle encouragement until, eventually, he began to read novels on his own, to write stories and poems, even to make his own movies. Not in pursuit of grades or test scores or admission to exclusive schools, but for fun.

Trashing the Hallmark card mom

Fri, 21 May 2004 21:21:00 +0000

To celebrate Mother's Day this year, the national group Mothers and More held a contest inviting members to submit particularly gag-inducing media images of mothers. Chosen among the worst was a newspaper column by J.D. Mullane in the Bucks County (Pa.) Courier Times, bashing "make-believe moms" with the nerve to plunk their kids in child-care programs while taking time for themselves: "Real moms do the heavy lifting of child care ... and the grunt work of lugging the kids around while running errands and shopping."

Mothers and More was appalled -- not by the concept of these supposedly self-indulgent moms, but by the (ahem, male) columnist granting himself the right to judge their authenticity.

"Apparently this writer believes that a 'real mom' ... must wear her children around her neck 24/7 as some sort of badge of selfless commitment," shot back a Web site commentary.

Is “Barney” destroying my kids’ brains?

Fri, 07 May 2004 18:45:00 +0000

I first heard about the study linking TV watching to attention-deficit (hyperactivity) disorder while, fittingly enough, watching TV. "Very scary," Katie Couric called it on NBC's "Today." Indeed. Something sank in my chest as Couric and a psychologist (not one involved in the research) discussed the implication that television can "rewire" the brains of young children and cause them to develop ADHD.

My first thought was, "Oh my God, I bet I've wrecked my kids."

My second thought was, "Oh my God, I bet they're confusing correlation with causation again."

Or so I assumed.

The study itself, reported last month in the journal Pediatrics, hardly offers smoking-gun evidence that television causes brain damage. Researchers at the Children's Hospital and Regional Medical Center in Seattle examined massive, government-sponsored health surveys of more than a thousand children, conducted over the past 25 years, which asked parents (among other things) about their children's TV-viewing habits at ages 1 and 3, and then, four years later, whether their children were impulsive, obsessive, restless, easily confused or had difficulty concentrating. Turned out the more TV the kids reportedly watched as preschoolers, the more often they were described as having those behavioral problems at 7.

Mommy mail

Tue, 02 Dec 2003 17:28:00 +0000

I gather I'm supposed to be -- what, amused? touched? -- right from the e-mail message's opening line:

"This is for all the mothers who have sat up all night with sick toddlers in their arms, wiping up barf laced with Kraft dinner and wieners, birthday cake and cherry Kool-Aid, saying, 'It's OK honey, Mommy's here.'"

Whatever reaction this provokes, it seems intended to be positive. It's supposed to be inspirational, to make me feel good about being a mom. If regurgitated junk food doesn't do the trick, I'm invited to savor other poignant moments: Walking the floors with a colicky infant. Shivering on the sidelines at kids' sporting events. Trying to subdue a screaming toddler in the grocery store...

In case these mothering challenges are wearing me down, the message -- which I received several times this year, under titles such as "Motherhood" and "Happy Mother's Day" -- offers encouragement. "Hang in there," it says.

Paeans to motherhood have been popping up in my e-mail in box for years -- ever since I had kids and got online, which happened at roughly the same time. Some are full of wisecracks, like Erma Bombeck or Roseanne. But most are sentimental, waxing syrupy amid the puddles of vomit. This one started out as a column in a small-city newspaper, where its tone was more cheerfully empathetic and less aggressively saccharine. As it made its way through cyberspace, it was embellished and rearranged on who-knows-how-many keyboards.

Parents on the verge of a nervous breakdown

Tue, 20 May 2003 15:55:00 +0000

I used to be a fairly easygoing person, but becoming a mother threw me into a state of low-grade but chronic anxiety. I fretted over my two sons' refusal to eat vegetables, their sibling battles, their taste for violent cartoons. Problems seemed to be evidence not that my children were normal flawed human beings but that I was a bad mom for not fixing them. I was frazzled when they misbehaved but remorseful when I yelled. If I let the boys play in front of the TV set while I grabbed half an hour of peace -- OK, God help me, an hour -- with a cup of tea and a magazine, I couldn't really relax. I feared I was dooming them to lives of, well, I wasn't sure exactly what, but I worried about it anyway.

In occasional lucid moments, I wondered why I should feel selfish for wanting time to myself, evil for every perceived misstep, and personally at fault for my children's failure to be perfect. Besides, my kids were healthy, bright and cute, so what was my problem? When I finally began to figure it out, I felt like the horror-movie baby sitter who finds out the threatening phone calls are coming from inside the house.