Mommy madness

How did you become aware of it and manage to extricate yourself?

The awareness was immediate, because the culture shock hit me right away. And because of that, I had the gift of having something of a more anthropological perspective than I would have had if I'd never left the country, where this would have just been normal life and I would have been sucked in to it without thinking.

And I would say that working on the book, in a way, helped me from being completely sucked under. Once I was thinking about these issues and making them a conscious thing rather than something I should just live through, then life became material. And when life becomes material, it's a lot more controllable and the pressures become less toxic, because you have this distance toward everything at the same time that you're going through it.

But I'm still not outside of these pressures. I listen to the stories women tell and I totally identify with them. There are new pressures that come up all the time, and it is incredibly difficult to stay centered as a parent.

What kinds of pressures?

As my kids get older, there are social pressures that kick in. How many sleepovers are the right number of sleepovers? How many activities should my daughter be doing in a given week? I live in a well-off community, so people can afford to do lots of stuff, and they invite my daughter to do them. Fortunately, in a sense, I can say, "No, sorry, we can't afford to have you do ice skating, horseback riding, swimming lessons, violin and whatever else simultaneously. So you've got to make choices."

The higher up you go on the socioeconomic spectrum, the more ridiculous it gets, because there's more money and time to be spent on things.

Other women who have written about these issues -- for example, Naomi Wolf in her book "Misconceptions: Truth, Lies and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood" -- have been criticized for focusing on problems experienced primarily by middle- and upper-middle-class women. But you decided very deliberately to do so: You interviewed women in that demographic, and your analysis focuses on issues affecting that demographic. Why?

I think of myself as a middle-class person. I live in a middle- to upper-middle-class area. My book sprang from personal observation of the world around me. I also became very interested in comparing the lives of women today with those described in [Betty Friedan's 1963 classic] "The Feminine Mystique." I became interested in looking back in time, not just of the conditions women were living in but also at their inner world. It became clear to me that it was consistent to keep that focus on the middle class, because that was where the focus has been always, in the mainstream women's magazines and women's writing, and in the question of motherhood from the 1960s onward.

I also realize that one book can't do everything. I would have liked in the book to write more about working-class women and poor women, but there was only so much I could do in this particular book.

The image of the hyper-intensive mother still contradicts a widespread stereotype of contemporary motherhood. People assume that since so many mothers are working at paid jobs, they're doing far less for their children than they used to.

There are a couple of studies that show that mothers today actually spend about the same amount of one-on-one-time with their kids as mothers did in the past, because they've upped the intensity of their mothering so much. One generation back, our mothers didn't put the same pressures on themselves to be sitting on the floor, building with Legos. They were ironing or gardening or cooking dinner or talking on the phone, and not feeling guilty about doing that.

Yet, we don't have a sense of being abused by mothers who didn't do enough "floor time."

No. Absolutely not. The bad memories that women seem to have, interestingly enough, is of overinvolved mothers who were frustrated and unhappy with their lives and who were overinvested in their children as a result.

There were also a certain number of women I talked to who grew up under more modest circumstances, whose mothers worked at a time when a minority of mothers worked. It became a real ambition for them to be stay-at-home moms because they remembered coming home in the afternoon after school to an empty house, and they remembered a mother -- often a single mother -- who was scrambling, never having enough money, getting fired from jobs when she tried to be with her kids or go to doctor's appointments and things like that. And they reacted to that and said they did not want that kind of life for their kids.

The predicament of modern mothers is sometimes referred to "the unfinished business of feminism." Did feminists drop the ball on this?

It isn't fair to say that they dropped the ball entirely. I think there has always been a kind of tension on this issue, because at the outset there was this desire to get away from seeing women in their traditional roles and certainly not to have them defined -- legally and professionally -- by their biology. This was the thing to accomplish. So in pursuit of that goal, you didn't want to have too much emphasis on women's roles as mothers, because those roles were limiting them, in the popular imagination, in what they could do with their lives.

Over the years, there were always calls for better childcare, for a greater valorization of the roles of mothers, that kind of thing. But I think what happened is that the abortion issue became so big, it became the major battlefield, and I think that everything else got kind of crammed to the side.

But it's unfair to the people who were working in women's movement throughout the '70s and '80s and '90s to say that they dropped the ball on motherhood.

Next page: Trying to get fathers to do their fair share is a lost cause