The Good Mother Myth

NAOMI SHULMAN

a COUPLE OF MONTHS AGO, I RAN INTO Sandy, a woman who used to be a fixture in my everyday life—our kids were in the same toddler playgroup. We never really clicked, but having bumped into each other at a lecture by a local speaker, it would have been socially awkward not to say hi. We fell into polite conversation: How are you? Fine, and you? Fine.

Then things veered off script.

“Naomi, I think of you every Sunday night!” Sandy put in suddenly.

“Really?” I replied.

“You know Downton Abbey?” she asked, breaking into a wide, toothy smile. “You look just like Lady Edith!”

Crash course on Downton Abbey: Lady Edith is the middle of three daughters—the ugly one. With her overbite, weak chin, and rounded shoulders, her homeliness is actually a major plot point. Put bluntly: She’s a dog. (And, no, I don’t look like her.)

Which is why I immediately responded, somewhat incredulously, “You mean the homely one?”

Sandy’s expression didn’t change. “Oh, I don’t think she’s homely,” she insisted. And then the irony overwhelmed me, because the lecture Sandy and I had just sat through for the past hour was all about female social aggression. Rachel Simmons, author of Odd Girl Out and Curse of the Good Girl, had just finished describing the way tween girls wield power by making snide comments, and then accusing the victim of being oversensitive. Simmons kept her talk confined to middle schoolers, but here we were, two grown women, acting out a page from one of her books.

A lot of research on female social aggression focuses on middle school because that’s when things tend to get out of hand. We parents anxiously watch over our daughters (and to some extent our sons) as they navigate the shark-infested waters of junior high school, praying they will emerge unscathed. But a woman of any age likely has a recent anecdote of girl-on-girl social swordplay. Some studies have shown that relational aggression can start in preschool, and it continues all the way to the nursing home, where old biddies pull the same crap one might expect of their great-granddaughters. (“What happens to mean girls? Some of them go on to become mean old ladies,” quipped one nursing home aide to The New York Times in 2011.) Middle school is the classic zenith, but I think there’s another time when social aggression ramps up: early motherhood.

Disclaimer: I am not a social scientist and I have no research to back this up. I do, however, have eyes. Think about it—new mothers are overwhelmed with hormones; our changing bodies feel unfamiliar and weird. We are entering a world of high stakes, and we are often scared. Remind you of anything? Just as in middle school, new parenthood is a time when many of us seek out new friends, not only to relieve the monotony of childcare but also to validate our choices and bolster our insecurities. Tween girls list their friendships as the most important element in their lives, which is why the threat of losing a friend—or worse, being cut off from a group of friends—is such a potent threat at that age. As women mature, we still have close friendships, but we aren’t so deeply invested in them—we focus on career, on dating, on building our lives. Once we get pregnant, however, many of us turn again to our peers—sometimes with the same results we had the last time around.

We operate under the illusion that we have all that social noise under control. Decent moms—decent women—are too mature, too socially evolved, to get all seventh-grade on each other (or, at the very least, too busy). But it was in the throes of new parenthood that I was last dumped, painfully and inexplicably, by a friend I’d made in a postpartum support class. Lonely and freaked out by motherhood, with my marriage rocking at least as precipitously as the proverbial cradle, I leaned on my new mom friendships harder than I had since—well, since I was about twelve. This new friend and I bonded quickly and deeply. It was about cracked nipples and sleep deprivation and rice cereal, yes—but not really. It was really over our sudden transformation from hip young chicks to frazzled young mothers, and over the space of just a few weeks, she became something like a best friend. We managed to get out to the park several times a week; we met for coffee and lunch at relaxed eateries, strollers in tow; we were on the phone pretty much every day, comparing notes about pediatrician visits, laundry pileups, the milestones our babies were hitting.

And looking back, maybe that was part of the problem. We weren’t just comparing notes; we were comparing, period. How much weight did you gain? How much have you lost? How much milk are you producing? Oh, your baby isn’t sitting up yet? Hm. In the attempt to mask our insecurities, even the most grown-up of us fall prey to some seriously immature behavior. I began to sense that my parenting style wasn’t cool enough for my new-mommy friend. When she dumped me, she did it just the way my middle school frenemies had, decades prior: She gave me the silent treatment. My calls and emails went unreturned; I found myself holding my baby in the park, alone.

We see this writ large in national conversations—hello, Mommy Wars! It’s reflected in our books (Bringing Up Bebe, The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother), our movies (I Don’t Know How She Does It). Read the comments at many online parenting sites and you’ll get a strong whiff of junior high. The minute a woman becomes pregnant, every choice she makes, from what she eats to where the baby sleeps to whether she works or stays home, becomes fodder for other mothers to analyze and judge. It is distressingly similar to walking through the halls of your local middle school, feeling critical eyes upon you, hearing the hushed murmurs of other girls making their cruel assessments. Most of those girls feel the same way when they walk through the halls. That’s the point: We judge others to deflect the risk of being judged. And now we’re expected to model healthy interpersonal behavior for our kids.

There’s a flip side, though. Being so invested in my friendships wasn’t all pain; most days, meeting up with my mom posse was a balm. We congregated at child-friendly cafes, the ones that had train tables in the back, and huddled over our lattes, trading stories and support. That woman who dumped me? She was an aberration. By the time my first child was toilet trained and I was pregnant with my second, I was comfortably ensconced in a strong circle of friends—maybe ten of us—with kids the same ages; we met at the family drop-in center several days a week. Every time I walked into the family center, I felt like Norm in Cheers—everyone knew me, I knew everyone, and my grown-up self relaxed into the social stew. I was so enamored with the family center, in fact, that I joined the board.

And it was during a board meeting that the director of the family center brought up a touchy subject. “It seems that some of the new moms coming to visit find this place kind of, um, cliquey,” she said.

“Really? That’s weird,” I said immediately. I had never felt anything but the warmth and ease of total acceptance. “Who said that?”

“Well, I can’t name names,” the director continued. “But, Naomi . . . I think some of them think you and your friends actually are one of those cliques.”

“That’s crazy,” I responded. And then the room fell silent. I heard someone clear their throat.

Could it be true? Anyone who went to middle school with me can tell you I was the furthest thing from a cool kid; I was always a little nerdy, a little clueless. But I had to admit, I didn’t feel nerdy or clueless anymore. I felt . . . popular. I wasn’t actively excluding anyone! I just didn’t have time to be friends with everyone. But is that how it felt to them?

More to the point, is that how it felt to Sandy, the lady of the Downton Abbey comment? Because, as I mentioned, that’s how we first knew each other—seeing one another across the room at the family center, day after day. Did she resent me? Is that why, even years after the onslaught of new motherhood was behind us, we still related to each other with all the wariness and mistrust of middle schoolers?

After that incident at the lecture, I immediately turned to my husband and, yes, my closest friends, who reassured me that I did not look like Lady Edith (as if!) and confirmed my suspicions that Sandy was just being snarky. But I don’t know if it’s that simple. The next day I got a Facebook message from Sandy. “I just wanted to say it was lovely to see you at such a great event last night,” she wrote, “. . . and to let you know that I think you’re quite fetching.”

She’d clearly been thinking about the incident as well, and while she didn’t exactly apologize for the slight, she was aware that what she said made me feel bad. Should I have pressed her to acknowledge the put-down, and let her know I took it personally? Should I have not responded at all, giving her the Facebook equivalent of the silent treatment?

I may have taken one of those courses of action thirty years ago, but I am not actually twelve anymore. I know I have hurt people’s feelings myself (maybe Sandy’s, in fact), and I know we’re all just doing the best we can with the resources we have. And as mothers—adult women who have the power to nurture instead of negate—I like to think we are kinder, more empathetic beings for it, and Sandy’s follow-up message was an example of that. Most importantly, I am my daughters’ first role model in how women relate to other women. So I reread her message, took a deep breath, and wrote back simply, “Thanks, Sandy! It was nice to see you too.” And then I clicked send.