I saw that several people on Facebook this weekend were sharing & discussing Heather Havrilesky’s New York Times rant about our cultural uber-focus and pressure on parents, and particularly mothers.
It takes me awhile for my thoughts to coalesce into something I can put on paper (or on screen, rather), and meanwhile, our collective attention span darts away to the next conversation. If you take more than 48 hours to respond, you risk irrelevancy!
If you’re interested in an aspect of this perennial issue that hasn’t been raised yet, read on! Here’s a snippet from Havrilesky’s piece:
We smugly shake our heads at the backward attitudes of Mad Men, but at this particular moment in our history, some combination of overzealous parenting, savvy marketing and glorification of hearth and home have coaxed the public into viewing female parents as a strange breed apart from regular people. You might feel like the same person deep inside, but what the world apparently sees is a woman lugging around a giant umbilical cord.
She seems to suggest that the existential pressures and identity crises of motherhood she so witheringly parodies are unique to this moment in human history. They’re not. {More at mothering.com}
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donjd2 through a Creative Commons license / Flickr
