Peace in the Kingdom

Over the last decade, much ink has been spilled chronicling the Mommy Wars. Breast vs. bottle, attachment vs. cry-it-out, Sears vs. Ferber, stay-at-home vs. back-to-work; there seems to be no end to the wedge issues purporting to undermine the ancient alliance of mothers.  As popular culture would have it, the modern maternal journey is littered with minefields everywhere we turn.  Whether it's Leslie Bennetts lambasting stay-at-home mothers as irresponsible or Caitlin Flanagan slamming those who work, the aftertaste is always one of contempt even as they both claim the mantle of feminism.  My grandmother was one of the first women to soldier through Boalt Law School in the 1930's, deflecting resistance everywhere she turned in order to take her rightful place.  Did she and other pioneering feminists fight their battles only to see feminism devolve into a joyless choice between corporate servitude and domestic slavery?

It all seemed pretty tragic to me a year ago as I was counting down the days to my due date, a steady drumbeat of inflammatory books creating unwelcome background noise for my inexorable march toward motherhood.  After all, didn't mothers have a long history of pulling together during challenging situations, as laid out beautifully in Anita Diamant's The Red Tent?  My mother-in-law told me stories of La Leche League's empowering nursing circles of the 70's, forging a community of mothers supporting mothers.  I remembered my mother's enduring friendships with other mothers - the ones who sat with her, read her novels and helped care for her in her last days.  My childhood was steeped in the influence of a firmly united Mommy Corps who didn't need to knock before coming into each other's homes and acted as surrogate eyes and ears for all of us kids.  Was it all disintegrating in the face of too many demands on the modern family in our fast-paced, increasingly connected world?  Had the united front really given way to entrenched open warfare?

With most money, power and influence in history, couldn't we mommies get it together?  Our birth instructor assured us that we were living in the best time and place in the history of the world to have a baby, and that all this power gave us tremendous leverage in the delivery room.  But what would happen afterward?  Would we bring our babies into the world in pain-controlled dignity only to be dragged into the mucky Mommy Wars before we even left the hospital?  Would playgroups be filled with passive-aggressive backbiting and discord amid the blankies and Hooter Hiders?  Would friendships forged in the workplace wither on the vine as we took different paths? And later, would stints chaperoning school field trips devolve into working moms and stay-at-home moms justifying their existence by attacking each other's choices? 

Yet my actual experience as a mother has belied the trumped-up tensions I'm supposed to be feeling as I venture with my son out into the world. As E.J. Graff wrote in the New York Times a few months after I gave birth (and sadly didn't have time to read its reassuring salve), the Mommy Wars are lucrative for the purveyors of the books, articles, and talk shows that stoke the flames, but most women manage to be more circumspect about each other's choices.

It's true that many women still find it hard to actually talk about their choices without infusing criticism of the path not taken.  It's often the second part of explaining choices that goes for the jugular: "I enjoy staying at home with Charlie; I could never leave him all day with strangers."  "I find working outside the home fulfilling; I need to feel like I'm doing something with my day."  The floor-hogging moderator of my hospital's "support group" looked visibly uncomfortable when I breastfed my two-month-old on demand as she reprovingly enumerated the virtues of putting babies on a firm schedule.  And it's true that long before it's germane to the conversation, working women I've encountered at my local Starbucks have abruptly asked me whether I stay home with my son and can't always mask their disapproval of my choice, no matter how mightily I try to deliver the offending news without affect or judgement.

But most mothers I know realize that the bond that unites us goes deeper than all of this hooey.  That there are many ways to raise a great kid, and the vast majority of mothers and fathers are just trying to do the best they can for their families.  

My mothers' group is a shining example of this.  Although we were born on four different continents, speak seven languages among us, and fifteen years separate our oldest and youngest members, the bond of motherhood trumps it all.  Last fall, a mother who bottle-fed her baby from day one had no trouble lending a supportive ear to a mother with mastitis, sharing great suggestions that had worked for her sister.  Last week, a mother who co-sleeps with her baby listened empathetically to the story of a rough night in the home of a Ferber devotee.  The fact that most of us stay at home didn't prevent us from supporting a fellow mother through a recent crisis at work.  And we're all far too practical to become invested in which baby hits each milestone when; no one actually thinks a few extra weeks or months of crawling will make or break any of them.

Smart moms realize that others' choices are not referenda on their own.  That love is the most important currency in raising children, and the exchange rate is forgiving as we traverse the public and domestic spheres.  That different circumstances warrant different choices, and the ones we make today are not necessarily forever.  Witty moms make light of it.  And the smartest moms realize that the really prickly topics require carefully chosen language and extra empathy.  One by one, we declare peace.

The women in our group have grown closer as we've shared in the age-old rites of new-mother hazing: being pooped, peed and spit up on in the span of five minutes, navigating raging hormones when we are least equipped to do so, and coping with the 700-hour sleep deficit the average American woman accumulates in that first mind-blowing year.  There's a commonality among us that disallows reducing each other to caricature.  We all understand the exhaustion of waking up twenty times in a night to care for a sick child, the joyful nostalgia of looking back on photos of our child just a few months earlier, and the vulnerability that takes hold as we straddle the fence between protecting our babies and letting them spread their wings.  Not quite sure of our footing yet as mothers, we all second-guess ourselves even as our experiences teach us again and again that our instincts speak the truth.  Through it all, a brand new community of mothers has asserted itself despite what the mommy warriors' highly profitable cottage industry would have us believe.  We are, in fact, at peace.

And we've grown to love each others' babies.  I now understand the anguish my cousin, a wonderful mother of two, felt when this horrific tragedy befell a family in her daughter's playgroup, and the happiness she felt when joyful news brought healing and renewal.  I now know exactly how those other babies become precious as the weeks turn into months and we see firsthand their first tentative forays into the Beloved Community we're creating for them.  We steady them when they stumble, ensure their fair share of the toy reserve, make silly faces to elicit heart-melting smiles, and steer them away from those stubborn bastions of unbabyproofed mischief they always seem to gravitate toward.  We love, entertain, and protect them, and in doing so echo generations of mothers before us in creating anew the most fundamental undergirds of community.  They deserve it.  After all, they are the reasons for the peace.