Looking Like a Mother
You find it on many mom blogs--some kind of admonition that all of us moms (especially if we are religious and have more than two children) get our acts together and go out in public not looking too “weird”. We should dress stylishly, put on some make up, do something with our hair. This is framed as some kind of evangelization tool.
Which is crap. It’s just the same old woman on woman shaming. It’s especially bad when this line of thinking is presented as an act of charity for those “who have to look at you.”
When this comes from other mothers of big families, it’s just intolerable cruelty. I don’t know about any other women, but when I look like a wreck, it’s not because I want to. It’s because there’s some kind of crisis--teething baby, sick kid, husband working unexpectedly meaning solo parenting--all or any of which could combine to create a back up in the laundry or just suck up any time I was counting on to make myself presentable. The last thing I need in those moments of maximum stress is someone lecturing me about letting Team Big Family down in public.
My experience as a mother of four in Los Angeles is that I am actually invisible. If I go out in public with all my children, people only see FOUR (4!!!) OMG FOUR KIDS!! More than a kid or two in public is just so overwhelmingly weird that no one notices me as a person at all. And even if I was perfectly coifed, having FOUR (really? are they all yours? are you going to have more?) FOUR KIDS!!! makes me too much of a weirdo to ever recover and be seen as “normal”.
I often compare motherhood to my stint as a grad student. When I was busy working on a paper or presentation or studying for an exam, I often looked like death warmed over. Dark circles under my eyes, messy hair, yoga pants and a hoodie. But no one ever suggested I should give up grad school because I looked like something the cat dragged in. It was understood that sometimes there was a lot of work, which was important, and looking put-together was just not a priority at those times.
Why don’t we extend the same grace to mothers? It’s hard enough to keep everything together and rolling along reasonably well. Shaming one another for going to the grocery store without make up or wearing yesterday’s yoga pants just doesn’t help. And it does nothing to build a culture that supports families. It’s simply another way of enforcing impossible norms of beauty, which are antithetical to a respect for childbearing and child raising. It’s accepting the insane position of our culture about how women should look and passing it off as charity or evangelizing. I’m pretty sure it makes Baby Jesus cry.
Which is crap. It’s just the same old woman on woman shaming. It’s especially bad when this line of thinking is presented as an act of charity for those “who have to look at you.”
When this comes from other mothers of big families, it’s just intolerable cruelty. I don’t know about any other women, but when I look like a wreck, it’s not because I want to. It’s because there’s some kind of crisis--teething baby, sick kid, husband working unexpectedly meaning solo parenting--all or any of which could combine to create a back up in the laundry or just suck up any time I was counting on to make myself presentable. The last thing I need in those moments of maximum stress is someone lecturing me about letting Team Big Family down in public.
My experience as a mother of four in Los Angeles is that I am actually invisible. If I go out in public with all my children, people only see FOUR (4!!!) OMG FOUR KIDS!! More than a kid or two in public is just so overwhelmingly weird that no one notices me as a person at all. And even if I was perfectly coifed, having FOUR (really? are they all yours? are you going to have more?) FOUR KIDS!!! makes me too much of a weirdo to ever recover and be seen as “normal”.
I often compare motherhood to my stint as a grad student. When I was busy working on a paper or presentation or studying for an exam, I often looked like death warmed over. Dark circles under my eyes, messy hair, yoga pants and a hoodie. But no one ever suggested I should give up grad school because I looked like something the cat dragged in. It was understood that sometimes there was a lot of work, which was important, and looking put-together was just not a priority at those times.
Why don’t we extend the same grace to mothers? It’s hard enough to keep everything together and rolling along reasonably well. Shaming one another for going to the grocery store without make up or wearing yesterday’s yoga pants just doesn’t help. And it does nothing to build a culture that supports families. It’s simply another way of enforcing impossible norms of beauty, which are antithetical to a respect for childbearing and child raising. It’s accepting the insane position of our culture about how women should look and passing it off as charity or evangelizing. I’m pretty sure it makes Baby Jesus cry.
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