Let's complain about parenting

A member of one of my parent groups posted this NPR article, Parenthood Got You Down? You're not Alone, whose author, Alan Greenblatt, writes about how tough, incredibly tough, parenting is, yet no one wants to admit it. Parents, he writes, "feel the need to extol the joy a child has brought into their lives," and "admitting that the kids are wearing you down [...] seems to be taken as some kind of statement that you don't love them." He thinks we'd feel less alone if we didn't feel the need to affirm the belief that we love everything about parenting and could just be honest with each other.

I could have written this same article about being a stay-at-home mom. While I have many friends, male and female, who are honest about the realities of being a parent, get a group of stay-at-home moms together and sometimes it sounds like everyone is towing the party line. "Being a mommy is the best job!" "Staying home with him was the best decision I ever made." "I couldn't imagine not being there for her."

We do talk about the challenges of parenting and no topic is verboten - breastfeeding, toilet training, sleep deprivation, tantrums, and sometimes even the monotany and frustration of spending your whole day with kids whose vocabularly doesn't extend much beyond "No!" and "Mine!" But to go beyond saying you wonder what you got yourself into becoming a parent and admitting you question becoming a stay-at-home mom, that conversation just doesn't happen.

Has no one else ever struggled with an identity crisis after trading career for stay-at-home parenting? Aren't there some days that make you want to scream in frustration too? Aren't you still coming to terms with the reality that being a stay-at-home is NOTHING like you thought it would be? Does no other stay-at-home mom question the reason(s) she decided to stay home in the first place? Don't you also get lonely?

I wonder if talking about these deepest darkest secrets of stay-at-home parenting can be interperted, like parenting in general, as not loving your kids. But more is at stake. Most of us stay-at-home moms today chose this path, in contrast to our grandmothers who may have not had many, or any, other options and to our own mothers, many of whom overcame societal and logstical obstacles to have careers. Having choices when it comes to families and careers is good, but I feel like we're left defending that choice, whether we chose to stay at home or continue working after having kids. To complain or admit that we're not always happy is threatening to our own strongly-held beliefs that staying home with our kids is what is "best" or "right."

Greenblatt concludes his article about parenting with:

Let's make a deal. Let's be honest with each other, or at least one friend, that there are times when the whole enterprise feels like a bad idea. Let's be less alone with this and maybe even laugh about it, putting aside for just a few minutes the earnest need always to say, omigod it's so great.

Maybe us moms can try to do the same when talking about the joys and challenges of staying home with our kids.