Missing the happiness boat
Charlotte Moore
PERFECT MADNESS by Judith Warner Vermilion, £9.99, pp. 327, ISBN 0091907160 ✆ £7.99 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 ‘C ompetitive and rapacious and amoral and moralising and just plain mad.’ That’s how middle-class American motherhood seemed to Judith Warner when she returned to the ‘pressure cooker’ of Washington DC after having her first child in Paris, where she had enjoyed the readily available support and relaxed attitude to parenting that French mothers apparently take for granted.
Perfect Madness arises from Warner’s conversations with American parents in their thirties and forties — educated, able, affluent people who ought to be leading happy and fulfilled lives. Instead, she finds a society fuelled by neurotic anxiety. She meets intelligent women whose intellectual horizons have narrowed to ‘tracking down the last gram of trans fat in their kids’ crackers’, women who weep as they tell of the strain of ‘trying to replicate Martha Stewart’s online cupcake decorations’, fathers who work 70-plus hours a week to pay for the elaborate luxuries that 21st-century Americans have come to regard as the simple bare necessities of life.
Warner decries the cult of perfectionism, seeing eating disorders, excessive exercising, and obsessions with largely imaginary food intolerances as the dark underside of the expansion of ambition and emphasis on high achievement that in the 1970s appeared to be liberating women. Why, she asks, is it so difficult for women to achieve a healthy work-life balance? She’s not prescriptive about whether mothers should work — ‘I do not think that women should do anything other than remain true to themselves so that they can be happy’ — and believes that government should support individual choice.
The US Constitution recommends ‘the pursuit of happiness’, but happiness competitively pursued is elusive. These control-freak women who run their families like little businesses unwittingly kill the conditions needed for happiness to flourish. The child who plays hockey or the violin or does ballet to quasi-professional standard after school and then tackles four hours of homework has no time for spontaneity or expression of individuality. One mother organises interaction with her children thus: ‘I sat in the family room and one by one I called them in. I said, “Talk to me. How was your day?” ’ Relations between husbands and wives, too, are streamlined to resemble business partnerships. One woman rails against her husband because he won’t write his ‘To Do’ list. And, though the women speak of their ‘wonderful’ husbands, none of them wants to sleep with them. There’s a sense of barely suppressed resentment against husbands for wanting sex at all, once the potentially perfect offspring have been conceived. In emptying themselves out for their children, mothers have destroyed their desire, just as their appetite for food has been distorted by neuroses about health and body image. They can’t even see what’s wrong. Warner’s interviewees ‘sharply disagreed with the idea that lack of sex was a sign of something amiss in their marriages’.
Warner makes a convincing case that denatured, stressed-out mothers create a psychologically unhealthy society. Is Britain heading the same way? She claims that ‘the Age of Anxiety is global’, but unlike Americans we Brits don’t elevate parenting theories to quasi-religious status, nor do we see business practice as the model for personal relationships. Here in rural Sussex, my friends and I are more likely to sit chatting in the garden while our — mainly state-educated — children grub in the mud than to obsess about SATS or cupcake decorations, but my London friends seem much more concerned with extra tuition and tying up every minute of their (mainly privately educated) children’s time with expensive educational activities. And, yes, maternal stress levels are higher.
Warner’s thesis is timely and humane. The core problem, she says, is that ‘because there is ... no widespread feeling of social responsibility ... [mothers] must take everything onto themselves’. And the weight’s too great to bear.
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