Jessica Grose on Motherhood in America

Image via @jessamine.chan.

By Leslie Price

What are some of the more surprising, pervasive, or hard-to-shake myths about motherhood you uncovered while researching this book?

The stuff that was really surprising to me was around pregnancy. We didn't really understand how babies were made until the end of the 19th century. So all of the ideas about what was good for mothers while they were pregnant were based on nothing. The details are so funny, like the idea of maternal impressions, which is if you look at something while pregnant, it can influence the way the baby looks.

If you look at a man who's not your husband, the baby could look like that man. Or if you look at a frog the wrong way at the wrong time, your baby would look like a frog. That sort of stuff. It was about controlling women's behavior while pregnant. Even if the details change, that desire to ascribe power to pregnant women and take it away from them was there.

It was perverted during the mid-20th century with psychiatrists and psychologists saying, basically, if you did anything or showed any emotion that was not pure joy and happiness while you were pregnant, there was something wrong with you. You were neurotic and you could destroy your baby. We know those things are not true anymore, but those myths still influence women and make them feel terrible about themselves while they're pregnant, which is a period of time where you often just don't feel your best. [That’s] how far back those ideas stretch, and the way that they shape-shifted over time. The other aspect that really surprised me was when one sort of pernicious idea would be backed away from or disproven, the culture found a new way to enforce it. Which is a bummer, but totally fascinating. 

I was struck by the idea of “total motherhood,” which is still present in our society, even if we aren't explicit about it. The other myth I find interesting is that women – even if they don't want to have a baby – will love being a mother and just transform themselves. Both of those concepts are so powerful.

The crux is when you become a mother, you're kind of not allowed the whole spectrum of human emotions in the same way you might have before. That's unrealistic, because we all have multiple feelings about everything that happens to us in life. I talk about that in the conclusion a lot, trying to get comfortable with your ambivalence. That holds true for marriage, too. People have an unrealistic idea of how these huge life choices are going to affect us, almost a fairytale of what it should look like that doesn't comport with humanity. We all are imperfect, and most people are just trying to do their best by themselves and their kids on a day-to-day basis. That is hard and it would be weird if it felt effortless because it's so much work.

We’re still the same people, for good and for bad, that we were before we became parents.

You talk with women who have to make compromises when they have children and are surprised by how little support there is for parents. That is present in many ways: the school day ending in the early afternoon, various holidays where kids don't have school, summer, the lack of childcare options for younger kids, the lack of paid leave, etc. Everyone’s kind of cognizant of this, but it's hard to fully understand the impact of it until you have children and you have to fill all of this time – especially if you don't have help.

People are forced to figure out individual solutions, and so we're not all taking to the streets saying, “This is crazy. Why is our school calendar structured like this?” Do you feel like there is a way for parents to come together to fix this? 

It has to happen locally, as micro as you can make it, because our federal government is definitely not in a place where it's going to move forward on these things. Part of that is because we have minority rule, and people who don't represent the majority of Americans have outsized control over the laws that get passed. More specifically, I would say there’s like 20% of Americans who are very conservative, don't believe that women should be working when they have young children, and don't believe that the government has a role to play in the care of very young children.

I call myself an optimistic realist, because I don't find despair helpful. Just try to get involved as locally as possible, even if it’s helping the after-school program at your kids' school. I hesitate to ask parents of young children to do any more than they're already doing, but you won't always have young kids. And so, 10 years from now, when you have more bandwidth, or if we get to retire (I feel like our generation will never get to retire), remember what it was like. 

It can feel like there are not enough people doing this work, because we don't see things moving in the right direction as rapidly as we would like to. But every day, I interview people who are doing this work. Every single day. And there are more of them than you think, and they're so smart. I feel like not being at least a little hopeful about it is almost disrespectful to them, you know? But are there days where I'm like, Wow, we're all going to be screwed forever.

When you have a kid, the feeling of… I guess betrayal is one of the feelings…it's almost shocking. Because by having a child, and spending so much time and effort and money and all the things you're doing to raise a child, you're helping the country by, you know, creating life and raising the people who will populate this country and do work in the future. But children are seen as a bother.

Not only are you not getting any support, but you’re penalized in ways big and small. There’s the judgment and just this negativity about children. How can we make that change? How can we make it seem like children aren't an imposition, and that women who have children aren't to be looked down upon?

It's always like, be the change you want to see in the world. These huge cultural shifts take time. This is a particularly American problem because we are so deeply individualistic as a nation, and so we don't want to help anyone, not just children. And we don't accept disturbance in any way. The disdain for children in public spaces is part of that. If I see someone struggling with a stroller, I always try to help them. If I see a kid at the grocery store, I'll play peekaboo with them.

Those tiny things, they seem inconsequential, but there have been so many times where your kid is having a public meltdown and you feel like the world's biggest asshole. It's always a grandma type who offers a kind word or generosity.

We're also used to being in a defensive crouch, right? We assume that we're never going to get any help and we can never make it work. Ask for help.

Writing the book helped you with your feelings around pregnancy. Did it recast any of your other experiences in a new light?

I feel way less guilt about working than I think a lot of people do. I never thought I wouldn't continue working, and I don't feel bad about it. There have been times where there were conflicts and it was stressful, but I was grateful that I did not feel that particular kind of mom guilt.

The pregnancy was the hardest part of motherhood for me, because it was so disastrous. Of course, it could have been way worse. I'm very grateful that I got healthy babies at the end of it, but it was not a good time for me. It was a really hard chapter to write, going back to that period where everything was quite frightening. Writing it down helped me to realize that your health is not fully under your control [Grose suffered from hyperemesis gravidarum during both of her pregnancies]. My kids are fine, it's fine. I'm always going back and saying, “Could I have done this differently? Could I have done that differently?” And it was like, no, you couldn't have done anything differently. You didn't do anything wrong. There's nothing to be embarrassed about.

Pregnancy is so hard, even if you don't have an uncontrollable vomiting condition. I hated being pregnant. I know some people like it, but it’s harder than you'd expect. 

It is. That was surprising to me. I've been writing about these issues for a while. Often, new moms will say to me, “Why isn't anyone talking about this?” Women have actually been talking about this stuff forever, but no one listens to them. I wasn't thinking about the intricacies of pregnancy before I wanted to be pregnant. You have other things on your mind.

I read so many diaries and letters, and did so much research that didn't end up in the book. There is too much to cover and I didn't want to get so deep into it, because I really wanted to talk about modern motherhood. There are many diaries and letters from women hundreds of years ago that were like, “This sucks. I'm miserable.” They didn't say it like that, but that was the takeaway. I also had the idea before I wrote this book that modern life makes it harder to be a mother, that it was easier in the past when things were more agrarian or whatever I told myself. It is frankly not true. They got through it, but it wasn't like they were having a good time. 

You include the pandemic in the book, and you've written about the pandemic and how it affected parents. We're still crawling out of a hole right now, so to speak. What are the glimmers of hope you see when you're talking to women or in your research?

People are way more excited to organize. That is long, hard work. I hope that folks who are new to organizing don't [give up]. I talked to specific women in the book who had been galvanized by the pandemic, or experiences they had prior, to change something about their community and the world. 

There are so, so many people who really took it on the nose during the pandemic and were just getting up and doing it over again every single day. That sort of everydayness that we're all still doing, I find that inspiring. I am actually optimistic that things like paid leave will continue to move forward in our lifetime. Hopefully by the time my kids have kids, if they so choose, they will be in a better space in that regard. There are things I'm less optimistic about, like big changes in childcare. But I do think that societally, we are moving forward very slowly, with stutter steps backwards. It's not linear, but I try to remain optimistic. As a Jewish woman, I'm really bummed at all the antisemitic things that are being said recently. And I don't even know how to process them. It's really shocking. I will say, I think having kids at all is optimistic. Not everyone is free to make that choice, unfortunately. But if you are lucky enough to have the choice, it is an optimistic one.

I was interviewing historian Alice Kessler Harris, who I think is in her eighties, and she was just like, get over yourself. You realize how much change has happened in the last 50 years? My mom got married in 1972. She could not have bought a house in her own name. My own mother. That's part of why I really wanted to include all that history, because it shows that, despite the perniciousness and persistence of some of these ideas, we really have moved forward a profound amount in the past 200 years.