Last night I read the cover story in the current issue of Newsweek. It talked about the way that women are constantly competing with each other on being Supermoms, and ruining their own sense of self-worth at the same time. A lot of elements reminded me of the book Flux, which I read a couple of years ago. In that book the author discussed how women have been told we can have it all so many times that when the reality of not having enough time to actually do everything hits us, we freak out. The magazine dealt with raising children exclusively while the book handled all the major life stages from marriage (or not) to having kids (or not) to retiring (or not). And while I certainly enjoyed both, and got a lot out of them, I am at the tail end of the generation they were discussing. I can see some familiar things but mostly, I just think, "What a bunch of wackos. There's no logic behind that kind of behavior!"

Last week morrigan commented on this very thing. She also brought up the point that these women so often define themselves only by their children. That is crazy talk. Mr. b and I have repeated, so many times that it's almost a mantra, that you should never let having kids stop you from living your life. Sure, things'll be harder and you'll have to make some sacrifices. But if you, say, convince yourself that you can't go camping anymore because you can't bring your child, then you're smoking crack.

I don't understand the need to go into perfectionist overdrive for kids. There was an episode of Desperate Housewives where Lynette ended up taking her boys' Ritalin just to help her compete with the "alpha mom". At the end of her speed addiction arc she broke down to her friends and complained about how easy they made motherhood look. The big revelation? That it wasn't. That they thought they were going to loose it. But that they kept up appearances.

This kind of keeping up of appearances has got to stop. And it's one of the reasons I'm so upset that in all the calls for more communication between moms about reality and less competition between moms about childcare, there is never any mention of the friend-desertion-during-pregnancy phenomena. How can we share our experiences when our supposedly closest friends won't even stick it out during the first stage? Yes, we can commiserate with our friends that already have kids, or Get It even if they don't have any. But from afar, those deserters are going to see a false picture of perfection because they won't be in the dialogue about how much things can suck. And then the cycle repeats itself.

I was in a lot of activities when I was a kid. I had chores to do. But I also had a lot of unstructured free time. I can't imagine trying to fill up my child's every waking second with bullshit to try to get them into college. Some people aren't cut out for college. And there is no way you can know if your infant is going to be one of them. Or your toddler. Or even your elementary school student. The quality time versus quantity time argument is as fraught with logical fallacies as the nature versus nuture argument. All I know is that I'm going to do what makes sense. Common sense people. Let's rediscover it. It makes life so much easier.