‘Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety’ an Exploration of Feeling

Judith Warner’s critique on motherhood begins by stating what it is not. Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety is not a scholarly history, not a self-help manual, not a treatise on the work-family conflict. It is neither pedagogy on how to raise children right nor an avocation for policy. Rather, Perfect Madness is an “exploration of feeling,” an observation of what happens to mothers caught in the “tyranny of the should,” mothers teetering on the edge, slowly being poisoned by a “choking cocktail of guilt and anxiety an resentment and regret.”

Positioned as a second coming of the Feminine Mystique adapted to today’s fear-laden, psycho-analytical Generation X, Perfect Madness introduces “the mess” as the new problem and substitutes the “feminine mystique” for one of the “mommy.” But Betty Freidan Warner is not.

Warner argues that something is amiss in America. Mothers are consumed by a “push to be perfect,” obsessed with making “informed decisions” on behalf of their children. Choosing formula over breast milk may mean the difference in IQ points, for example. Not engaging in “positive mirroring” might engender abandonment issues and failing to chauffer kids to a host of extra-curricular activities could relegate a child’s acceptance to a mere third-rate college. Wah wah wah.

Warner noticed this maternal mess when she returned to the United States from France where the author was seemingly able to “have it all” — flexible working hours and excellent low-cost childcare. That balance and material government support is lacking in the States Warner argues and its forcing women to choose – between work and family, between their families and themselves. It’s a choice that engenders nothing but guilt and it’s a choice, Warner argues, that doesn’t have to be made.

In writing her book, the author interviewed 150 middle-class mothers. Some were stay-at-home-moms, others worked full time; most were white, many were African American; the majority lived in Washington, D.C or its surrounding suburbs. It’s easy to speculate that the malaise Warner found in the D.C. Metro area would undoubtedly be present in regions, yet narrowcasting that testimony undermines the potential power of the work and the author herself. Ditto using France as the only offered ideal archetype.

While Warner draws some astute connections — that this rise in “maternal over-achievement” and control-freak parenting stems from American culture’s pernicious obsession with diet, that we have begun to privatize and internalize social issues, and that mothers today “communicate to our kids all our anxiety, our competitiveness, and our narcissism,” creating a new bread of worry-warts, Perfect Madness makes women out to be needy and neurotic and unsatisfied with being average. What is worse, she makes women unsatisfied with having average kids.

Moreover, is this “mommy mystique” really new? Are mothers actually mad in the Frances Farmer connotation of the word or are women just plain pissed off? And if women are merely angry, then is that any different than the anger Sylvia Plath or Anne Sexton felt forty years ago when they were plagued by a similar feeling of “too muchness,” when they too wanted the career and the children and were asked to make a choice? Now Warner says our problem is we have too many choices or not the right choices. Well when does it ever stop?

We can say that we want everything and nothing at the same time, but does that make right or logical? We can stand around hand-in-hand and burn our bras and complain and complain and complain, vut when is enough enough? When do you lose the moment for the cause? Or the cause for the complaint? In many ways, Warner’s book typifies the very problem it addresses. Just because we should never settle does not mean being satisfied is synonomus with failure.