The Conspiracy to Keep Women Busy ™ – Part 342 : The Mom Police
When a kid turns up to school with scruffy hair and wearing mismatched clothing, nobody, and I mean nobody, is going to say “What was the dad thinking, sending the kid to school like that?”.
If it was indeed the dad who got the kids ready, the surrounding world admires him for knowing that kids need to wear clothes in the first place. (Yes, it appears some people don’t think much of men’s brains, which I find rather sad). When a woman takes her kids to school in that state – wait, we don’t take our kids to school in that state. We will knock ourselves out to not take our kids to school in that state, because we fear the repercussions.
What repercussions? The repercussions from … the Mom Police!
Who are the Mom Police?
They’re the people who will blame us if we step out of line the slightest bit. They live in our neighborhoods; they pop out at us from magazines; they haunt social media. Sometimes they are only visible out of the corner of our eyes. They fade out of sight the moment we try to look them in the face, but the moment we look away, they are there!
Why this term, using the word “mom”, when it’s common for a woman to experience female-specific expectations that aren’t related to any kids she may or may not have? For example, the expectation to provide relationship counseling to male friends and colleagues. Or being a reminder service to male partners. I thought about this for a while, because the term “mom” seems so appropriate to me regardless. It’s because those expectations implicitly place women in a “mom” role.
The Mom Police will blame us if our kids aren’t attending music lessons and practicing each day. They will come to us asking for things to be fixed if your partner failed to send holiday cards to his relatives. They will tell us we’re inadequate if our bathrooms don’t look like professional cleaners finished polishing them five minutes ago. They will tell us we are lazy if we let our family get themselves dinner from whatever they can find in the pantry. They will seriously look down on us if we don’t find time to volunteer to cut out paper stars for the craft activity at school. And as for spending any time on self-care, or our own activities, the Mom Police will consider that quite beyond the pale.
The blame isn’t always obvious, or loudly stated. It can be presented in terms of a sour face or raised eyebrows. It can be carefully hidden so that we are left wondering what the person thinks. Or it might actually not be there at all – but without an explicit statement of reassurance, we simply don’t know.
Who are these people who blame us everywhere we turn? They can be friends and family members. They can be “experts” who attempt to dictate to us exactly how many hours a day a child needs to have their parents reading to them, and tell us the correct number of times a week that floors must be vacuumed.
Let’s put some faces to these people. If you’re currently the person who deals with your entire household’s laundry, the Mom Police can be represented by the disgruntled partner who wonders how you could possibly not have had copious amounts of time to ensure that he has plenty of clean clothes to choose from. It can be a kid who wants you to prepare meals that are not “boring”, but when you consult them as to what they’re willing to eat, you find out that really, they just want to eat candy. It can be the schoolteacher who calls you to tactfully check in as to why your kid constantly has rips in their clothing. (That would be because of the kid’s liking for sliding down stair railings instead of walking sedately down the stairs, and because you don’t have a full-time seamstress living at your house.). It can be your mother-in-law, glaring at you if she finds you reading a book, or wondering why her son forgot to send her a card for her birthday. And it can totally be the whispering parents at school, who wonder why your kid is wearing odd socks.
Let’s continue with that image of the whispering parents, wondering how you could possibly be so incompetent as to send your kid to school wearing odd socks. Imagine the shocked and maybe malicious expressions on the expressions of those men…. Huh? No, no, we know perfectly well that that picture is completely wrong. We all know that those whispers of condemnation are coming from – women!
Yes, ladies. Let me state what we all know, but never talk about. I’m not here to pretend that women don’t ever get blamed by men, or don’t have tasks of all kinds left for us to deal with by men. But today, I want to particularly notice something else, something that is truly horrendous. It is the fact that the blame, the expectations, the standards of household cleanliness and who knows what else, are, to a large degree, coming from the women around us.
Think about it. Yes, some women do end up with annoyed partners if they aren’t picking up after everyone at home and tidying up all the time. The idea of a man coming home and asking “Where’s my dinner?” is not dead yet. But, when we look around at what our friends are worrying about, what all the online forum posters are fearing, and whose opinions we are constantly trying to pander to, the people who largely loom in our minds are still, to a large degree, female! The friend whose house is cleaner than ours. The mother-in-law who will never believe you’re good enough for her son unless you wait on him hand and foot. (Let’s be real here. If that’s how it’s going, she’ll never believe you’re good enough, full stop). Even the complaints from women that the partner never bothers to clean the bathroom because he doesn’t care about cleanliness enough to actually pick up a toilet brush – in that case, any criticism of dirty bathrooms is coming from elsewhere.
What is going on here? After all, we tend to think of women as the group of people upon whom a lot of menial work is dumped on. Because, you know, we are. But the people whose criticism we are fearing for not keeping up with all that stuff, they are, incredibly often, from that same group! Is your father-in-law going to guilt-trip you over not sending holiday cards? Usually not, usually the fear is that the mother-in-law will do so. When my house is a mess but I’ve still hosted a play date, that panic I feel when the kid gets picked up and the parent comes to my door – my panic levels are so much lower when it’s a dad who is picking up the kid.
I’m sure I’m not the first person to notice that women are such a significant part of the Mom Police. But I wanted to know why. Of course sociologists have studied this. But here is my more conversational take on it:
- Some of it is just automatic, based on what we see around us. We are friends with a family where the play dates are always arranged by the dad. He does more of the kid stuff, the mom has a more intense job. Birthday party invitations would generally be sent out by the dad. But for whatever reason, the mom sent out the birthday party invites for her kid that year. I was sent an email, my husband was not. As it happens, my husband is quicker to get the kids’ party invitations responded to and on the calendar than I am (I think he sees missing a party as more tragic than I do). By the time the mom had seen me in person and checked in if our kiddo would attend, I had seen the email, and not actually opened it. I admitted to her that my husband was generally more on top of these things than me, and she stopped still and slapped herself on the forehead, realizing that she’d made a very traditional assumption about who should pay attention to these things. “It won’t happen again!” she said. I wasn’t upset with her, but it was interesting that even a woman whose own family didn’t operate traditionally, had made an assumption like that.
- Historically, the role of cleaner, cook, child carer, and overall picker-up-of-the-pieces, was the only role available to a woman. Like any other human being, women want to do well at their job, so they work hard to be good at it. Sadly, humans being what they are, one way to feel good at what you do is to compare yourself to others and look down on them for being less successful than yourself. The fact that there is literally no objective way to declare that these tasks have been done well enough doesn’t help. There will always be someone on this planet whose house is cleaner, whose meals are more fancy, and whose kids are in more activities. All of a sudden, we have women competing with women and putting each other down.
- In order to go through life not being constantly depressed, people need to believe that their life is fair. Or something approximating that. Oh, and historically as a female, you couldn’t do math or business, you could just cook and clean and change diapers. How to reconcile those things? Why, develop the belief that these tasks are naturally female tasks. Tasks that we’re automatically good at. Tasks that bring us massive joy and fulfillment. And if you don’t feel that way? Why, there must be something wrong with you. The pressure is real and pervasive. I’m the one who wrote about The Conspiracy to Keep Women Busy, and I personally still find myself envying those perfect housekeepers who have wonderfully clean houses.
- Of course, it’s not always easy to convince yourself that menial daily tasks are a source of fulfillment and happiness. A lot of women feel trapped by these tasks. But then, they see the occasional woman who gets away with not doing as much of them. They don’t see the constant fire of disapproval that she endures as a consequence. They simply see that she isn’t doing as many menial tasks, and that somehow, she’s still alive. What happens then? Envy! We don’t get to escape these tasks. Why does she? Anger and disapproval follow.
This is where I got frustrated and started to do a few things differently. When my friends expressed worry over their houses being messy, I didn’t merely sympathize and say I was experiencing the same thing. I told them that they had better things to do with their time than to fix that problem. I began to admit to people that I was prioritizing posting on this blog ahead of cleaning the floor.
Please know that you have much more worth than how well you perform everyday, traditionally female, tasks. Even if being a perfect housekeeper is your life’s calling and your whole neighborhood benefits from this skill, you are even more than that. The world would be an entirely different place if all the world’s women could stop criticizing each other for not fitting into society’s boxes.
The problem is, the criticism has gone so far and for so long that now we fear it coming even when it’s not there. I wonder how many women are quietly sitting in their homes right now, wishing to announce to their friends and family that it really is okay to not devote our entire brain space to these traditionally female tasks, but not quite liking to say so for fear of what other women think. This is why instead of just thinking things like “the floor can be cleaned next year”, I actually started saying them. I haven’t lost any friends yet 🙂
My challenge for you today – next time that your house is messy, or you haven’t lived up to someone’s expectations in the realm of all these traditionally female tasks, take a deep breath, and – don’t apologize!
And my plea to you all today – for every opportunity you have to criticize another woman for not doing “womanly” tasks well, or not doing them at all – refrain from doing so, and say something supportive instead. In fact, if she left some of those tasks alone in order to work on a project that is her particular priority, give her a big high five!
Previous posts in this series:
- The Conspiracy To Keep Women Busy ™
- The Conspiracy To Keep Women Busy ™ – Part 197: School Activities
- The Conspiracy to Keep Women Busy ™ – Part 231: How to Make School Life as Inefficient as Possible
