Blame it on Angelina. The pressure to be perfect stepped up a notch this year when Angie, pregnant with twins, donned a helmet and flak jacket to visit Iraq on a humanitarian mission. Two weeks later, there she was on the red carpet — coiffed, polished and proudly showing off her baby bump in a clingy black dress.
This is the new perfect mother: skilfully juggling career, motherhood, activism and a loving relationship, while being a perfect size 6.
Angelina is an extreme example, but the fact is that the ideal of the perfect mother has changed — and is perhaps more unrealistic than ever.
As Susan J. Douglas, co-author of The Mommy Myth, tells Salon.com, the mother workload has actually increased since the 1950s:
“People say, “Well, what about June Cleaver? But it’s actually worse. I mean, June Cleaver was not expected to drill the Beaver with algebra flashcards when he was 6 months old. June Cleaver was not expected to drive 10 hours round trip to a soccer match. June Cleaver wasn’t expected to home-school and, by the way, look sexy the whole time doing it. So even June Cleaver couldn’t meet these standards today, which are absolutely through the roof. So it’s actually different from the ’50s: It’s more intense.”
The Mommy Myth is about the rise in the media of what Douglas calls ‘new momism’, which she defines as,
” the insistence that no woman is truly complete or fulfilled unless she has kids, that women remain the best primary caretakers of children, and that to be a remotely decent mother, a woman has to devote her entire physical, psychological, emotional, and intellectual being, 24/7, to her children. The new momism is a highly romanticised and yet demanding view of motherhood in which the standards for success are impossible to meet.”
Of course, the pressure to be an über-mother is a boon for advertisers who want to push upon sleep-deprived, guilty women all kinds of products, from anti-bacterial cleaning solutions to educational children’s DVDs and push-up bras.
” Women have been deluged by an ever-thickening mudslide of maternal media advice, programming, and marketing that powerfully shapes how we mothers feel about our relationships with our own kids and, indeed, how we feel about ourselves,” writes Douglas.
We can also blame Nigella Lawson. Martha Stewart and Donna Hay may have made domesticity fashionable again, but Nigella taught us how to be domestic goddesses. If you can’t whip up a chocolate pudding while wearing four-inch heels and a low-cut twin-set, well, you’re just not trying hard enough.
It’s all about the sexy, something a woman needs to bring back if she has any hope of being a MILF. Celebrities flaunt their post-baby bodies like a badge of honour, and who wouldn’t, if you had a multi-million dollar movie career riding on it.
Denise Richards, who gained 15 kilos while carrying her first daughter Sam took it all off (the weight and her clothes) for Playboy magazine just five months after she delivered. Not to be outdone, supermodel Heidi Klum hit the Victoria’s Secret catwalk in a bra and g-string just eight weeks after giving birth to son, Henry. “I’m still sexy! I’m still relevant!” such displays of flesh seem to shriek.
But Jodie Hedley-Ward, author of You Sexy Mother, claims that sexy doesn’t have to mean looking good in a g-string.
“It’s about living a sexy, vibrant, passionate life — one that you are excited about and grateful for,” she told Babblebaby last week. “By striving for a life that is your best yet, you can’t help but feel better about yourself and therefore more desirable, sexy and authentic. It isn’t about wearing red lipstick and lingerie — it’s about rediscovering the magic in life and believing that you deserve to live a phenomenal life that you love.
Still, plenty of women do want to look good in their underwear, and judging by the popularity of the mummy makeover, are going to extreme lengths to do so.
On one hand, women are told breastfeeding is best for their baby, but when that’s over, are told by plastic surgeons that pregnancy, childbirth and breast-feeding is “severe physical trauma” which can have “profound negative effects” on their body.
When you can fly to Malaysia for a boob job, tummy tuck and liposuction for just $16,000, inclusive of surgery, hospital stay, 4-star accommodation for 21 days; you’d be crazy not to, right? It’s just a “gorgeous getaway” to restore your body to pre-pregnancy shape. Because pregnancy is sexy (Maxim tells us so), but saggy breasts and loose tummies are not.
Of course, there is nothing wrong with wanting to look good after you’ve had a child. It can be deeply satisfying to have a shower and put on a nice dress after a day spent changing nappies and covered in vomit.
But the competition to drop kilos quickly can be downright dangerous. “It probably takes on average four to six months to lose a normal amount of baby weight gain,” says Dr. Laura E. Riley, practising OB/GYN and author of You and Your Baby: Pregnancy.
“It took you nine months to put it on. It’s not going to come off in nine weeks.” She suspects that a fair number of celebrities do calorie restriction while pregnant so that their weight gain isn’t so high. The tendency to cut calories and over-exercise in order to stay thin even while pregnant has been dubbed “pregorexia”.
So how do you overcome the pressure to be a Yummy Mummy? The most important first step, says Reynolds, is to rip the veneer off the mummy myth. “It’s important for mothers to get together and talk back to and make fun of these ridiculous ideals in the media.”
It’s time to get our fight on. “We’re not supposed to be angry. We’re supposed to be all sweetness and light and understanding” says Reynolds. “Well, where did that come from? You know, if mothers had never gotten mad… there would never have been social change. We wouldn’t have child labour laws if mothers hadn’t gotten mad. Birth control would be illegal if mothers hadn’t gotten mad. So yeah, it’s time for mothers to get mad.”
The truth is, Angelina Jolie and Nigella Lawson are both inspirational women for very valid reasons. But they also have help, and money. So the next time you find yourself reaching for the muffin tin at 10pm before the daycare fundraiser the next day, leave it. Go to bed. You can pick something up in the morning.
Very interesting article. I would be interested to read more on the ‘new momism’ as well, beyond the pressure to look gorgeous after having a baby – more about the pressures to both be a perfect mother and the pressure that we are meant to want to be a perfect mother.
Call me what you will but i have this perhaps crazy idea that i want to look like i have children, im proud of the way my body grew my happy healthy babies and a few kilos and stetchmarks make me a stronger person, i would never expect a real mum to look like those celebirty “mums”.
The article seems to want to strike the balance between the societal pressure to strive for perfection and the natural tendency to just not care anymore. There really has to be a happy medium because I still want to be beautiful and attractive but not to the point of neglecting my children or pushing them down the list of my priorities. My argument is that to want to be beautiful again is essential if you want to be able to be a good mother. You need to be the one to control that standard of beauty though, but you don’t need to feel guilty about wanting to be physically beautiful. Taking care of yourself will help you take care of everyone else. Check out my post: http://www.trishcardona.com/2010/04/yummy-mummy-the-tc-way/