The Brilliant Book Club meets today! We are discussing Katrina Alcorn’s Maxed Out: American Moms on the Brink. I hope you’ll join our conversation about the state of motherhood today!
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In Maxed Out, Alcorn describes her journey as a working mom, with two children and a high-pressure job, but also with a supportive spouse and employer, quality childcare, and financial security. Even with these advantages, she suffered a breakdown {though I prefer Brene Brown’s term “spiritual awakening”}.
In many ways, this book was not what I expected it would be ~ based on the title, I expected it to be more sociological in nature, similar to Judith Warner’s Perfect Madness, or Jessica Valenti’s Why Have Kids? What I really enjoyed about Maxed Out is that it is primarily a memoir ~ one woman’s journey through modern working motherhood ~ yet it is interspersed with small asides about the state of work, family, childcare, and public policy in the United States today. To me, the best memoirs focus on the personal and link it to the universal. While my life is very different from Alcorn’s {teaching is a very different profession than web design}, I could relate to many of her struggles in balancing work, family, and self.
Ourselves: Honoring the Ambivalence in Motherhood
I genuinely appreciated the honesty in this book about how hard and sometimes unlikeable motherhood is. One mother Alcorn interviewed stated “the daily grind of parenting and working outside of the home often overwhelms and bores me at the same time.”
The more we can be honest about motherhood, admitting that we don’t love every minute of it, the better off all mothers will be. We love our children intensely and profoundly, but we don’t always like parenting. It’s okay to admit it’s hard. It’s okay to not like it all the time. It’s okay to long for just a few quiet minutes to yourself. It’s okay to like going to work.
I loved Alcorn’s description of her first day back to work: part of her felt liberated to be leaving her child and husband at home. She was “wearing grown-up clothes and eyeliner and dangly earrings, the kind [she] could never wear around little grasping hands.” I SO get that.
I love being a working mom. It’s hard and overwhelming, but I love that there is a part of my day that links me to my life and ambitions from my pre-children world. My job, though it definitely has its rough moments, is one of many parts of my life that sustain and fulfill me. It is challenging and intellectually-stimulating. It has introduced me to amazing colleagues and talented young people. It allows me to be part of something bigger than myself.
I am reminded of a story Judith Warner shares in Perfect Madness: the liberating words from her pediatrician when her daughter was five months old. “You don’t just have this child for a couple of months. You’ll have her for the rest of your life. You have to have a life of your own. Because if you’re happy, she’ll be happy. If you’re fine, she’ll be fine.”
And if working outside the home is what makes us happy and fine, great. If staying at home is what does it, great. Let’s not revive the Mommy Wars. Let’s find our path to fulfillment, yet speak honestly about our ambivalence toward the very things from which it is derived: kids, work, family, and all the rest.
Our Bodies: Honoring our Needs
Alcorn writes, “The hard truth is you are not an airy spirit. Nor are you a floating head with no body. You are an animal…. Living in the ‘soft animal of your body’ means you must respect the systems of that body.”
As Alcorn continued her demanding schedule of travel and long working hours, she began to suffer physical symptoms. She was having panic attacks, mental fog, and bodily aches and twitches. She discovered many other mothers experienced similar physical problems.
Though I never had a “breakdown,” I did have a period several years ago where I had many physical symptoms that we never found an official cause for. My children were 4 and 1, and I was back to teaching full time. I started having panic attacks, sometimes even throwing up before work. I was constantly dizzy, gripping the shopping cart in Target, or even the table in my classroom while teaching, convinced I was going to fall over. My mind felt foggy and confused. Teaching became harder, the words and examples not coming to me as quickly as they used to while I lectured.
I saw many doctors and professionals: my GP, a psychiatrist, a psychologist, a neurologist, an optometrist, a chiropractor, and even an acupuncturist. I had two MRIs, each revealing my brain to be “unremarkable” {which I found terribly offensive}. Ultimately, my symptoms were determined to be idiopathic, the medical term for “we have no idea what’s going on.”
My psychiatrist believed my symptoms were due to anxiety. She said the dizziness, the brain fog, the physical reactions to stimulating environments, could be manifestations of panic. I started taking medication for anxiety, which helped tremendously. Alcorn describes being on medication for a short time, but ultimately implies that her problems were likely not physical in nature. She simply needed to slow down her maxed-out life.
And while that may be the case, I know those medications saved me from a dark period of my life. I had been exercising, eating right, going to yoga, doing every self-care thing imaginable, but it was once I started the medication that my physical symptoms improved, and my fog of depression lifted.
We live in the soft animal of our bodies, and we must take care of those bodies. In addition to seeking medical help if needed, we must ensure we are providing our bodies with their most basic needs ~ sleep, water, healthy food, and exercise. We must acknowledge our limits, and take the time for self care.
An important decision I made a few years ago, as I struggled with depression and my physical symptoms, was to not take my work home with me. As a teacher, I spent many nights and weekends grading papers and planning lessons. I realized that as a working mother, I simply couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t wake up at 5 am, get myself and my children ready, teach for 8 hours, come home with my children and cook and clean and play, get kids to bed by 7:30, and then sit down and work for two more hours. I needed time to myself. I needed sleep! It takes a few more days to get essays back to my students, and I have to make use of every available minute of my prep time at school. But it has made me a better person, mother, and teacher.
The Personal is Political
Though social policy changes are not a cure-all to the problems encountered by families and working mothers today, they can be a good start. At a minimum, we need more flexible work options {part-time, job-sharing, or work-from-home}, mandatory paid maternity and paternity leave, and affordable, high-quality childcare. We need to view childcare as an investment in our children, not as a service for privileged working parents.
Alcorn offers several suggestions for how we can do this:
- CHANGE THE CONVERSATION. Talk about these issues with friends, colleagues, employers, and public officials. As Alcorn states, this conversation should not simply be about our “choices,” for not all women have the choice to stay home or the choice to work for a supportive employer. “What often gets left out of the conversation,” Alcorn writes, “is that our choices are profoundly influenced by the cultural and institutional forces around us.”
- VOTE! Seriously, this social studies teacher gets really mad when people don’t vote. Go watch Iron-Jawed Angels. Once you see what women went through to earn this right for us, you won’t even miss an election for city dog-catcher.
- PRACTICE SAYING “NO.” You need to protect your time. At the Bloggy Boot Camp Conference I attended in October, they shared these words with us: “If it’s not a ‘HELL, YES!’, it’s a NO.” Devote your precious energy to your passions. Don’t allow yourself to become stretched too thin.
Let’s honor ourselves, our bodies, and our ambivalence, and discover how our personal narratives can support meaningful political change. We, and our children, deserve nothing less.
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You can read more reactions to Maxed Out from my fellow Brilliant Book Club bloggers by clicking on the links below. And I’d love to hear your thoughts on this!
- Deb of Urban Moo Cow: Everyone Has Limits, Not Everyone Has Choices
- Jessica of School of Smock: In Fear of Maxing Out: And Why I’ll Never Be Scandal’s Olivia Pope
- Lauren of Omnimom: Are You Maxed Out?
- Stephanie of Mommy, For Real: Can You Be Maxed Out If Your Boss is You?
We’ll announce our January book selection soon ~ stay tuned!
- A Mindful Approach to New Year’s Resolutions - January 13, 2020
- Just This Next Step - December 16, 2019
- WAIT: A Mindfulness Practice for Waiting in Line - December 9, 2019
