Who’s missing from discussions of motherhood?

by Kaylen Ralph

I’m 23, single and childless, but Brigid Schulte’s new book, Overwhelmed, has struck a chord. In releasing this first-person account of her own feelings about “time pressure” and modern life, Schulte has once again made the discussion of how women spend their time something that writers write about and the general public, who reportedly don’t have time to read, read about.

In her review of Overwhelmed for The New York Times Book Review, Crittendon writes, “In recent years, an endless stream of books have been written about the overworked American Mom.”

When Arlie Hoschild’s groundbreaking book, The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home, was released in 1989, I wasn’t born yet. Ann Crittenden’s The Price of Motherhood came out in 2001, at a time in my life when I hadn’t yet perceived “stress” as something that could go to bed with you, wake you up in the night, and follow you around the next day, week, month, etc.

Our culture is obsessed with how women, specifically working mothers, spend their time.

As I said, I’m not a mom, working or otherwise. But as a woman who would like to have children one day, I find the issues that Schulte and her foremothers have pointed out in their works to be pressingly important and frankly, terrifying.

The cover art for Overwhelmed looks like the to-do lists that litter my desk, my bag, and my brain. It’s a jacket full of frenetic scribbles and harried cross-through lines. Many of the words, (“Sunscreen,” “NOW,”) have the multiple tracings that items on my own to-do lists tend to show if I’m staring at the list while on the phone or thinking about what exactly that forgotten item near the bottom of the list was supposed to be.

Since starting college and subsequently entering the working world, there hasn’t been a day that has gone by where I don’t go to bed mentally checking off the list of things I haven’t checked off my own list (no apologies for a triple-negative because that’s what this behavior is­­­­—negative.)

And in most intelligent and discerning circles, the fact that this behavior is negative and unhealthy is not up for debate. The way we spend our time, the forfeiture of our leisure and the guilt trip we send ourselves on when we fail to achieve our full capacity is bad for our health.  It’s giving us cancer and it’s shrinking our brains. In her chapter on “The Incredible Shrinking Brain,” Schulte brings up an experiment in which rats were subjected to a stressful environment “for several hours a day up to three weeks.” The study found that after enduring the constant stress, “age was a critical factor in the brain returning to normal. Young rats recovered fully within three weeks. Middle-aged rats recovered only partially. And older rats, not at all.”

In reading about this study, I realized that if we continue to leave this discussion largely rooted in the lives of working mothers, our collective culture will never change.

Stressed-out working mothers aren’t born – they’re formed. Women are growing up learning to be stressed and believing that stress equals achievement – in a world that is still biased against professional women.

 In her book, Schulte quotes a conversation she had with Lyn Craig, a sociologist and time-use researcher from Australia. Their discussion poses the question I believe is the most important, as well as the most glossed over:

“’What’s missing from this talk about “having it all,”’ (Craig) says, “is the recognition that if it’s left for women to work out for themselves, like it is now, they can’t have it all.’”

I’m tired of asking myself if it’s possible for me, or anyone, to “have it all.” It’s become a buzz phrase that I find distracting from the systemic problem that exists in our culture: “If we don’t discuss the consequences of the pressures society puts on women (and women on themselves) until the onset of motherhood, we’re not only running the rat race, we’re setting the course ourselves.”

 

Overwhelmed

Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time

By Brigid Schulte

353 pp. Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $26.

 

Kaylen Ralph is The Riveter‘s co-founder and co-editor.

Related content: “Surviving Perfectionism” by Carly Dyer, March 12, 2013