It’s hard to think that moms who are beautiful, wealthy and talented could feel the sting of criticism about her mothering, but I guess that’s pretty naive of me. It’s also naive of me to think that Gwyneth Paltrow wouldn’t be affected by mommy wars, and her latest post on her site Goop speaks quite beautifully and openly about the mom wars, and why we get entrenched in them.

Whether you like Gwyneth or not, I feel this is well worth a read. There’s also a long piece that she has included below her post, but for me, her words were enough.

Here goes :

“A few weeks ago during an interview, I was asked why I have only worked on one film a year since having children. My answer was this: Film work takes one away from home and requires 12-14 hours a day, making it difficult to be the one to make the kids their lunch, drive them to school, and put them to bed.

So I have found it easier on my family life to make a film the exception, and my 9-5 job the rule. This somehow was taken to mean I had said a 9-5 job is easier, and a lot of heat was thrown my way, especially by other working mothers who somehow used my out-of-context quote as an opportunity to express feelings (perhaps projected) on the subject.

As the mommy wars rage on, I am constantly perplexed and amazed by how little slack we cut each other as women. We see disapproval in the eyes of other mothers when we say how long we breastfed (Too long? Not long enough?), or whether we have decided to go back to work versus stay home.

Is it not hard enough to attempt to raise children thoughtfully, while contributing something, or bringing home some (or more) of the bacon? Why do we feel so entitled to opine, often so negatively, on the choices of other women? Perhaps because there is so much pressure to do it all, and do it all well all at the same time (impossible). Below is a somewhat radical piece by Brigid Schulte, which has provoked many a discussion here in our HQ, and even a tear or two.

To every single mother out there, have a wonderful Mother’s Day.

Love,
gp

• You’ve tapped into one of the more live-wire conversations going on in this country: From Anne-Marie Slaughter to Sheryl Sandberg, the overriding thesis seems to be that women can’t have it all—unless they have deep pockets and a tireless work ethic. How do you hope to add to—or change—that conversation?

• I take the conversation further. I talk about The Good Life. Harvard psychologist Erik Erikson wrote that the richest and fullest lives make time for the three great arenas of life: work, love, and play. That’s where the subtitle of my book comes from. I look at the big picture, because it’s all connected—work, love, and play; men and women; people with children and those without; workplace culture; laws and policies; cultural assumptions; unconscious bias and ambivalence about shifting gender roles; and how busyness has supplanted leisure time, joy, and refreshing the soul.

  I ask two questions: Why are things the way they are? And how can they be better? I wanted to take all my skills as a reporter for more than 25 years and investigate deeply modern life and why so many of us feel so overwhelmed and pressed for time. I wanted to look at time pressure and modern life with the same seriousness, research, history, data, and science that we’d use to cover war, politics, and economics, and weave in the stories that resonate and make it all come alive.

  But in looking for hope, I didn’t want platitudes. I wanted to find real world Bright Spots—where things are already changing, and people are beginning to live more authentic lives, with time for meaningful work, close connection with family, loved ones, and community. With that, science is now proving what we’ve known all along, that that is the source of human happiness, and where people have embraced the value of play.

  And my aim, my North Star, if you will, was to find the keys toward a more egalitarian future, where people can be people, and not stuck in predetermined and limiting gender roles, where choices can be freer, and not so constrained, career paths wider, with multiple, even meandering roads that all lead to good places, rather than one steep, narrow ladder and dead ends leading nowhere. The Greek philosophers wrote about The Good Life, but it was only available to high status men, in their view. I look for how The Good Life can be available to everybody.

  

  That’s simply untrue. Instead, it’s making us sick, stupid, unimaginative, unproductive, disengaged, unhappy, and unhealthy.

  I call for change on the big, structural level, as well as the individual level, because real change requires both.

  Anne-Marie tapped into this deep, deep frustration, rage and sadness around the globe and unleashed it, made it ok to bring it to the surface, and to talk.

  

  Sheryl has done important work, creating Lean In Circles around the globe and giving women a chance to come together, learn how to navigate the workplace as it exists now, share stories and support, and not feel so isolated and alone, as I did.

  We’ve needed both of their work, effort, and thinking to get the conversation going. Now, I argue, it’s time to change the very structure of work itself, so that both men and women can lean in to flexible, productive, performance, not hours—rewarding workplaces, and both men and women can lean out to have sacred time for family, to be full partners, so everyone can have time for joy and play.

• Clearly this is an incredibly emotional topic for women from all ends of every spectrum—and the “mommy wars,” are one manifestation of this. What, to your mind, is this a symptom of? And how can we change the conversation and/or do a better job of supporting each other?

• 

  But you’re right, these are very threatening, hurtful conversations, because they hit so deeply at our identity and the cultural assumptions of what a “Good Mother” is.

  Right now, our cultural messages are pretty clear: We are torn about what we think mothers should do.

  

  The General Social Survey, the largest, longstanding public opinion poll shows that only a handful of both men and women think mothers should work full time—a statistic that hasn’t budged much in decades. And yet, the majority of mothers do work full-time.

  It’s like we have this permanent, buzzing undercurrent of cognitive dissonance. I felt that every morning—just walking out the door sometimes to go to work in the morning, I felt so conflicted and polluted. I’d feel guilty and jealous and defensive around my at-home mom friends. And, once we started talking and being honest, they felt conflicted and worried and anxious and defensive around me and other working moms, wondering what all that education was for, but seeing no other way to combine overly demanding jobs and still meet the sky high expectations we now have for what moms should be and do.

  

  That ambivalence is so damaging. What are we most afraid of when we think of working moms? We think they’re going to neglect or abandon their children. That she’ll be selfish and put her needs and wishes above those of her children. But because we’ve been so ambivalent about working mothers, we haven’t done much to help her work a reasonable, flexible schedule without sidelining her. We haven’t even talked, much less passed laws and policies to support her and working families, with high quality, affordable child care, with paid parental leave. And so what have we done? Our ambivalence has led to inaction, which has created the very conditions that we were most afraid of: In order for a mother to compete at work, she has to put in crazy overwork hours—and sacrifice time with kids and at home—in short, all that we were so afraid of in the first place.

  

  It’s not only infuriating, it’s also really illogical. It’s time we all got together and recognized our “choices” are really constrained choices. And changing our overwork culture would go a long way toward making both men and women have real choices about how they want to combine work and life and what works for their own families.

• Throughout the book, you use your own life as an example of the crushing Overwhelm—of trying to do everything…and doing everything kind of badly. What, for you, was the tipping point when you knew you had to find a better way?

• Oh, I wish I could say I had an aha moment, and that I then determined things had to change. I’d had several breaking points. Once, when I was feeling so absolutely weighed down that it felt like I was drowning, I made a huge long list of all the work that it took to run the family and who did it. It went something like this: Pediatrician: me. Dentist: me. Childcare: me. Carpool: me. Grocery shopping: me. Bills: me. Summer camp planning: me. Vacation planning: me. And on, and on, and on. My husband and I would even talk about it every now and then, but it wasn’t very productive. He’d get angry and defensive and say my standards were too high, and I’d seethe and accuse, and then we’d get back to where we were: Stalemate. It was really poisonous for me, for our marriage, and for our kids. I felt like I was a perpetual nag. He’d help, but only if I asked him, or pointed something out. My husband is seven years older than I am, and sometimes it felt like I was the mother of three kids. And I really resented that. But I felt sort of hopeless that it could ever change.

  What really started me on the path of change was this book. My book is really a journey from what I call living in Time Confetti to moving toward Time Serenity. (I’m still a work in progress! But… progress!) I started it when a time-use researcher told me I had 30 hours of leisure time each week—like all women—and challenged me to keep a time diary. At the time, I was working full-time in a demanding job as a reporter for The Washington Post, I was a crazy, guilty, over-involved mother of two, I tried to keep the house tidy, fold the laundry before the cat burrowed in for a nap, had more dates with a Target shopping cart than my husband, and felt like I was barely hanging on through the days by my fingernails.

  

  I hate to say this, but without that one phone call to the time-use researcher, which pissed me off so intensely, as it was just one more person—a man—telling me about my life, making judgments, finding another thing for me to feel inadequate about, I may never have had the reason, the impetus, or the courage to begin to see how change is possible. And, even though I was so angry at the time, I am so grateful for that phone call. Because I have learned so much. I am ashamed and shocked by how ignorant I was of the forces that had shaped my life, my thoughts and my actions and those of my husband. Our lives are so much better. We’ve done hard work to become fuller partners. It took me changing—letting go of the Ideal Mother, Martha Stewart—and also of him changing, by also letting go of the Ideal Mother, and the thinking that I should do it all because I was somehow more “naturally” suited to it, which, I discovered, is patently untrue! That got us both moving forward together.