Yes! Yes! Yes!

Some choice selections from Maternal Desire by Daphne de Marneffe. It's slow going when the only time I read is when I'm pumping (oh, the irony) but here are some lovelies from the first 75 pages.

Here you are, trying to care for your child, wanting the overwhelming importance of what you are doing to be acknowledged, yet simultaneously feeling that in leaving or cutting back on your job, you have relinquished all claim to adult respect. Yes, you want to feel valued, even special, amid the diapers and baby spit-up and your exhaustion; but you cringe at the thought that devoting yourself to this not particularly easy role might be viewed by some as a demand for special treatment, as some kind of refusal to pull your own weight. And yes, admittedly, you occasionally crave a manicure or a new haircut; and though perhaps these are lame, socially engineered desires, you can't deny that they will make you feel better, maybe even because they carry a welcome whiff of femininity now that you are living in sweatpants. (44)

From time to time, we try to fortify ourselves in our choices by disowning our competing motivations: by elaborately insisting on our contentment at home with children, or our belief in the importance of mothers' work. But the reality for most of us is that we are torn, and we live with a sense of conflict, sometimes flickering, sometimes flaring, hour by hour, day by day. (49)

Success, it appears, is synonymous with getting rid of your yearning to be with your children or your belief that your children need you. Feeling conflict about leaving your children all is a self-destructive hangover from the benighted past. Here we see a chilling confluence between a certain set of feminine ideals [workplace "equality" and full-time working women] and the aims of corporate capitalism [everyone working all of the time, making more money and consuming consuming consuming]. And the net effect is to make mothers feel that there is one more thing to feel guilty about: their inability to banish guilt. (53)

I feel all of this so acutely. I know this book is not going to provide solutions. But I am really enjoying the camaraderie.