Mommiedaze

The June Cleaver Experiment: Day Five (The Conclusion)

This was the last day. I’ll be back to jeans and flip-flops tomorrow. Well, until it snows, and I have to start wearing sneakers. But I’ll hold on to the flip-flops as long as I can.

I will be glad to be in casual wear most of the time. And I really look forward to sitting on the couch in my PJs watching the morning news and sipping coffee again. No more housework in heels either. But I do think I’ll start dressing up a little more often when I go out, because it’s just plain fun. And maybe at home once in a while for the hubby.

June Cleaver was a fictional character. When Leave It to Beaver was on the air in it’s original run women were already starting to wear pants. And I doubt that women who did wear dresses all day did all their cooking and cleaning in high heels and pearls.

But June was a representation of that era’s ideal wife and mother.

We have expectations for wives and mother’s today too. But I think it’s gone in the opposite direction. Once we were portrayed as serene, well-dressed, homemaking-experts. Today women are often portrayed as frazzled, frumpy, over-scheduled moms who can’t quite seem to get it together. And far from serene, mom is made out to always be frustrated and tired.

Once you were either a mom or you had a career. Then we discovered we could do both. Then some of us decided we’d rather just stay home. And then some of you started working from home. And now it’s OK to choose what’s best for you and your family. Being a mom went from bottom of the totem pole to “the hardest,  most important job in the world.”

But it’s like society decided that if we were going to make motherhood an important position, then we shouldn’t be happy about it.

So we have all these snarky mom blogs that talk about drinking martinis just to get through the afternoon. And we have TV shows like Old Christine that make mom look like a loser, and Desperate Housewives that makes us all out to be headcases.

Then there’s the stereotypes. The soccer mom who doesn’t know who she is anymore because she spends all her time catering to everyone else’s needs. The mousy mom who let herself go. The working mom who feeds her family fast food every night, and never cleans her house. The lonely, miserable single mom.

So instead of the high standards of June Cleaver we have these really low expectations. And I wonder if the low expectations don’t feed on themselves? We certainly can’t try to achieve perfection like June. It’s not realistic, and we would only end up frustrated by our failures. But instead of pressured to be perfect, it’s almost as if we’re pressured to be screw-ups. Like it’s not OK to just be  good mom, and love it.

But we can do a little better than what society seems to expect from us.

What if we just decided instead of being harried we would be happy? Take a few minutes for yourself and put on some lipstick. Say no to one more PTA committee, and spend the evening doing something fun with your family. Enlist the family to pitch in on the cooking and cleaning, and take all the pressure off yourself.

Embrace motherhood, and embrace yourself. Do it your way, and the way it makes you happy. No matter what anyone else expects or doesn’t expect from you.

Thanks to everyone who followed along this week. It was a lot fun to read your comments!

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