JUST WHEN YOU thought there couldn't possibly be any more pastel-colored books about the magic, mysteries and political ramifications of parenting, several more titles have entered the fray in recent weeks.
Some are anthologies, such as "Mommy Wars," in which stay-at-home moms "face off" against career moms, and "Maybe Baby," which ponders the question of whether to procreate at all. Others, such as "Every Mother Is a Daughter" by Perri Klass and Sheila Solomon Klass, and Caitlin Flanagan's "To Hell With All That: Loving and Loathing Your Inner Housewife," unpack the narrative baggage of traditional femininity as if it were one of the original Greek myths. As Susan Salter Reynolds pointed out in a review in this paper last Sunday, "in the ebb and flow of publishing, these and other books, all released within a short period, indicate a groundswell, an issue about to break."
In other words, now that it's 2006 and the Gen-Xers (including me) have completed their apprenticeships in self-reflection under the masterful tutelage of the boomers, it's time for a whole new crop of domestic literary disputes.
The funny thing is, we don't seem to have learned all that much from our elders -- except, perhaps, that books about existential crises brought on by dirty diapers sell a lot better than books about plain old existentialism. As wonderful as motherhood is, we're told again and again, it involves compromise (and resulting peace) somewhere on the level of the Oslo accords. Careers derail, marriages flounder, finances dip, bodies are permanently altered and, inevitably, household labor gets divided unevenly.
Whether you're a nostalgic like Flanagan, who unapologetically champions stay-at-home motherhood, or harried and angst-ridden like the writers in "Mommy Wars," the take-away from all this chatter is as much an endless circle as it is a groundswell. After nearly three decades of dealing with this stuff, we're still not much closer to figuring it out than we were back when Betty Friedan, in "The Feminine Mystique," wrote about "the problem that has no name."
Except, of course, by now that problem has found a name, and it is Guilt. Of all the emotions these books tap into -- unconditional love, unquenchable desire, unrelenting fear -- the one that rises most quickly to the surface is the self-reproach that comes from the inability to combine a 1950s standard of perfect motherhood with the fervent careerism that took hold in the 1980s.
