THE LATEST SKIRMISH in the Mommy Wars is taking place in Britain, where American ex-pat journalist and mother of two Helen Kirwan-Taylor has confessed her dirty secret in a London tabloid. Hang onto your wigs! -- she's bored by her kids.
In her engineered-to-inflame, first-person essay titled, "Sorry, but my children bore me to death!" Kirwan-Taylor brazenly confesses to blowing off birthday parties to get her highlights done, text messaging friends through Disney movies and using work as a means of escape from her two young sons: "To be honest, I spent much of the early years of my children's lives in a workaholic frenzy because the thought of spending time with them was more stressful than any journalistic assignment I could imagine."
The world has taken the bait, placing Kirwan-Taylor at the center of a recent blogosnit. Mommy websites are buzzing with angry responses, and the Daily Mail followed up the article with two pages of readers' reactions along with the requisite weigh-in from a psychologist, Pam Spurr, who has coined the acronym du jour, SMUM, or Smart, Middle-Class, Uninvolved Mother.
So now it's on between the SMUMs and the SCAMs (Smart, Child-Centered, Active Moms -- my coinage). SCAMs are the superachieving moms who hand-letter birthday invitations, spend their days in imaginative play with their toddlers, bake from scratch and joyfully embrace each moment spent with their supergifted offspring.
I know (and have been known to like) these women. I even have moments when I wished I had their game, but I can only be the SMUM that I am: distracted, well-meaning, ambitious for myself. But my kids know I'll always be there for them when the chips are down, even if I'm not actually going to get up to serve them any chips.
We daughters of second-wave feminist mothers were raised to dream big and strive for goals beyond the hearth and home. We launched careers, gained the respect of our peers and defined ourselves as individuals. Then we had kids, and everything changed. Motherhood can be fascinating, challenging, life-affirming work. It can also be mind-bendingly dull. Having a child can feel like a sudden erasure of all that we have worked for out in the world.
