TELEVISION TRUTH ABOUT MOMHOOD

Almost a year ago, I read a column that got me thinking.  “Issues that go beyond kissing boo-boos” (NYT Critic’s Notebook, April 30,2015) was a great piece about Mom, the popular sitcom that is brilliant in its writing, its humor, its sometimes difficult truths about mothers.  Mom isn’t the only one; television today is blatantly honest to the point of pain at times, about motherhood in the new century.

The moms of television when I was growing up in the 1950’s and 60’s portrayed women who were so inert it is a wonder they didn’t stop breathing. Their lives were never messy.   Lucille Ball was the exception; Lucy’s life was never boring because she had an irrepressible aspiration for more, but that “more” was ridiculous buffoonery played for laughs very successfully  Quite a contrast from the “real” (bland) lives portrayed by Donna Reed, Harriet Nelson, and Barbara Billingsley.

Most of us knew even then that the lives portrayed by those women were fantasy, but it wasn’t acceptable to say so.  Real-life moms of that era enjoyed a different reality, many of them not finding any happiness in changing diapers and making meatloaf in their pressed shirtdresses and pearls.  They were the women who Betty Friedan wrote about in The Feminine Mystique, suffering from the “problem that has no name.”  They were depressed or they were alcoholics or Valium poppers.  They practiced corporal punishment on their kids with hands and belts.  If their husbands hit them they kept the secret because that was just…. life.  They cried in private. They are the mothers who dropped out of high school to get married.  Or they didn’t go to college because they married their high school boyfriends, or they went to college to find and marry a better man.   They were the women who had to give up their jobs when they got married or pregnant.  They lived with husbands who spent more time at their jobs than with their families.  They had more babies than they should have, anesthetized, in hospital rooms without the fathers.  They spent hours sterilizing baby bottles and mixing home-made formula because breastfeeding was considered old-fashioned and too earthy and unsanitary for modern women.  They raised the kids pretty much alone, even if they were married.  Too many were left with nothing when the kids grew up and moved out, or their husbands left them for younger women. Emotionally, financially, they were adrift like a leaky rowboat.

The women of the old TV shows did not portray the truth that Friedan and others courageously revealed.  The next generation of daughters got the message.  They grew up to finish college; they became lawyers and business owners and doctors; they joined the Army or they waitressed or sold real estate, while still running homes and raising children.   They fell victim to the opposite extreme -- the “you can have it all” or even “you had better have it all” mentality.  It was hard, sometimes impossible, and it sometimes drove them to drink, or to affairs, or to divorce.  Now their millennial daughters are looking at their mothers’ lives and wondering what choices should they make?  How can they or should they live their own lives?  

Conservatives who decades later still lament the passing of the 1950's fantasies, are still fighting, unsuccessfully for the most part, to pull women back into dependency on husbands and the kitchen and nursery existence, while these young women -- more of whom are educated and career oriented -- wonder how to structure their world to find a better balance. They are finding no easy answers.  Today, family life is still hard; too many mothers are single, or have children by more than one father, or like me, are grandmothers raising their grandchildren. 

Alcoholism, depression and other domestic troubles have always existed behind the family’s front door.  In the past they just never let us see it, certainly not for laughs.  So we can’t know for sure if Mrs. Cleaver was drinking alone at her kitchen table and worrying about whether Eddie Haskell was a bad influence on Wally, or Harriet Nelson thought about divorcing Ozzie because he was a bad lover, or Donna Reed was self-medicating with pills stolen from her doctor husband because he was having an affair with a nurse.  Family life has its troubles, and over the decades we have increasingly accepted watching truth on television.  We can now speak some truth about problems in families, or make TV shows poking fun at it, which perhaps makes it a little less painful.  That, I guess, is progress.

(My truth will soon be published in my book:  Swimming Lessons:  A Mother’s Tale of Navigating the Mental Illness Tide)