First of all, no, I have not watched "I don´t know how she does it" and no, I don´t think I will do it anytime soon. Somehow my brother´s DVD collection has proliferated too much these last months and all films, with no exception, are to queue for at least a season before getting to our screen. That´s how life goes, I am afraid.
However, I am familiar with the plot of the movie (thanks to all the buses in Manchester advertising the film) and it made me think about a few things related to modern life and maternity. After spending some months in an Obstetrics wards, I got the feeling that women were indeed capable of juggling a professional life and raising their children (without having to resort to their own parents to do the job). But then, I got to the Paediatrics wards and the impression was a bit different. So yes, "breaking" news: maternity does really change your life!

"Those aspects of life -- whether it's the pleasure of being a wife or of raising children or of making a home -- were, until the day before yesterday, considered the most natural things in the world. After all, our grandmothers didn't agonize over such existential questions as to whether marriage was ultimately "right" for them as women or if having a baby would "compromise" them as individuals. Yet we do. We approach these aspects of life warily and self-consciously: A new bride adjusts her veil in the mirror and frets that she is selling out to some false idea of femininity; a new wife is horrified to find herself slipping into the habit of cooking dinner and doing the laundry; a new mother, who has spent years climbing the corporate ladder, is thrown into an identity crisis when she's stuck at home day after day, in a sweatsuit, at the mercy of a crying infant. It is because of feminism's success that we now call these parts of our lives into question, that we don't thoughtlessly march down the aisle, take up our mops, and suppress our ambitions. But feminism, for all its efforts, hasn't been able to banish fundamental female desires from us, either -- and we simply cannot be happy if we ignore them.

For if we, as women, were all to sit down and honestly attempt to figure out what sort of lives would make us happy, I suspect -- assuming the basics like food and adequate income and leaving aside fantasies of riches and celebrity -- that most of our answers would be very similar to one another's, and quite different from men's. They would go something like this: We want to marry husbands who will love and respect us; we want to have children; we want to be good mothers. At the same time, many of us will want to pursue interests outside of our families, interests that will vary from woman to woman, depending upon her ambition and talent. Some women will be content with work or involvements that can be squeezed in around their commitments at home; some women will want or need to work at a job, either full- or part-time. Other women will be more ambitious -- they may want to be surgeons or corporate executives or lawyers or artists. For them, the competing demands of family and work will always be difficult to resolve . (...)

Copyright c 1999 Danielle Crittenden. All rights reserved