When the concept of perfection in motherhood emerged in comments on last week’s blog post, I thought of many of the mothers I helped interview for a nationwide marketing project this time last year.

I was privileged during the fall of 2007 to talk to dozens of mothers coast-to-coast, in Seattle and Manhattan and several points in between as the Atlanta-based marketing group tried to get inside the heads of mothers so as to know how to market to them.

The mothers were stay-home mothers and working mothers. They were mothers who were 22 and mothers who were 52. They were mothers with one child and mothers with six. They were single mothers, married mothers, financially struggling mothers and mothers with Hope diamonds on their hands who lived in the burbs of New York City with nannies, even though they didn’t work outside the home.

In open-ended, face-to-face conversation, I and a team of other journalists working in other cities listened as groups of mothers talked to each other about identity. They talked about the struggle to combine the personal with the professional. They talked about their cultural, political and personal motivations as it pertains to motherhood. They talked especially about their determination get it just right, especially their kids.

Based on the reports that we sent from the trenches, the marketing group came to several conclusions:
- Today’s mothers often feel judged, even and especially by other mothers.
- Today’s mothers feel an urgency to contribute to the greater world, whether it be with volunteer work or as a CEO of a major company, even as they feel an urgency to be the perfect mother.
- Today’s mothers, in their reach for a whole and balanced life, often wind up in an obsessive battle with perfection and a subsequent loss of identity.

“Not unlike their predecessors, contemporary mothers continue to experience great joy in motherhood,” said our concluding report.

“They also experience heightened confusion, pressure and fear as they continue to maintain primary responsibility for raising children in an increasingly unpredictable and competitive world.

“Aware more than ever of their own skills and talents, yet determined not to fail at the one job society still says equals feminine identity, they (can) end up sacrificing that very identity and well-being as they compulsively take on more and more mothering tasks.”

I particularly remember a 41-year-old mother of two who lived in New York .

Christine, whose Greek husband struggled to keep stable work, was the breadwinner in her family. Bright and beautiful, she had a very sexy job as a video editor in very posh offices in Greenwich Village.

But because she wanted most to be home with her children, she was pushed to the limits of her abilities, rushing home with a 90-minute commute to tuck in her children, whose grandmother tends them during the day, and then rushing around with them all weekend.

She had nothing for herself.

“I don’t even take time to dye my hair,” she told me, lifting her dark, thick locks with a few strands of gray.

I remember Christine saying she knows she needs to relax her expectations so as to have more time for herself: she tried exercising for awhile at 6 every morning. But then her son’s school schedule changed, and she had to spend that time getting him ready for school and out the door.

It always comes back to what she is and is not giving the kids, she said. It’s the way she was raised.

“You have so much love and you’re taught to give it and to love your husband and do everything for him and to love your kids and give everything to them. And so you follow those directions.”

As I was leaving Christine’s office that day, she told me to take care of myself. I told her the same. She laughed.

“You know I won’t,” she said to me.

Sometimes I think we mothers today are every bit the pioneers that our wagon-train predecessors were, navigating the uncharted territory of these 24-7 times, what one mothering author, Judith Warner, calls the “Age of Anxiety.”

Sometimes, then, some things have to go. This includes beating up on ourselves and each other.

What do you think?

- Debra-Lynn