I smiled at Kathleen Deveny’s recent column in Newsweek where she asks narcissist mommies who share every obsession over all each minute parenting choice to shut up already:

Do whatever you want: stay at home with your kids, wear gym clothes all day and make your own organic baby food. Work 60 hours a week, fire your babysitter every six months and communicate with your children via BlackBerry. Declare your toddler carbon neutral or get your hair highlighted while you’re in labor. Breast-feed your kid till he’s 17! I’m a single working mother, and should be interested in all this, but I’m not.

And though as a writer for a mom blog I know Ms. Deveny is also indicting me when she says that she’s “bored to death with talking, hearing and reading about motherhood,” I found myself agreeing with one of her larger points: The seemingly constant media drone of “experts” critiquing others’ parenting choices (”Lazy moms gaining on the Alphas!”) obscures issues that deserve much more attention: The daily crises faced by women who don’t have a lot of wiggle room in terms of parenting choices, such as low-income mothers. (And please tell me if I’m missing something, but I think I’d agree with Ms. Deveny’s assessment of the recent spate of “mommy lit” that has hit the bookstores. When the boys are in bed and I have a half hour to curl up with a book, the last thing I want to do is read about some other mother’s day. Give me murder most foul, thanks.)

Of those who seem to be caught by surprise at how difficult motherhood can be, Ms. Deveny has little sympathy:

Sure, husbands could be more helpful and bosses are always demanding something on the day your kid comes home with lice. The challenge of finding good, affordable child care is no joke. But we didn’t exactly invent kids. “No one can ever understand how difficult it is,” says Kateria Niambi, a publishing executive from Montclair, N.J., and single mother of girls, ages 14 and 11. “But once you are a mother, you need to get over it. There’s no need to whine about it.”

No argument here on the whining. But my mother-in-law insists of motherhood in her day, “It was easier back then because everyone was doing it.” When she had her children and stayed at home to raise them, her sister, her best friends, her neighbors – every woman she knew was on the same path. Obviously taking care of babies and children wasn’t physically easier than it is now – how could it be, without proper bouncy chairs? – but maybe she’s right about the emotional and psychological impact of motherhood. For most of us today, motherhood is infused with much more choice than in the past. Should I have my kids “on time” or “delayed”? If I work, who will care for my kids? If I don’t work, how will we survive financially? How will I manage my career track? How will my husband and I achieve work/life balance for our family? And with each choice comes the subsequent awareness of the other option, the path I didn’t follow. And mixed in with the trademark joys, sorrows, and in-betweens of motherhood, those “shadow choices” can provoke a certain measure of doubt, anxiety, guilt, and perhaps regret. Certainly those feelings pepper every individual life, but a lot of us seem to be living similar psychological scripts right now.

And I suppose that produces a bit of analysis on message boards, in magazines, on blogs, and the like. So long as this happens while we’re getting on with the business of raising our kids and living our lives generally (including the non-mom parts!), I can’t see this as a bad thing. We didn’t invent kids, true. But motherhood in the developed world looks a lot different now than it did forty years ago. I think that’s worthy of a conversation or two.

Posted by MommaSteph.