Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety

An interview with Judith Warner

Where did you grow up? Were you raised in New York?
Yes. I lived in Manhattan for the first 30 years of my life. I went to Grace Church School until 8th grade, and then to Brearley. Mom was an active volunteer at Grace but didn't begin to work there until after I left.

How old are your children?
Emilie is 5 and Julia is 8. They go to school here in Washington D.C.

Has life changed for you since they started school?
It has in that I don't have to be as desperately dependent on babysitters, and now the two of them have the same vacation schedule.

Tell me about your relationship with your mother. You dedicated the book to her, with a reference to Yodels and Chef Boyardee, but never Gatorade.
My favorite food was SpaghettiOs. All the food we're so hyper about now was not what we were worried about then. Twinkies were not a cause for concern, for example. But, for some reason, I never got to have Gatorade. It has become an inside joke in my family.

How has your mother influenced you?
She always supported me in what I wanted to do. When I left graduate school to write a novel, she believed in me. When it didn't sell, she didn't make me feel bad about it. She encouraged me and never criticized.

Do you consider yourself to be working full-time?
No. I take my kids to school. Then I come home and work frenetically. Up until a week ago I tore down to pick them up at school at three o'clock. Now I have some childcare and time to myself in the afternoon.

Who takes care of your children when you travel?
To a large extent my mother. I went through this whole semester without childcare. There is so much unreliability in my schedule and in my husband's; he is a journalist, too.

You've described yourself as being like "a human television set" with 24 hour programming for your children. Is that still true?
No, not at all. A certain point came, when Julia was four and a half and I was getting burned out. I realized that she was too dependent on me and needed to be more independent. I talked with her teachers and worked with them as I gradually started doing less. I didn't want to stop abruptly. With the passage of time and two kids, maybe I'm more tired. I tell fewer stories than I used to, and I don't make up as many songs. I don't know if my brain is overtaxed and I'm not as creative as I was before. (We have a whole series of stories about our former cat.) But I think I really got it when I banged up my car one day as I was telling the girls a story. You can't do so many things at once.

In your book the descriptions of life focus a lot on parent as chauffeur, in a car-oriented society. New York City is different in that way. Do you think parents here have an easier time because of that?
Yes. I'm an urban person and that's the style of life I prefer; it's healthier. You're walking and you're in contact with different kinds of people. If your children play outside, you take them out to play where there are other people, of all types. In the suburbs there are enormous jungle gyms in the backyards, and people don't leave their houses. It's an atomized society.

Your daughters were born in France and the contrast between motherhood in France and the United States seems to have been the catalyst for this book. Do you fantasize about going back to France?
No, I don't want to go back to live there. I never wanted to live in France permanently. I wanted my children to grow up in the United States and be socialized here. But I left France with the knowledge of leaving behind a specific time in my life. And it was easier there. My life here was much more expensive and much harder to set up. I have never resolved my childcare issues in five years of living in D.C.

Is intense parenting a distinctly American phenomenon?
It's spreading to everywhere you have an insecure middle and upper class. Perfect Madness is being published in France in March as a kind of wake-up call - to say, "Look out, this is the direction where things are going." There are a lot of similarities in England. You see it in the book I Don't Know How She Does It. In Holland it has resonance, as well as in Spain, India and Brazil, because of the emergent upper middle class. The elite are newly anxious to reproduce themselves. They feel a sense of heightened competition. You just can't take for granted that your children are going to occupy the same social stratum that you are.

You conclude that what our society is not doing and should be doing is to give women real options. What are those options? What would they be for you?
I don't think my personal situation is any different from that of most middle class women. There is the enormous calculation of who earns more - the babysitter or me? A lot of mothers have to do that calculus and come out finding that they don't earn more. In France the tax subsidy was so enormous that I was able to have a full-time nanny, which gave me many options for work. Here, unless you're privileged enough to have a husband who carries the financial weight or has health insurance, you may not have the option to choose to work part-time. If we had national health insurance, women wouldn't be forced to stay in full-time jobs. When you look at most women's lives and consider the ability to choose the kind of life they want, you can see that those choices only exist for privileged women, and we have to be really clear about that. Not one of those privileges is guaranteed; all of us can lose a husband to death or divorce.

Is there anything happening on the public policy front now that parents should know about?
Nothing good is happening; it's not even being talked about. Nothing. I don't see any sign of progress, despite the fact that women vote in larger numbers and determined the outcome of the last Presidential election. There should be support for families, but there is not.

There is a lot about your book which reminds me of The Feminine Mystique. Did you consciously do that? Did the book influence you?
It was not a conscious decision; it was more that The Feminine Mystique kept running through my head. I started writing about work and family issues and over and over again kept hearing the resonance from The Feminine Mystique. I was shocked by how much the inner monologues Betty Friedan wrote about have not changed, despite the fact that the ideas of women's place in the world has changed so much since 1963.

How does it feel to have written a best seller?
It feels good! I daydreamed when I was writing it, the way you daydream about wining a lottery without buying a ticket, but I never anticipated the phenomenon that the book became. The media coverage has been sometimes enthusiastic, sometimes not, but there has been a lot of it.

How has the book been received by parents?
Generally parents have responded in passionate ways. People either love it or hate it. The book is a mixture of personal feeling and intellectual insight. Looking back, it is strongly infused with my personality - not a book that you read through without having a strong reaction.