I often think about how much easier my life as a mother has been made as the result of advancing technology. Need a quiet moment to make a school-related phone call? Put on a DVD. Prefer the kids to read instead of watch TV while you clean the kitchen? Pull out the Leap Frog Tag.
I don’t need to send my children outside to play unsupervised (remember those days when five year olds roamed the neighborhood solo?) just so I can find time for house cleaning and meal preparation. I have an arsenal of electronics at my disposal. Tasks that once took hours to do are now set into motion with the flick of a switch. No wonder we watched The Jetsons and really believed that one day, a full three course chicken dinner could be conjured up by pushing a few buttons on a box in the wall. I mean, I am from the generation that witnessed the dawn of microwave cooking. What wonders would follow?
So while I once dreamed of being Laura Ingalls Wilder and wearing long dresses with bonnets, playing in backyard creeks and hosting taffy pulls, I now shudder to think of cold basin baths, washboard laundering and cooking in giant pots over hearth fires. Pioneer living doesn’t sound like much fun to me as a mother in 2010.
And aside from fun, the real upshot of all of this is that we now have more time to devote to parenting our children. We give them chores to teach them responsibility, not because we require their help to run a household.
We all know about the sociological (or is it anthropological?) phenomenon of “teenagers,” and how this is a fairly modern development. Today, people don’t automatically become adults at age sixteen (or younger). They have so much more time to be kids. But for today’s mother, that boils down to more time to parent. To baby our babies, to cherish our children and to indulge our adolescents’ angst.
What a gift – this extra time. This option to forgo daily chores so that we can spend a few extra hours with our kids. Because for us that only means some clutter and mess – while for Pioneer Woman, it could have impacted the family’s survival.
And I’m not looking at this from a stay at home mom perspective either. Even when I was a working mom, I still had to do all the same housekeeping. So I really relied on my modern conveniences to give me even a modicum of time to devote to simply enjoying my children.
I think all mothers have at least one moment when they are struck by how different life is for us and how trivial some of our child rearing obsessions really are. The stress of preschool waiting lists and taking the perfect holiday card picture will lose some urgency when you consider the number of women who used to die in childbirth as compared to today’s statistics.
That was the big one for me. I was once talking about the number of friends I had (myself now included) who required either planned or emergency c-sections to save the life of the baby and/or mother. And I realized that there was a good chance that fifty percent of my friends would have been dead by age thirty.
At one time, Pioneer Woman got up before dawn to nurse an infant, gather eggs, milk cows, prepare a meal and wonder if her second missed period foretold the birth of yet another baby and all the risk that accompanies that miracle. It certainly puts my own complaints of sleep deprivation and stretch marks into perspective…
It’s so easy for me to get caught up in my own world of real and imagined problems, and I often call upon Pioneer Woman to give me that much needed perspective. She reminds me of the many things I take for granted: good doctors, baby monitors and time (albeit limited) to spend on myself. I can read, go out with friends, buy myself a little something because I had a hard day… I can actually worry about having too much to eat.
I look at my daughter and wonder what her life will be like. Will my own idea of modern ease put her much more advanced coveniences into proper perspective? Will she see me as an example for everything she takes for granted.
Of course it’s all relative. Someday, I’ll be another woman’s Pioneer Woman to be remembered. What will women fifty to one hundred years from now say about our current daily life? Only time will tell. But I do hope for their sake, someone comes up with a better system for dusting and vacuuming. Because no matter how much easier it is for us now with modern cleaning products and appliances – I’d rather be pulling taffy with my kids.