The most fairytale bedtime story I’ve heard is the story about what bedtime with an infant looks like! It’s one of the many myths that our media, TV shows, movies, social media all serve to build up. The world is swimming in cultural narratives and memes on what life and parenting is like which are often far from reality. Even in shows like Netflix’s “Workin’ moms” from which you might expect better, there’s a lot of unrealism. The characters are slim tall rich females who do not represent the diversity of moms out there physically or socio-economically. These characters work out, have hobbies and are well-dressed in new-looking clothing every day (sidebar: for once, I’d like to see Hollywood dress a character in something that doesn’t look like they just snipped the tag off) and living in houses with ample space (where the guest room isn’t your office AND the nanny share kid’s nap room from 11 am – 1 pm; and the living room isn’t your kid’s primary play area). How far our stories are from reality and whether this is healthy is a big topic – the unrealism extends across so many things. In this blogpost, I’ll be looking at the depiction of evening/bedtime routines in movies, and especially the routines with babies. With older kids, there’s the classic scene of a parent having a thoughtful conversation with a kid who is tucked into bed. It often ends with both parent and kid saying “I love you” and the parent heading out of the room turning off the light. I don’t have personal experience with older kids, but somehow I’m skeptical already. Because I do have experience with infants and oh boy, is there a gap there between the media story and the reality. For infant bedtime routines, one prominent cultural meme (often used in marketing kids stuff still) is two parents looking lovingly at their sleeping baby in a crib before going off to spend the evening together eating dinner and drinking wine in their perfect house. In my 14 months of being a parent, this moment of my partner and I standing side by side looking into a crib at our sleeping baby has not happened so yeah, I don’t know where they got that from. So here it is: a comparison of the media narrative Utopia, and what reality often looks like!
Myth/Utopia: What evenings with a baby look like according to the Media
Put baby to bed at 7 pm after reading 1-2 bedtime stories that you both love and find engaging, whilst cuddling in bed. Say Goodnight and then shut the door and baby is asleep quietly and will sleep for 12 hours until morning. You go have a glass of red wine (because your figure is perfect and you burn these calories off easily with your high metabolism) whilst any of these things happen:
- Your husband gives you a foot massage and you watch a TV show together, heck maybe even a movie – it’s only 7 pm, the night is young!
- Relax in your living room on the cream spotless couch reading a book. Your fancy lamp, unafraid of being knocked over, rests on the cream plush rug. Everything is tidy and in its place. You sigh in satisfaction of how aesthetically pleasing and instagrammable your home is
- You talk about things with your partner in artful conversation. This is really special connection time with just the two of you, each giving the other their full attention. “How was your day?” you ask and you help your partner solve a problem they’ve been having at work.
- Romantically head to the bedroom for a passionate night wearing lacy lingerie. Your partner has a six pack and you have washboard abs from all the gym workouts you do in the day so you both feel so body-confident
Reality: What the majority of evenings with a baby look like
Try to put baby to bed at 7 pm. Read 12-15 books that you find boring because you’ve read each one 12-15 times every day for the past 7 months, and you can recite them by heart. Baby keeps picking the same one again and again to read. Say Goodnight, and shut the door to wailing baby. Try to give them 5 minutes to calm down. They do not calm down. Go pick baby back up. Try a variety of techniques to get them to go to bed including all the things that are no-nos in sleep training (bottle, rocking in the chair). Give up. Wait until 8 pm and try again. This time you succeed, but only after another rough 10 minutes. Feel utterly worn out though it’s only 8.10 pm and you should have the night ahead of you. Then any of these things happen:
- Collapse in a tired heap on the couch, half-arsedly ask your partner how their day was and then ignore their answer; or have a conversation with them entirely about pressing errands around the house. In any of these conversations, switch topics abruptly and frequently interrupt your partner with unrelated thoughts that occur to you as they’re talking because you lost the ability to form complete thoughts many months ago. Most importantly in all these scenarios, do not concentrate on what your partner says and process only about 50% of it, and feel vaguely guilty about that. Realize your lack of listening skills later when something comes up that your partner remembers telling you about but you have no recollection of.
- Look around at the pile of dishes from dinner and the big mess around the high chair that needs to be cleaned up. Negotiate with yourself to clean up things, against all the tiredness in your body. Effective motivating thoughts: the threat of E coli and Salmonella growing on baby’s high chair tray; the threat of spreading around mashed banana from your slipper if you don’t pick up the chunks of banana on the floor; the threat of baby eating the leftover veggie sausage piece off the floor the next day and getting sick. These motivating thoughts usually suffice to complete the biggest most pressing items of cleaning, but are not enough fuel to do the whole thing: you still leave a pile of dishes to be attended to in the morning, and the countertop can wait another day to be wiped.
- Negotiate with your partner on who will sleep in the baby’s room tonight. Common negotiating points: early morning meetings, who did this last time, who will have to do this more in the future. Win and celebrate, but realize a night in another room is not really that much of a prize – when baby is loud and up at 5/6 am, the neighbor’s know about it too – being in another room is hardly insulation. Romantically head to separate bedrooms to sleep whilst wearing flannel pyjamas or the same sweatpants you wore all day and plan to wear the next day too (as much as you can call just waking up and getting started on the day in whatever you were wearing last night out of laziness/fatigue a “plan”).
Aren’t utopias nice? What’s the harm?
Media utopias seem like pretty narratives. Some may ask: why would you want to watch TV and movies and follow people on Instagram that are exactly like your life? Why not enhance it? Style it better? Spruce it up? What’s the harm?
The harm is that these narratives become standards pretty quickly. Standards that people measure themselves against, fail against and then feel bad about and ultimately lose life satisfaction against.
If these stories were completely fantastical they’d actually be safer than their current form. I think the trap of the Media Utopia story is that it sometimes does occur in reality (at different frequencies for different people). “Every dog has its day” and every now and again you do get that perfect evening with your partner which proves that it is possible. Furthermore, people you know will post about elements of their lives that look close to the media story on Instagram – and they’ll do this selectively and way more than they share anything of the many more mundane moments they live or the ones where there is food on the floor or a pile of unfolded laundry in the background. And therein lies the danger – you can easily convince yourself that this is the standard to which you should be aspiring every day, that if it was possible once, there must be a formula to it, a method to it. You spend time and energy every day trying to get to something that simply can’t occur every day, rather than being grateful for when it randomly and infrequently occurs.
My hope in writing this blogpost series on parenting is to bring us back to reality a bit and lower the standards and expectations. Life as a parent is supposed to be messy, it’s supposed to be hard. And a cream couch or cream anything is just not a good idea if you have kids.
Notes
PS on Netflix’s show Workin’ moms, I found this article critiquing it more relatable than the show!
PPS I tried really hard but just couldn’t find a good stock photo for this blog featuring brown characters, which I try to do whenever possible on this blog
