Another archive hit from Mary Tyler Mom. And if you’ve read Donna’s Cancer Story, now you know why I feel a moral superiority to Ms. Paltrow. Hope you enjoy!
Last week I wrote about the cruelty of mothering and working, the judgment that goes on, the thanklessness of it all. This week? Sorry, but I’ve got to judge. I can’t stop myself. Huff Post did a piece on Gwyneth Paltrow a few days ago, I can’t even remember what it was about, but there was a link to Goop, her weekly online “newsletter” about “lifestyle.” Specifically, a link to her posting about “A Day in the Life” of busy working mothers. I’m a busy working mother, I says to myself. I write about working mothers, too, I says to myself. So I clicked on the link. I laughed. I cried. I wretched.
At reader request, Gwyneth, or Gwynnie as I like to call her, thought she would solicit a slice of life, day in the life guest blog from two “extremely busy working mothers.” To best relate to her readers, she chose Juliet, a partner in a California venture capital firm, and Stella, daughter of a Beatle and famed fashion designer. You know, just two average working Joannas. The intent was to have the three working moms, Gwynnie included, detail a day in their “manic” lives to see how they fit it all in, how they do it all, if you will, and to share working mom tips for the rest of us. Ugh.
How Wealthy White Women Who Work Make It Work:
- get up b/w 5:30 to 6 am daily to exercise as it will “make you happy”
- have a personal trainer come to your home on Monday mornings to ensure a healthy start to your work week
- “curate” your social media and personal web
- get an amazing assistant
- commit to a weekly blow out to save time in mornings
- enjoy 90 minutes of “family time” from 6 to 7:30 pm, as “many nights of the week as you can make it”
- schedule your acupuncture at 9:30 at night
- spend your time “impacting the highest upside situations”
- have dinner with your kids at least 3x/week; read to kids 5x/week
- find a “great alteration person” to help you “review your looks, sort out closet, and plan key looks for travel, weekend, evenings, holidays”
- ingest copious amounts of flax seed oil and make your children do the same
- devise lists and spreadsheets and lists of spreadsheets
- organize “one or two key moments” during school year so your kids can see you “interacting as ‘Mummy'”
- take meetings in cabs
I honestly thought I was reading a piece from The Onion. Alas, I wasn’t. These three gals go on and on about the difficulties of doing it all and something about it all being worth it. At one point Gwynnie describes the conundrum of needing to leave the house by 8:20am and having one of her two adorably named kids still asleep at 8am. In just 20 minutes time, that Gwynnie managed to gently awake her son, dress him, feed him eggs and toast she prepared herself, administer the aforementioned flax seed oil (lemon flavored, she’s not stupid!), finish decorating the Christmas toy drive shoe boxes for those less fortunate, explain the significance and reality of children having less around the world, then wait for her two adorably named kids to go to their playroom and pick personal toys and books to contribute to now completely decorated shoe boxes as they have been sufficiently enlightened about the plight of others and feel for Angelina Jolie’s soon to be adopted children.
Fuck that. I reject that is humanly possible. Gwynnie has lost all credibility, awesome gLee appearance be damned.
The three gals each very briefly mention their nannies. Who come to them. And apparently stay til the kids are in bed. And probably live with the family. Fuck that, too. I can’t stand this need to perpetuate the myth that women can do it all. We can’t. Something always suffers. Always. It’s work or it’s family or most commonly a bit of both. And my honest guess is that something suffers for these gals too, even though they are Oscar winners and rock and roll scions and venture capitalists. What is a venture capitalist, anyway?
Mary Tyler Mom 