Screaming on the Inside
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Average rating3.2
"If this book feels like it’s sounding the alarm on the state of American motherhood, well, that’s because it is." -- San Francisco Chronicle In this timely and necessary book, New York Times opinion writer Jessica Grose dismantles two hundred years of unrealistic parenting expectations and empowers today’s mothers to make choices that actually serve themselves, their children, and their communities Close your eyes and picture the perfect mother. She is usually blonde and thin. Her roots are never showing and she installed that gleaming kitchen backsplash herself (watch her TikTok for DIY tips). She seamlessly melds work, wellness and home; and during the depths of the pandemic, she also ran remote school and woke up at 5 a.m. to meditate. You may read this and think it’s bananas; you have probably internalized much of it. Journalist Jessica Grose sure had. After she failed to meet every one of her own expectations for her first pregnancy, she devoted her career to revealing how morally bankrupt so many of these ideas and pressures are. Now, in Screaming on the Inside, Grose weaves together her personal journey with scientific, historical, and contemporary reporting to be the voice for American parents she wishes she’d had a decade ago. The truth is that parenting cannot follow a recipe; there’s no foolproof set of rules that will result in a perfectly adjusted child. Every parent has different values, and we will have different ideas about how to pass those values along to our children. What successful parenting has in common, regardless of culture or community, is close observation of the kind of unique humans our children are. In thoughtful and revelatory chapters about pregnancy, identity, work, social media, and the crisis of the Covid-19 pandemic, Grose explains how we got to this moment, why the current state of expectations on mothers is wholly unsustainable, and how we can move towards something better.
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This is an informative, well-researched book on the challenges faced by modern-day mothers in a variety of situations in the US. The argument is that structurally & culturally, the US is pretty damning to mothers, and that the pandemic made things a lot worse.
Like most books I've read about motherhood, I find the experience of reading this book a bit depressing: the chapters focus on how difficult it is to exist normally/continue working through pregnancy, the general lack of paid leave, the history of discrimination against pregnant women and mothers, the pressures of social media, the exorbitant costs of child care, child rearing falling more often to mothers than fathers, etc.
And I get it – that's what the book is about. It's to show the dismal state of affairs, presumably in the hopes of inciting change via legislation, community organizing, and shifting sociocultural beliefs around motherhood to make things better. But the mention of that – what can be done, I mean, what actions we can take – is only briefly mentioned at the end. There are glimmers of hope for change, but it makes it difficult for one to be excited about motherhood when it's made out to sound like one monumental, soul-sucking struggle.
The author mentions her daughters are the best thing she ever did in her life the acknowledgements, but that doesn't come through at all in the book. Ultimately, the line that hit me the hardest, which came towards the very end, reads: “Even about the things we love most, we are truly ambivalent.” That really resonates.
Anyways. The book is okay. It reads more like a research paper than a book – an engaging research paper, but not the most fun thing to sink your teeth into.
Not a totally bad book and I did like some parts, especially about the history of motherhood and it's expectations, and the final chapters about how it has all changed for mothers in the times of the pandemic. I guess I just wasn't sure what I was expecting from this.
Much of what I have experienced as a woman and a working mother is discussed in this book, along with some history. It's depressing, but also good to feel seen.
