The idea of striving for perfection—and, perhaps, being satisfied with nothing less—has been on my mind lately. I finally feel like I understand the role perfectionism has played in my life: a big one, but like most ideas, it’s not straightforward. My perfectionism does not look like my sister’s, which does not look like my mother’s, which did not look like her sister’s. At the heart of all of them, though, is the fear of making a mistake, which is wrapped up in notions of earning love and being worthy and trying to deserve anything at all.
Maureen Murdock writes on page 6 of The Heroine’s Journey:
The beginning stage of the journey often includes a rejection of the feminine as defined as passive, manipulative, or nonproductive. Women have often been portrayed in our society as unfocused, fickle, and too emotional to get the job done. This lack of focus and clear differentiation in women is perceived as weak, inferior, and dependent—not only by the dominant culture but by many women as well. Women who seek success in the male-oriented work world often choose this path to dispel that myth.
Murdock names women who have chosen the career path to illustrate her point, but doing so causes confusion. While she is speaking about all women, it sounds like she’s talking about only a segment of us, and isn’t this playing right into the hand of a patriarchy that relishes division and pushes black-and-white, all-or-nothing, good-or-bad points of view with only two choices and nothing but literalism? I have read the book once, so I know that Murdock’s thesis is more nuanced than that. I just wish she had worked harder to help all her readers understand that.
A paragraph or two after the one I just shared, we find this: “Our heroine puts on her armor, picks up her sword, chooses her swiftest steed, and goes into battle. She finds her treasure.”
Can’t that image be applied to the stay-at-home mom who suits up each day to be everything to her husband, her children, the homeschool group or the PTA, and quite possibly, even her next-door neighbors?
She looks for the next hurdle to jump, the next promotion, the next social event, filling every spare moment with doing. She doesn’t know how to stop or say no and feels guilty at the idea of disappointing anyone who needs her. Achieving has become an addiction, and there is an incredible ‘high’ associated with her newly won power.
If, societally, the division between career woman and stay-at-home mom weren’t so great, I wonder if I would have been able to get a handle on my unhappiness sooner. And again, it’s unfortunate that Murdock is not savvy enough to understand or see how she cooperates with the patriarchal system by emphasizing the divide: doing it so well, in fact, it’s likely that a reader of the stay-at-home persuasion will need a good dose of determination to stick with the book long enough to get anything out of it.
After a period of time of enjoying the view from the top, managing it all, including perhaps both career and kids, there may be a feeling of ‘Okay, I’ve arrived; what’s next?’ . . . It is often at this stage that a woman begins to feel out of sync with herself, or she may experience a physical illness or accident. She begins to ask, ‘What is all of this for? I’ve achieved everything I set out to achieve and I feel empty. Why do I have this gnawing sense of loneliness and desolation? Why this sense of betrayal? What have I lost?
How many times, in the course of my motherhood career, had I felt exactly that? Yet I hadn’t been fortunate enough to be allowed to ask such questions. Since I was doing “God’s work,” “living my vocation to motherhood,” and following in the footsteps of Blessed Mother Mary, I had no right to be dissatisfied. If I was unhappy or falling apart, it must be my fault. It certainly could have had nothing to do with my mostly absent husband. My complaints about him—a man who traveled an average of 28 weeks of the year for work until a worldwide “emergency” puts the brakes on that—and the parenting and homeschooling I had to do mostly on my own were largely met with protests from him and others about how hard he worked to provide for his family and assurances that he was a good father/husband. These assurances—spoken with conviction by just about everyone around me—were largely based on the fact that he didn’t smoke, drink to excess, do drugs, or carouse with friends and/or other women. And while I’m thankful for these things, I needed more than those to feel emotionally supported.
So, as I finish up with the introduction, I’d just like to say that Murdock’s book is important to me, because (even with its occasional lack of clarity) it helps me feel heard, understood, and validated, and we all need those more than we realize.