Alpha Mom

I’m sure many of you by now have read, or at least heard discussed, the Alpha Mom article in New York magazine a while back. It featured the kind of upper-stratosphere wealth and uber-working-mom gawking/stereotyping that would make Caitlin Flanagan salivate (or at least want to kick herself for not getting to skewer this woman first). I read it half resentful at the way the article seemed to manipulate the knee-jerk impulse to judge mothers with this whopper of an easy target to judge, and half sympathetic, in a sad way, to the article’s subject, who seems to be doing what many mothers try to do during that intense period of early motherhood — try to explain it all to herself in a way that fits her worldview — albeit on a scale most of us would never consider. I’d meant to bring up the Kallman piece on this blog (and my own) a while back, when we were posting about mom-on-mom judgment and how easy it is to be judgmental of mothers, and then, of course, life got in the way. But this thread on Metafilter today reminded me just how torn we are when it comes to judging other mothers, and how divided we are on what is required of mothers to be considered “good.”