Mom’s Night Out Critics: Is Being a SAHM Anti-Feminist?

Several months back, I got a chance to preview the movie, Mom’s Night Out, which is still playing in theaters for a few more days. You can read my review about it here, but what I want to talk about today is the mixed and even NEGATIVE reviews it is getting from many critics. While not completely surprising since it was somewhat promoted as a funny chick flick but has a very Christian message, I can see how some might have been unpleasantly surprised in the theater. But to go so far as to call it “Depressingly regressive and borderline dangerous,” “Unabashedly anti-feminist,” with “Ugly sexism” and “Archaic notions of gender roles” – hold the phone, I have to take a stand!

What bothers me about these critics’ reviews is not what they have to say about the movie, but what they have said about MY JOB. In addition to being a tiny, unpaid mommy blogger and taking some very infrequent, small-time contracts for web and graphic design, my FULL TIME job is a stay-at-home wife and mother.

Do I have an old-fashioned notion of womanhood to want to stay home and raise my babies? Is my husband a sexist, chauvinistic or demoralizing man because his job is the one that pays our bills? Am I an oppressed and stifled nonproductive member of society because I have chosen to forgo my professional career in favor of a domestic one? Mama, please!

I take HONOR in my role, I am PROUD of my job and I believe with 100% of my being that what I do is vital to our future and more important than all the VPs, Fortune 500’s, fame and power combined in the whole, western world!

Now, do I believe that EVERY woman should be a stay-at-home mom? No way! I have several dear friends who have to work because their income is needed to provide for their families. I also know other moms who have very successful careers outside of the home and not only are they good at what they do, but they love to do it! Do I look down on them because they have chosen a different path than me? Absolutely not! In fact, I have learned many valuable lessons from my working mom friends. While they may work 40 or more hours away from the home, when they come back to their husbands and children, they are more present with them than I sometimes am all week long! Seeing this encourages me to be a better mom in the place where I am at.

So, here’s my punch line: I believe every woman is called to do what is right for themselves and for their families. And as such, we are accountable to no one regarding those callings except to our husband, children and our God, if we choose to serve one. Let’s stop pushing our ideals, notions and callings onto others. Let’s let women lead the lives they are convicted to lead no matter how simple or complex we think they are. And let’s support and encourage each other in those choices instead of slapping on hurtful labels and tearing each other down.

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Mom’s Night Out is in theaters just through Thursday of this week. Get your tickets here and go see it today to show your support and tell the entertainment critic world that good, wholesome films about the domestic job we hold is NOT archaic, but is just as valid of a career choice for a woman to make as any other!

 

Moms’ Night Out – Motherhood Monday Movie Review and Link Up!

I got the chance last week to see a special screening of the upcoming movie, Mom’s Night Out. I convinced my sweet hubbie to come along, and despite him being one of only three or four men in a packed theater full of giggling and shrieking women, he laughed right along with us. That is how true this movie reflects motherhood and all of our mama-isms.

Movie Background
Allyson (played by the adorable Sarah Drew) is a stay-at-home mom of three little ones with a husband that travels often for his job. As a way of reminding herself that she is still a productive member of adult society, she blogs as a “mommy blogger,” with three followers. Yesterday she had four. She is also a clean freak, germ-a-phobe with “nerve endings in the carpet.”

As the movie begins we see Allyson unable to sleep and frantically cleaning her home at 4 a.m. on Mother’s Day. It’s spotless when she finally falls into bed, but when she gets up a few hours later all hell has broken loose. The kids have DESTROYED the house to make her breakfast and through her OCD eyes, she sees them covered in salmonella. Meanwhile, her husband, Sean (Sean Astin), calls from the airport and while she is trying to get the kids ready for church, she finds her daughter drawing pictures on the wall and nearly loses it. Or, as she calls it, has a “moment.”
Several scenes (and “moments”) later, she arrives at church, disheveled and with mascara smeared all over her eyelids (from her daughter’s insistence on playing make-over). She sees and silently judges the beautiful, together moms (“I bet she has a nanny”) and brushes past the seemingly perfectly composed pastor’s wife, Sondra (Patricia Heaton), who well-meaningly consoles her “just give it five years.”

Allyson drops her kids off at Sunday school with the teacher, her best friend, Izzy (Andrea Logan White) and heads to the bathroom to clean herself up. But the “no touch” automatic paper towel dispenser will not come out, no matter how hysterically she gestures and dances in front of it.
Somehow she manages to squeeze into a packed pew and, sure enough, moments later gets paged to return to the nursery because of her son’s latest antic. When the day is over and Sean returns home late from his business trip, he sees the disaster that is their house and follows the trail of chocolate wrappers to find Allyson hiding in their closet, stress-paralyzed and unable to take her eyes off a live, internet feed of an Eagle’s nest.

Later that week, while at a church book club (an elusive dream of being able to read books as a mom of three, but going to the book club nonetheless because it makes her feel better) and texting with Izzy, sitting right next to her, Allyson realizes she needs a night out. They invite Sondra, because she looks like she is stressed too, having a teenage daughter and being unable to text legibly.
But when Saturday comes and it’s time to go out, Allyson has visions of the craziness that will ensue if she leaves her children with Sean. Despite this, she takes the minivan to pick up Izzy, who is in the midst of her own troubles in the bathroom, surrounded by five positive pregnancy sticks, to prove to herself that it really is true. Meanwhile Izzy’s husband, Marco (Robert Amaya), is freaking out about watching their twin boys alone. But off the girls go to pick up Sondra and head to their fancy Groupon restaurant for dinner.

What ensues next is a mom’s night out nightmare…and then some! Miscommunicated dinner reservations, unexpected hospital visits and a wild goose chase all over town that leads them to a stoner’s house, a tattoo parlor, a police chase and ends up at jail. And through this crazy weaving of every mom’s struggles and worst nightmares, there runs the sweet truth and tender moments that make us all say that although we have the hardest of jobs as a mom, it is also very important. We love our children and their quirks. And even their art scribbled on the wall is frame-worthy.

My Review
I seriously loved this movie. I loved how real it was. I loved how it reminded me that even with kids that sometimes make me feel like I am going figuratively insane, I am not alone on the battlefield of motherhood. And a reminder of this on a daily basis is soooo important for my mental stability!
I loved that everyone in the theater laughed at the things my husband and I laughed at…because what they were talking about or showing was all true! Things like comparing ourselves to Bruce Banner…we don’t WANT to turn into a mommy hulk. And sometimes we can’t help being the wild woman leaning out the minivan window to reality-check the “just married” couple in the car next to us, right?!

I resonated so much with Allyson. There are seriously moments every day in my life as a mom where it could be me in that movie. And even though on those days I would so much like to just throw my hands in the air and scream or eat a whole bag of chocolate and crumble onto my closet floor in a sobbing mess, sometimes it helps to just laugh at it. Which is why I also loved how Patricia Heaton prefaced the movie by saying, “You need to laugh at motherhood. Because if you don’t laugh, you will go CRAZY. And the kids will WIN!”
I, like Allyson, wanted to be a mommy when I grew up. This was my dream as a child. I am literally living my dream and yet I am still not happy. I’m stressed, exhausted, short-fused and most of the days, I feel like I am not enough. But, as Trace Adkins’s “Bones” character so poignantly asked Allyson, “not enough for who?” my answer would be the same as hers. I feel like I am not enough for my husband, for my kids, my mother or for God. And when it really boils down to it, I feel like I am not enough for myself. I spend so much time beating myself up for feeling inadequate, but no one else sees that except me. My children always want to give me hugs, tell me that I am pretty or draw beautiful pictures of our family. My husband daily thanks me for a job well done and weekly insists that I take some time out for myself. I may sometimes feel like I am not enough and that I am often a failure, but as this movie makes clear, we ARE enough, right where we’re at.

Moms’ Night Out takes this message of laughing at motherhood and “you are enough” further than just the comedic, mothers uniting in comradery of silly mommy-isms. It shares a message of hope and of love. And not just love from family, but of the Divine. This movie does a fantastic job of showing the love of Jesus to an often skipped-over and unreached group; stay-at-home-mothers. It is so easy for a mom who does not work outside of the home to sometimes feel that what they do is of little value with almost no reward. They need to hear that most of the reward is eternal and we have a heavenly Father, who can see past the temporary, even when we can’t. And that IS enough!

So look for Moms’ Night Out, coming to 1500 theaters nationwide on May 9, 2014. Check your local listings or Fandango.com and make it your very own, much-deserved mom’s night out! You can check out the movie trailer here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Leb6Vnhbp1A and learn more about the movie and the people who produced it at: http://www.momsnightoutmovie.com/

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