Mom camps offer a much-needed and different kind of family getaway | Canada Voices

Amberly McAteer is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail.

I heard them long before I saw them. Outside the dining hall at Camp White Pine, in Haliburton, Ont., the noise sounded less like 175 women gathering for a weekend retreat, and more like a roaring stadium.

The lake was glass, a loon called somewhere in the distance, and the log cabins glowed red in the setting sun; it had all the makings of a quiet summer night in prime Canadian cottage country.

But once inside, the laughter, the rowdiness, the immense joy was deafening. It was welcome night at the organized getaway by Rustic Mama Retreats, the group’s 150th such organized trip.

“When I say rustic, you say mamas,” chanted founder Jennifer McKee to the riotous crowd of women, mostly mothers from across every corner of Ontario and at every stage of parenting. They answered in unison, cracking cans and clinking wine glasses over icebreaker games. Some had come alone for the first time – myself included. Others had been returning with the same friends for eight retreats in a row.

All had come for the same reason: to get away.

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Mothers vacationing away from their families was largely unheard of in previous generations. My own mother remains bewildered by the concept. “What do you mean, a trip without your children?” she had said, baffled. “I could have never left you kids.”

The advent of weekend retreats such as Mom Camp in Squamish, B.C., and one-day reprieves like Motherhood Expanded in Windsor, N.S., speaks to something distinctly modern: moms looking to temporarily escape the impossible expectations that we should be endlessly available, emotionally present and always responsible for nearly every aspect of our children’s lives. The mental load we carry – not only the endless list of things to do, but the relentless task of constantly thinking about that list – never lets up. Which kid has outgrown their summer clothes? Is there still wet laundry in the washer? Did I remember to register the kids for gymnastics? When’s the next dentist appointment? What on Earth is for dinner?

So of course this dining hall is loud; this was what relief sounds like.

As a mom of two little girls who are less than two years apart, I am well acquainted with the need for escape. When my kids were very young, my mom friends and I would plan family trips together, but the result was the same: longer lists, more stress, less sleep, just in a different setting. Now, we plan getaways without our families, exchanging texts with exhausted emojis and the number of days in the countdown until our next mini-vacation, sans kids.

We love our children beyond measure, and we cannot wait to leave them.

Thirty years ago, in The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood, American sociologist Sharon Hays coined the term “intensive motherhood” to describe a cultural shift that has only further intensified in the decades since. The good mother, she argued then, was expected to devote extraordinary amounts of time and all of her energy to maximizing her child’s development, and her value as a person depended on it.

Those demands have only expanded. Today’s moms are expected to be fully engaged parents while also succeeding at work, managing the household, carrying the family’s invisible labour – not to mention the growing sense of pressure to document it all in a social-media-driven culture that constantly moves the goalposts for what good parenting looks like.

“The standards have gone up,” said Andrea O’Reilly, the gender-studies professor at Toronto’s York University who is widely credited with founding the academic study of motherhood, “and the support has disappeared” – the village of family and community networks that helped shoulder the work of raising children.

Whereas the measure of a good woman in the 1950s and 1960s was her husband’s success and well-being, Prof. O’Reilly says that women today are increasingly judged by the success of their children.

We have opportunities our mothers and grandmothers often did not: more fulfilling careers, greater financial independence, and partners who, in many families, play a more active role at home than in previous generations. “But the expectations on moms have also absolutely gone through the roof,” Prof. O’Reilly says. “So can we call that progress? I really don’t know.”

She cites a fact that I often tell anyone within earshot: Even when women are the primary earners in heterosexual marriages, they continue to shoulder more caregiving and household responsibilities than their husbands do, according to a Pew survey.

Another statistic I reach for when my mom friends say they don’t have enough hours in the day: Compared with mothers in the 1960s and 1970s, who were far less likely to also be juggling a full-time career, modern mothers spend the same amount of time engaged in actively caring for their children.

Motherhood retreats and child-free weekends, Prof. O’Reilly said, act as an “escape valve” – a release from the mounting “pressure, resentment and exhaustion” of modern motherhood.

“But it’s extremely temporary.”

During Saturday morning archery lessons at camp, it doesn’t take long for the relief valves to start whistling.

For Susan Kerner, who came from Cambridge, Ont., to attend her fifth Rustic Mamas Retreat, the greatest appeal of the getaway was also the hardest part: choosing from among the activities and workshops.

“I truly had no clue what I actually liked,” she said, noting that her teenage son has an intense passion for soccer, so that became her “entire identity” for the last 10 years. “I just stared at the activity list for a long time and thought, ‘Archery could be fun? Maybe I like belly dancing?’ ”

That feeling of losing ourselves became a recurring theme in my conversations at camp. After launching five arrows into her target, Jacqueline Dancey, a mom of two from Keswick, Ont., told me about the lengthy, never-ending mental checklist that she always carries with her: “Are the kids ready to go to school and daycare? Are the lunches packed? Is the laundry done? House cleaned? Dinner served? Groceries bought?”

“I spend my entire weekend just on those things,” she said. “I feel like I can’t enjoy the majority of my life – so these mom trips let me carve that time out.”

Before Alison Hutt left for camp, she prepared dinner in advance for her husband and kids, and downloaded the kids’ busy calendars to her spouse – “like doing the extra work before I can turn on my out-of-office,” she said. Everyone nods in agreement. In the afternoon, after a canoe trip across the lake, the topic moved to another popular feeling: doing it all, and still feeling like a failure.

“I am for sure pulled in all directions,” said Carmen Pakkidis, a Grade 3 teacher in Aurora, Ont., and the mother of three boys. “It’s overstimulating, like I’m going from one job to the next. I give all of myself at school, then rush home and feel like I have less energy, and always feel I’m not doing enough.”

Sociologist Arlie Hochschild famously gave this experience a name in 1989: the second shift. For many working mothers, paid work is followed by a second round of unpaid labour at home. Later research has delved deeper into stress levels at home and at work, finding that working women reported much greater happiness levels when not at home.

With sons at similar ages as the 23 kids in her classroom, Ms. Pakkidis said her feeling of overwhelm is peaking, and that this trip was not an option – it was a necessity for her mental health.

“I don’t even care what I’m doing today,” she sad. “I just want to go at my own pace. Oh, and sleep a lot.”

Fittingly, the question that kept occurring to me at Camp White Pine is one that my kids harass me with all too often: says who?

Says who, that I should remember every birthday party RSVP, every dentist appointment, every impossible gymnastics registration? Says who, that I should be the de facto researcher of all things, the keeper of all parenting knowledge – the one expected to know the right way to discipline, feed, teach, comfort and empathize?

Who decided that loving our children should require losing ourselves? Who decided that motherhood had to become something so relentless that many of us feel like we have to escape into the woods, and run away from the very role we cherish?

It’s tempting, for me, to blame the patriarchy or social-media culture. But have mothers also decided this for ourselves?

According to Erica Djossa, a psychotherapist in Courtice, Ont., and founder of the maternal mental-health platform Momwell, the problem is that most moms aren’t stopping to ask those questions at all.

“Mothers just kind of merge onto this freeway, in the direction we see everybody else going, without any really clear destination in mind, without any real clear target other than this unsustainable, idealized form of motherhood that we are trying to embody,” she said.

Just as we are taught digital literacy – how to critically think about the medium and the message – Ms. Djossa says one missing piece is “motherhood literacy,” so that moms don’t simply “auto-subscribe” to the idea of a good mother as a martyr. Instead, we ask who, exactly, is benefiting from all this sacrifice.

The invisibility of the struggle is a large part of the problem. Until we can measure a mom’s mental load, we can’t possibly begin to lift it. Ms. Djossa recently launched the Invisible Load Inventory, an online assessment in which partners separately report who carries different aspects of household and caregiving work, an idea made popular by Eve Rodsky’s Fair Play. Thousands of couples from Canada and the U.S. have completed Ms. Djossa’s inventory exercise – and it has caused some male feathers to ruffle.

“Yes, we all know how hard you work,” Ms. Djossa said with a laugh. But, she said, righting the ship of the unbalanced mental load at home requires change to come, quite literally, from the inside.

So too does it need to come at a policy level, says Brigid Schulte, director of the Better Life Lab in Washington and author of Overwhelmed: How to Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time.

Since “maternal instinct is a myth” – a sentence so powerful I needed a moment to recover when she said it to me – she says the path out of intensive motherhood begins with ensuring women don’t default to being the primary parent in the first place.

She points to generous, well-used paternity leave as one of the clearest examples. When fathers stay home from the beginning and assume a caretaker role, they don’t just bond with their newborns. They learn the rhythms of caregiving and feel confident that they can – and should – be an equal partner, establishing a partnership that research suggests endures long after the leave ends.

Changing expectations about motherhood, of course, also means changing fatherhood. According to data, men overwhelmingly want to be more involved caregivers, but many feel constrained by workplace expectations and deeply ingrained cultural ideas about what a good man does. Caregiving, Ms. Schulte said, isn’t inherently maternal; it’s human.

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A similar imbalance surfaced in research she conducted on leisure a decade ago: women across countries, religions and age groups consistently said they felt they had to earn free time. Leisure wasn’t a right, but a reward.

That hundreds of women now feel the cultural pressure to be always on, and book the weekend away anyway? “This is absolutely an act of political power,” Ms. Schulte said – a small but meaningful rejection of the idea that a good mother should be endlessly available.

It’s no wonder my own mother couldn’t fathom mom trips. She, and her generation, didn’t give themselves permission to put themselves first, ever.

These getaways are hardly a universal solution – and the mothers who need them most are likely the ones who cannot afford to spend hundreds of dollars on a weekend away or have the means to ditch the kids at all. But to start to escape intensive motherhood, we need fewer mothers who feel guilty for leaving – and more families, workplaces and policies that make leaving unnecessary.

I can still hear the sound of the dining hall, and I think about it often. At the time, I thought it was simply the sound of overwhelmed women letting loose, setting aside impossible expectations for 48 precious hours.

But I remember it differently now. I hear it as the sound of change itself.