The Sheila Variations

Lileks Bleated about this same article today and then linked us to an article about the slacker mom. Couldn't post the URL as your comments section wouldn't let me (it's at msn),

Yeah, I read Lileks. 75% of my blogroll are commenting on this right now, so I thought I'd throw my 2 cents in.

You can't put links into comments? That doesn't seem right - let me look into it.

I wouldn't go so far as to call it grim and bleak, but then we didn't wait FIVE FRACKING (Battlestar Galactica is my new favorite show) YEARS to go on a date, either. On the whole, I think you have the right take.

My whole response to Jean Kerr's stuff, Ken, is that she treated parenting, being a mother, and balancing work and motherhood, with humor. There was a TON of slack given - to herself, to her husband, to the stresses. And not only that - she saw the whole thing as grist for the comedy mill. Not that she didn't take her responsibilities seriously - but that she far more focused on the joys of it, the FUNNINESS of her kids ... than this grim bleak rat-race of today.

Maybe it's not all grim and bleak ... but it seems that way to me sometimes, from the outside. When I hear everyone talk about how HARD it is. How FRACKING hard it is!

Sure, it's hard. But isn't it a little bit fun, too?

I keep going back and editing this piece. I wrote it fast, and posted it fast.

Julia - I added some quotes from Lileks, and also a link to that slacker mom piece.

i'm not a parent either. but...columbine happens? people blame parents. education is in decline? people blame parents. kids do drugs? people blame parents. kids grow up to be serial killers? people blame parents. teenagers get pregnant? people blame parents. guns in schools? people blame parents. parents are constantly being implicated in their children's failings--child's failure=parents' failure, so child=parent and parent=child. that's one way to look at it.

and it's not just childhood that's no longer about having fun. it's life in general. it's harder and harder to make ends meet with just one full-time job, so many people--including myself and many of my friends my age--work two. and freelance. there are few households that can afford for one parent to stay home anymore--and so when parents are around their kids they try to make up for lost time (one of the biggest "alpha moms" i've ever seen was a woman who was a nurse at a hospital when i was a volunteer at a parenting center in college. she got to be around her children so seldom that when she was there, she would literally not let anyone else touch her children). and parents, in thinking about their children's futures, cannot be confident any longer that they will find their way, that flipping burgers might pay the rent for a while. real wages adjusted for inflation are at a lower point than any in the last century. no one has time for anything anymore--least of all "fun."

But I've seen people able to adjust to the tougher realities of life you describe (all very real, of course) with more finesse and savvy and humor (above all else: HUMOR) than the Alpha Moms. What you say is correct ... but some people buy into the lie more than others.

My parents didn't have a lot of money. My mom made all our clothes. There were 4 of us. It must have been NUTS on their end. Yes, cost of living was much cheaper then ... but the same stresses were there. You have to set your kids up right, you have to get them through school, you have to spend time with them, you have to make sure you're there for them and that you pay attention to what's going on with them ...

There were some "mommies" in my neighborhood who hadn't grown up, and always wanted to hang out with us. You know ... they literally had forgotten how to be an adult (if they ever knew).

Slacker Mom has the right idea. I like it. She doesn't care how "hard" everyone tells her parenting should be. She's not buying into it. A question of perception, perhaps.

there IS overidentification, you're right. but that's more the nature of the phenomenon rather than a change in what causes it. in the past, parents would disown their children for enough of a disappointment. now, they try to live their children's lives FOR them instead. it's a different wrong solution to the same problem. as for why that reaction, you can probably point to an increased sense of introspection in our culture and a tendency towards self-actualization as an ultimate goal.

another reflection of this is in children's books and television programming. when i was a kid, popular kid's shows were about learning--reading rainbow, 3-2-1 contact, square one. there were some silly cartoon shows, too, but most of them involved action! and adventure!

now it's all barney--"i love you, you love me..."

3-2-1 contact is one of the greatest shows ever produced. And that's final.

"Contact
It's the feeling
It's the motion
When everything happens
Contact
It's the answer ..."

I wonder if part of it is the "safety mom" (or "safety dad") phenomenon?

When I was a kid (between 25 and 30 years ago now - damn, where did the time go?), my mom would send me outside to play. I walked down the street - probably close to half a mile - to my best friend's house. I climbed trees. I played in the mud. My mom probably worried, but she never let on that it was potentially dangerous for me to be outside alone, or walking along a residential street alone at dusk. (Of course, had I not arrived at my friend's house in a timely manner, HER mom would have called my mom and they would have gone out looking...)

Nowadays, all you hear is how dangerous the world is. And how you can damage your child permanently by doing something a little wrong - like letting them see a cartoon that's too scary, or feeding them a particular food too early. And although I don't discount that there have been some medical discoveries (like - feeding a kid solid food too early increases the risk of food allergies), I think it's so blown up into a giant swirl of fear that parents get terrified and shut down some of their more rational impulses and they go and cocoon their children in safety.

And of course, keeping a kid that swaddled is a 24 hour a day job.

I don't know. I remember when I was a kid, the house was usually a mess, there were tadpoles slowly developing into frogs in an aquarium somewhere, there were "art" projects my brother and I made drying on the dining room table, there were Lego bricks and Star Wars figures everywhere. And we were happy. My mom used to roll her eyes and cackle over the "perfect" mothers in town who had cleaning people and who never let their kids take toys out of their bedrooms and who wound up raising these boring, vacant-eyed little kids.

I think the fact that my mom didn't sweat over doing everything "perfect" and the fact that she had a healthy sense of contempt for the 70s-era "alpha moms" went a long way to making my childhood happy, and raising me up into a fairly normal person. (What neuroses I have, are my own. They're not my parents' fault.)

And another thing, if I could be a wee bit selfish here? The parents who make kids their whole entire lives, to the exclusion of everything? Super boring to us childless singles. We really don't want to hear discussions of meconium. Trust me on that.

(Of course, the other option, and the one that usually happens, is as soon as my friends breed, they join some secret Fraternity of Parents, and suddenly I find myself not being invited over as often/any more, and the woman who was once willing to say "hey, let's go get some lunch" on a whim is suddenly too busy with parent's groups and Mom's Day Out and stuff like that. And it's sad....I'm sure there are family-folk who suffer a sort of claustrophobia from being so much involved with childrearing, but there's also the other side of the fence - the lonely single people going "but you can bring your baby along when you come out to lunch with me, really..." I had a friend in grad school who used to roll her eyes and mutter "great, see you in 18 years" when one of our mutual friends announced she was going to be a mother. I'm trying not to sound bitter, but...frozen dinners and re-runs of Law and Order are really a poor substitute for an actual social life with real people)

And beth - I think you're spot on with your comment about the increase in self-actualization as a goal in our culture.

ricki:

I've experienced that weird balancing act, too, when my friends become parents. A lot of times it's the parents themselves who are begging ME to go out. "Let's do a night out!! Please???"

I say, yawning, "I really need to catch up on my reading. I'm way behind in my biography about Patrick Henry."

The parent begs: "Oh, come on, you're no FUN anymore!!"

They need to get out, sometimes, more than I do!

I so love the phrase - Perfect is the enemy of Fun. Truer words were never spoken. I talk about this with my friends who have kids all the time. When I was a kid I remember that my mom had an extended support group made up of her friends. She would drop us off at Donna or Liz's or Vi's and then all of the kids would make forts in the backyard or play board games inside, or make forts in the dining room. We were really into making forts. Maybe we did this because we didn't have computers to play games on, and there were only about 7 channels to choose from on TV, but we had a so much fun. We were never bored. We never expected a mom to entertain us. Feed us, yes. But that was usually a meal on the run so we could get back to whatever project we were doing. We would put on shows in the garage and charge admission and our parents, God bless them would come and sit through our performances with a straight face and clap loudly at the end. Then we would all eat the refreshments that my mom made and it was the best time ever.
I remember my parents always seeming to have a good time with us and with my friends too - we always got to bring a friend.
What the moms that I know tell me is that they don't have that kind of connection with each other and I can't help but wonder why. The whole judgement/critical thing seems to be a factor, but it seems that it's in the subtext of their interactions with other moms. It's not something they can really identify.
I don't have kids so I try to be a support system for my friends who do. I spend time with their kids and I really enjoy myself. The isolation that I see in the parenting experience makes it seem really daunting to me.

susie:

Uhm ... did we share childhoods? I think we did.

I love what you said about the kid/grownup line. I totally agree because my parents were a lot like yours. There was a definite "adult" world and a definite "child" world. Now, my parents were young (20) when I was born, so sometimes those worlds overlapped, especially in the pop culture area, but not very much. It amazes me how different things are today. For example:

The other day I asked my friend J if she had heard a certain popular song and she said, "Oh, I don't get to listen to the radio anymore. We have to listen to B's CDs."

Um, hello? Who's the ADULT here? You don't get to? You have to? Ain't that your car? B, by the way, is SEVEN. Seven years old, and she runs pretty much the whole show. If I had told my mom she couldn't do something, well, let's just say that would have been BAD. Very, very bad.

I read the supermom piece via Lileks this morning, and have been chewing about what to write about it ever since. I still am - your post touched on a lot of the same stuff.

I've been raising my kids pretty much by myself for the last five years; my kids live with me about 90% of the time. Now, I was one of those guys who was voted "least likely to be allowed to have children" in high school, so this fact continually amazes my old friends. I fall firmly in the "let kids be kids" camp - and I DEFINITELY have learned the value of separating "kid time" and "adult time". I spent a few years before my divorce being "Super-Dad" myself (partly as a pre-emptive legal tactic, mostly because I'm DAD, dammit), and it nearly drove me crazy. No hobbies, no social life, nothing but kids, cooking, and that whole divorce thing.

And I worry about the children of "superparents". If kids grow up knowing that their parents have no lives outside of then, they take it for granted - and have as their "role model" a model of monomaniacal obsession (and not the fun kind we see on Red's blog!). They never learn to see their parents as humans, I don't think.

So I tell my kids "I'm Dad from when you wake up until 9:30 at night. After that, you are sleeping, and I'm the Un-Dad for a couple of hours".

And I think it works. I have friends who are superparents. When their kids come over, and escape their parents' smothering, I think they overcompensate - they're EXPLOSIVELY energetic, they break things, they just go farging CRAZY! They get to be KIDS, and they make up for lost time. My kids are little hellions around me, of course - but when I take them out in public, around *adults*, they are charming, personable, and actually - I'm amazed to write this - well-behaved.

Gack. Back to the drawing board on my post!

mitch:

For whatever reason, your "un-Dad" comment brought to mind some random comment you made on my blog a long long time ago ... about waking up clutching a bra with a vomit-soaked blanket nearby? Underneath a drum set, was it??

hahaha Un-dad, indeed.

Anyway, I really hear what you are saying - and I like your point about kids going NUTS when they're with you, but being able to behave themselves in public ... Interesting. It's the smothered kids who do not know how to behave in any way other than the way they are accustomed to at home.

I've got a funny story about my cousin Mike reprimanding someone else's kid on the Staten Island ferry ... ha ha Very funny story. But it's late. And I need to go home and cook something.

For the first two years of Conor's life, I tried to be a Super Mom, and discovered it was hard enough just being a mom. I went insane. Or I could have. It was close. What changed me was something I read (I wish I could remember where):

If you're on an airplane with a child and there's a sudden loss of cabin pressure, you're supposed to secure your own mask first THEN help the child with his.

Because if you can't breathe, you're no good to him.

Knowing that and accepting it, made my own un-Super-ness okay. So my boy gets ramen noodles more than I like to admit. So he plays video games for hours -- I play with him. We also go to museums, and movies, and look up odd crap online and read lots of Captain Underpants books. I haven't killed him yet, and I think he may pass the first grade.

Big Arm Woman over at tightly wound also blogged about this:

www.bigarmwoman.com

We have dear friends who have 3 year old twins, which being somebody without kids right now, I'm sure there's more than meets the eye. I honestly never heard the term "play date" until we had friends become parents. My brother and I never had "play dates", we just did whatever. Sometimes we'd trot over to the neighbor kids' houses, stomp around in the creek behind the house, now and then we'd get together with cousins close in age to us.

Lourie (the twins' mom), can never have a meal on her own. She sits down and one (or both) of the kids suddenly needs something, it could be as trivial as not finding a toy, and off she goes to tend to them. My mother would've said "Let me finish eating, then I'll help you". She did not attend to our every whim at the drop of a hat, she let us learn how to be independant, and it was for the better. Like you said Sheila, our parents were the parents, we were the kids, and it was made clear as far back as we can remember.

I had forgotten what parenting used to be like until I recently saw the movie Far From Heaven, which is set in 1958. It predates me a little, but not much (I was raised in the 60's and 70's). At first the movie seemed like a cartoon, a stunning, gorgeous cartoon. But the way Julianne Moore interacts with her kids is so amazingly different from the way it works now: In the movie, her son says, "Mom, can I go over to Hughey's house?" And she calmly replies, "No, dear, your father and I have plans this evening. Bring in the groceries and get out of the way - I need to park the car." Not angry, not threatening, just stated the case, and the child says, "Okay, Mom." The daughter says, "Mom, can I pul-eeze get the new ballet slippers?" And Mom says, gently and with respect but authority, "Dear, I told you that we would discuss it with your Father, now march inside and take a bath." If you asked a mom to say these lines today they would tell you their children would laugh in their faces, right? Or else they would have to yell them, not simply purr them like Julianne does. I know it's a movie, it's fiction -- I know, but was it so bad that the parents were the leads in those days, and the children were the supporting cast? That's how it was then. Mommy and Daddy had their lives and they weren't completely given over to getting their kids to and from a hundred classes and lessons and playdates. My mom would say, "Go outside and ride your bike or something, dear," And I'd say "Okay." (Honestly, it didn't occur to me to disagree or argue or whatever, I just did it.) And I'd go out to the cul-de-sac and there'd be someone else from the neighborhood there and, sure enough, hours would pass, and my mom would stand on the front porch and say, "Stevie, come to dinner!" And I would. Was I some sort of automaton, whipped into submission by super strict, punishment-oriented parents? On the contrary, I was hardly ever punished, I just accepted that Father (more often Mother) knew best. It was strangely comfortable growing up with that sort of strength. I could RELY on their character.

Oh, later on, when I was a teen, sure, I was a disobedient, mouthy, sarcastic snot, and my parents weren't thrilled with me. But I had a good 12 or 13 years there where I was NOT the center of the family but I was certainly very important, knew I was loved, knew right from wrong, enjoyed my life, and didn't feel deprived of anything or any activity. Isn't that what everyone wants for their children? Does the child-as-tyrant need to sit at the center of the house and dictate to the parent what happens?

My mother was a super Mom but she was no SuperMom. She didn't feel like she had to impress anyone with her "parenting skills" or her "high-achieving son." She never signed up for cupcake duty at school. She'd rather have a philosophical discussion with the principal about education.

My weekly piano lessons happened to coincide with her weekly wash-n-set appointment at the beauty parlor, so we went together on Saturday mornings. After my lesson, I'd explore the art store and buy yards of colored butcher paper for 5 cents a yard, then go to the bookstore and read until my mom was done (about an hour later). Then we'd go to Little Luigi's and have lunch. Quality time with Mom? Damned straight. Would I have had piano lessons if they were offered Thursday afternoons? I'm not sure, actually.

When my parents had guests for dinner, I would sometimes be invited to join them, but sometimes I would eat early and go play with my Legos in my room if my parents wanted to have an adult evening. Later on, my mom would tuck me in and kiss me goodnight. That's all the supermomming I ever wanted or needed.

I hadn't realized how vastly different it is now, until I took a look into the past with Far From Heaven and realized with a start how much things had changed.

John - that's an awesome rant she wrote. I love it.

I just want to mention one thing that I don't think was mentioned... ("What that lady is saying is, she would really prefer you not empty your bucket of sand over her little boy's head. Is that okay with you, honey?")
When was it up to the kids to decide whether or not they did these things? You don't ask them if they *mind* not throwing sand; You say to them, "Stop throwing sand."
This assumes that parents even care about what their kids are getting up to. When I worked post-college at a local bookstore, parents would plunk their kids down in the kids section and watch apathetically as their 'perfect little angels' proceeded to trash the place, often times destroying lots (and lots) of merch. We couldn't stop them either, because any attempt to do so would end up with a psycho-parent in our faces yelling that it wasn't our place to control their kids. Whose place is it then, if you are so obviously not willing to do it? I know I would never have gotten close enough to do any kind of damage when I was young, so what makes parents today think it's okay? Being a Super Mom means being a mother, not a friend or human entertainment system. Discpline is important, but it seems to have fallen by the wayside in an attempt to make our children into our friends. This too needs to change in order to raise the future generation to be aware, productive, non-egomaniacal, functional members of society.