Area Woman Blows Gasket (6 page)
Read Area Woman Blows Gasket Online
Authors: Patricia Pearson
NEUROTIC MODERN PARENT
When my son was eleven months old, the question arose: How do I get somebody else to stand around, stupefied with boredom,
while he drops a rubber duck into the toilet, fishes it out, drops it in, fishes it out, cries, spies a stray bit of Kleenex,
drops that in, discovers that it has disintegrated, cries? In other words, I wanted to go back to work.
Do I pack him off to day care as I did my daughter, or do I hire some sort of nanny, preferably one who, through a rare genetic
disorder affecting the cerebral cortex, cannot be judgmental about the catastrophic state of my house?
Nothing in the world makes women more insanely neurotic than having a nanny. It doesn't matter who the nanny is. She could
be Mother Teresa, in which case the mother would start worrying that her nanny was more concerned about world poverty than
toddler gymnastics. What if, as a result of Nanny Teresa's neglect, baby Jimmy grew up to be uncoordinated? What then? As
soon as a woman hires a nanny, she's off and running with outlandish paranoia. One of my sanest friends recently confided
in me that she thought her nanny was putting poison in her son's Cheerios.
"Whaddya mean— like rat poison?"
"Yeah, I'm not kidding. He's been getting really sick after breakfast."
"Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't you think that your last nanny was slipping him Quaaludes?"
"Yes, but that was just a misunderstanding. This is different. I think she has a lot of repressed hostility."
There is no reasonable response to this kind of frenzied maternal fretting jag, and I've heard it so many times that it makes
me lean toward day care. There's the occasional Satanic abuse worry at day cares, of course, but for the most part mothers
don't tend to get into weird psychotic turf wars with day care staffers. Instead, they just feel guilty. Guilty, guilty, guilty,
alllll the time. "Bye sweetie, I'm just dropping you off here— please stop screaming and clutching my leg— because it's important
that I permanently undermine our attachment and warp your development, according to several new studies, and also MUMMY HAS
TO GO TO WORK NOW, PLEASE LET GO OF MY PANTS."
I try to follow the day care vs. Mommy debates, but the logic seems to travel in small vicious circles. At some point you
get to wondering: "Well, what is seriously going to happen if my children go to day care, or have a nanny? Like, are they
going to become contract killers, or are they going to be somewhat more argumentative in adolescence? Exactly
how
damaged a future are the experts envisioning as a result of substitute care? This led me to think about the child care arrangements
of history's most accomplished men and women. Maybe history could frame the debate a little more concisely. For instance,
did Shakespeare have a nanny? Because if he did, then, end of conversation, as far as I'm concerned.
So I perused a few biographies in the local bookstore, and here are my preliminary notes:
Elizabeth I, Queen of England: When a toddler, mother s head chopped off. Spent childhood locked in Tower of London. Perhaps
had some attachment issues later on, but nevertheless became greatest ruler of England ever. (Studies show that thinking of
oneself as a semi-divine being can often compensate for decapitated or working mother.)
Jane Austen, romantic novelist: Sent by parents to pass infant and toddler years in a hut, being raised by peasants until
parents deemed child "more interesting." Child became so interesting she invented Mr. Darcy, upon whom all twenty-first-century
women now have crush.
Peter the Great, Tsar of Russia: Raised by staff of fourteen dwarfs. Admittedly, was rather boorish as grown-up but had a
good time and managed to modernize Russia. Important to know: Was there high staff turnover among the dwarfs, or were they
always the same fourteen, ensuring constancy of care?
Michelangelo, painter of the Sistine Chapel: Wealthy parents putter about country estate near Florence while baby lives with
wet nurse in shed. Mother becomes muse for
La Pieta
and is thus immortalized rather than made to answer questions about how could she put her own interests ahead of her child's
crucial early development.
Katharine Graham, publisher of the
Washington Post:
As infant, left with nanny in a Fifth Avenue flat while parents moved to Washington for four years. As adult, finally follows
them to the capital— with a vengeance.
Thomas Jefferson: Raised by clinically depressed slaves. Daughters also raised by slaves. One slave becomes mother of youngest
son, who therefore becomes slave. Life confusing, but very productive.
Jean Chretien, former prime minister of Canada: eighteenth of nineteen children born in rural Quebec, making caregiver-child
ratio four times the legal limit for day care.
I love my children, but my life would be much improved if they were unconscious more often. Ideally, my four-year- old could
go to sleep at six, say, and then wake up at ten the next morning. Or if that's too ambitious, what if it got to be eight-thirty
P.M. and she scrambled into bed and closed her eyes, instead of climbing onto the kitchen table and drawing on her legs with
a pen?
Still too aspiring? Then maybe she could fall asleep before I do.
Conversely, my baby son could try sleeping until it was light outside in the morning, because it was fine to watch the Athens
Olympics live, but on the whole I would rather not have one child fall asleep at eleven and the other one wake up at five.
Every time Ambrose and I go on a "date," the fun is overshadowed by the dread of getting to bed too late and being dragged
to our feet before dawn with a hangover stunningly magnified by sleep deprivation.
We keep hoping, instead, to spend time with each other privately at home, which is like waiting for Godot. When Ambrose kissed
me recently in front of Clara, she cried out in genuine astonishment: "What are you doing?" Oh, never mind. We resumed staring
gloomily at our children not-sleeping.
The children beam back like little rays of sunshine; life's a never-ending bed-bouncing blast when you're small. Bedtime?
Yay! Time for back flips, giggling fits, five trips to the bathroom, three to the fridge, and then sixteen outfit changes.
Yippee!
In the la-la-land inhabited by experts in parenting books, Mommy serenely reads bedtime stories, sings songs, and rubs the
child's back in a comforting ritual that leads smoothly to sleep. In my land, serene Mommy turns very gradually into serial
killer Mommy, after reading, singing, and rubbing culminates in child hopping gaily out of bed.
Sleepy child flies downstairs to get her Barbie/ballet slippers/half-eaten banana before returning to discourse vigorously
on who is and is not invited to her birthday party in two months' time.
Serene Mommy screams "GET INTO BED RIGHT NOW!" And sleepy child looks totally shocked, before bursting into tears and wailing
"DAAAADDDDYY!" At which point, serene Mommy kvetches, "Daddy has nothing to do with this!" feeling bitter that her authority
is so swiftly undercut by the prospect of divine rescuing Daddy.
Serene Mommy points out churlishly that Daddy, aka God, is lying in a stupor in the other room, after having swayed the baby
back and forth to Bob Marley tunes for several hours. Sleepy child proceeds to fling
Guess How Much I Love You
off the bed.
At ten-thirty, sleepy child is finally sleepy and wishing to snuggle, and serene Mommy is so stiff with suppressed rage that
she's about as snuggly as particle board.
So it goes, with minor variations, no thanks to the smug advice of other parents who consider themselves towering fonts of
wisdom because their children happen to be biddable. "I find," a typical parent chimes helpfully, "that after I read angel
three stories, I tell her that Mommy's just going downstairs to make tea, and when I come back she's asleep."
Well, I don't find that, do I? I find that angel follows me downstairs and asks for a dish of noodles.
Of course, where I see a problem, entrepreneurs see an opportunity, so I note that there's a burgeoning crop of GO TO SLEEP
audio products on the market. Video producer Kandi Amelon in Chicago, for instance, has recently released
Nighty Night, a,
twenty-minute cinematic extravaganza of yawning baby animals, courtesy of Peter Pan Productions.
In my view, this is designed to induce sleep through boredom, whereas the more traditional videos, like
Sweet Dreams, Spot,
and
Maisy
y
s Bedtime,
merely hint at the popularity of sleep among a child's favorite characters, much the way that every preschool book ever published
ends with the hero comatose in a bed.
Videos are not the answer in this house, because there's something creepy and Brave New World about having electronic portals
in every bedroom.
I prefer cassettes. Since Clara spent the first six months of her life listening to a continuous loop recording of vacuum
cleaner noise, there's cause for hope.
Thus I found
The Floppy Sleep Game
tape, created by a cheerful California lady named Patti Teel. A children's entertainer in Burbank, Teel has been garnering
great word of mouth for the "progressive relaxation technique" she's adapted from yoga and embedded in her game. Hyper children
are said to be snoozing within half an hour, after listening to her Betty Boop voice direct them in a sort of self-hypnosis
exercise.
I ordered the tape, and excitedly played it for Clara when all other rituals had been attended to. She was sitting cross-legged
on her bed, avidly popping the bubbles from a padded envelope.
Teel's voice materialized in a tinkle of music and encouraged her to lie down. Clara obliged, holding the envelope above her
to resume popping. To the faint sound of crickets, Teel said: "Close your eyes, and imagine that you're lying outside on a
blanket in your own, special meadow."
Clara continued popping. "You're supposed to close your eyes," I prompted.
"Why?"
"Because we're playing the floppy sleep game."
"What does floppy mean?"
"It means . . . I don't know, like . . . a rag doll."
"What's a rag?"
"It's an old washcloth, Clara— just listen to the tape."
"Lift your leg and let it flop down again," murmured Teel. Clara engaged in the body relaxation instructions for a while,
then went back to her bubble popping. When Teel segued into a lullaby, Clara deconstructed the lyrics like Jacques Derrida.
"Oh, forget it," I muttered, turning the tape recorder off.
"Mommy? Are you tired?"
"Yes, as a matter of fact, I am."
"You can go to sleep if you want to."
Oh, thanks.
Last night I had a dream about Benicio Del Toro, the actor who, being male, gets to stride around with puffy eyes, unwashed
hair, and minimal makeup and still be considered THE most gorgeous specimen of Latin masculinity ever to emerge from small-town
Pennsylvania. In my dream we were having a wonderful, wonderful romance, although for some reason we were in a dental office
and I kept having to spit into a paper cup. But it was delicious and enthralling. When I woke up, Clara was feeding Chiclets
to the cat.
Is That a Cheerio Stuck to My Pants, or Are
You Just Happy to See Me?
I was at the Children's Museum with thousands of highly excited toddlers streaking by me in every direction like a huge colony
of snow-suited ants, when at some point, feeling harried and claustrophobic, I looked up and noticed a dad checking me out.
No way! He can't be looking at me, can he? I'm a mom! What's he looking at? Is there something on my shirt? An unusually large
smear of applesauce or snot? Because he can't be looking at
me.
I. Am. A. Mom. There must be Scotch tape on my pants.
Five years ago I might have registered his gaze as admiring or desirous or lustful, and it wouldn't have been rocket science.
But here in the altered state of consciousness called motherhood, male attention inspires a slow-motion double take. I think
it has to do with defining myself in the eyes of my children. My face could be a boiled ham, as far as they're concerned.
Therefore, wondering if I look sexy is irrelevant, not to mention hopeless and entirely beside the point.
My sexuality has gone AWOL.
I cannot find it under the couch with the stray puzzle pieces and empty formula bottles. I cannot find it in the bathtub among
the spouting whales and duckies. It isn't in the bedroom, which is knee-deep in Barbie shoes and crackers. Sometimes I wonder:
Is my sexuality behind the garden gate in Geoffrey's lift-the-flap book? No, but there's Spot the dog and Tom, the green alligator,
playing ball, yay! Is it in the refrigerator? No, but there are some crinkly grapes in there.
Surprisingly, I am married. This used to have a romantic connotation. I keep assuring myself, as Ambrose does, that all will
be romantic again just as soon as we can reach for each other in a bed and not bump into two children, a Groovy Girl doll,
the TV remote, our dog, a pacifier, and
Goodnight Moon.
Wishing to be guaranteed of this eventuality, I recently attended a conference on motherhood, sex, and sexuality. The conference
was organized by ARM, the Association for Research on Mothering, together with the Center for Feminist Research. Much of the
conversation centered on society's discomfort with maternal sexuality, but that attitude has actually grown more ambivalent
of late. If we used to divide neatly into madonnas and whores and crones and virgins, what of the pop star Madonna, sauntering
about on her book tours looking gorgeous in her forties with two children in tow?
She rather confounds the categories. But she works at it. Women are generally becoming mothers later now, in their thirties,
when their sexual ambitions have played out a bit, seeds have been sown, blocks have been run around. We
were
whores, so to speak, and now too many of us are behaving like madonnas with chronic fatigue syndrome.
There's something the matter with that, which has to do with yielding to the loss of sexual vitality without a fight, as if
it doesn't matter as much as it does. But maybe one of the reasons that we yield to the shift from sexy hottie to frumpy hen
is that we derive a great deal of sensual nourishment from our small children.
This subject was explored rather intriguingly by one Pamela Courtney-Hall, a professor at the University of British Columbia.
She proposed that many parents derive an erotic pleasure from their children that calls for a new vocabulary of sexuality
or Eros, for it isn't sexual in the orthodox sense but deeply intimate and physically sustaining.
We declare child care to be an "Eros-neutral domain," Courtney-Hall said, "but caregivers report connections to their children
that are rapturous . . . and rooted in intimate bodily contact." They are not sexual, however, not dirty and self-pleasuring,
not pedophiliac. "The language we have inherited," she noted, "is inadequate to the lived experience."
Thus, mothers who unexpectedly find breastfeeding to be sensually enthralling are suspected of sexual abuse, while mothers
who find their children's bodies beguiling, like the photographer Sally Mann, are accused of taking pornographic pictures.
This same point, about the unspoken "tender-erotic" connection between parents and children, as CourtneyHall calls it, is
raised in a book by American writer Noelle Oxenhandler,
The Eros of Parenthood: Explorations in Light and Dark.
Oxenhandler tries to promote an invisible but uncrossable line between parental passion and pedophiliac lust, sensual joy
and sexual exploitation. It's tricky and fraught, like playing with a conceptual hand grenade. I think most parents intuitively
understand what's being spoken of without needing a language that can be so dangerously appropriated.
A child's bodily integrity is not at stake in a mother's embrace, but that doesn't mean that hugging your daughter is the
same as hugging a friend. It is more intense and lovely and delicious. It also ends— at about the point when daughters make
mothers walk five paces behind them in public so as not to be embarrassed in front of their friends.
Then it is probably time for a midlife crisis. Not the best path to tread, this celebration of the tender-erotic. Better—
surely?— to insist upon our sexual vibrancy as women all along, to allow ourselves to be viewed as Madonna rather than as
madonnas, as, if anything, more beautiful because of motherhood. I deserve to recognize a man's gaze in a crowded kid's museum
for what it is, admiring, and take some sustenance from that.