In Praise of Messy Lives (23 page)

Then there are the schools of more traditional erudition on, for instance, the Upper East Side. You can console yourself, if you are a partner in a corporate law firm whose experience of reading, to be frank, is largely confined to your BlackBerry, that your daughter is sitting in the well-upholstered library, as the afternoon
light flows in from the river, highlighting her Ovid. Or if you are a stay-at-home mother, who is whiling away many hours of the one life God gave you at the gym, and at Jimmy Choo, you can be reassured that your seven-year-old is learning “not just to answer but to question.”

Then there is the wise but beleaguered segment of the anxious parental population worrying about admission to the Gifted and Talented public schools, which are free but so rare as to be almost mythical. There is a mysterious, almost dauntingly incomprehensible system that you have to master before even testing your child. And it feels like you could study it full-time for years and not ever understand it, and to make it worse the city, in its wisdom, likes to change these byzantine rules every year or so, so it’s that much more impossible to figure out. But if you somehow are yourself Gifted and Talented enough to figure it out, and your child has tested into the top 2 percent of children in the city, if they are classified, officially, as “Gifted and Talented,” then you still have to wait to see if they are assigned, or lotteried, into one of the tiny handful of excellent Gifted and Talented schools. This would still, even though they have tested into the top 2 percent of children in the city, be less likely than the camel passing through the eye of the needle, or the people from the other more materialistic school getting into heaven, and this wait is more heartbreaking, since you are not sullied or implicated in the unsavory system of private school admissions that is consuming other people around you.

Someone somewhere in this glittering, impossible city is developing the fantasy, right about now, of moving to a small town in Montana, with faded red barns, and open fields, and a heady
stretch of watercolor blue sky, where your children chew on stems of hay, and there is one shingled schoolhouse on the top of the hill, where everyone goes, and a battered old vintage bus to take them there.… Unless of course the school in the next town over is a little bit better, a little less structured, and a little more creative.

If from beyond the grave Betty Friedan were to review the Facebook habits of the over-thirty set, I am afraid she would be very disappointed in us. By this I mean specifically the trend of women using photographs of their children instead of themselves as the main picture on their Facebook profiles. You click on a friend’s name and what comes into focus is not a photograph of her face, but a sleeping blond four-year-old, or a sun-hatted baby running on the beach. Here, harmlessly embedded in one of our favorite methods of procrastination, is a potent symbol for the new century. Where have all of these women gone? What, some earnest future historian may very well ask, do all of these babies on our Facebook pages say about “the construction of women’s identity” at this particular moment in time?

Many of these women work. Many of them are in book clubs. Many of them are involved in causes, or have interests that take them out of the house. But this is how they choose to represent themselves. The choice may seem trivial, but the whole idea behind Facebook is to create a social persona, an image of who you are projected into hundreds of bedrooms and cafés and offices
across the country. Why would that image be of someone else, however closely bound they are to your life, genetically and otherwise? The choice seems to constitute a retreat to an older form of identity, to a time when women were called Mrs. John Smith, to a time when fresh-scrubbed Vassar girls were losing their minds amidst vacuum cleaners and sandboxes. Which is not to say that I don’t understand the temptation to put a photograph of your beautiful child on Facebook, because I do. After all, it frees you of the burden of looking halfway decent for a picture, and of the whole excruciating business of being yourself. Your three-year-old
likes
being in front of the camera. But still.

These Facebook photos signal a larger and more ominous self-effacement, a narrowing of worlds. Think of a dinner party you just attended, and your friend, who wrote her senior thesis in college on Proust, who used to stay out drinking till five in the morning in her twenties, a brilliant and accomplished woman. Think about how throughout the entire dinner party, from olives to chocolate mousse, she talks about nothing but her kids. You waited, and because you love this woman, you want her to talk about … what? … a book? A movie? Something in the news? True, her talk about her children is very detailed, very impressive in the rigor and analytical depth and verve she brings to the subject; she could, you couldn’t help but think, be writing an entire dissertation on the precise effect of a certain teacher’s pedagogical style on her four-year-old. But still. You notice that at another, livelier corner of the table the men are not talking about models of strollers. This could in fact be an Austen or Trollope novel where the men have retired to a different room to drink brandy and talk about news and politics. You turn back to the conversation and the woman is talking about what she packs for
lunch for her child. Are we all sometimes that woman? A little kid talk is fine, of course, but wasn’t there a time when we were interested, also, in something else?

The mystery here is that the woman with the baby on her Facebook page has surely read
The Feminine Mystique
, or
The Second Sex
, or
The Beauty Myth
, or DoubleX or Jezebel. She is no stranger to the smart talk of whatever wave of feminism we are on, and yet this style of effacement, this voluntary loss of self, comes naturally to her. Here is my pretty family, she seems to be saying, I don’t matter anymore.

I have a friend whose daughter for a very long time wore squeaky sneakers. These sneakers emitted what was to adult ears an unbelievably annoying squeak with every single step she took. I asked my friend once why she put up with the sneakers, and she said, “Because she likes them!” Imagine being in this new generation, discovering with every joyous squeak of your sneakers that Galileo was wrong: the sun is not the center of the universe, you are!

Our parents, I can’t help thinking, would never have tolerated the squeaky sneakers, or conversations revolving entirely around children. They loved us as much and as ardently as we love our children, but they had their own lives, as I remember it, and we played around the margins. They did not plan weekend days solely around children’s concerts and art lessons and piano lessons and birthday parties. Why, many of us wonder, don’t our children play on their own? Why do they lack the inner resources that we seem to remember, dimly, from our own childhoods? The answer seems clear: Because with all good intentions we have overdevoted ourselves to our children’s education and entertainment and general formation. Because we have chipped
away at the idea of independent adult life, of letting children dream up a place for themselves, in their rooms, on the carpets, in our gardens, on their
own
.

Facebook, of course, traffics in exhibitionism: it is a way of presenting your life, at least those sides of it you cherry-pick for the outside world, for show. One’s children are an important achievement, and arguably one’s most important achievement, but that doesn’t mean that they are
who you are
. It could, of course, be argued that the vanity of a younger generation, with their status postings on what kind of tea they are drinking, represents a worse or more sinister kind of narcissism. But this particular form of narcissism, these cherubs trotted out to create a picture of self, is to me more disturbing for the truth it tells. The subliminal equation is clear:
I am my children
.

Facebook was pioneered for a younger generation, of course. It lends itself naturally to strangers who run into each other at parties and flirtations struck up in bars. Part of what is disturbing about this substitution is how clearly and deliberately it subverts that purpose: this generation leaches itself of sexuality by putting the innocent face of a child in the place of an attractive mother. It telegraphs a discomfort with even a minimal level of vanity. Like wearing sneakers every day or forgetting to cut your hair, it is a way of being dowdy and invisible, and it mirrors a certain mommy culture in which it’s almost a point of pride how little remains of the healthy, worldly, engaged, and preening self.

What if Facebook pages are only the beginning? What if next are passports and driver’s licenses? What if suddenly the faces of a generation were to disappear, and in their places were beaming toddlers? Who will mourn these vanished ladies and when will Betty Friedan rest in peace?

If you have ever experienced a dark hour of the soul in the middle of a dinner party, when the men seemed to be talking about something intriguing at the end of the table, while you were deeply immersed in a women’s conversation about how to transition from the bottle to the sippy cup, the French feminist Élisabeth Badinter’s rousing indictment of our child-centric culture,
The Conflict
, is bound to offer some consolation.

Her very French, rather severe and fascinating book does not pander to readability in the way an American cultural analysis would, but she raises important points about the dangers of what she calls
“L’enfant-Roi,”
or “the child is king,” culture, to the hard-won gains of feminism. She describes the blow to our freedom, to work, to expansive ideas of self, delivered by rigid standards of what motherhood should be. She discusses and attacks, among other things: the La Leche League and the pressure to breastfeed, the fad for natural birth, the total abstinence from alcohol during pregnancy, and the stigmatization of women who decide not to have children.

Badinter has referred to herself a “fanatic of clarity”; and at
times her commitment to clarity, her desire to overresolve or over–pin down, can be a bit constricting. (I prefer, in my feminist tomes, what Elizabeth Hardwick referred to as Simone de Beauvoir’s “brilliant confusion”—that is, the willingness to tolerate enlivening conflicts and complexities.) But Badinter’s arguments are provocative and rigorous: she explains the phenomena that we are currently struggling with, the phenomena that lead us to rabidly consume and debate books about Chinese mothering or French mothering, in an effort to rethink or recast or correct our current mode of parenting.

Badinter attributes the current enslavement to our somewhat repressive styles of child-rearing to the fact that women with feminist mothers in the seventies onward have rebelled against their experience of being abandoned, or somehow insufficiently mothered, by their working mothers. She writes that these daughters thought to themselves: “In pursuit of your independence, you sacrificed me as well. You didn’t give me enough love, enough care, enough time.… The truth is, I was not your top priority and you were not a good mother. I won’t do the same with my children.” This seems possibly true to me, as a sort of larger, underpinning psychology, but there must be more to it as well.

Why
are
we raising our children in this way? Why have we created this oppressive culture for ourselves? (And of course, for those of us not exactly raising our children this way, we are raising them in the shadow of this way: thinking about it, worrying about it, or flagrantly disregarding it with some consciousness of recklessness, some demoralizing whiff of potential failure.) But why has the dominant ideology of child-rearing veered so radically toward responsibility, sacrifice?

While I was mulling over this question, I was reading the back of some fancy granola that happens to be in my house, and it says: “Happiness isn’t found on a clothing tag. We’ve looked! We find happiness in making healthy choices, getting outside and keeping fit—choices that make us feel better, inside and out.” This idea of enlightenment through health—this lively preoccupation or concern with what is healthy over, say, what is fun or vivid or pleasurable—is a larger turn that affects our ideas of motherhood. Doing something unhealthy, or creating an unhealthy environment for a child, is currently so taboo that we are tyrannized by the fear of it: we are almost unable to think in other terms.

In discussing the disheartening toll babies take on relationships, Badinter writes, “A mother cannot allow herself to be consumed by her baby to the point of destroying her desires as a woman.” It occurs to me that in some sense, many of the mothers she is talking about are using their children as an escape from the imperatives of romantic life. This elevation and fetishization of the child over the parent’s private life is perhaps not always the
cause
of unhappiness, but rather it may be some sort of escape from the pressure to be happy, some flight from the demands of romantic connection. If the child is overwhelmingly central to family life, in all of the much discussed, anti-romantic ways, then you are delivered from the demands of true intimacy, at least for a while; it’s a reprieve from the expectation of romantic happiness, which can, of course, be exhausting.

Likewise children deliver us from the pressure of our ambitions, the shadows of our failures. I often think of Geoff Dyer’s brutal, bravura passage in
Out of Sheer Rage
. In describing his decision not to have children, he writes, “People need to feel that
they have been thwarted by
circumstances
from pursuing the life which, had they led it, they would not have wanted; whereas the life they really want is a compound of all those thwarting circumstances.… That’s why children are so convenient: you have children because you are struggling to get by as an artist—which is actually what being an artist means—or failing to get on with your career.
Then
you can persuade yourself that children had prevented you from having this career that had never looked like working out.” And it actually goes on, and I’ll continue to quote it because in its bleakness and cynicism it carries a certain insight, an insight that dovetails nicely with Badinter’s condemnation of certain attitudes toward motherhood.