Adequate Parent's Open Salon Blog

On love and need, part deux

Wed, 2 Mar 2011 14:03:38 -0500

Like Verizon Wireless’ billing department, love is a mysterious thing. Over the years I’ve learned a few things about the latter. As for VW billing, I’ve delegated that to my husband, who has a higher tolerance for hold music than I.

Since I began my exploration of the modern parenting discourse, I’ve come to think that a spectrum from least to most, more to less, is not an apt way to describe relationships.

As Ayelet Waldman can tell you, writing that you love your husband more than your children is going to get you a fatwa. And a book contract. As the mommy website people will tell you

Did you know? I haven’t visited DC Urban Moms, Urban Baby, or any other mommy war battlefield since February 12! 2011 is shaping up well.

--as I was saying, they’ll tell you that this sentiment is treasonous, pathological, and likely to inflict lasting psychological trauma on your 7-week-old. It’s also kind of dumb, in the way that “I like metabolizing protein more than I like breathing” is dumb.

As I’ve written before, I use the term “Eggmus” (my child's pronunciation of eczema) as shorthand for the love that we feel for our children—so different than what we feel for the adults in our lives. Eggmus is your child complimenting your “fancy” 10-year-old t-shirt. It’s the mispronunciation you hope she won’t outgrow. It’s kids.

My daughter and I had a really cool talk about this recently, during which we took turns telling one another what we love about one another. Our loves were different, but they’re equally strong. There are wide differences of opinion about this, even among my friends, but I’m squarely in the camp that says that my kid has to be considerate of my feelings, but not at all responsible for my emotional needs. I don’t think that she’s old enough to cope with being needed by a grownup—partly because she’s old enough to know that she doesn’t really get what it is that grownups give one another. I feel I should earn her affection—she has the right to my effort.

That’s unlike any other relationship I have. No adult friendship or marriage could survive that dynamic.

I love the way my child pronounces ‘eczema’ (Eggmus). Without her, there would be no Eggmus. I would, ummmm, not have that feeling that, ummmmm, Eggmus is the best word ever and I would, ummmm, just be friggin miserable. When I see her my heart melts. Eggmus. You know?

This love is sublimely, gorgeously free of need.

To me, this is the mystery of mothering. You spend your life learning to cultivate mature relationships that begin with doing and evolve to inchoate feelings that make life great. Then this little soft person plops into your world with inchworm-sized fingers and the capacity to come up with “Eggmus.” And she becomes the keystone relationship of your life—the one you’ve been training for since you first managed to share a spittle-covered alphabet block with the kid next to you.

People who think Big Thoughts About Brains have partially explained how our relationship-building capacities develop.

An infant feels the warmth of proximity, the security of needs met.

This is a three-year-old’s idea of friendship:

Why I Julio your friend?

Because I like him.

Why do you like him?

Because he’s my friend.

Why else do you like him?

Because he lives next door.

At eleven, the child answers this way:

Why is Amber your friend?

Because I can trust her with my secrets.

Why else is she your friend?

Because we think the same way about things.

So in the middle school years, when kids start to be more like us, they seek to differentiate themselves from parents. Maybe that’s when they need more out of us than our capacity to be selfless with the spittle-covered block that is our love.

Through adolescence and beyond, our children go through the same evolution that we remember—toward being engaged and loving friends and spouses. And then plop, here comes kiddo. Whom they love because he is their child. Whom they love because he is there, in their arms. Much like their first friend.

In my Eggmus-filled home, love is once again primal. Have we come full circle?

Maybe not yet. Every couple of months I visit my 97-year-old grandmother. My life has spanned that cycle of relationships with her—from infant in her arms, to playmate in her condominium, to confidante who wanted “a private conversation,” just us. She lives surrounded by photos, the viewing of which occupies half of each visit.

Our private conversations have changed. I report the news. She reports on visits. She reminds me of important things—her new twin great grandchildren, the location of the mail room at her residence. Which is very close to her apartment, by the way.

Her face is bathed in the serene and glowing Eggmus of stored love. A goodbye hug is heady, simple, and primal, even though saying goodbye to a 97-year-old necessarily makes one worry. But her own Eggmus, love that has been built for so long it is self-sustaining, floats above the room, patient wordless, and not tethered to need.

Got Eggmus? Send me your thoughts on what love means, what makes you go “awww,” or anything else that is arguably on point.

parents: you don't have to buy the rust coating

Fri, 25 Feb 2011 22:02:57 -0500

Bounty, you’re off the hook. Just when I was ready to slam you for the Worst Commercial Ever, Toyota came along and one-upped you.

I will therefore limit the Bounty bashing to a text box: Suburban kitchen. Father and son chat at the counter. Father spills drink. Woman swoops in from off camera with (Bounty!) paper towel and wipes the spill. Woman beams with satisfaction. Fade to product shot. It’s a great sales pitch for a Y chromosome, but turns out to be a paper towel commercial.

It’s almost unfair to expect anyone to make a commercial I hate more. In the wake of Toyota’s Lethal Floormat Incident, they knew they needed game. And they brought it.

Toyota’s newest ad campaign for the Toyota Highlander, an SUV that starts at over 27 grand and gets 20 MPG city, 25 highway, claims that the car will help parents become cool enough for our kids. They go all out: in the first commercial, a tow-headed 10-year-old spokesman, equipped with electronic gadgets (that his parents bought him!) sulks in the back seat of a lame car (that his parents bought!) that he’s too young to drive. The boy generously explains that though his chauffeur is an embarrassment, he has potential.

Good news: according to towhead, parents don’t have to be lame! They can buy the car that the kids want, so that in the next commercial he can brag about setting them straight. “They used to be total dorks,” the child says on voiceover. On screen, we see him taking down an embarrassing family Christmas portrait. “I got them squared away.”

More like cornered. Bound, gagged, and thrown in the trunk of the discarded Ford Tortoise.

Did you know? I can make fun of cars I don’t like. Cuz I can drive. And get a car loan.

Toyota congratulates child on ordering his parents around and parents for spending nearly thirty thousand dollars to placate someone who is not competent to enter into a contract, weighs half as much as dad, and is unarmed.

Some restrictions apply. Offer not available in Texas.

Who the hell would fall for that? Top ad firm Saatchi and Saatchi apparently did some market research before selling this ad to the world’s top car company (now available with non-lethal floor mats!). Who is this market segment?

Lighten up, you say. It’s just a commercial. Actually, it’s a series of commercials. Here’s the next: opening shot shows child crowing about how cool the Highlander is. He’s rockin’ a porkpie hat and sunglasses (that his parents bought!) and acting as a bouncer for the party barge that is his (parents’!) car. The towheaded bundle of joy leers at a blond girl, his head cocked, looks her up and down and lets her have a seat. He turns away a boy whom we are supposed to understand is less cool than he is.

He revels in the power that his formerly-lame parents have just made even stronger. Now, he not only exerts control over them. He gets to decide who else is cool and where they can sit.

The parents (who bought the car!) are nowhere in sight. He doesn’t need them (except to drive the posse to the mall).

I don’t like this 10-year-old douchebag. Fortunately, he’s fictional. But still.

I know it’s a joke. It’s a joke in a commercial. But it’s scary because there’s this tiny shred of truth to it. Everyone has a memory of some stranger cowering before their tyrannical child in a restaurant. It’s linked to a rare memory of feeling like a pretty good parent oneself.

But I also think there’s a little voice in every parent—more than a little voice—that tells us to prove ourselves to our children. That’s the scarier part—knowing that you really do want your kid to think you’re a rock star. I do, anyway.

But there’s no way I’m buying the rust coating.

Love is strong as death: the tie goes to the Reaper

Thu, 24 Feb 2011 11:02:16 -0500

Parents: some day you might have the pleasure of joining your children on college tours. You will walk with them beneath sturdy elms and past neoclassical structures named for decidedly non-ethnic people from days past. You’ll soak in the honor of helping your excited offspring decide where to spend your money to serve a thinly-veiled agenda of ditching you. When that day comes, this could be its least festive highlight:

Love is strong as death.

That’s the inscription on my alma mater’s clock tower. Love is strong as death. The 16-year-old me was instantly suspicious. If love is strong as death, that’s a tie. Meaning that the best thing you will ever have in this life is no stronger than the worst thing that will happen in this life: the loss of a loved one. Fan-freaking-tastic.

I somehow overcame the bleak future presented on the Carrie Tower at Brown, and instructed my parents to send them my money, buy me some extra-long twin sheets, and get out of my face. My seventeen-year-old freshman self accepted that while love might not win out over death, sex, unscheduled Wednesdays, and my first hours hanging out in a coffee shop were sufficient to avert a major existential crisis. Back when my breasts and buttocks were closer to my brain, I spent less time thinking.

This is my “somebody died and I’m scared” moment. I’m 39, my husband is 45, and I am helplessly watching my neck’s and boobs’ growing estrangement. Somebody died, and I’m scared. I didn’t know her well: she was my husband’s cousin’s wife. Like us, they met in middle age. They were together 14 years, having planned on a lifetime. They got one—her lifetime. Over at 50.

At 53 he got another. So far it has been all about death and love. And catering, and accepting hugs and condolences, and apologizing for death’s inconveniences—travel, standing in the cold, fumbling over what to say to the people you hadn’t met. It’s been a reverse wedding, the widower thanking guests for joining him as he begins life without her. It’s been about the hollow thud of the first shovelful of soil hitting a casket. When life really stops. It’s been forgetting that sound, which is the only way to continue.

It’s knowing that there’s an empty apartment waiting when the crowd disperses.

Next will be healing and adjusting, though how these things will happen we can’t say. Rebuilding, certainly. But what? All that is certain is that even if love survives death, companionship does not.

Someone’s spouse has died, and because I love my own, I’m scared. We say we couldn’t survive a day without the other, but we must, so we will. Love and death are tied, but life inevitably wins out—for someone.

I freely confess that this doesn’t make me think about my daughter at all. Like every parent—including those whom I just witnessed burying their late daughter—I expect to pre-decease her. If I’ve done right by her, she’ll miss me but love her life and the people in it too much to remain heartbroken for long. If I’ve done my job well, she will be mad at me because I took so few pictures of us, leaving her little to show her own kids. To which I say, screw you. I paid for college.

Covalent bonding: across 7000 miles, this is your son

Thu, 10 Feb 2011 12:02:34 -0500

I’ve said that parenting has the lowest barrier to entry of any profession.

I’ve said that I’m sick of baby pictures.

Et maintenant, je m’accuse.

Today I got my favorite kind of email—news of a family coming into being. Nobody’s pregnant. Well, millions of people are pregnant. But a pregnant person isn’t relevant to this story, which is a good thing. Pregnancy news is nice, but like babies, pregnancies proceed unremarkably. The best part is the mother’s face as she learns that one can be pleased about nausea—a sign that all is well in there, in the dark, unreachable recesses above her bladder. Mostly it’s a drag to feel guilty drinking coffee in front of her.

Today’s news and baby picture made me cry, a little. This family is being born across 7,000 miles. You picture the moment: this is his name. Here is his picture. This is your son. I haven’t lived this moment myself, so I can’t imagine what it feels like to be that family. My family got started by cell division. This family by covalent bonding. This is your son.

This family had to audition. How does one put into words “I want to be a parent because” when scared shitless about hearing “yes?” How can one say “I can do this,” searching for something to prove a talent for family? This is his name. Here is his picture. This is my brother. Do you see that I call him every week? This is her name. Here is her picture. This is my niece. Do you see that she loves me? These are our names. Here is our home. Here is where our child will sleep.

And all I needed to become a parent was a car seat.

To everyone who lived this moment, seen his picture, inhaled her sweet scent amid the institutional smells of a government office, hospital, or airplane, congratulations. It’s been a long journey, and you made it. You’ve earned your moment on Facebook and more.

The bad news is, from tomorrow on, you’re as screwed as the rest of us, and your child as unremarkable. Which, if you think about it, is remarkable in itself.

The piano bench at Riker's Island, or "Who's the tiger now?"

Fri, 4 Feb 2011 12:02:09 -0500

If I were a stronger woman, I could duck out of the Tiger Mother conversation that has bunched our national panties beyond our fingers’ reach.

However, since the eensy beensy bikinis started their hike up Mt. Buttock, dozens of people have asked me to weigh in, which I did inthis post. Most recently, people have asked whether the highly-educated, highly-competitive mothers on urban discussion boards are an iteration of the tiger mother.

I believe that the phenomena are related but different. Both “Chinese mothering” and “western mothering” are three-way relationships, each with its big cat. After that, they diverge.

To understand, we must see that “intensive mothering” and mommy wars did not emerge in a vacuum. Many women make sacrifices on the way to, or during motherhood. Whatever path we choose, women give something up. We’re trained not to expect or want “it all” before we set eyes on our babies. We often buy into the idea that being “a mom” means that these are solely women’s concerns—and this impression is validated everywhere we look. By the time we visit a parenting site, we’ve conceded something.

The media is fascinated with privileged women bickering about the choices we’re fortunate enough to have, but spends little time addressing whether men play a role in this war, or whether the mothers with fewer choices deserve more column inches. I have to admit that I’m complicit in this, even though I like almost every mother I meet and empathize with every struggle apart from “maternal guilt.”

Enter the tigers.

In Chua’s portrait of Chinese mothering, there are three players: the tiger mother, the daughter on the piano bench, and the world. The world swallows mice but a tiger can swallow it. The American world is populated with herbivores and declawed tigers—which leaves a vacuum at the top of the food chain. The tiger mother knows that the top spot is ripe for the taking—but only for a tiger. The person on the piano bench is not a deer. She is a tiger cub.

So-called “western women” may also function in threesomes. I have observed two types.

First, what some call helicopter parenting. Helicopter parents attempt to reduce perceived risks to zero. They protect children from being the youngest in kindergarten, exposure to a microgram of bacteria, and from receiving the Bs they earned. These parents sacrifice to give their children a place at the top of the food chain. Like a housecat rearing an orphaned squirrel, they seek to empower by providing. In these cases, the sibling kittens, though its natural predators never eat the squirrel because the mother cat eliminates the risk. Squirrels raised this way typically can’t function in the wild. There’s no data showing that children of helicopter parents are similarly challenged, nor am I qualified to say.

As I see it, this is the helicopter threesome: the parents are nurturing cats. The children are orphaned squirrels that the parents perceive as uniquely miraculous and uniquely vulnerable. The world is the litter of sibling kittens. It can be shooed away and sated with milk, uninterested in consuming a squirrel. If necessary, the world can be picked up by the scruff of its neck and shaken.

Then there is the soldier in the mommy war, who isn’t a tiger either. By the time we become mothers, we’ve read “what to expect” and we expect to sacrifice. It isn’t true that no one is prepared for parenting. We at least know where we’re going to sit.

We are the girl in the bench. We forego dinner until noses are wiped, fevers are cooled, homework is done, and the hamster is mourned. We calculate whether we can afford not to work—or afford to work. We take sick leave for our child’s annual check-up, accept lost pay, or regretfully forgo it.

We all sit on the piano bench. Some have the power to take a bathroom break. Sometimes we wonder if we’re rearing tigers that are eating us one pound of flesh at a time. The outside world we used to inhabit is a deer the cub chased down and extinguished. We are in awe of the beautiful cub, but sometimes wonder if we’re sending a deer out into a carnivorous world. Most of all, we hope that life will not pin our daughters to the piano bench. That the world will be kind to deer, or that we are raising tigers.