
Given how much Abigail loves to say her own name, I figured her first properly pronounced three-word sentence would include it, and sure enough, I was right. As we pulled into our driveway after a five-hour car trip last weekend, she looked at me and said, calmly but firmly, “Pick Abby up!”
This is also what I heard, off and on, for two hours yesterday afternoon as we stood in line to get her a swine flu shot. “Pick Abby up!”
And it’s what we hear when bathtime, mealtime, or naptime is over: “Pick Abby up!”
I have to say, a couple of times I’ve come close to telling her to pick herself up. She’s awfully heavy.
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The December issue of The Atlantic arrived in our mailbox earlier this week, and as usual, I skipped right to the book reviews section, because Real News bores me. No, really: it does. And The Atlantic is simply lousy with Real News; have you ever noticed? I cannot for the life of me remember why I ever stopped subscribing to The New Yorker, which was my Snooty Magazine of Choice all through college and just after. Sure, The New Yorker was half-filled with events in or around New York City that I (resident of Baltimore and D.C.) could not attend, but at least it also included original fiction and the occasional ten-page feature about sandwiches. Sandwiches! Want to keep my interest, Atlantic? I hope you are taking notes here. The Atlantic doesn’t even publish fiction anymore, except in its much-touted, once-a-year, off-the-rack-only “fiction issue.” What is THAT? And isn’t a fiction issue that is not automatically sent to subscribers — like myself — the publishing equivalent of a tree falling in the woods when no one is there to hear it?
But enough of my whining. I really do enjoy Sandra Tsing Loh’s sporadic book review columns for The Atlantic, though lately she has been oversharing about the recent demise of her marriage, so that the simple act of reading her reviews makes me feel like a voyeur. In her latest offering, from the December 2009 issue, she reads about (and confesses to) bad mothering — in this day and age, is it inevitable, to some degree? Using Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch as a jumping-off point, Tsing Loh considers her own late marriage and the situations of mothers like her:
[T]hen I turned to [Greer's] chapter called “Family,” in which she argues that “stem”—or extended, multigenerational—households are inordinately stable; as opposed to today’s two-parent nuclear families, stem homes can never be “broken,” as their success does not “rest on the frail shoulders of two bewildered individuals trying to apply a contradictory blueprint.”
Bingo. What better phrase to describe marriage among those of my own bewildered demographic slice—parents of the Creative Class? We start with the best of intentions. In her 20s, the Creative Class female carves out a cool Creative Class career, like Writer. She meets a man with an equally cool Creative Class job—say, Devoted Documentary Filmmaker of the Obama 10-Year African Kiva Water Project. In their 30s, the baby comes: the Creative Class mom is pitched into hormonal bliss (at least at first); the very same week—argh, the timing!—Gates Foundation money suddenly comes through for the Obama-kiva-water-project documentary. Clinking champagne glasses, both spouses agree that Dad must fly to Africa for two months to finish filming while Mom cares for the baby. (The last thing she wants is be a 1950s nag—and how rarely does Gates money come through, how important is drinking water for Africa?)
After kissing her husband goodbye, the Creative Class mother now begins to care for their baby, alone, in New York, or Los Angeles, or whatever cool city they’ve moved to. She’s isolated from her stem family—the grandma, aunts, and in-laws (who all love children!) have long been left behind in notoriously un-Creative Lompoc, Fort Lauderdale, or Ohio. She can barely maneuver the stroller down the four flights of stairs to get to Gymboree ($20 for 45 minutes, and you have to actually stay with your nine-month-old and drum). Result: the 21st-century Creative Class mom’s life is actually far worse than that of her 1950s counterpart. Her husband works as many hours (and travels more), but life is uncomfortable on his salary alone, and the isolated mom has no bingo-playing moms’ group to ease the unnatural, teeth-chattering stress of one-on-one care of her child.
Greer argues that what the shift from stem to nuclear family primarily serves is capitalism, as single-family units represent, first and foremost, a “controllable pattern of consumption.” How much would industries suffer, she argues, if three families shared a washing machine?
I know, that’s quite an excerpt. So much to take in. Let’s get the obvious out of the way, first: Call me capitalist scum if you must, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to share my washing machine. Not with cloth diapers to wash every other day.
Next. I confess, I don’t think I am exactly one of the “Creative Class” Sandra is talking about here. I don’t know whether I can capitalize my Creativity. I did (sort of) “carve out” a “cool” “career” in nonprofit and freelance work — if we broaden the definition of “career” to “assorted jobs at which I make, in total, far less than I would tutoring rich kids not to blow the SAT.” And, unlike the true Creative Class moms as defined by Tsing Loh, I didn’t wait till my 30s to have a baby. My husband is not a member of the “Creative Class” at all; he is a weird hybrid of biologist and engineer, and so while I do occasionally worry about him never finishing graduate school, I don’t have to worry about him running off to save Africa, either.
But the part that really spoke to me in this article is the isolation of the anxious modern mother. It drives me absolutely batty when anyone I know talks about stay-at-home motherhood as “traditional,” because really, there is almost no time and place in history except for perhaps the last 50-60 years when (reasonably well-off) women even had the option not to work, at some sort of job, in or outside the home, to help support their families. And while those women throughout history were working and caring for and teaching and bringing up their children, they often had help and support in the form of older sisters, aunts, grandparents, etc. — the “stem”/multigenerational households to which Greer alludes. Not so for today’s mothers, navigating the choppy waters of modern parenting while being buffeted on all sides by the rigid ideologies, personal agendas, and unrealistic expectations of others.
I think about this often, actually, because I live a good 3,000 miles from my own mother and rarely see her. We don’t see my parents-in-law terribly often, either (about which I shall refrain from comment). I hear from people whose parents live close by that, frankly, they are not always very helpful, but for me and Dan it’s not even a possibility. Let’s face it, our fathers would probably be no help whatsoever; and even if we lived near our mothers, neither one of us relishes the thought of living with them again (I don’t think our moms are exactly clamoring to live with us, either).
As for support, I do have some great friends who are mothers, and I love them and their kids, but the support we offer each other is primarily the emotional sort. These women, many of whom live several states away, are all just as busy as I am. Of course they can’t do much to help if I just can’t deal with my dramatic toddler or find the motivation necessary to make dinner. Again, I love them and am so grateful to have them in our lives, but in terms of my day-to-day tasks and the isolation that comes along with staying home with Abby, knowing other moms doesn’t really alleviate the pressure, because we’re almost too busy to take the time to vent to one another. Also, when I do get together with or talk to other mothers, the last thing I want to talk about is how stressful it is to be a mom — really, how relaxing is that?
My husband, who is a full-time student, still manages to do more child care and chores than about 99% of the other husbands we know. The work of caring for and raising our daughter is far from mine alone, and we try to be supportive of one another and give each other the breaks we need. But I think we both still feel somewhat isolated and overwhelmed much of the time, as we have, honestly, ever since we found out we were expecting our first child. I keep looking around, wondering, where the hell is my village? And dude, we only have the one kid so far; we still outnumber her — imagine what it will be like with one or two more.
It’s a great life, being Abby’s mother and squeezing my own life in around the edges, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything. I don’t mean to sound discouraging, truly. I know how fortunate I am to be able to make the choice to be home with Abigail most of the time. All the same, I wouldn’t call this situation of ours perfect — in this day and age, living where and how we live, I’m damned if I even know what “perfect” would look like.