House of Eratosthenes

This gets into something personal. My Mother was, by all accounts including mine, a truly remarkable woman who acted a lot more like a capital-D Dad than a capital-M Mom in many ways. I mean, by that, the she built her relationships with my brother and me around an expectation of her own demise. Toward the end this became a necessity, as the tumor took hold in her brain and proved to be inoperable. But by this time we were in our late twenties, and of course she had to learn to “know” us long before then. Teaching us independence was always part of the equation.

Except, I must say, for laundry. She never did tell me why I shouldn’t use Tide. Guess that’s lost forever.

Anyway, in a lot of little ways it’s been brought to my attention that my Mom was unusual among mothers, and my understanding of the more typical mothering process has emerged a bit skewed.

Item: Well, there’s my own son, who has a capital-M Mom. I always make a point of spelling that pronoun with a capital-M, and I always make a point of reminding people that, in my world if in none other, there is meaning involved in this. Some moms and dads deserve lowercase m’s and d’s, because they do their parenting much the way a lazy caps-free typist does his typing. Like trying to copy e.e. cummings with every little keystroke. Every little demand for attention or energy is met with a spoken or unspoken “Why should I?” And so I try to do them the “honor” of giving them small m’s and d’s, because I doubt they’d have it any other way. But that is the burden to be borne by their kids. My kid deserves a Mom and Dad spelled with capital letters. I insist on it. I’m selfish that way. But — the kid is growing into an adult. Without going into too much detail about it, there are certain events that remind me that his two parents are coping with his new ambitions and abilities in different ways, and there is a distinct gender split emerging here. My own Dad says “Kidzmom” is grieving. Again: I didn’t have that kind of Mom, so this is something I don’t understand, and I’m unique in not understanding it. Just about everyone else who ever had a m/Mother, of whatever flavor, is in a superior position to clue me in. I’m uniquely ignorant. Everyone with a belly button knows more. Grieving?? WTF?

However. Second item:

One of the few experiences upon which I can draw, is from when I was learning to drive. Learner’s permit in hand, I would very often have the “idea” that I would drive us wherever we’d be going, and Mom would wail “Morgan, why do you always want to drive? It keeps leading to Dad yelling and you arguing.” This was, I think, the only time I ever saw this side of her: To keep the peace, don’t learn something. Like any other teenager, I was jealously guarding my stature as an emerging adult, thinking about destinies. I should enter adulthood not knowing how to drive, but having avoided fights with my Dad, that would’ve happened over other things anyway? How silly. What was Mom thinking? What the heck? Was this really my Mother? Was she wavering? With the benefit of hindsight and a bit more maturity, I realize a much simpler & more credible explanation exists in the spoken wisdom of Bill Cosby: “Parents are not interested in justice, they want quiet.”

Third item:

I have been unfriended on Facebook. That’s a bit unusual for me. And that isn’t because I’m most agreeable, I’m certainly not, it’s more likely because when I’m curmudgeonly and disagreeable, it’s pretty easy to see that coming miles down the road and so I don’t have too many friends I shouldn’t be having. This was probably a “friending” that never should’ve been done in the first place. The friend, a Mom who I’d always considered to be a capital-M type, was bursting with pride because her daughter made some big advances in speech. The girl’s been in special-ed because she’s been a few years behind in this delicate talent. I really thought this was wonderful news, and unfortunately made the inquiry about the time-line for potentially mainstreaming. Well, it’s been brought to my attention, in this particular case and perhaps in general, that this is a big faux pas. It seems there is a reason why kids in special ed are not supposed to be mainstreamed. And this has to do with the maternal relationship, which is expected to have been crafted according to this premise that requiring special education is part of the child’s identity. It logically follows that any vision for mainstreaming is tantamount to a vision for the child to be abducted in the middle of the night and replaced with some doppleganger or other such interloper…who might not require the special education. But because of that, wouldn’t be the same child. Wishing for a child to be mainstreadmed, is like wishing for the child to be replaced. Big no-no. Well, now I know.

In this day and age, when the genders are quickly becoming interchangeable, and we have masculine women and effeminate men, gender stereotypes are becoming treacherous and unreliable. But, typically, a d/Dad is not going to relate to the children that way, if he’s around. The male-parent tendency is to relate to the kids the way my Mom related to me: Good, you can do something you didn’t know how to do a week ago. That does not mean you’re dead; that means you’re going to be less of a pain in the ass. Cheers!

Fourth item:

Another Facebook friend became noticeably piqued with me, although she didn’t go to the extreme of e-mail-yelling “Thanks for crapping on my daughter’s special day Morgan” and unfriending me, when I linked to this with a derogatory reference to “helicopter moms”:

Am I early for pick-up?…I’m used to an army of harassed looking mums and dads jostling for first contact with their little ones, but all I see is a small cluster of middle-aged people staring at their feet. Then it dawns on me why no one is here. And when I reali[z]e what’s going on it feels like a bucket of cold water has been poured over my head. Parents don’t pick up children at senior school, do they? They make their own way home. And the thought of my 11-year-old doing this makes me feel physically sick.
:
I lurched past the hordes to cuddle her, but the look of fear in her eyes stopped me in my tracks. The little girl who used to let me blow bubbles on her tummy was finally gone.

Like the melancholy sadness at the end of summer, this rite of passage feels unbearably poignant. I miss that little girl so much and I don’t feel we ever had a chance to say goodbye. [bold emphasis mine]

It’s clear that the whole point of the column is that there are a lot of people who can relate to this. I can’t even come close; I just don’t get it. I see old videos of my sixteen-year-old when he was eight, or four, or two, much shorter and shaped differently, and not able to do things. And I think: That is just so cool, look at all he’s learned since then. It’s one of those situations where different people look at exactly the same thing, and see different things because of their different backgrounds, values, and perspectives.

“Miss that little girl so much?” What the…?

Fifth item:

Yet another Facebook friend, a male, posts:

Heh. My oldest boy is on the phone, asking a girl on a date. My wife is LOSING HER FUCKING MIND. “My baby’s too young to be asking girls out!”

Looks like time is progressing.

There it is again. Now, I’ve only had lunch with this fellow one time, when he happened to be in town, and I’ve never met the wife. But I’ve known of them for awhile, my esteem for her runs high, and it would be an understatement to say I have way too much respect for her to start calling her a small-m mom, or a “helicopter mom,” or anything derogatory like that. Besides the respect/esteem thing, I know it wouldn’t be accurate. Among the many reasons she’s made a favorable impression on me, are anecdotes about parenting. It’s pretty obvious the husband is one lucky sonofabitch. He says so, and he must know something about it…and it looks that way…

Nevertheless, helicopter-mom behavior is what it is. “My baby’s too young”? I recall the m/Mom of one of my friends saying something to mine, along the lines of “If Dan wants to build a nuclear bomb in his bedroom, my big deal is that he not make too much noise or leave a mess.” My Mom agreed. In the wake of the Columbine incident, I realize that looks like something very far removed from what it really was; in the early eighties, building bombs in bedrooms was not closely associated with actually hurting people, unless you had aspirations for joining Weather Underground, Symbionese Liberation Army, or something like that. If you engaged in behavior stereotypically associated with hurting people, you might be stocking up on serial-killer apparatus like a tire iron, duct tape and a tan Volkswagen Beetle. Building a bomb meant trying to build a bomb. It was implicitly understood in the Mom Community that the big worry wasn’t an explosion, it had more to do with a mess. Plutonium in the living room, no place to set anything down…can’t find the remote…and all that. Point is: Neither one of them would have said something like “my baby is too young to build a thermonuclear device.”

I made a comment earlier that nowadays, with the gender roles being intermixed, faded out, occasionally reversed, stereotypes are becoming unreliable. Perhaps it is more accurate in some ways to say, the male and female roles still mean something, and it has become our default predisposition to define the male role and then make it irrelevant. To geld it.

To frown upon it, to bat some angry eyelashes at it, to shake a big fuzzy magenta head at it, unless & until it complies. Complies with the protocols by making itself absolutely ineffectual, voluntarily. By evolving to become indistinguishable from the female meanderings. To do what it is told, and nothing else.

Like the mahna mahna guy:

I realize it is in our nature to fear what we do not understand, and there can be error involved in that. And I don’t understand mothers who “grieve,” as in, act as if their children have ceased to exist, when the children stand on the cusp of learning how to do things they didn’t know how to do before. I note, apart from the plain and simple fact that this is what children are supposed to do, that we live in an age in which the female sensibility & value system, where it is different from the male varieties, is expected to prevail. That’s usually a harmless thing. Females can be right about things; they may know more than the males; if they know far less, they still might have something in mind that will eventually work.

But being emotionally invested in the next generation being weak and incapable, clearly, is something that over the long term isn’t going to work. It worries me because it is a vision toward expansion of something we already have in great abundance, and for which our economic demand throughout the decades is bound to be lacking; and shrinkage of something else, for which our demand is much higher, which is already in critically short supply. The expansion is going to be of weak, incapable people who can’t do things, and the shrinkage is going to be of talented, creative people who can build and fix things. The abundance, as well as the shortage, in the moments in which I’m writing this, are already at crisis levels. Exacerbating that imbalance can’t lead to anything good.

For all of society’s sake, we need to find ways to help these m/Mothers grieve when their children learn how to do new things. If they have to do this kind of grieving as if the child has actually died, my place is not to reason why, but perhaps it is advantageous for us all to help them get over it & move on. Our children deserve nothing less. They don’t need more obstacles, more “jump-through hoops,” more hurdles, on the way toward learning new things. They’re already having a tough time, I think.

Perhaps I can make my first million selling little cardboard coffins, a foot long or so, so the family can hold little mock-funerals in the back yard? With crying and everything? Organ music? Would that help?

The male-friend’s response when I proposed this over the IM was, and I quote: “OH HOLY SHIT I WILL INVEST.” Huh. Maybe I’m on to something. I do have to say, if I’m going to start my own business, I’d prefer it be in something I understood just a bit better than I understand this. On the other hand, a need is a need is a need, right?.

I think what is going on is something more common, but not new. My mother was not like that. Your mother was not like that. Why are some mothers like that? I think it’s how “quickly” the mother in question herself “grew up”. If you were making woopie at the age of sixteen, you just might be a grandma at the age of thirty. NOT COOL. I think that’s where most of the “they are growing up too quick” comes from, projection based on old, personal sins…..
- Robert Mitchell Jr. | 09/13/2013 @ 11:55
If I had one idea I could magically insert into the brains of all American women, it would be: “you can’t have everything.”

But if I got a second wish, it’d be: “Children are not lifestyle accessories.”

I can’t tell you how many Supermoms I’ve seen whose entire identities revolve around scheduling their precious little snowflake’s activities. Snowflake does jazz and tap and band and choir and karate and soccer and Girl Scouts and 4H. And when Supermom isn’t actually driving Snowflake someplace in the ol’ SUV … or waiting on line to drive …. or juggling phone calls to seven different groups to get Snowflake out of this one early so that she can make it to that one… or complaining to Teacher that such a vibrant, active, special child as Snowflake can’t be held to conventional standards like turning in her homework on time…. why, Supermom just doesn’t have the foggiest clue what to do with herself!

No wonder everyone I meet who is under 30 strikes me as a whining, entitled narcissist.
- Severian | 09/13/2013 @ 15:17
A second thought. Perhaps a perfectly natural response by women who have “taken control of their body!”? I note that women who have had four or more children don’t do that, in my experience. Perhaps there is something in the souls of many women that wants eight to ten years of “baby time”. Well, not a problem if you let Nature take it’s course, but if you just have the socially acceptable one, hmm………
- Robert Mitchell Jr. | 09/14/2013 @ 08:38
[…] be out of a vision that the child should eventually become stronger. Admittedly, some small-em moms present some problems for this, some of them even become emotionally attached to their childrens’ lack of ability […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 12/28/2014 @ 00:26

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Recent

Items of Interest

Monthly Archives

What They Say

Links

Why Do Mothers Grieve When Their Children Grow?Friday, September 13th, 2013

Why Do Mothers Grieve When Their Children Grow?
Friday, September 13th, 2013