the lie about mothers and daughters

I am skeptical of memoir, not so much because I am uninterested in other people’s life stories but because I am leery of the sense that simply because an author says something happened in this way or that, it is then imbued with a sense that this is the Absolute Truth. Memory is always colored by subject position, and the truth–as we learned from James Frey, if no one else–is a slippery fish.

Catherine Lloyd Burns clearly understands this dilemma. She opens It Hit Me Like a Ton of Bricks with her mother’s insistence that Burns “should write a disclaimer . . . which clearly states there are three truths: mine, yours, and the truth.” Burns’ book, which she has subtitiled A Memoir of a Mother and Daughter, examines this space between her truth and her mother’s truth in order to illustrate that the truth about mothers and daughters is more than just the sum of these other truths.

Burns writes in spare, lean prose. She opens the book with a tiny chapter titled “Something Nice About My Mother,” which both explicates the book’s title and disabuses the reader’s notions that this will be another paean to perfect motherhood. A phone call from her mother sends the nineteen-year-old Burns scurrying home, expecting her mother to apologize for what she sees as a lifetime of neglectful parenting. Instead, her mother shares what is clearly a profound revelation, the “ton of bricks” of the title: “If you kill yourself, it is simply not my fault. I am off the hook. None of this is my fault. I am not responsible . . . And I couldn’t wait to tell you.”

This is, in many ways, a horrific way to start the story of a mother-daughter relationship, but Burns has an excellent sense of timing and pacing. The first half of her book (Part One) is all about Burns’ life as a daughter. She grew up wealthy and spoiled and basically unsupervised. When she is nine, her father dies suddenly, leaving her mother a widow for the second time. As a child–and, remarkably, as an adult looking back at her child self–Burns is baffled by her mother’s insistence that they carry on, that they not continue mourning her father. Her childhood self is grounded in the fact that her mother will only love her if she is somehow different. And so she bumbles through childhood and adolescence and adulthood struggling to be what her mother will love.

The turning point, both in the book and in Burns’ life, comes with the birth of her daughter, Olive. Now that she is a mother, Burns begins to rethink her own mother’s position and responses. She chooses to parent her daughter in the extreme opposite of her mother’s parenting; she is obsessively hands-on and involved, where her own mother was detached and distant. She begins her life as a mother smugly assuming that unlike her OWN mother, SHE will do this better. She will do it RIGHT.

What she finds, of course, is that there is no one right way to love a child, no one truth about how to mother. Instead, like all of us, she finds that the ideal picture of motherhood that we all carry with us has nothing to do with the day-to-day of loving a real child: “My daughter, who was supposed to spend her childhood basking in the warm glow of my idyllic maternal love, is having a time-out in the next room. And I am in a foul fucking mood about shit that has nothing to do with her.” The revelation that motherhood is hard, that children are trying, that perfection is a lie, isn’t new or startling; what is new and startling is Burns’ ability to talk about how a mother can seemingly fail her child and be a good mother all at once.

the butter people

Yesterday, during the boys’ Enforced Rest Time, I was surfing the Interwebs, trying to get a handle on my Christmas shopping (okay, no I wasn’t; I was reading blogs. I am in deep denial that Christmas is only WEEKS away, as I have purchased NOTHING and am overly aggravated by grandmotherly type people asking what the boys need–they don’t need anything). Anyway, via Mamazine, I came across Linda Hirschman’s provocative essay about the feminist politics of the opt-out ‘revolution’, and I found myself thinking OH MY GOD SHE’S RIGHT. And it was killing me.

Hirschman’s theory is essentially this (yes, I think you should read the whole essay, but it’s long and you are busy so I will summarize): ‘while the public world has changed, albeit imperfectly, to accommodate women among the elite, private lives have hardly budged. The real glass ceiling is at home.’ What does this mean? It means, as Judith Warner argues, that the ‘choice’ to stay home is not a choice per se, but a default acquiesciece to generations of gender sterotyping. It is a fall into the model where the half of a couple with the uterus gestates and births and feeds the baby–and, while she’s at it, feeds the rest of the family and cleans the bathrooms and drives to doctor appointments and plans craft projects and . . . you get the idea. While the half of the couple with the penis conquors the world.

Yes, I exaggerate, and no, this isn’t (exactly) how it works at my house. I do not have gainful employment (unless you are counting this web site, and that won’t be ‘gainful’ until you people CLICK THOSE GOOGLE ADS a few more times). But I am one of the women that Hirschman talks about, whether I like it or not. I am able to stay home because we do not, honestly, need my income, and I am aware how fortunate I am to be in that position. Yet Hirschman argues that this kind of rhetoric is a large part of the problem–discussing the ‘choice’ to stay home in terms of economic ‘need’ ignores the intellectual and social needs of women. She writes about ‘the feminist moral analysis that choice avoided: The family — with its repetitious, socially invisible, physical tasks — is a necessary part of life, but it allows fewer opportunities for full human flourishing than public spheres like the market or the government. This less-flourishing sphere is not the natural or moral responsibility only of women. Therefore, assigning it to women is unjust. Women assigning it to themselves is equally unjust.’

While I agree with Hirschman, I still like to think of myself as a feminist, as someone who did not buy into the Father Knows Best narrative of domesticity (really, who vacuums in a dress and heels?). I kept my own name when I got married, despite the fact that it aggravates my mother and confuses the insurance company. And while I really DID choose to stay home when Henry was born, I did not necessarily chose to be a ‘housewife’ (a term I despise even more than ‘SAHM’).

I am, in fact, a complete failure at the ‘housewife’ part of this job. I don’t cook, I pay someone else to clean, and my motivation in doing laundry is entirely selfish (I am particular about the laundry–get over it). I love my children, and for all kinds of reasons I am thankful that I do not ‘have’ to work, but my god there are days when I crave the company of adults–not just other mommies, but people who have read the New York Times recently or have actually FINISHED a novel or seen a movie BEFORE it comes to the dollar theater. My friends and I talk about how much we wish we could do these things, but we’re not actually doing them–we’re too busy scraping Playdough off the hardwood floors or loading the dishwasher or making doctors appointments. Or whatever it is we do all day with the kids. Because often, at the end of the day, I wonder–what DID I do today?

Hirschman, however, sees a way out: ‘The home-economics trap involves superior female knowledge and superior female sanitation. The solutions are ignorance and dust. Never figure out where the butter is. “Where’s the butter?” Nora Ephron’s legendary riff on marriage begins. In it, a man asks the question when looking directly at the butter container in the refrigerator. “Where’s the butter?” actually means butter my toast, buy the butter, remember when we’re out of butter. Next thing you know you’re quitting your job at the law firm because you’re so busy managing the butter. If women never start playing the household-manager role, the house will be dirty, but the realities of the physical world will trump the pull of gender ideology. Either the other adult in the family will take a hand or the children will grow up with robust immune systems.’

I have never managed the butter at our house, and I think it’s the only thing that keeps me sane. I struggle with the mommy thing, not so much because my children are not who I expected them to be, or even because I am not the mommy I imagined I would be, but because I don’t want to do the ‘housewife’ things. I would rather spend my child-free time reading long essays about the failure of third-wave feminism, because that makes me a better wife and mother and member of society. And one could argue that I took all this on–the kids, the houswork, the butter–when I decided to leave my job and ‘stay home’. One could argue that Wade goes to work and doesn’t get to choose what he does and does not do there. But I think that misses the point. Wade’s job does not define him as a person; mine does. And Hirschman is right, the mommy job defines us not by our intellect or our social activism but by our gender, and heaps on us the gender expectations of a century ago.

For the longest time, Charlie went around yelling, ‘You’re supposed to help the butter people!’ We were baffled by this, until we realized that it was his mis-hearing of a line from The Incredibles (‘You’re supposed to help OUR people!’). I don’t want to be one of the butter people; I don’t want to be the mommy all the time. And I am torn between knowing that for my family, having me ‘at home’, making doctors appointments and playing soccer and reading Harry Potter aloud is the best possible thing and feeling like I have somehow compromised both myself and my family by conforming to (and thus confirming) the gender stereotypes.

And you wonder why it takes so much coffee to get through my day.