Great reading in the new Brain, Child

As promised, here is my article/essay (essicle? artay?) in the new issue of Brain, Child magazine about mothers who complain, and the people who complain about mothers who complain.

Also, check out Brain, Child's table of contents for a couple of really excellent essays. Sarah Werthan Buttenwieser writes about open adoption and her complicated relationship with her daughter's birthmother. Tracy Lynch explores what we mean when we call something "inappropriate," and wonders whether we could all stand to stretch our boundaries a bit.

And of course, check out the whole paper issue of Brain, Child itself to read lots of honest and intelligent writing about motherhood. It's a magazine in which, if you complain about motherhood, people won't roll their eyes. And if you talk about how wonderful motherhood is, they won't give you that pat frozen smile and try to be subtle as they gaze around the cocktail party in search of more interesting conversation.

Trying to explain the paradox of parental happiness

Irin Carmon of Jezebel has written an account of the same screening of the new movie I Don't Know How She Does It—and its Q&A session afterward with star Sarah Jessica Parker and novelist Allison Pearson—that was reported in a Slate post that I wrote about a couple of days ago. Like Slate's Jessica Grose, Carmon compares the event to a group-therapy session, though thankfully she avoids sneering at the other women in attendance.

Also like Grose, Carmon worries that movies like IDKHSDI—and comments by mothers at the screening—make motherhood seem, well, awful (frankly, the movie itself sounds pretty awful, but that's a matter for another post). Carmon writes, as Grose also implied, that hearing about all these problems is a turnoff for young women like themselves, who don’t have kids yet.

Childless young women don't necessarily welcome a bunch of negativity, I’ve come to realize in writing about this issue here on the blog and in an upcoming piece for Brain, Child (link to come, once it runs). They’d rather anticipate motherhood as joyful. Make it sound like a bummer, Caron and Grose suggest, and they’ll want to skip the whole thing.

"So I'm curious how do you balance being really honest about the fact that it's really challenging, with scaring younger women?" Carmon asked the celebrities, during her turn at the mic.

Parker, Pearson and some woman in the audience tried to explain that, however much it sometimes sucks, parenting overall is nonetheless wonderful.

Parker and Pearson discuss "I Don't Know How She Does It."

Honestly, it’s no wonder Carmon and Grose were dismayed.

The hassle/happiness balance of parenting is unquestionably a paradox, one that’s tough to discuss even with another parent who totally gets it, let alone someone who hasn’t experienced it. Just last night, in a conversation in Real Life®, a friend and I were exchanging motherly rants about how our children drive us nuts. We noted that our childless friends lead more serene existences—they get to choose what to do after work, don't have to clean up after anybody but themselves, never are nagged to buy stuff they can't afford, never (or at least rarely) have to helplessly endure the wrath of planeloads of strangers. Yet we also agreed that, despite everything, we’re still glad we have kids. Not only because we love our specific kids, but also because it’s an experience we wouldn’t want to have missed.

But why? Here we grasped for the right words. Because it’s, um, a challenge? Because kids make life unpredictable and variable? Because what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger? Yes, sure, all of those things.

Except that those don't sound all that fun, either.

What parents feel, I think, is not reducible to simple concepts like “happy” or “fun.” Those words are vague enough themselves, let alone when you try to stretch them to cover an experience that, let’s face it, involves its share of heartbreak, worry and swearing. Hence the bewilderment, not only of Carmon and Grose, but of journalists trying to explain all those studies finding that parents are less happy than non-parents.

Maybe satisfaction in parenting is a primitive animal reflex, hardwired in our brains by evolution, enhanced with washes of hormones. Maybe it's some other mysterious emotion entirely, one that exists independently of those modern comforts we usually associate with enjoyable lifestyles—concepts like “plenty of free time” or “adequate sleep." Or maybe, speculates the Atlantic’s Megan McArdle, “we are simply sentimentalizing the whole ordeal to keep ourselves from rooting out our unused passports from the sock drawer and dashing off to Europe, never to be heard from again.”

In any case, try to describe any of this to people who haven’t experienced it and you may sound inane. You may even find your efforts described on someone’s blog as “bizarre baby proselytizing.”

One more thing puzzles me about this episode. Why should anyone care whether Carmon and Grose want kids—or whether they’re driven instead, as Grose suggests, to “consider sterilization”? That is, aside from whatever larger, demographic concerns we might have about building a sufficient work force to subsidize our future Social Security and health-care requirements.

Personally, I’m not desperate enough to sugarcoat things with an eye toward securing my monthly checks. And there’s no point in snaring women into parenthood with false promises of paradise, like 19^th century land speculators luring unwitting Easterners west to what turned out to be harsh prairie homesteads.

I say we lay out the realities for not-yet mothers as honestly as possible, then leave it up to them. Having children is an act of faith, its consequences unpredictable. If they have kids, most likely, they’ll be glad they did it, despite the challenges. If they don't, most likely, they'll be content also.

If young women like Carmon and Grose think the risk of dissatisfaction is too great, as far as I'm concerned they should feel free to skip the whole thing.

Other People's Parenting

My friend and editor (frenditor? nah, sounds too robotic) Jennifer Niesslein has written a wonderful essay in the spring issue of Brain, Child, which she co-founded and co-edits, about the power of Other People's Parenting.

In "The Village: How Other People Influence Your Parenting," Jennifer talks about the ways that our social networks—not the online ones, like Facebook; the real-life ones, like the parents of the kids who go to school with your kids—can affect our parenting behavior, causing us to throw extravagant kid birthday parties (or disapprove of them), punish our children for mouthing off by dabbing hot sauce on their tongues (or be horrified by the practice), and so on.

So true! It's part of what I was trying to get at in my 2005 essay, "Volvo Trash," in which I wrote about owning a Volvo that was respectable on the outside but a trash can inside, about living in a Volvo-loving neighborhood but feeling more like ... well, maybe a bit more like the Mazda Protégé that I eventually acquired instead (and which, 10 years later, is, as of last night, totaled; but that's another story).

I so remember how much my parenting, especially when my children were small, was influenced by what I felt my parenting community—progressive, educated, NPR-listening types—would deem appropriate. As I put it in that essay:

Toy guns were out, of course. Network television was frowned upon, the Disney Corporation suspect, fast food restaurants questionable from many angles: nutritional, environmental, vocational, culinary, aesthetic.

Which do you like better, McDonald’s or Burger King?” my son once asked a neighbor kid.

“Our family,” the girl replied loftily, “does not eat fast food.”

Again, I understood the reasoning and even concurred. But half-heartedly. Without television and Disney videos, I never would have got dinner made or read an entire newspaper. Those indoor playlands at fast-food restaurants offered precious rainy-day recreation—and reading time for me—for the price of a couple of burgers. In a weak moment in the toy aisle, I allowed Jack to select a plastic gadget with a trigger that discharged little foam rings.. Don’t call it a gun, I instructed him privately, it’s a space shooter. That made it sound comfortably kitschy, like a weapon a Martian might wield in a ’50s sci-fi movie.

I eventually loosened up, quit worrying about what my parenting community might think about this or that. Partly because I realized, “Hey, my parenting community would frown on a great many of my parenting decisions—screw 'em.” Partly because everybody loosens up as their kids get older.

But I haven't completely escaped the influence of Other People's Parenting. Maybe I never will.

On the radio again

I'll be live on MPR at 10 a.m. CST today, with author Joan C. Williams, author of the fabulous "Reshaping the Work-Family Debate," whom I interviewed just a couple of weeks ago for the upcoming spring wiissue of Brain, Child (currently up on the site is the winter issue, which doesn't contain the Williams interview, but does feature an article of mine about one of my fave topics: the widespread confusion of causation and correlation in parenting "science").

MPR's program is a call-in show and will be streaming on the site if you're out of MPR range but interested. I would guess it would be available after the fact, too.