S Y N O P S IS
Confess your unique sexual preference, your homicidal fantasies, your basement laboratory schemes--and you may not shock a soul. But allude to an impure maternal feeling and you are the instant target for scorn, re-education or villagers with torches. No wonder mothers keep those secrets confidential!
Yet who can reach that lofty goal of immaculate orthodoxy?
If an absence of the "right stuff" is deflating, a surfeit of the wrong stuff can be unnerving. That’s why MOTHERHOOD CONFIDENTIAL swerves off the superhighway of absolutes and onto the rutted frontage road of the parentally-incorrect.
Best friends, Cohen and Bechtel, who once worked together in theatre and film, are now mothers--alienated from society, each other and themselves. Separated by birth (Linda’s first, Joan’s third), 3,000 miles longitude--and 180 degrees attitude, their polar opposite perspectives illuminate a wide range of feelings mothers aren’t supposed to have about pregnancy, childbirth and parenting.
This journal of their trials by parenthood breaks the conspiracy of silence for every mother who thought she was alone in that chasm between what she "oughta be" and who she really is.
Joan—-now a single, stay-at-home mom, homeschooling her highly sensitive son in a small mountain community--finds herself confronted by waves of anti-homeschooling scorn, a barrage of advice for curing her "over-protectiveness," the chill of life behind the Fundamentalist Curtain, and her own disastrous experience in a one-woman cult.
Linda is a married working mother of an easy-going child in L.A., dealing with anti-war toy crusaders and New Age breast-feeding police, as well as her glaring deficits in the "Good Mother" categories of guilt and martyrdom.
Linda mothers like a butterfly, Joan like a hawk. Linda worries about mothering too little, as she tries to make a success of writing. Joan has put all her ambitions on hold--and still feels she’s not mothering enough.
But they resist the temptation to nestle into the Procrustean bed of "Proper Motherhood." Instead they hack their way through thorny taboos, and shovel aside the dogma-doo to find their own personally-correct answers.
As the story unfolds over ten tumultuous years, they realize that their children, their friendship and their dreams are not only intact, but actually thriving--not in spite of--but because of who they are--who they have allowed themselves to be, even when giving in to the motherisms would have been easier.
Monsters from the id--as well as from the Superego--will probably always plague us. But armed with a sense of humor, some self-acceptance and a good strong flashlight, there’s treasure for the taking on the Dark Side of Motherhood.
quotes from the book
If living up to a standard of perfection is the goal, it just might be that the "true" measure of a mother is her capacity for guilt (keeping her from doing what’s "not right"), combined, of course, with a flair for repression (to keep those "not right" feelings in the closet.) And maybe there are some mothers who can repress their way to sainthood. But many of us--less well-endowed in that area—-always seem to wind up straddling the dark chasm of self-doubt that yawns between what’s supposed to be right and what--deep down—-truly feels right. The blowhole of maternal conflict.
My motherly instincts were slowly returning, telling me to give up breastfeeding for good. My old, but helpful, fear had returned to guide me. What truly made me stick with the bottle was that recurring image of myself at Cynthia’s, slumped over in the dark, like a wet nurse shot in the back of the head, while Jack clung on like a monkey, lustily sucking the last drops of life out of me. That’s when I knew the seeds of undeserved resentment towards him had started taking root.
People looked at me as if I had a vile social disease. And everyone had a cure. Advice came pouring in from therapists, teachers and people behind me in lunch lines. "You can’t just pick him up every time! You’re creating his dependency," or "That sippy cup is depleting his will forces--you’re turning him into a smoker." If only I’d had the energy to invoke the wisdom if the halter-topped oracle. "You’ll get this pacifier when you pry it out of my cold dead fingers."
No one would argue that one could become a professional dog trainer without proper education. But how to raise a human being is supposed to come naturally. I felt nervous about telling other women, "I’m a mother. That’s what I do." Maybe my choice aroused a secret dread in other women: the prospect of returning to the Dark Ages of enforced biological destiny. I did my best to avoid the subject. If asked point blank about my current endeavors, I’d mutter something incomprehensible about an "off-site," "being post-proactive" or "experiments in my basement I’d rather not discuss."
"What is your occupation?" asked the woman wioth the clipboard.
Oh, dear, here it comes: Are you now or have you ever been...? She pushed through my hesitation, "Would you say you were a homemaker? Unemployed?" I began to squirm. How could I be unemployed? I was too exhausted. That meant I had to be a—-Oh, God, no!
"Homemaker," I sniveled, hanging my head, ready to be marched off to Re-Liberation Camp.
Joan had told me once that a pregnant woman's brain was like The Streets of San Francisco." A couple of trigger-happy detectives patrolling the neural pathways in a black-and-white with a bullhorn. It's one shakedown after another," was how she put it. "Every loitering thought and feeling gets busted as a potential Danger To The Baby." Knowing Joan, her brain must have been a regular policemen's ball.
My pregnant shadow was frozen on the road. I knew then that I would be run down by some phantom-driven muscle car. Naturally. What else? That was the cheap tawdry end I deserved.
I managed to step back from the road, but I couldn't step out of that death scene. It was as if I'd fallen through a rabbit hole into a 50's teen crime movie, and suddenly I saw myself lying in the street listening to the screeching tires of a hit-and-run Torino. My final conscious act would be to stare up from the blood-soaked asphalt at the craggy lieutenant who'd be crushing a cigarette under his foot an inch from my shoulder. "Kids having kids," he would spit, waving my body bag into the meat wagon.
"You have to ask yourself, Joan, is the homeschooling really for him or is it for you?" For him or for you? Well, as tools go, this one was a gem. Perhaps the first empirically objective standard for distinguishing between good mothering and bad! A perfect mantra for the guilt-ridden! Not messy and ambiguous like family therapy or esoteric and impractical like Rudolf Steiners mysticism. As convenient as a Cosmo test, as versatile as duct tapeit seemed to possess the wisdom of Solomon Am I doing what truly suits Grahams needs or am I just falling back on my slovenly selfishness?
Surely this new mood ring for the conscience could eliminate all that waxy build-up of self doubt, giving me whiter whites and blacker blacks till I could see my old certainty shining back at me.
I waited for my contraction to end before yelling at him. "This parking lot's completely flat! What kind of idiot would put on the emergency brake?"
Brian looked at me with absolute, unreserved loathing. "You make me sick."
I nearly bit him. "Youll never know how REPULSIVE it is going through this with YOU!" I screamed.
"I know what it's like being in Hell," he sneered, saliva oozing from his teeth.
"OWWWWW!!! God, do you get some kind of sick pleasure making my pain worse? Do you like it? Well?"
"GODDAMN IT! SHUT THE FUCK UP!" At that point Brian nearly tore the emergency brake out of the car and somehow we were on our way. All I kept thinking, to make myself feel even more terrible, was: This is not the way it's supposed to be. This is not the way it's supposed to be. Like a mantra, which gradually evolved into: I can get a divorce right after. I can get a divorce right after.
But when it came to self-doubt, we could have started a mail-order business. Motherhood seems to be a perpetual doubt factory. When last decade's "should" becomes obsolete, a new improved one is designed to replace it. One thing we never doubted, though, was our devotion to our kids.
Well, what parent doesn't feel devoted to her child? In all the Bedlam of emotions and conflicting needs that come with parenting, devotion seems to hover above the tumult like an angel of instinct--part reason, part urge--with lofty wings and bloody teeth, so primal and pervasive parents take it for granted. Until someone questions it.
"Do you really think working every weekend is good for him?" or "Are you sure you should have custody, when your ex could give her a room of her own and a puppy?"
Sometimes we can just duck these accusations of selfishness. But if were already feeling uncertain about our choices, such well-meaning advice can throw us onto a mobius strip of toxic reflection.
Linda and Stewart were beginning to realize I couldnt respond to anything that was not relayed to me through my child. In their frustration, they must have figured that if you couldn't get around the baby--why not go through? Because at this point, Linda was leaning over in front of the baby's face--speaking into him as if she were ordering something from a MacDonald's drive-through. She seemed convinced his head was a communication link to my consciousness. Unfortunately, it wasn't.
My antenna has always selected out any chatter having the potential to make me feel worse. Back then it was: "My son’s a real go-getter--he just jumps up there and does it!" or "She falls down all the time, but then she picks herself up and goes right back at it!" I wondered if anyone would be interested in hearing, "Jack falls down all the time, and then he cries and doesn’t want to play anymore!" What could someone say to that? "It’s Okay, he’ll change!" or perhaps a more well-intentioned, "I think Jack’s getting braver!" Extremely innocent comments, but I took it to mean something was wrong with him that needed to be improved.
