Home Free (12 page)

There was no TV. I do remember the newsprint paint books with little dots; if you “painted” the dots with water, a thin wash of colour appeared. The radio was our main entertainment. I would lie in bed at night with a radio on beside me, the dial glowing orange, as I listened to
Bulldog Drummond
,
Dragnet
, and the
Amos
'n' Andy
shows. A few times, my father took me fishing down along the lakeshore. For some reason I longed for a bamboo fishing pole, and he bought me one. During the winter, he would take my brother and me iceboating on the frozen lake, a completely thrilling and dangerous activity involving bedsheet sails and two-by-fours mounted on skate blades. The three of us would go skimming and chattering across the goosebumped surface of the ice.

Nobody told me not to play in the ravine, or go down to the lake, or near the highway with the dogs. Nobody told me not to wander into construction sites, our preferred playground. The main rule was to be home by dinner. This was not negligent, this was normal. There was no preschool, no daycare, and no piano lessons, except for the occasional session with my grandmother, who raised her three children as a single mother by teaching piano.

If I was lonely, I didn't know it.

I like to catch frogs and bring them home,much like our cat likes to deposit gifts of mice on our doorstep. One day I bring a fine specimen back to the house and crouch on the stairs to watch the frog wetly lurch toward my mother, who is, as usual, standing at the sink. She steps back, almost on the frog, then turns and let out a gratifying little shriek. My turtle, however,meets a sadder fate. I let it roam about the kitchen floor one day when my mother passes through with laundry in her arms, obscuring her view of the floor. She steps on the turtle. Either the shell or the creature itself makes a very upsetting, high-pitched noise. Then it dies. So does Frisky, our best dog.

I am playing in the ravine with both dogs when he bounds ahead and darts across the highway. A pickup truck hits him, pushing his blond body forward as the driver brakes. He gets out and lifts the dog gently into the crib of the truck,which happens to be full of hay. He drives him to the vet, but they have to put him down.

I had wrapped my arms around Ricky but hadn't been able to save the better dog, the one my mother loved.

After the accident, in the kitchen, I try to normalize things. Bruce will really be surprised, I venture to my mother. She says nothing. I ask for a sandwich—lunch would surely help matters. She fixes a sandwich and plops it down in front of me. I eat it with a tight throat, as my mother goes upstairs without a word. After I finish, I creep up and see her lying sideways across the bed, face down, her shoes still on. I go back down to the kitchen.

Pet deaths were evidence that life wasn't kind, but it was mostly safe. “Play” meant roaming around our small town with friends, unsupervised. The task of parents was to construct a sturdy world in which these simple beings called children could grow up. The world outside was not considered perilous and toxic, as it is now. There were indeed pedophiles out there, penis-flogging losers, but if you didn't get into a car with them they were no threat. You could always take a different route home.

However, I was rummaging around in the basement recently and found a little pile of evidence that perhaps all was not right with my young, secure world. Some adolescent poetry and a few short stories from my high school yearbook. One, “The Eye of the Storm,” was the story of a cartoonist on his way home to commit suicide. Another was called “The Lonely Road.” (“A road is only lonely when someone walks down it,” it begins, unpromisingly.) And oh, the poetry, the wretched, terrible poetry—beyond the usual puerility of teenage free verse: “Thoughts hang like rotten fruit in the room.”This was the work of a smiling, flip-haired girl who didn't appear to have a care in the world—apart from this blighted subtext of Samuel Beckett-sized alienation.

My literary efforts were part of a phenomenon I call the Basements of Burlington. My mother did all her creative work in our large, cool, split-level, disorganized basement. Upstairs, she was mom. Downstairs, she was Georgia O'Keeffe. She had easels, paints, a potter's wheel, and a ceramic kiln in the basement. There was a ping-pong table where she laid out the tissue-paper patterns for her dressmaking. On the surface, her artwork was unsophisticated and craft-y; she favoured mother-and-child sculptures. One of her paintings was of a small blond girl with a rake, heading into a field of pumpkins. But there was something faintly threatening about those pumpkins. Her clay sculptures were unusual: in class, she was given the assignment to “sculpt your clay into an ordinary household object.” She chose to make a blue hot water bottle, but in the firing the piece cracked. To keep it together, and as a kind of visual joke, she fashioned a set of grey skeletal fingers wrapped around it. Death's hot water bottle. Her ceramics teacher was left speechless by this object, and so was I.

Upstairs, the theatre of family ran smoothly, day after day. Downstairs, the basements of Burlington were devoted to pure, buried id.

A month before her 98th birthday, I went to visit my mother in her long-term care facility,where she had lived for two years.

“How's the book coming,” she croaked. She had learned to ask what mattered to each of her children, even if she sometimes couldn't remember where we lived.

“It's plodding along,”I said. “I've been trying to remember what it was like for you when we were living on Stillwater and you had just moved out east. What it was like for you to be a mother then.” I was being offhand.

“Oh, I didn't think it mattered to you kids what I did,” she said, “I didn't really think it was important.”

Well. There you have it. She was spending her days and the prime of her life doing things she believed didn't matter, for people she thought didn't care. But she poured herself into it anyway. By the next decade, this state of affairs became known as “the problem with no name,”Betty Friedan's phrase for the loneliness of domestic life in the middle-class families of the 1950s.

The Great Unraveller

T
HERE IS SOMETHING about motherhood that undoes a woman, sooner or later, in one way or another. It's the Great Unraveller. Whenever you see someone who looks like a four-star parent, a composed, trim, confident woman picking up her daughter at the preschool on her way home from her demanding, high-paying but gratifying job, remember: you are seeing a mirage. Go home with her, shadow her, get into bed with her, spend a chilly hour in the park with the perfect mother and her child at dusk, and you'll see. Eventually she'll crack. She'll say, “Anthony, I
told
you not to do that! Now look what you've done! Are you satisfied?” in a tone of voice she loathes in other parents.

Or one evening, after too much Chardonnay,when her husband loiters too long on email after failing to unload the dishwasher, even after they had
discussed
this, there will be tears, shouts, and maybe something thrown.

The more perfect the mother, the harder they snap.

Independent women launched in fine careers sometimes fall madly in love with their small children, quit their jobs, stay at home, and cannot imagine going back to their old lives . . . until one day they wake up and find themselves alone, morosely sifting sand on the desert island of modern motherhood—the atoll where women must be both church and state, extended clan and perfect play date, to their children. It is all up to them, because the real church and the real state like to pay lip service to the importance of child-raising,but when it comes to making life easier for mothers— preschool programs, affordable daycare, decent public schools— the church and state have better things to do.

In the past 40 years, family life has evolved. We have all-terrain baby vehicles. Fathers are more hands-on,while mothers blog and write more publicly about their rich, exasperating lives. Kids growing up are taking longer to leave home. But nothing fundamental about motherhood seems to have changed. Each mother breastfeeding her child is alone, with the glass of water just out of reach. And many mothers who shed salaries and worldly positions feel queerly, oddly isolated in their new and better lives at home, raising their children—surely the most important job in the world. Except that often it doesn't feel like that in the middle of it.

“Parenting” is a recent invention. In just two generations,we've gone from playpens (practical little cages for restless children, now viewed as abusive) to play dates (a four-way social encounter requiring scheduling, transportation, and alcohol). For the last decade, the dominant child-rearing wisdom has been that only total bonding, the near-fusion of mother and infant, can lay down the foundation of a healthy, successful adult. Somehow we have gone from ignoring the enormous sacrifices women made for their children in the past to valorizing a new and subtly sacrificial model of motherhood that, ironically, might not be helping our kids in the long run.

We work too hard at mothering. And we don't know when to stop. When Casey was 24 and looking for a GP in Montreal (no mean feat), I rustled up a few names from friends and emailed them to him. Along with the contacts for a couple of sound galleries I had heard about that I thought he might want to check out . . . plus the name and number of a naturopath too.

“Thanks for the doctor referrals, I will check them out,” he emailed back. “The galleries don't sound like my sort of thing. And when you give me too many resources at one time, it kind of stresses me out.”

Our theories about the best way to raise kids have gone from the pre-Spock days, when the worst thing parents could do was to “spoil” a child with too much attention, through the post-war, post-Freudian focus on the importance of early childhood development to our current wave of “attachment parenting”and “intensive mothering,” as it is known in the burgeoning field of maternal scholarship. Child-rearing,once something that new parents muddled through, has acquired a quasi-professional set of skills, accessories, and knowledge to become a culture unto itself. It used to be “Shut the door and let the baby cry”; now it's “Pick him up and never put him down,” literally or figuratively.

I was a textbook intensive mother. I couldn't bear to “Ferberize” my son, which would mean . . . shutting the door and letting him cry himself to sleep. That was cruel! I was a human Jungle Gym for years and breastfed him for 22 months. Even in his twenties, I still hurt when he hurts; we share too many ancient neural circuits now for a completely clean separation. My mind may be elsewhere as he navigates his world in another city, but my nervous system is still attuned to his. Yes, I have a life,work, and an interesting husband, whom I love, but the unfolding of my son's fate, on good days and bad, can occupy my thoughts more than I care to admit.

This is probably not a good thing.

Intensive mothering arises innocently, of course, from intense love. But it seems based on the premise that children are inherently fragile vessels that require constant topping up with encouragement and self-esteem. As a result we've become the anti-Simon Cowells on the parental
American Idol
jury, always softening the blow of “no.”

In the process, I think we've lost the middle ground between the too-distracted parent of the past and the overly invested, hovering modern one. One of the consequences of this has been a generation of twentysomethings perplexed by a world outside the family that plays by different rules. When they come through the door for a job interview, no one says,“You're on time! Well done13”

Judith Warner, a former columnist for the
New York Times
, published an appealingly indignant book in 2005 called
Perfect
Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety
. She was addressing American, Walmart-sized anxieties, not the boutique levels of fear in Canada, but her book offers an aerial view of our child-rearing culture and clarifies just how quickly and radically parenting ideals have changed over the past half century. In the 1990s, middle-class mothers who could afford it began to interrupt or forgo their careers in order to stay home and raise their kids full time. Corporate moms torn between work guilt and home guilt, bumping up against the glass ceiling on the job and unwilling to work 60 hours a week to make law partner, began to opt out.

Since then, the job of mothering has acquired new dimensions and ambitions as a growing population of mothers choose to pour all their energies into it. (More fathers are tackling the stay-at-home role too. But less than five per cent of families are “run” by men.) Women began to make motherhood an all-consuming vocation in a way it never has been in the past, when homemakers had too many chores, and too many children, to focus exclusively on parenting.

But mothers are no longer managing the world of childhood from their distracted adult perch, phone in one hand, cigarette in the other; they're down on the floor and eye to eye with their kids, taking on the role of playmates, coaches, surrogate siblings, and all-round domestic CEOs. Mom looms large on the horizon now— even more than she did in the pre-feminist past,when children were rug rats, not tender, complex little beings, and mothers had tablecloths to iron. No one wants to roll back down the hill into that world. (Too many tablecloths.) But the reigning “child-centred” theory of parenthood may prove to be less about the well-being of the child than we imagine.

Let us not forget, the full moon of motherhood has only been visible in the sky for the past 10 years or so. The intimate details of motherhood, now so bloggable, were once considered beneath discussion. In the 1950s and '60s,women were expected to pass through their child-rearing years as gracefully, stoically, and inconspicuously as possible; a new mother extolling the virtues of her Swedish breast pump at a cocktail party would soon find herself alone by the cheese tray.