I Feel Bad About My Neck (6 page)

DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA WHAT THAT COST
?

BECAUSE I SAY SO
.
THAT
’
S WHY
.

I SAID NOW
.

STOP THAT THIS MINUTE
.

GO TO YOUR ROOM
.

I DON
’
T CARE WHAT JESSICA
’
S MOTHER LETS HER DO
.

A TIARA
?
YOU WANT A TIARA
?

Back in the day when there were merely parents, as opposed to people who were engaged in parenting, being a parent was fairly straightforward. You didn’t need a book, and if you owned one, it was by Dr. Spock, a pediatrician, and you rarely looked at it unless your child had a temperature of 103, or the croup, or both. You understood that your child had a personality. His very own personality. He was born with it. For a certain period, this child would live with you and your personality, and you would do your best to survive each other.

“They never really change,” people often said (back in those days) about babies. This was a somewhat mystifying concept when you first had a baby. Exactly what was it about the baby that would never change? After all, it’s incredibly difficult to tell what a baby’s exact personality is when it’s merely a baby. (I’m using the word
personality
in the broadest sense, the one that means “the whole ball of wax.”) But eventually the baby in question began to manifest its personality, and sure enough, remarkably enough, that personality never changed. For example, when the police arrived to inform you that your eight-year-old had just dropped a dozen eggs from your fifth-floor window onto West End Avenue, you couldn’t help but be reminded of the fourteen-month-old baby he used to be, who knocked all the string beans from the high chair to the floor and thought it was a total riot.

Back in those days—and once again, let me stress that I am not talking about the nineteenth century here, it was just a few years ago—no one believed that you could turn your child into a different human being from the one he started out being. T. Berry Brazelton, the pediatrician who supplanted Spock in the 1980s, was a disciple of Piaget, and his books divided babies into three types—active, average, and quiet. He never suggested that your quiet baby would ever become an active one, or vice versa. Your baby was your baby, and if he ran you ragged, he ran you ragged; and if he lay in his crib staring happily at his mobile, that was about what you could expect.

All this changed around the time I had children. You can blame the women’s movement for it—one of the bedrock tenets of the women’s movement was that because so many women were entering the workforce, men and women should share in the raising of children; thus the gender-neutral word
parenting,
and the necessity of elevating child rearing to something more than the endless hours of quantity time it actually consists of. Conversely, you can blame the backlash against the women’s movement—lots of women didn’t feel like entering into the workforce (or even sharing the raising of children with their husbands), but they felt guilty about this, so they were compelled to elevate full-time parenthood to a sacrament.

In any event, suddenly, one day, there was this thing called parenting. Parenting was serious. Parenting was fierce. Parenting was solemn.
Parenting
was a participle, like
going
and
doing
and
crusading
and
worrying;
it was active, it was energetic, it was unrelenting. Parenting meant playing Mozart CDs while you were pregnant, doing without the epidural, and breast-feeding your child until it was old enough to unbutton your blouse. Parenting began with the assumption that your baby was a lump of clay that could be molded (through hard work, input, and positive reinforcement) into a perfect person who would someday be admitted to the college of your choice. Parenting was not simply about raising a child, it was about transforming a child, force-feeding it like a foie gras goose, altering, modifying, modulating, manipulating, smoothing out, improving. (Interestingly, the culture came to believe in the perfectibility of the child just as it also came to believe in the conflicting theory that virtually everything in human nature was genetic—thus proving that whoever said that a sign of intelligence was the ability to hold two contradictory thoughts simultaneously did not know what he was talking about.)

And by the way, all sorts of additional personnel were required to achieve the transformational effect that was the goal of parenting—baby whisperers, sleep counselors, shrinks, learning therapists, family therapists, speech therapists, tutors—and, if necessary, behavior-altering medication, which, coincidentally or uncoincidentally, was invented at almost the exact moment that parenting came into being.

Parenting carried with it the implicit assumption that any time is quality time if the parent is in attendance. As a result, you were required to be in attendance at the most mundane activities—to watch, cheerlead, and, if necessary, coach, even if this meant throwing your weekend away by driving three hours and twenty minutes in each direction so that you could sit in a dark, hot locker room next door to a gym where your beloved child was going down to resounding defeat in a chess tournament you were not allowed to observe because your mere presence in the room would put unfair pressure on him or her. (The willingness on the part of both parents to be present at any place at any time had the interesting side effect of causing schools to rely on parents to oversee all sorts of events that used to be supervised by trained professionals.)

Parenting meant that whether or not your children understood you, your obligation was to understand them; understanding was the key to everything. If your children believed you understood them, or at least tried to understand them, they wouldn’t hate you when they became adolescents; what’s more, they would grow up to be happy, well-adjusted adults who would never have to squander their money (or, far more likely, yours) on psychoanalysis or whatever fashion in self-improvement had come along to take its place.

Parenting used entirely different language from just plain parenthood, language you would never write in big capital letters in order to make clear that it had been uttered impulsively or in anger. So it went more or less like this:

I’m sure you didn’t mean to break Mommy’s antique vase, sweetheart.

We should talk about this.

I know how frustrated and angry you must feel right now.

Why don’t you go to your room and take a time-out and come back when you’re feeling better.

If you want, I’ll call Jessica’s mother to see what her reasoning is.

If you finish your homework, we can talk about the tiara.

Stage Two:
The Child Is an Adolescent

Adolescence comes as a gigantic shock to the modern parent, in large part because it seems so much like the adolescence you yourself went through. Your adolescent is sullen. Your adolescent is angry. Your adolescent is mean. In fact, your adolescent is mean to you.

Your adolescent says words you were not allowed to say while growing up, not that you had even heard of them until you read
The Catcher in the Rye.
Your adolescent is probably smoking marijuana, which you may have smoked too, but not until you were at least eighteen. Your adolescent is undoubtedly having completely inappropriate and meaningless sex, which you didn’t have until you were in your twenties, if then. Your adolescent is embarrassed by you and walks ten steps ahead of you so that no one thinks you are remotely acquainted with each other. Your adolescent is ungrateful. You have a vague memory of having been accused by your parents of being ungrateful, but what did you have to be grateful for? Almost nothing. Your parents weren’t into parenting. They were merely parents. At least one of them drank like a fish. Whereas you are exemplary. You’ve devoted years to making your children feel that you care about every single emotion they’ve ever felt. You’ve filled every waking second of their lives with cultural activities. The words “I’m bored” have never crossed their lips, because they haven’t had time to be bored. Your children have had everything you could give—everything and more, if you count the sneakers. You love them wildly, way more than your parents loved you. And yet they seem to have turned out exactly the way adolescents have always turned out. Only worse. How did this happen? What did you do wrong?

Furthermore, thanks to modern nutritional advances, your adolescent is large, probably larger than you. Your adolescent’s weekly allowance is the size of the gross national product of Burkina Faso, a small, poverty-stricken African country neither you nor your adolescent had ever heard of until recently, when you both spent several days working on a social studies report about it.

Your adolescent has changed, but not in any of the ways you’d hoped for when you set about to mold your child. And you have changed too. You have changed from a moderately neurotic, fairly cheerful human being to an irritable, crabby, abused wreck.

But not to worry. There’s somewhere you can go for help. You can go to all the therapists and counselors you consulted in the years before your children became adolescents, the therapists and counselors who’ve put their own children through college and probably law school thanks to your ongoing reliance on them.

Here’s what they will say:

• Adolescence is for adolescents, not for parents.

• It was invented to help attached—or overattached—children to separate, in preparation for the inevitable moment when they leave the nest.

• There are things you can do to make life easier for yourself.

This advice will cost you hundreds—or thousands—of dollars, depending on whether you live in a major metropolitan area or a minor one. And it’s completely untrue:

• Adolescence is for parents, not adolescents.

• It was invented to help attached—or overattached—
parents
to separate, in preparation for the inevitable moment when their children leave the nest.

• There is almost nothing you can do to make life easier for yourself except wait until it’s over.

Incidentally, there’s an old joke that was probably invented by someone with adolescent children. Not that I’m good at telling jokes. And if I were, you still wouldn’t know how good this joke is, because it takes quite a long time to tell it and requires one of those Yiddish accents people use when telling jokes about old rabbis. But anyway, this married couple goes to see a rabbi. What can I do for you, the rabbi says. We’re having a terrible problem, Rabbi, the couple says. We have five children and we all live in a one-room house and we’re driving each other crazy. The rabbi says, Move in a sheep. So they move a sheep into the house. A week later they go see the rabbi and tell him that things are worse than ever, plus there’s a sheep. Move in a cow, the rabbi says. The next week they go to complain once again, because things are so much worse now that there’s a cow. Move in a horse, the rabbi says. The next week the couple goes to see the rabbi to tell him that things are the worst they’ve ever been. “You’re ready for the solution,” the rabbi says. “Move the animals out.”

Stage Three:
The Child Is Gone

Oh, the drama of the empty nest. The anxiety. The apprehension. What will life be like? Will the two of you have anything to talk about once your children are gone? Will you have sex now that the presence of your children is no longer an excuse for not having sex?

The day finally comes. Your child goes off to college. You wait for the melancholy. But before it strikes—before it even has time to strike—a shocking thing happens: Your child comes right back. The academic year in American colleges seems to consist of a series of short episodes of classroom attendance interrupted by long vacations. These vacations aren’t called “vacations,” they’re called “breaks” and “reading periods.” There are colleges that even have October breaks. Who ever heard of an October break? On a strictly per diem basis, your child could be staying at a nice Paris hotel for about what you’re paying in boarding expenses.

In any event, four years quickly pass in this manner. Your children go. Your children come back. Their tuition is raised.

But eventually college ends, and they’re gone for good.

The nest is actually empty.

You’re still a parent, but your parenting days are over.

Now what?

There must be something you can do.

But there isn’t.

There is nothing you can do.

Trust me.

If you find yourself nostalgic for the ongoing, day-today activities required of the modern parent, there’s a solution: Get a dog. I don’t recommend it, because dogs require tremendous commitment, but they definitely give you something to do. Plus they’re very loveable and, more important, uncritical. And they can be trained.

But that’s about all you can do.

Meanwhile, you have an extra room. Your child’s room. Do not under any circumstances leave your child’s room as is. Your child’s room is not a shrine. It’s not going to the Smithsonian. Turn it into a den, a gym, a guest room, or (if you already have all three) a room for wrapping Christmas presents. Do this as soon as possible. Leaving your child’s room as is may encourage your child to return. You do not want this.

Meanwhile, every so often, your children come to visit. They are, amazingly, completely charming people. You can’t believe you’re lucky enough to know them. They make you laugh. They make you proud. You love them madly. They survived you. You survived them. It crosses your mind that on some level, you spent hours and days and months and years without laying a glove on them, but don’t dwell. There’s no point. It’s over.