In Spite of Everything (18 page)

Again, our setup drew concern from the grandparent section. How
wonderful
that I had taken so
powerfully
to motherhood, my mother said—and how
miraculous
Cal’s devotion to fatherhood was! What a lucky baby Zanny was to have
two
such
adoring
parents! Now, don’t attack her just
yet
, as she simply wished to ask the
question:
Were we
really
going to be able to get anything
done
? Were we
certain
that we didn’t need a babysitter? Couldn’t we ask around for the name of a good service?
She
had always found a good service
invaluable;
it would only provide the most
qualified
applicants. No thanks, we said; we’re good. For her part, Cal’s mother was flat-out apoplectic. What kind of a
man
was her son, working from
home? And
cooking and changing
diapers
? He was a
house-husband
, that’s what! Why wasn’t he out finding a
job
, to provide for his
family
? He was not
ambitious
! He was
lazy
! Why wasn’t
the mother
(me) taking care of the house?

These reproaches were enraging, and it felt as if all the goodwill that Cal’s mother and I had stitched up over the years was getting yanked out at the seams. “So, it’s more important to her to uphold some dumb-ass, retrograde idea of manhood than it is for you to be a good father?” I would rail. Cal shrugged. “That’s how she is—you can’t do anything about it,” he’d say. “Plus, it’s guilt talking because she knows that’s how she raised me.” It was true: She had basically raised Cal to be a housewife. Just as it is true that the easiest way to
discover whatever is unhealed from your childhood is to have children, it is true that you can learn what was good about your childhood by having children; you find yourself bucking the former and reflexively enacting the latter. Cal had loved tending house as a child, so he was doing it now that he had a child. He was more than good at it, he was
perfect
.

So?
So
what
if some facets of traditional gender roles were topsy-turvy in our new family? Wasn’t that what the women’s movement had fought to encourage—the empowered woman, the feminized man? Wasn’t this what our generation was
supposed
to be doing? Moreover, by working from home and raising our child ourselves, weren’t we not only offering our daughter egalitarian role models, but also avoiding the cycle of exploiting immigrant mothers who worked as nannies to send money back to their own children abroad? What part of the way in which Cal and I were raising our child was not an obvious reflection of having it all?
Whatever
, parents! We were going to do things our way.
Everything is different now
.

I
wonder, as I step back to survey all of us as peers, if there has ever been a more defensive generation of parents. When I asked for her reflections on the subject, my in every way excellent pediatrician, Philippa Gordon, told me that she routinely sees X parents “ferociously advocating for their children, responding with hostility to anyone they perceive as getting in the child’s way—from a person whose dog snuffles inquiringly at a baby in a carriage, to a teacher or coach who they perceive is slighting their child, to a poor hapless doctor who cannot cure the common cold.” What she seemed to be saying is that X parents somehow have developed the idea that their children cannot handle reality. It’s as though we’re subjecting them to the emotional corollary of everyone’s favorite Travolta teen beat classic,
The Boy in the Plastic Bubble
. “There is a feeling,” Dr. Gordon went on to say, “that anything interfering with their kid’s homeostasis,
as they see it, is an inappropriate behavior to be fended off sharply.”

I giggled sheepishly on hearing this, recalling the first time Cal and I took Zanny to the park. It was a fabulously gorgeous spring day: People were out biking, kite-flying in the meadow, having picnics. As Cal and I huddled around our six-week-old baby girl, who was lying comfortably on a blanket and contentedly gazing up at a cherry tree, I glared out at the scene: What the fuck were people thinking, playing
Frisbee
? Didn’t this strike anyone as
dangerous
? Why were so many dogs unleashed, just galloping around wherever? And what about all these
bees
? This whole situation struck me as a death trap, a suicide rap. Within fifteen minutes, we packed up, outraged. When, a few weeks later, I confessed this park incident to my first real mom friend, Genina, she shared with me that as she had been strolling her newborn son, Sam, an acorn had dropped from a tree and pegged the top of the stroller, triggering her reflexive primal shriek, “What the hell is your problem?” Addressed to the tree.

Whatever your take on our parental forebears may be, you can say with confidence that they were not screaming at bees and trees to back off from their children. They were, experts say, more concerned about their children’s behavior toward others than the other way around. But this state of psychic affairs may also highlight what makes X tick, as a group—specifically, a reaction to how they themselves grew up. When I spoke about this to the child psychiatrist and a chair of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Dr. Michael Brody, he said simply: “You all are doing what all parents do: trying to heal the wounds from your own childhoods through your children.” Yup. Given this, is it really all that surprising that we’ve become attachment-parenting zealots—that Baby Boomers accuse us of being family values neocons, Eisenhower Era throwbacks? In trying to protect our children from experiencing the kind of anxiety and neglect that we suffered as kids, we are apparently not being able to separate our own feelings from our children’s.
“Generation X parents seem to have mistaken emotional ‘enmeshment’ for ‘attachment parenting,’ ” Brody pointed out.

It’s a really good point, and I totally get it. But what can you do? As a new parent, I couldn’t help feeling—still can’t, albeit to a lesser extent now that my two older children are school-aged—that I would rather hurl myself in front of a bus than for my kiddos to get their feelings hurt. Naturally, people who don’t have children, as well as older generations, all respond with variations on the theme “You can’t protect them from everything, and it’s not healthy or even right to try.” To this I again say, yup—and anyone with any cranial twitch fiber knows that what you say is true. But knowing that never seems to change my feelings, and judging from my peers’ comparably cognitive dissonant behavior, it’s the same story for them. Self-awareness doesn’t necessarily seem to be an effective salve. We can self-dissect—even self-eviscerate—to our snarky, laden hearts’ content, but
The Drama of the Gifted Child
reminds us, like the monster in the closet, that we “continue to live in [our] repressed childhood situation, ignoring the fact that it no longer exists.”
^*

No news flash here. Over the past several years, it has become well established in the popular press that X parents are overprotective, overinvolved—overattached, some might say. In 2005, journalist Judith Warner’s bestselling polemic
Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety
skewered the rise of upper-middle-class, postfeminist mothering for its obsessive perfectionism about raising developmentally correct children (as well as American public policy for neglecting to support families). Part of what inspired me to write my own first book,
Buy, Buy Baby: How Consumer Culture Manipulates Parents and Harms Young Minds
, was having investigated in an article the marketing industry’s exploitation of Generation X’s attachment neuroses. Further reporting for the book on my generation’s mania as I was raising two children under the age of three made for a mind-blowing revelation, compelling me to look more deeply at what was triggering my consumer behavior as well as my parenting decisions. Not that I could change the instincts, though I thought it was important to look more analytically at the consumption reflexes.
Even established advocates of attachment parenting have started saying “Enough already.” In 2007, less than a decade after publishing the seminal book on the advantages of attachment parenting, the author Katie Allison Granju wrote an invective for the hip parenting site
Babble.com
arguing that Gen X mothers had supplanted postwar homemaker concerns with postfeminist neuroses about child development. She called this phenomenon an “over-parenting crisis,” going so far as to characterize its reach as “epidemic.” It’s not that Granju had changed her mind about attachment parenting. Rather, the issue had become, in a way, one of quantity, not quality. “In our hyperfocus on all things parenting,” she wrote, “are we bungling the very thing we seek to perfect?”

It’s a ridiculously complicated question for us to answer. But it’s pretty clear what everyone else thinks. When it got to the point, as it did in 2005, that a local barkeep felt compelled to post a “Stroller Manifesto”—the now infamous public remonstrance of overattached parents in Park Slope, begging them to get a freaking babysitter instead of rolling up, en masse, to happy hour with their howling infants and toddlers—clearly the weight of the zeitgeist had gotten to the bone-crushing stage. Even those who vowed to revile X’s “the-world-is-my-changing-table” philosophy when their baby time came, now find themselves somehow insidiously absorbed into the machine. The
New York
magazine sex columnist turned wife and mother Amy Sohn bemoaned her own
et tu?
moment a few years ago. Who is it we’re afraid to leave alone—the babies or ourselves? In spite of vowing never to be one of those annoying Stroller Manifesto addressees, she found herself with fellow infant-strapped parents making a family-style nuisance out of herself at a trendy Brooklyn restaurant. “We had,” she wrote, “become Them.”

But X seems to take special pleasure in cataloging in epic detail the ways in which we suck. Remember that scene in
8 Mile
where Eminem wins the battle before the other guy even gets onstage, by preemptively using the competition’s ammunition against himself? We’re all like that. We’re all the real Slim Shady. We’ll tell you all about our legion faults and shortcomings—more than, perhaps, you cared to know—well before your finger curls around the trigger. (Contrast with Baby Boomers’ protest-era megaphone-style self-promotion: The Whole World Is Watching! The Revolution Will Be Televised! Stand and Deliver! Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow!) You would think that such excruciating self-analysis would count for something psychologically, and it does, so far as our generation’s contributions to entertainment and media are concerned. But where parenting is concerned, excruciating self-analysis seems to get you only so far. It certainly doesn’t seem to keep you from acting like an asshole, any more than knowing about his whole prophecy kept Oedipus from killing his father and schtupping his mother. For one thing, our attempts to reconcile our own childhood wounds in parenthood yields some very odd, pop-culty results that peg us as sandwich-board-wearing chumps.

Indeed, we’re such obvious targets that you can see us from the Washington desk of the
New York Times
columnist, smug Bobo Boomer, and self-described “comic sociologist” David Brooks, who observed back in 2007 that Park Slope mothers—by making minime’s of their infants, dressing them in Ramones onesies and skull-and-crossbones booties—were offending those who understood that babies had a right to be babies. Say what you will about Brooks, but he was totally right. Please. We could all add enough of our own weird, sorry examples to pack what’s left of the Staten Island landfill. For instance, what did I do when I wanted to talk to my children about racism? I blasted Public Enemy’s “911’s a Joke.” My children and I then discussed how justifiably upset and angry the people singing the song were when the police wouldn’t come because they weren’t considered important enough to help, which spurred a fascinating
conversation. I can hear Brooks clearing his throat contemptuously. My six-year-old’s favorite song, at last check, was “Spanish Bombs”; my nine-year-old’s is “Life on Mars?” and just the other day I caught myself cooing the bing-bong part of “Satellite of Love” to my newborn son. I know, Brooks, I know who I am, and I’m not proud. But I’ll see you
and
I’ll raise you. My sandwich board reads
ALL APOLOGIES!
You can see it from the numbing, frigid desert of deep space.

X parents also brook a lot of bad behavior in our children, even though we may not consciously think that we do. As an Xer, you may feel great sympathy for people’s complaints that our well-attached kids are, well, rude. You may hear outrageous stories, like the 2009 post I read on a
New York Times
blog recounting a preschooler’s purposely tripping a woman in a crowded restaurant and chortling, “ ‘Mommy, did you see me trip that woman? I tripped her!’ ” with no corrective measure from the mother. You may join a grandmother in her mortification when she asks for advice on
Grandparents.com
on how to handle her grandson’s relentless public insulting of his own mother, who seems unable—or unwilling—to stand up to such mistreatment. You can even understand that indulging this kind of rudeness can have more serious behavioral consequences for your young children down the line. As a 2005 Yale study revealed, preschool students are expelled at a rate more than three times that of children in grades K–12 because of behavioral problems. Preschoolers? God only knows how our kids will get jobs if they’re getting kicked out of preschool.

But you don’t need to read that kind of stuff in studies or on blogs to know that it’s as true as it is crazy. Because you sense an uncomfortable cognitive dissonance in your own psyche, you know that you’re somehow part of the problem. You also really don’t need to ask child development experts for affirmation, but what the experts have to say is: Yes, today’s kids are ruder than ever, and it is the fault of the generation that’s raising them. Which is to say, us. The consensus is that we, in general, are so fixated on our children’s emotional
well-being that we may be teaching them that everyone else’s feelings are comparatively unimportant—a poor etiquette twist on the Nirvana chorus “All alone is all we are.”