In Spite of Everything (19 page)

What Brooks and his Boomer sympathizers dismiss as pathetic vanity is of course more than that. But it nonethless raises bizarre, vaguely troubling questions about us as parents. Why do we outfit our infants in “Koo-Koo for Cocoa Puffs” and “Silly Rabbit! Trix Are for Kids!” onesies, but feed them homemade organic baby food and breast-feed them way past their first birthdays? Why are we all so drawn to caustic parodies of the Saturday morning cartoons of our childhood on late-night TV? Why do we have such dissonant responses to wholesomeness and cheesiness? Are we trying as adults to normalize the icky, sexualized, psychedelic gestalt of the media and culture that came in through the front door while our parents weren’t watching?

Yes, we are. Still, I’m not convinced that this is all bad. I know that I continually walk the line that divides attachment parenting and enmeshment parenting because of my childhood neuroses. But it can be instructive. Take, for instance, the Princess Game.

W
hen Zanny was three years old, the girls in her preschool developed a circle that revolved around the Disney princesses. Anyone who wasn’t wearing a dress of the trademarked hue of the princess of the day wasn’t allowed to join in the game, so if you weren’t wearing powder blue on Cinderella day, you were out. For starters, my daughter had only the barest notion of who Cinderella, Snow White, and the rest of them were, even in their original fairy-tale configurations, since I had felt that she was far too young to hear such scary stories. I agree with Bruno Bettelheim and the raft of other child development experts who argue that these folk archetypes help little ones work through their primal fears of parental abandonment and so forth, but as they will tell you, children aren’t ready for this kind of psychic challenge until they are five or six. On the basis of such
thinking, I’d decided to wait with the whole Brothers Grimm oeuvre until she reached kindergarten. Moreover, as you might expect from the author of a book on early childhood and consumerism, I had made our home a no-Disney zone, so my daughter was not acquainted with the princesses’ merchandising sorority. This meant that, faced with the Princess Game at the age of three, my little schmushkie was confused, excluded, scared by stories she didn’t understand, and hurt.

By the time I had actually pieced together what was going on by picking up the fragments that Zanny offered, asking teachers what she might be talking about, and then running such patched-together snippets by the other mothers for their take, I was beside myself. My daughter’s tiny little self; her tender-lipped face! She had borne this thorny situation, alone, for at least two weeks. The teachers hadn’t tuned in to it, in part because my daughter’s modus operandi is to affect a poker face in public, particularly in the throes of stress. It didn’t seem as though anything was bothering her. But it was. It was my
job
to know what was bothering her, and it had taken me two weeks to figure it out. Dropping her off at school that morning, I was vibrating at such a high pitch of anxiety that when I let go of her hand as she walked into school, I felt my skin had slipped off with it, leaving the ragged meat of my fingers pulsing in full view of my daughter, of the children, the other mothers.

I was crazed. I had to stop it. I had to stop it. What could I do? How could a Montessori school allow such social deviance and transparent marketing to intrude on early childhood education? I wanted to lecture the parents until I could feel smoke billowing from my ears: How can you let your daughters behave this way, and moreover, how can all you liberals countenance creating a new generation of sexist shopaholics? What the hell is wrong here when preschoolers are acting like queen bees and wannabes? I was racked with guilt: How could I allow my rarefied, navel-gazing notions of the walled garden of childhood to bar my little girl from simply making friends? I had done this. Then I started to despise the little girls: petty, small-minded,
vicious little creatures. That’s when I knew I was really nuts.
They were three years old
.

I finally summoned the courage to talk to the teachers, somehow managing to keep my shit together enough to couch my concerns diplomatically. They were not only wholly sympathetic but grateful that I had raised the issue; frankly, they hadn’t noticed that the game was having such an impact on the girls, much less on stoic little Zanny. As we progressed through a really thoughtful and rich conversation, it dawned on me that this might be one of those instances in which my hypersensitivity had the capacity to be useful, much in the same way that it had fueled my determination to probe the marketing industry’s targeting young children. Huh.

At home, my daughter and I talked through her feelings, which ultimately inspired us to embark on an exploration of Cinderella stories from around the world; every culture has one, and we compared the Mexican, Chinese, Caribbean, and Disney versions. She was comforted when I assured her that her teachers knew about the Princess Game and were going to help all the girls, including her, work through it at school; and they did, in a loving and thoughtful way. The game sparked heartfelt and nuanced conversation among all the mothers; I was interested in, and learned a lot from, their insights. One day, nine months later, my daughter had a friend over for a playdate. I overheard the friend say: “Hey! I thought you said you had princess costumes!” My daughter replied: “I
do
have princess costumes—they just aren’t
Disney
princess costumes. Disney just wants you to
buy
all their stuff, and I just like making my own.” In addition to taking sheepish pleasure in her punk-rock resistance efforts, I felt a blossoming of peace and pride: Everyone had done so well.

And, really, it would have been so easy to miss. The whole thing. Even I, in my enmeshment parenting craze, almost had. The parents I knew as a kid hadn’t particularly been looking out for these things. They were so small, barely discernible: No well-adjusted person would have taken notice of them. But how many times as a child had
I found myself suddenly in the midst of confusing, scary circumstances, not understanding enough about the contours of my own feelings to know what they meant, much less the vocabulary required to speak up about them? I can’t say. For my friends and me, probably the outline of our childhoods could be traced via the sequence of such moments: wandering, confused, unsafe. I wanted my own babies to feel, from the start, that the adults around them were paying attention, were there to help untangle the bramble in front of them—that we might not be able to clear it entirely, but that we were unknitting it alongside and behind them. Not alone. I did not want my children to feel alone.

But what if, in spite of our best efforts, we failed them anyway? Or, rather, what if
I
failed them? Cal, with his unalterable compass, wouldn’t be capable of it. And beyond his solid upbringing, part of the reason for this, I thought, was his sense of faith—as in a holy connection. I had, to be exact, less than zero. I remember with excruciating clarity the moment I asked my mother the Death question. I was four, and I was tucked into bed under my hippie patchwork quilt with my Snoopy. My mom laid out the standard secular humanist line: No one knows, but some people believe that you go to “Heaven” (oh); others think that you die for a little while but are reborn as some other kind of thing (wha?); others are pretty sure that’s
that
(what?!). And thus launched a lifetime of existential fear and nihilistic dread. What
really
happens? What really
is
God, if anything?

My commitment to trying to cultivate some, any kind of, faith had started with a question posed by Zanny a few months after she turned two. She and I were stumping up to the park on an airless summer day. She spotted a dried-up earthworm on the sidewalk and wanted to know what had happened to it. The second I said that it had died—meaning, it was not alive anymore—I knew what was next: “What happens to things when they aren’t alive anymore?” Of course she wanted to know—who doesn’t? Standing there dumbly, I thought, (a) you should have been rehearsing this moment since
she was in utero, and (b) you have the next ten seconds to get this right.

Had I been of a different background or generation—the kind that has fixed ideas on what to say to kids—handling this perennial ontological riddle would have been a piece of cake. But I did not know how to handle it, and I didn’t know many people who did, either. It does seem funny that most people my age whom I know are dumbstruck by the whole God thing and what to tell their kids. For a crop of parents so dishy and analytical about everything from nursing in front of their fathers-in-law to whether to introduce toddlers to
Star Wars
to “red-shirting” kindergartners, it seems weird that this should leave us so stumped. Then again, we are the generation that felt that everything was essentially bullshit. Then we had kids, and everything became important again. And if there was ever a decidedly no-bullshit scenario, it’s talking to your little boo-boo-head about God, a Higher Power, the Afterlife—all that.

It’s not that we don’t want to. At least according to my own unscientific survey, most of us do want to offer our kids spiritual undergirding. But that survey also says that the spiritually confused and/or dissatisfied generally fall into one of three camps. The first are those who grew up with religion but don’t feel particularly connected to the associated traditions and values. The second camp is conflicted about its religion of origin; the third never had one to begin with and is lost. The bottom line seems to be that we want it, but it has to feel
real, authentic
. But how do you
do
that? What does that even mean?

Take the case of my friend whom I’ll call Simone. Simone grew up a stone’s throw from the West Virginia mountains, and her hometown was traditional United Methodist. But because it was also a college town, and her dad was a professor, Simone always felt as though she got just the right mixture of skepticism and faith. She wanted the same experience for her two kids, six and four years old. But not only had her perspective broadened with adulthood, life was also different for her children than it had been for her. For one thing,
she was troubled about the church split over gay marriage. For another, her kids were born in Dallas, Texas—a far cry from small-town Methodism. Moreover, Simone was divorced shortly after the birth of her second child; the women of the church were mostly married, traditional. Ditto when she moved to Jacksonville, Florida. There were uncomfortable moments, alienating periods. But Simone says that things worked themselves out because she and her church community were guided by what they’d been taught from childhood: love, tolerance, service. “It’s funny,” she wrote to me, “but when you’re raised on an idea or concept, all the answers to the thorny questions are answered when you need them to be.”

Astonishing. Same thing with the case of another friend, “Stacey.” Mother of three in Glendale, California, Stacey grew up in Hawaii and was active in Protestant youth groups, even as her Catholic-born mom dabbled in Buddhism. Throughout her twenties, she herself practiced Buddhism before she decided to adopt her husband’s faith, Judaism. It was the richness of Jewish family traditions—celebrating the Sabbath together every Friday night, attending temple as a family, Hebrew school for the kids—that compelled her to convert. Stacey’s connection to God, Lord of the Universe, the Higher Power—all that—was already firmly entrenched in childhood.

So, my question for first- and second-campers has always been: Is it necessary for one’s connection to God, and the spiritual/religious customs that one might adopt for the sake of family bonding, to be strictly intertwined? To the observant, this probably sounds like straight-up sacrilege. You can’t just swap out religious tenets because you feel like it! What’s the point of religion at all, then? But if erstwhile nihilistic Gen Xers turned parents do, indeed, want to include a sense of faith and tradition in the raising of kids—but need it to feel
real, authentic
—then another point is: If you believe, then it’s
all
good.

In the case of Cal, this point had stuck hard, even as it backfired. A lapsed Catholic, he couldn’t countenance the Church of his upbringing.
At the same time, no other religious tradition felt legitimate. So when, in a fever of seeking, I ultimately found and joined an ultraprogressive Protestant church whose mission we both supported, Cal could never bring himself to go. “I know it sounds dumb, but it just doesn’t feel real without the Stations of the Cross,” he said. You might think that his is an extreme example of a first-category camper: someone whose faith was stripped, leaving him with only with religious trappings. But here’s the interesting thing. Of all my friends and family, Cal was perhaps the most grounded in faith. In fact, when I was in my twenties and having panic attacks about life after death—wildly grasping at any answer—it was his sureness of the soul’s eternal nature that quelled my terror. For him, this was shoulder-shrugging territory.

What first- and second-campers have in common is that they’re bilingual, in spiritual terms. Even if they tinkered with, or scrapped, their religion of origin, they know the milieu of higher communion the way they know English and another foreign language. They can pick and choose whatever customs and traditions feel good and right for their families because their relationship with a Higher Power is already real and authentic. If I wanted real and authentic, I’d better train up. At least, that’s how Martin Buber might have thought about it. Buber, if you’re feeling a little rusty in the freshman philosophy department, was an Austrian-Israeli-Jewish philosopher, and his seminal work,
I and Thou
, argued that most of the time we relate to other people, things, and events in the world as “it”—that which is fundamentally outside ourselves—which he characterized as I-It relations. In our communication with God, however, it is the deeply personal, mysteriously interconnected relation of I-You that is activated. We cannot pursue that relation, because it is already within us; the only requirement for connection is the willingness to listen.