Mothering

Everyone is in a complete tizzy over the Chinese-American mother who wrote Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother about the strict and expectant raising of her two daughters, presented as a philosophy in direct opposition to contemporary American mothering where the child is the center of the universe and can do no wrong because that would lower his or her self-esteem.

But I don’t get it. Since when did the millions of mothers over there in China who are struggling to feed their families from subsistence farming or sending them off to work in factories 10 hours a day become Tigers? And since when do the millions of mothers here in the U.S. who work all day and then come home to cook and clean have time to be soccer moms?

This is all nonsense because of course we’re talking about the privileged few. China may have a Confucian culture that cherishes education, and this country a Protestant ethic that believes anyone can lift themselves up by their bootstraps and succeed, but without a discussion in the context of class these mommy wars (it’s always mommy wars, not daddy wars) are irrelevant. So I’m going to talk about mothering—and fathering—from a different point of view: just a regular Jill, the female equivalent of a regular Joe, trying to raise her kids in a loving, nurturing environment while at the same time make a living and have a life (more than a room, Virginia) of one’s own.

Mark and I, as I’ve talked about before, chose time over money so our kids essentially had both of us as almost fulltime parents. When they were younger we each had part-time or seasonal jobs that allowed both of us to parent together some of the time and at least one of us to parent all of the time. While there were days in their infancy when I wanted to run screaming out of the house to the nearest bar, the Konrad Lorenz argument that infantile features trigger nurturing responses in adults and that this is an evolutionary adaptation that helps ensure adults care for their children seems pretty accurate. They were so cute, loving, and interesting that for the most part I didn’t feel constricted or confined by spending a lot of time with them. I often viewed the rest of my life—writing guidebooks for a living, fighting the Forest Service over inane management decisions that impacted the community, and fighting the developers who wanted to smash the community—as obligations, not engagements, even though they were all of my own choosing.

When the kids were older we worked at home, so were both around during the difficult pre-adolescent and adolescent years when they didn’t particularly want us around. But things changed over time for us as well, as we got pulled into more interesting work or more intense struggles and we didn’t have the time, or the interest, really, in being as intense caretakers as we’d been. I can’t imagine trying to exert the kind of attention and influence the Tiger mother describes on children who start functioning more independently while we parents get on with our lives. We always expected our kids to do their schoolwork (even though a lot of it was just busy work) and get good grades (so they could have that illusory option of Harvard or Yale), we became more of a consultant than a programmer in our kids’ lives.

Jakob was just here to visit and told me how scared he was as a kid of the attack rooster when he had to go out and feed the chickens (we gave him an attack broom). We once left Max behind in the forest (momentarily) when he threw a fit about cutting one more tree to load into the truck for firewood. This was how we traumatized our kids instead of how the Tiger mother did, calling one of her daughters “garbage” when she made her an unexceptional hand-made card, or Lang Lang’s father did hanging him upside down from their apartment balcony when he told him he wanted to quit playing the piano. (Or am I getting that story confused with Michael Jackson and his hanging baby? I know Lang Lang’s father did something terrible to him). So who’s the worse for wear? It’s hard to say, but in terms of finding their way in the world, my kids haven’t done too badly, despite the fact that they can’t play the violin or the piano—well, that is; Jakob asked that he be allowed to quit taking lessons for his 14th birthday present. Sometimes you just have to let it be and hope that everyone, including your kids, can just have a life.