Parenthood
24/1/06 08:57![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
madrobinsIn her lj, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jonquil was, um, celebrating the joys of parenthood. Which put me in mind of a piece I wrote years ago, when Sarcasm Girl was a wee slip of a thing. I never figured out what to do with it, .
I Remember Marmee
It is three a.m. on a Wednesday morning, and my eight-year-old daughter has been up, sick, for an hour. Her bed is unspeakable. She's changed nightgowns twice. Now, afraid to go too far from the bathroom, she is lying on a blanket in the hallway, curled around her misery and muttering to herself. I do the Mom-check again: no fever, no stiffness in the neck, no rash, none of the signs that would have me rousting the pediatrician out of his bed; probably a stomach bug. I sit down beside her on the hardwood floor and push her fly-about hair out of her eyes. She asks me, in fading tones suited to melodrama and sick children, to lie down and cuddle her, so I do, shaping myself around her, half on and half off the blanket. She is comforted and falls asleep. I am anxious, awake, and deeply uncomfortable. I want to be asleep in my bed, if not a thousand miles away. I do not want to be lying on a wrinkled blanket on a hardwood floor next to a beloved child who stinks of vomit.
I'm thinking of Marmee.
Marmee, the serene, wise mother of Jo March and her sisters in Little Women, impossibly comforting, patient, sage and loving. Beautiful, tranquil Marmee: I cannot tell you how much I hate her. Because while I'm taking care of the kid and longing for my bed, there's a little corner of my brain that is telling me that a real mother wouldn't feel that way. Not a mother like Marmee. Marmee would clean up the vomit and feel it a privilege. Marmee would be elevated by the experience. Marmee's daughter would know that nothing in her mother's whole life has been more fulfilling than swabbing down her baby and the floor at three in the morning.
And in a sense, that's all true. I love my kids, and taking care of them is a job I not only signed on for, but enjoy. But as with any job, there are moments when the work stinks—in this case, literally. And in those moments I wonder if I'm doing this right. That's when I go back to Marmee, the Barbie of motherhood, the impossible yardstick against which I measure my parenting.
Okay, look, I know that the fictional Marmee was Louisa May Alcott's wish-fulfillment version of her own deeply imperfect mother, as Little Women was a retelling of her childhood with all the nasty bits prettied up or left out. When I go back to the book now, I notice that Marmee's serenity could pass for distance, her comfort for soft-edged counsel to shut up and get on with things. Alcott tells the reader how wonderful Marmee is; she rarely shows it. So why, when I fret about my own ability to be a good mother, do I go back to Marmee?
It's the nature of people--certainly people of my generation--to look for role models and mentors. I tend to look to friends, to books, to movies, for the models I crave; my own mother, also not Marmee, died before my girls were born. And even when I look at modern mothers in books and movies I don't find much I can use: Since the end of the Victorian mother-worship cult, so many fictional mothers have become Mommies Dearest or Mommies Amok. In the end, maybe Marmee sticks with me because I met the character at a young age.
She sticks with other women, too. When I finally got up the courage to dis Marmee publicly, I was not met with the cries of outrage I expected, but with a sigh of the "you've belled the cat" relief that comes when someone finally says the thing everyone's been thinking. It's not just me, and that's comforting. But it also starts me thinking: I have two daughters. Do I want to perpetuate the Marmee-thing with them?
A few weeks later, the kid asks if we can read Little Women at bedtime. I wonder idly if I should say something, confront the Marmee issue and try to head off incipient Marmee worship. In the end I decide to stay out of it and let her draw her own conclusions. So we read, with digressions about clothes, relative degrees of poverty, and whether the clothespin on Amy's nose hurt. About three or four chapters in, cuddled into the crook of my arm as we sit on the couch, the kid looks up at me and said "Marmee's kind of--I mean, she's always lecturing and telling Jo to be better than she is. If I were Jo, I'd feel like she didn't like me the way I was."
I ask if she feels like I like her the way she is.
"Uh huh," she says offhandedly, like one stating an unremarkable truth.
That's one in the eye for you, Marmee. I turn the page and begin to read again.
jonquil was, um, celebrating the joys of parenthood. Which put me in mind of a piece I wrote years ago, when Sarcasm Girl was a wee slip of a thing. I never figured out what to do with it, . I Remember Marmee
It is three a.m. on a Wednesday morning, and my eight-year-old daughter has been up, sick, for an hour. Her bed is unspeakable. She's changed nightgowns twice. Now, afraid to go too far from the bathroom, she is lying on a blanket in the hallway, curled around her misery and muttering to herself. I do the Mom-check again: no fever, no stiffness in the neck, no rash, none of the signs that would have me rousting the pediatrician out of his bed; probably a stomach bug. I sit down beside her on the hardwood floor and push her fly-about hair out of her eyes. She asks me, in fading tones suited to melodrama and sick children, to lie down and cuddle her, so I do, shaping myself around her, half on and half off the blanket. She is comforted and falls asleep. I am anxious, awake, and deeply uncomfortable. I want to be asleep in my bed, if not a thousand miles away. I do not want to be lying on a wrinkled blanket on a hardwood floor next to a beloved child who stinks of vomit.
I'm thinking of Marmee.
Marmee, the serene, wise mother of Jo March and her sisters in Little Women, impossibly comforting, patient, sage and loving. Beautiful, tranquil Marmee: I cannot tell you how much I hate her. Because while I'm taking care of the kid and longing for my bed, there's a little corner of my brain that is telling me that a real mother wouldn't feel that way. Not a mother like Marmee. Marmee would clean up the vomit and feel it a privilege. Marmee would be elevated by the experience. Marmee's daughter would know that nothing in her mother's whole life has been more fulfilling than swabbing down her baby and the floor at three in the morning.
And in a sense, that's all true. I love my kids, and taking care of them is a job I not only signed on for, but enjoy. But as with any job, there are moments when the work stinks—in this case, literally. And in those moments I wonder if I'm doing this right. That's when I go back to Marmee, the Barbie of motherhood, the impossible yardstick against which I measure my parenting.
Okay, look, I know that the fictional Marmee was Louisa May Alcott's wish-fulfillment version of her own deeply imperfect mother, as Little Women was a retelling of her childhood with all the nasty bits prettied up or left out. When I go back to the book now, I notice that Marmee's serenity could pass for distance, her comfort for soft-edged counsel to shut up and get on with things. Alcott tells the reader how wonderful Marmee is; she rarely shows it. So why, when I fret about my own ability to be a good mother, do I go back to Marmee?
It's the nature of people--certainly people of my generation--to look for role models and mentors. I tend to look to friends, to books, to movies, for the models I crave; my own mother, also not Marmee, died before my girls were born. And even when I look at modern mothers in books and movies I don't find much I can use: Since the end of the Victorian mother-worship cult, so many fictional mothers have become Mommies Dearest or Mommies Amok. In the end, maybe Marmee sticks with me because I met the character at a young age.
She sticks with other women, too. When I finally got up the courage to dis Marmee publicly, I was not met with the cries of outrage I expected, but with a sigh of the "you've belled the cat" relief that comes when someone finally says the thing everyone's been thinking. It's not just me, and that's comforting. But it also starts me thinking: I have two daughters. Do I want to perpetuate the Marmee-thing with them?
A few weeks later, the kid asks if we can read Little Women at bedtime. I wonder idly if I should say something, confront the Marmee issue and try to head off incipient Marmee worship. In the end I decide to stay out of it and let her draw her own conclusions. So we read, with digressions about clothes, relative degrees of poverty, and whether the clothespin on Amy's nose hurt. About three or four chapters in, cuddled into the crook of my arm as we sit on the couch, the kid looks up at me and said "Marmee's kind of--I mean, she's always lecturing and telling Jo to be better than she is. If I were Jo, I'd feel like she didn't like me the way I was."
I ask if she feels like I like her the way she is.
"Uh huh," she says offhandedly, like one stating an unremarkable truth.
That's one in the eye for you, Marmee. I turn the page and begin to read again.