The Way Our Mothers Did

(I’ve re-written this post a few times and each time, it comes out sounding so self-congratulatory and smug I can scarcely read through. Or sanctimonious. Other words that start with “s”.

Here’s how it shouldn’t read: My relationship is the fabulousest! We are terrific parents. Other people do things wrong. Why do they DO that?

If it reads like that, make a little voodoo doll with curly hair and jab it with pins. You’ll feel better and I’ll get mysterious backache.)

Do you ever feel like most people are following a track, like a toy train track, without having made a conscious decision to do so? They hop on the train around high school and stay on it through college work dating marriage children grandchildren retirement death? They perform every ritual known to society without questioning, they follow the seasons according to Hallmark, they know when the Big Game is even if they don’t watch football, they live life like they’re on a sitcom.

Saint Aardvark calls them, “the normals.”

Necessity dictates that I learn their language and how to interact with them because they do make up the majority. Probably 80% of the people I work with are normals. I can get along with them, superficially, but they don’t make good friends for me. They make excellent friends for each other but not for me. Inevitably I will shock them with something or they will want to go see a movie and I will laugh and they will say, “Oh, I wasn’t joking…” and then I will feel dumb and they will feel dumb.

I have met a lot of potential friends in our neighbourhood (from a pretty good selection) – women who have babies my Trombone’s age and they are all normals. Which is sad for me, because it means I have even more people to add to my collection of “folks I say hello to brightly at the supermarket and then try to avoid, resulting in ‘Pink Panther’-esque capering up and down the laundry and pet food isles” but actually OK for me because I prefer to have friends I like than friends I dislike.

Not everyone is like this, I’ve learned. I have observed women talking to each other quite animatedly and it is apparent that they have nothing in common but their babies who were born 3 days apart yet it is just as apparent that they are determined to be friends with one another because of this one commonality. I just can’t do it. I need more.

And in my life I have harboured not a small helping of the I’m not like you! I’m DIFFERENTs. This isn’t that. I’m trying. I’m talking to people, introducing myself, making the baby “talk” to other babies so I can talk to their mothers. Hell’s bells: I’m in a townhouse in the suburbs with my infant. I have wall-to-wall carpet. I have obviously GIVEN UP on being cool. There has got to be someone in this city with whom I have more than a baby in common?

Me: Trombone only sleeps during the day if I hold him.
Her: Ohhh, l’il X used to be like that…
Me: Yeah?
Her: I used to sit there, holding her, looking around at all the things I could be doing…
Me: Yeah
Her: …vacuuming, dusting..
Me: I have a laptop. And an internet connection. That keeps me entertained.
Her: (blank look)

(Doesn’t everyone have an internet connection? Yes, it’s a pain in the ass [and other muscles & ligaments] to be stuck under a sleeping baby when you want to pee, or eat, or go shopping. But VACUUMING?)

Errr, JUDGEMENT CHECK

I have discovered that I have different priorities from most of the people I have been meeting and that my approach to my relationship and my child is different from that of the status quo.

If my recent research in the normal community is to be believed, women are doing all the work and men are sitting helplessly by, gape-mouthed and ignorant. Women get the pointy end of the stick and men help sharpen it. Moms slave incessantly and get none of the credit, that’s just the way it is, their relationships with their husbands (no gay couples at drop-in) are far less equal than they were pre-kid.

Sure & begorrah, there are men who aren’t interested in parenting. But there are at least as many women who actively shut their male partners out of parenting because

a) they believe the man will do it wrong and then the woman will just have to do it over again – what a waste of time and laundry detergent
b) they believe it is their duty to do everything
c) their male partners eventually stopped offering to help after being met with active resistence backed by arguments a) and b).

From talking to/eavesdropping on my fellow moms in the ‘hood, it seems that a lot of people approach parenthood thusly: “I am NOT doing things the way my parents did.” This seems to really light a fire under people. (Understandably – I think it would be unusual for someone to say, “Oh yes, my parents were the BEST. I want to do everything they did exactly because I am so great!” Everyone does the best they can.) The problem is, if you don’t do things the way your parents did and you don’t know what the hell you’re doing, then whose model are you following until you get the hang of things?

Our first lessons in parenting come from our parents. Or parental figures. Or whoever raised you.

(Followed closely by: Television. Books. Websites. Other peoples’ parents. Our own friends who are parents.)

But first, from our parents. We learn before we even know we’re learning. We learn what respect sounds like. We learn how disagreements are dealt with. We learn who does what jobs – in and out of the house.

For example: my dad doesn’t do the dishes. He knows how, he just doesn’t. My mom doesn’t change the oil in the car. She knows how, but she doesn’t. My parents agreed, somewhere back there, that mom would do the dishes and dad would change the oil. These are their roles in the family – they also happen to be stereotypical roles but I truly believe they came by these roles honestly, that is to say; one wanted to do one and one wanted to do the other. This honesty and respect was what I learned, not that men change the oil and women do the dishes but that “work is shared equally and agreed upon by both parties.” (At the time, of course, I thought my dad was a sexist and my mom a poor, put-upon housefrau; mainly because I was an only child and a girl and had to help with the dishes. Oh and a teenager from, like, age 9.)

I don’t mean that we should do exactly as our parents do, either.

I mean that when you go to the hospital/birthing centre/backyard pool big with your first child and you go through labour and delivery, it’s like you’ve been skinned alive. (Not in a pain-sense. Well, sort of, but – no.) You lose who you were before you had that child. Not all of you and not the most important parts of you, but the skin of you; the you who was not a parent. That person is gone because now you are a parent. But you’ve never been a parent before so what the hell do you do? How do you act? Can you still wear red? It’s all completely new. Plus, you’re a little raw from the skinning.

You have to “act as if.” I don’t know where that phrase comes from, I suspect from The Artist’s Way. You have to “act as if” you are a parent until finally one day it comes naturally because you have grown that skin for yourself, using your tools and experience and trial and error and having taken everyone’s advice and tossed it in a blender with some ketchup and called it salsa. Dig?

Some people don’t allow that growth to take place. Some people FREEZE at the point of modeling themselves after other people – be those people their parents or the people on the latest dumb sitcom about a family where the mother is spunky and in control and the father is a fat doofus who sits on the couch and scratches his balls. They build relationships as those people. They treat their partners as those people would treat their partners. And that is where the resentment buds.

That is where the chafing begins, where the breakdown starts, where the “we never had problems until the kid came along” gets its root and starts its cycle.

That is my observation for the day.