Area Woman Blows Gasket

by Patricia Pearson

  Elizabeth I, Queen of England: When a toddler, mother s head chopped off. Spent childhood locked in Tower of London. Perhaps had some attachment issues later on, but nevertheless became greatest ruler of England ever. (Studies show that thinking of oneself as a semi-divine being can often compensate for decapitated or working mother.)

  Jane Austen, romantic novelist: Sent by parents to pass infant and toddler years in a hut, being raised by peasants until parents deemed child "more interesting." Child became so interesting she invented Mr. Darcy, upon whom all twenty-first-century women now have crush.

  Peter the Great, Tsar of Russia: Raised by staff of fourteen dwarfs. Admittedly, was rather boorish as grown-up but had a good time and managed to modernize Russia. Important to know: Was there high staff turnover among the dwarfs, or were they always the same fourteen, ensuring constancy of care?

  Michelangelo, painter of the Sistine Chapel: Wealthy parents putter about country estate near Florence while baby lives with wet nurse in shed. Mother becomes muse for La Pieta and is thus immortalized rather than made to answer questions about how could she put her own interests ahead of her child's crucial early development.

  Katharine Graham, publisher of the Washington Post: As infant, left with nanny in a Fifth Avenue flat while parents moved to Washington for four years. As adult, finally follows them to the capital— with a vengeance.

  Thomas Jefferson: Raised by clinically depressed slaves. Daughters also raised by slaves. One slave becomes mother of youngest son, who therefore becomes slave. Life confusing, but very productive.

  Jean Chretien, former prime minister of Canada: eighteenth of nineteen children born in rural Quebec, making caregiver-child ratio four times the legal limit for day care.

  Sleeping Beauties

  I love my children, but my life would be much improved if they were unconscious more often. Ideally, my four-year- old could go to sleep at six, say, and then wake up at ten the next morning. Or if that's too ambitious, what if it got to be eight-thirty P.M. and she scrambled into bed and closed her eyes, instead of climbing onto the kitchen table and drawing on her legs with a pen?

  Still too aspiring? Then maybe she could fall asleep before I do.

  Conversely, my baby son could try sleeping until it was light outside in the morning, because it was fine to watch the Athens Olympics live, but on the whole I would rather not have one child fall asleep at eleven and the other one wake up at five.

  Every time Ambrose and I go on a "date," the fun is overshadowed by the dread of getting to bed too late and being dragged to our feet before dawn with a hangover stunningly magnified by sleep deprivation.

  We keep hoping, instead, to spend time with each other privately at home, which is like waiting for Godot. When Ambrose kissed me recently in front of Clara, she cried out in genuine astonishment: "What are you doing?" Oh, never mind. We resumed staring gloomily at our children not-sleeping.

  The children beam back like little rays of sunshine; life's a never-ending bed-bouncing blast when you're small. Bedtime? Yay! Time for back flips, giggling fits, five trips to the bathroom, three to the fridge, and then sixteen outfit changes. Yippee!

  In the la-la-land inhabited by experts in parenting books, Mommy serenely reads bedtime stories, sings songs, and rubs the child's back in a comforting ritual that leads smoothly to sleep. In my land, serene Mommy turns very gradually into serial killer Mommy, after reading, singing, and rubbing culminates in child hopping gaily out of bed.

  Sleepy child flies downstairs to get her Barbie/ballet slippers/half-eaten banana before returning to discourse vigorously on who is and is not invited to her birthday party in two months' time.

  Serene Mommy screams "GET INTO BED RIGHT NOW!" And sleepy child looks totally shocked, before bursting into tears and wailing "DAAAADDDDYY!" At which point, serene Mommy kvetches, "Daddy has nothing to do with this!" feeling bitter that her authority is so swiftly undercut by the prospect of divine rescuing Daddy.

  Serene Mommy points out churlishly that Daddy, aka God, is lying in a stupor in the other room, after having swayed the baby back and forth to Bob Marley tunes for several hours. Sleepy child proceeds to fling Guess How Much I Love You off the bed.

  At ten-thirty, sleepy child is finally sleepy and wishing to snuggle, and serene Mommy is so stiff with suppressed rage that she's about as snuggly as particle board.

  So it goes, with minor variations, no thanks to the smug advice of other parents who consider themselves towering fonts of wisdom because their children happen to be biddable. "I find," a typical parent chimes helpfully, "that after I read angel three stories, I tell her that Mommy's just going downstairs to make tea, and when I come back she's asleep."

  Well, I don't find that, do I? I find that angel follows me downstairs and asks for a dish of noodles.

  Of course, where I see a problem, entrepreneurs see an opportunity, so I note that there's a burgeoning crop of GO TO SLEEP audio products on the market. Video producer Kandi Amelon in Chicago, for instance, has recently released Nighty Night, a, twenty-minute cinematic extravaganza of yawning baby animals, courtesy of Peter Pan Productions.

  In my view, this is designed to induce sleep through boredom, whereas the more traditional videos, like Sweet Dreams, Spot, and Maisyys Bedtime, merely hint at the popularity of sleep among a child's favorite characters, much the way that every preschool book ever published ends with the hero comatose in a bed.

  Videos are not the answer in this house, because there's something creepy and Brave New World about having electronic portals in every bedroom.

  I prefer cassettes. Since Clara spent the first six months of her life listening to a continuous loop recording of vacuum cleaner noise, there's cause for hope.

  Thus I found The Floppy Sleep Game tape, created by a cheerful California lady named Patti Teel. A children's entertainer in Burbank, Teel has been garnering great word of mouth for the "progressive relaxation technique" she's adapted from yoga and embedded in her game. Hyper children are said to be snoozing within half an hour, after listening to her Betty Boop voice direct them in a sort of self-hypnosis exercise.

  I ordered the tape, and excitedly played it for Clara when all other rituals had been attended to. She was sitting cross-legged on her bed, avidly popping the bubbles from a padded envelope.

  Teel's voice materialized in a tinkle of music and encouraged her to lie down. Clara obliged, holding the envelope above her to resume popping. To the faint sound of crickets, Teel said: "Close your eyes, and imagine that you're lying outside on a blanket in your own, special meadow."

  Clara continued popping. "You're supposed to close your eyes," I prompted.

  "Why?"

  "Because we're playing the floppy sleep game."

  "What does floppy mean?"

  "It means . . . I don't know, like . . . a rag doll."

  "What's a rag?"

  "It's an old washcloth, Clara— just listen to the tape."

  "Lift your leg and let it flop down again," murmured Teel. Clara engaged in the body relaxation instructions for a while, then went back to her bubble popping. When Teel segued into a lullaby, Clara deconstructed the lyrics like Jacques Derrida.

  "Oh, forget it," I muttered, turning the tape recorder off.

  "Mommy? Are you tired?"

  "Yes, as a matter of fact, I am."

  "You can go to sleep if you want to."

  Oh, thanks.

  Last night I had a dream about Benicio Del Toro, the actor who, being male, gets to stride around with puffy eyes, unwashed hair, and minimal makeup and still be considered THE most gorgeous specimen of Latin masculinity ever to emerge from small-town Pennsylvania. In my dream we were having a wonderful, wonderful romance, although for some reason we were in a dental office and I kept having to spit into a paper cup. But it was delicious and enthralling. When I woke up, Clara was feeding Chiclets to the cat.

  Is That a Cheerio Stuck to My Pants, or Are

  You Just Happy to See M
e?

  I was at the Children's Museum with thousands of highly excited toddlers streaking by me in every direction like a huge colony of snow-suited ants, when at some point, feeling harried and claustrophobic, I looked up and noticed a dad checking me out.

  No way! He can't be looking at me, can he? I'm a mom! What's he looking at? Is there something on my shirt? An unusually large smear of applesauce or snot? Because he can't be looking at me. I. Am. A. Mom. There must be Scotch tape on my pants.

  Five years ago I might have registered his gaze as admiring or desirous or lustful, and it wouldn't have been rocket science. But here in the altered state of consciousness called motherhood, male attention inspires a slow-motion double take. I think it has to do with defining myself in the eyes of my children. My face could be a boiled ham, as far as they're concerned. Therefore, wondering if I look sexy is irrelevant, not to mention hopeless and entirely beside the point.

  My sexuality has gone AWOL.

  I cannot find it under the couch with the stray puzzle pieces and empty formula bottles. I cannot find it in the bathtub among the spouting whales and duckies. It isn't in the bedroom, which is knee-deep in Barbie shoes and crackers. Sometimes I wonder: Is my sexuality behind the garden gate in Geoffrey's lift-the-flap book? No, but there's Spot the dog and Tom, the green alligator, playing ball, yay! Is it in the refrigerator? No, but there are some crinkly grapes in there.

  Surprisingly, I am married. This used to have a romantic connotation. I keep assuring myself, as Ambrose does, that all will be romantic again just as soon as we can reach for each other in a bed and not bump into two children, a Groovy Girl doll, the TV remote, our dog, a pacifier, and Goodnight Moon.

  Wishing to be guaranteed of this eventuality, I recently attended a conference on motherhood, sex, and sexuality. The conference was organized by ARM, the Association for Research on Mothering, together with the Center for Feminist Research. Much of the conversation centered on society's discomfort with maternal sexuality, but that attitude has actually grown more ambivalent of late. If we used to divide neatly into madonnas and whores and crones and virgins, what of the pop star Madonna, sauntering about on her book tours looking gorgeous in her forties with two children in tow?

  She rather confounds the categories. But she works at it. Women are generally becoming mothers later now, in their thirties, when their sexual ambitions have played out a bit, seeds have been sown, blocks have been run around. We were whores, so to speak, and now too many of us are behaving like madonnas with chronic fatigue syndrome.

  There's something the matter with that, which has to do with yielding to the loss of sexual vitality without a fight, as if it doesn't matter as much as it does. But maybe one of the reasons that we yield to the shift from sexy hottie to frumpy hen is that we derive a great deal of sensual nourishment from our small children.

  This subject was explored rather intriguingly by one Pamela Courtney-Hall, a professor at the University of British Columbia. She proposed that many parents derive an erotic pleasure from their children that calls for a new vocabulary of sexuality or Eros, for it isn't sexual in the orthodox sense but deeply intimate and physically sustaining.

  We declare child care to be an "Eros-neutral domain," Courtney-Hall said, "but caregivers report connections to their children that are rapturous . . . and rooted in intimate bodily contact." They are not sexual, however, not dirty and self-pleasuring, not pedophiliac. "The language we have inherited," she noted, "is inadequate to the lived experience."

  Thus, mothers who unexpectedly find breastfeeding to be sensually enthralling are suspected of sexual abuse, while mothers who find their children's bodies beguiling, like the photographer Sally Mann, are accused of taking pornographic pictures.

  This same point, about the unspoken "tender-erotic" connection between parents and children, as CourtneyHall calls it, is raised in a book by American writer Noelle Oxenhandler, The Eros of Parenthood: Explorations in Light and Dark. Oxenhandler tries to promote an invisible but uncrossable line between parental passion and pedophiliac lust, sensual joy and sexual exploitation. It's tricky and fraught, like playing with a conceptual hand grenade. I think most parents intuitively understand what's being spoken of without needing a language that can be so dangerously appropriated.

  A child's bodily integrity is not at stake in a mother's embrace, but that doesn't mean that hugging your daughter is the same as hugging a friend. It is more intense and lovely and delicious. It also ends— at about the point when daughters make mothers walk five paces behind them in public so as not to be embarrassed in front of their friends.

  Then it is probably time for a midlife crisis. Not the best path to tread, this celebration of the tender-erotic. Better— surely?— to insist upon our sexual vibrancy as women all along, to allow ourselves to be viewed as Madonna rather than as madonnas, as, if anything, more beautiful because of motherhood. I deserve to recognize a man's gaze in a crowded kid's museum for what it is, admiring, and take some sustenance from that.

  Penises and Pryin' Eyes

  I was sitting at the marina near my old cottage last summer, dumbly engrossed in a novel, when a woman came up to me and declared with great umbrage: "He is peeing in the LAKE."

  I looked up slowly— the way you do when it dawns on you that the ambient sound of someone blurting gibberish is actually addressed to you personally— and saw a sixtyish woman with smoker's wrinkles, sporting hot pants and carrying a dachshund, staring down at me and smiling very tightly.

  "Oh, I'm sorry," I said, uncertainly. I assumed that she was referring to my dog. It is a well-known fact in North America that dogs can relieve themselves only in the one place— parks— where people like to sit, picnic, and go barefoot, usually slipping on smears of dog shit. Otherwise, dogs' needs are a constant embarrassment to the owner, as the dogs heedlessly urinate in lakes, on marigolds, against car tires and recycling boxes, into leaf piles, and alongside hedges belonging to cat owners. God forbid that dogs should defecate on the ground when you don't have a bag, because then you just have to perish from self-consciousness on the spot. It's the rule.

  I readied myself to argue with this hectoring woman, but then I suddenly remembered that I didn't have my dog with me at the marina. Confused, I followed the limp, disdainful wave of her arm as she pointed across the docks, and realized that she was talking about my son.

  Ohhhh, I nodded. Right. There was my son, naked, as is his wont, ever since he was busted loose from diapers and snow pants and the restrictions of the city. He was playing on a strip of sand near some boats and had evidently just executed an exciting arc of piss into the shallows.

  I smiled apologetically. "Accidents happen at that age, you know. He doesn't always remember to come to me in time."

  Of course, I knew that Geoffrey had peed in the lake deliberately, bending his knees and thrusting his pelvis forward in great I-love-my-penis glee, because that is what he's into these halcyon days of summer, and I don't care. Male friends have murmured admiringly to me about Geoffrey's penis-waggling because they were taught shame. If only they had had a bookish absentminded mother who found nudity easier to deal with, frankly, than chasing a boy around and around the house attempting to clothe him, they tell me. Imagine their sexual confidence then!

  If truth be told, I wasn't aware of this masculine evolution of the self, but still I intuitively agreed with my friends. I think Geoffrey's innocent happiness about his penis-gadget is touching and amusing to watch. But not so. The woman's prim, perturbed expression suggested that my explanation had not appeased her. "He needs to be in a diaper," she said.

  "I can't put him in a diaper," I protested, aroused. "He's over three years old."

  "Then make him wear a swimsuit," she countered.

  Now my faced flushed. I put my novel down and got to my feet. "Are you suggesting that small children in swimsuits don't pee in the lake? You don't think your granddaughter pees in the lake through her swimsuit? Or are you telling me that
Geoffrey shouldn't be naked?"

  She drew her panting dachshund in closer to her chest, as if to protect him from my sudden hostility, and whipped out the proverbial feminine pistol: "It is the consensus here at the marina that your child should be clothed."

  Errrgh. I so deeply hate that. I'm being discussed! I'm the subject of an impromptu town hall meeting! Over the Skittles and Aero bars at the cashier's counter in the store!

  I must go, now, to Peshawar on a mule.

  "So you've been gossiping," I observed.

  At this, she absolutely bridled. "I do not gossip," she avowed, as if I'd accused her of having sex with a goat.

  Okay, so what was it then, her shared conversation, that came to its decisive consensus about the affront of Geoffrey's nudity? A matter of "what is to be done?" It had nothing in common with the savage dog that's been mauling children in the township, or the drug addict who has been stealing cash, or whether to intervene when a parent is seen cuffing her child with an appalling backhanded blow.

  The quandary here was a naked toddler occasionally arriving at the marina in a boat, and this woman, I sensed, had seized the opportunity to forward her agenda when she saw Geoffrey flaunting the implications of nudity by peeing in the lake.

  I gazed at her and shrugged helplessly. "You have your opinion," I said, "and I have mine."

  But it didn't end there because I was left to deal with the issue of community relations. I have been spending summers at this lake since I was a baby. I was married here. My aunts and uncles and cousins and second cousins are scattered all around its shore.

  To ignore the marina store gossip would be to make an antisocial statement, the sort of broad hit of contempt that is notable in a small community, where the reverberations of every comment and shift of mood are observed.

  It isn't like the city, where anonymity presides and thus a kind of tolerance for everything but dog shit is assumed; that very weekend, gays from all over North America were getting married at Toronto City Hall and celebrating Gay Pride Day, and here I was in that general vicinity discovering that the phrase "it just isn't done" still has currency.