Home Free

by Marni Jackson

  It’s my first glimpse behind the maternal curtain of someone I don’t recognize,who isn’t always mother.

  When I was in my teens and precociously reading the British psychoanalyst and author R. D. Laing about the basic insanity of families, I took it upon myself to “cure”ours. I initiated social hugging. I hugged my parents whenever I arrived or left. They slowly adopted this new habit. They were devoted, loving parents, but physically undemonstrative.

  When I grew up and had my son, I went the other way: I revelled in the physical intimacy of breastfeeding and caring for him. As he began to walk and climb, my body was the handiest set of monkey bars. He scaled me, swarmed me, inhabited me. In pictures of the two of us at this stage, he is always hanging off my neck and arm, like an ornament on a Christmas tree. I spent hours down on the rug with him, running a plastic car around a cardboard expressway, doing my best to make engine noises.

  Our mothers were not down on the rug with us. They were too busy keeping house and stage-managing the world of home, with its scientific draperies and avocado-coloured appliances. They were putting on lipstick for the arrival of their husbands and wondering if 4 p.m. was too early to pour a biggish glass of sherry because they were bored and lonely. They played bridge. They joined school committees and pursued creative hobbies—my mother had many in her life, from ceramics to dressmaking. The children were part of this mise en scène, but not necessarily the central characters.

  We had a washing machine with two hard rubber rollers mounted on top. After the clothes sloshed around in the tub part, my mother would feed the wet clean clothes, lump by heavy lump, through the rollers. They emerged from the other side thin and flat as cardboard, curving down into the laundry basket.

  Don’t get your hand caught in the rollers, my mother would always warn me.

  We lived near a peninsula of homes, some quite grand, known as Indian Point. This wasn’t a developer’s moniker; the Mohawk chief Joseph Brant once had a settlement here, long before the smokestacks of Dofasco and Stelco arrived across the bay. My brother and I used to find arrowheads in the ravine. For the first years of my life, the way I spent my days was probably more Mohawk than minivan. Okay, Joseph Brant didn’t listen to Small Types. But I spent more time in the ravine than inside a car.

  There were no other kids my age on Stillwater. We always had a dog on the go, and they ran free. Frisky, a border-collie/shepherd, was my brother’s dog and my mother’s favourite. Ricky (we had bad pet names, always), a cocker spaniel with weak hips, was mine. The house had a coal furnace; once or twice a winter a delivery of coal roared through a basement window down a chute into a dark little room. Then my father shovelled it into the furnace. Milk and bread were delivered to the house too, left in the “milk box,” an ingenious compartment that opened both ways, to the outside and inside. I am not really as old as Susannah Moodie but I do remember a horse-drawn cart hauling blocks of ice covered in sawdust. I used to feed apples to the ice man’s horses. The warmth of the horse’s breath on my hand.

  Much time and labour were required to keep the household running smoothly. Home was a kind of theatre for the performance of family; curtains that opened and closed smoothly were important, as was the discreet box that covered the curtain-drawing mechanism—the valence. Parents focused on the material side of things rather than the inner life of their kids.

  Mothers weren’t expected to drive off to mom ’n’ tot yoga classes. The job of preschoolers was to go outside and play, which is what I did. I went hunting for water rats down by the lake. I went next door to visit old Mrs. Perry, who would lend me her powerful binoculars so I could watch the fire spitting out of the steel-plant stacks across the bay. On weekends, my father might take my brother and me skating on the lake, and in the summer we would ride our bikes to the second hydro tower on the beach strip to swim. My mother swam, too, a fine figure in her black woollen suit.

  There were no music lessons, no play dates, and, for that matter, no friends in my first five years. My brother occasionally deigned to let me hang around with him and his slightly delinquent friend Derek, as the two of them collected snakes and shot at things with their BB guns. You could order many wonderful things from the backs of comic books then: BB guns, Chihuahuas the size of teacups, bust enhancers, and sea monkeys.

  So I had the ravine, the lake,my comic books, the company of two dogs plus some sea monkeys, and my mother, who was there but also absent in a way. Or just an adult. I remember her back, as she stood at the sink, or the stove, or sat curved over a panel of fabric at the sewing machine. Always making something.

  My father worked for a company that manufactured pesticides and water-purifying chemicals. He was overseeing the construction of a new branch, which was the reason we had moved east from Saskatoon a year after I was born. Job transfers often determined the destiny of families in those days; Brian grew up in a Toronto suburb because his father, who worked in insurance, was transferred there from England. My mother had been whisked away from her own family to a strange new town and a house that my father had bought in the weeks before she arrived.

  It must have been lonely for her at first. What I registered as a kind of emotional absence in those early years was probably nothing more than a current of depression, the isolated housewife’s affliction.

  Once I asked my mother if she had ever wanted to work at a career. “No, I was happy to stay home with you kids,”she answered. Pause. “But I think I would make have made a good geneticist.”

  Too true.

  “Oh, your mother’s a smart one,”my father liked to say with pride, whenever she produced some showcase dessert or upholstered a couch. He adored her. She was endlessly ingenious and artful in her homemaking. There was, however, the slightly disarming advice my father liked to give Casey, many years later: “Be sure you marry a girl who’s smart—but not too smart.”

  There was no TV. I do remember the newsprint paint books with little dots; if you “painted” the dots with water, a thin wash of colour appeared. The radio was our main entertainment. I would lie in bed at night with a radio on beside me, the dial glowing orange, as I listened to Bulldog Drummond, Dragnet, and the Amos ’n’ Andy shows. A few times, my father took me fishing down along the lakeshore. For some reason I longed for a bamboo fishing pole, and he bought me one. During the winter, he would take my brother and me iceboating on the frozen lake, a completely thrilling and dangerous activity involving bedsheet sails and two-by-fours mounted on skate blades. The three of us would go skimming and chattering across the goosebumped surface of the ice.

  Nobody told me not to play in the ravine, or go down to the lake, or near the highway with the dogs. Nobody told me not to wander into construction sites, our preferred playground. The main rule was to be home by dinner. This was not negligent, this was normal. There was no preschool, no daycare, and no piano lessons, except for the occasional session with my grandmother, who raised her three children as a single mother by teaching piano.

  If I was lonely, I didn’t know it.

  I like to catch frogs and bring them home,much like our cat likes to deposit gifts of mice on our doorstep. One day I bring a fine specimen back to the house and crouch on the stairs to watch the frog wetly lurch toward my mother, who is, as usual, standing at the sink. She steps back, almost on the frog, then turns and let out a gratifying little shriek. My turtle, however,meets a sadder fate. I let it roam about the kitchen floor one day when my mother passes through with laundry in her arms, obscuring her view of the floor. She steps on the turtle. Either the shell or the creature itself makes a very upsetting, high-pitched noise. Then it dies. So does Frisky, our best dog.

  I am playing in the ravine with both dogs when he bounds ahead and darts across the highway. A pickup truck hits him, pushing his blond body forward as the driver brakes. He gets out and lifts the dog gently into the crib of the truck,which happens to be full of hay. He drives him to the vet, but they have to put him down.

  I had wra
pped my arms around Ricky but hadn’t been able to save the better dog, the one my mother loved.

  After the accident, in the kitchen, I try to normalize things. Bruce will really be surprised, I venture to my mother. She says nothing. I ask for a sandwich—lunch would surely help matters. She fixes a sandwich and plops it down in front of me. I eat it with a tight throat, as my mother goes upstairs without a word. After I finish, I creep up and see her lying sideways across the bed, face down, her shoes still on. I go back down to the kitchen.

  Pet deaths were evidence that life wasn’t kind, but it was mostly safe. “Play” meant roaming around our small town with friends, unsupervised. The task of parents was to construct a sturdy world in which these simple beings called children could grow up. The world outside was not considered perilous and toxic, as it is now. There were indeed pedophiles out there, penis-flogging losers, but if you didn’t get into a car with them they were no threat. You could always take a different route home.

  However, I was rummaging around in the basement recently and found a little pile of evidence that perhaps all was not right with my young, secure world. Some adolescent poetry and a few short stories from my high school yearbook. One, “The Eye of the Storm,” was the story of a cartoonist on his way home to commit suicide. Another was called “The Lonely Road.” (“A road is only lonely when someone walks down it,” it begins, unpromisingly.) And oh, the poetry, the wretched, terrible poetry—beyond the usual puerility of teenage free verse: “Thoughts hang like rotten fruit in the room.”This was the work of a smiling, flip-haired girl who didn’t appear to have a care in the world—apart from this blighted subtext of Samuel Beckett-sized alienation.

  My literary efforts were part of a phenomenon I call the Basements of Burlington. My mother did all her creative work in our large, cool, split-level, disorganized basement. Upstairs, she was mom. Downstairs, she was Georgia O’Keeffe. She had easels, paints, a potter’s wheel, and a ceramic kiln in the basement. There was a ping-pong table where she laid out the tissue-paper patterns for her dressmaking. On the surface, her artwork was unsophisticated and craft-y; she favoured mother-and-child sculptures. One of her paintings was of a small blond girl with a rake, heading into a field of pumpkins. But there was something faintly threatening about those pumpkins. Her clay sculptures were unusual: in class, she was given the assignment to “sculpt your clay into an ordinary household object.” She chose to make a blue hot water bottle, but in the firing the piece cracked. To keep it together, and as a kind of visual joke, she fashioned a set of grey skeletal fingers wrapped around it. Death’s hot water bottle. Her ceramics teacher was left speechless by this object, and so was I.

  Upstairs, the theatre of family ran smoothly, day after day. Downstairs, the basements of Burlington were devoted to pure, buried id.

  A month before her 98th birthday, I went to visit my mother in her long-term care facility,where she had lived for two years.

  “How’s the book coming,” she croaked. She had learned to ask what mattered to each of her children, even if she sometimes couldn’t remember where we lived.

  “It’s plodding along,”I said. “I’ve been trying to remember what it was like for you when we were living on Stillwater and you had just moved out east. What it was like for you to be a mother then.” I was being offhand.

  “Oh, I didn’t think it mattered to you kids what I did,” she said, “I didn’t really think it was important.”

  Well. There you have it. She was spending her days and the prime of her life doing things she believed didn’t matter, for people she thought didn’t care. But she poured herself into it anyway. By the next decade, this state of affairs became known as “the problem with no name,”Betty Friedan’s phrase for the loneliness of domestic life in the middle-class families of the 1950s.

  The Great Unraveller

  THERE IS SOMETHING about motherhood that undoes a woman, sooner or later, in one way or another. It’s the Great Unraveller. Whenever you see someone who looks like a four-star parent, a composed, trim, confident woman picking up her daughter at the preschool on her way home from her demanding, high-paying but gratifying job, remember: you are seeing a mirage. Go home with her, shadow her, get into bed with her, spend a chilly hour in the park with the perfect mother and her child at dusk, and you’ll see. Eventually she’ll crack. She’ll say, “Anthony, I told you not to do that! Now look what you’ve done! Are you satisfied?” in a tone of voice she loathes in other parents.

  Or one evening, after too much Chardonnay,when her husband loiters too long on email after failing to unload the dishwasher, even after they had discussed this, there will be tears, shouts, and maybe something thrown.

  The more perfect the mother, the harder they snap.

  Independent women launched in fine careers sometimes fall madly in love with their small children, quit their jobs, stay at home, and cannot imagine going back to their old lives . . . until one day they wake up and find themselves alone, morosely sifting sand on the desert island of modern motherhood—the atoll where women must be both church and state, extended clan and perfect play date, to their children. It is all up to them, because the real church and the real state like to pay lip service to the importance of child-raising,but when it comes to making life easier for mothers— preschool programs, affordable daycare, decent public schools— the church and state have better things to do.

  In the past 40 years, family life has evolved. We have all-terrain baby vehicles. Fathers are more hands-on,while mothers blog and write more publicly about their rich, exasperating lives. Kids growing up are taking longer to leave home. But nothing fundamental about motherhood seems to have changed. Each mother breastfeeding her child is alone, with the glass of water just out of reach. And many mothers who shed salaries and worldly positions feel queerly, oddly isolated in their new and better lives at home, raising their children—surely the most important job in the world. Except that often it doesn’t feel like that in the middle of it.

  “Parenting” is a recent invention. In just two generations,we’ve gone from playpens (practical little cages for restless children, now viewed as abusive) to play dates (a four-way social encounter requiring scheduling, transportation, and alcohol). For the last decade, the dominant child-rearing wisdom has been that only total bonding, the near-fusion of mother and infant, can lay down the foundation of a healthy, successful adult. Somehow we have gone from ignoring the enormous sacrifices women made for their children in the past to valorizing a new and subtly sacrificial model of motherhood that, ironically, might not be helping our kids in the long run.

  We work too hard at mothering. And we don’t know when to stop. When Casey was 24 and looking for a GP in Montreal (no mean feat), I rustled up a few names from friends and emailed them to him. Along with the contacts for a couple of sound galleries I had heard about that I thought he might want to check out . . . plus the name and number of a naturopath too.

  “Thanks for the doctor referrals, I will check them out,” he emailed back. “The galleries don’t sound like my sort of thing. And when you give me too many resources at one time, it kind of stresses me out.”

  Our theories about the best way to raise kids have gone from the pre-Spock days, when the worst thing parents could do was to “spoil” a child with too much attention, through the post-war, post-Freudian focus on the importance of early childhood development to our current wave of “attachment parenting”and “intensive mothering,” as it is known in the burgeoning field of maternal scholarship. Child-rearing,once something that new parents muddled through, has acquired a quasi-professional set of skills, accessories, and knowledge to become a culture unto itself. It used to be “Shut the door and let the baby cry”; now it’s “Pick him up and never put him down,” literally or figuratively.

  I was a textbook intensive mother. I couldn’t bear to “Ferberize” my son, which would mean . . . shutting the door and letting him cry himself to sleep. That was cruel! I was a human Jungl
e Gym for years and breastfed him for 22 months. Even in his twenties, I still hurt when he hurts; we share too many ancient neural circuits now for a completely clean separation. My mind may be elsewhere as he navigates his world in another city, but my nervous system is still attuned to his. Yes, I have a life,work, and an interesting husband, whom I love, but the unfolding of my son’s fate, on good days and bad, can occupy my thoughts more than I care to admit.

  This is probably not a good thing.

  Intensive mothering arises innocently, of course, from intense love. But it seems based on the premise that children are inherently fragile vessels that require constant topping up with encouragement and self-esteem. As a result we’ve become the anti-Simon Cowells on the parental American Idol jury, always softening the blow of “no.”

  In the process, I think we’ve lost the middle ground between the too-distracted parent of the past and the overly invested, hovering modern one. One of the consequences of this has been a generation of twentysomethings perplexed by a world outside the family that plays by different rules. When they come through the door for a job interview, no one says,“You’re on time! Well done13”

  Judith Warner, a former columnist for the New York Times, published an appealingly indignant book in 2005 called Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety. She was addressing American, Walmart-sized anxieties, not the boutique levels of fear in Canada, but her book offers an aerial view of our child-rearing culture and clarifies just how quickly and radically parenting ideals have changed over the past half century. In the 1990s, middle-class mothers who could afford it began to interrupt or forgo their careers in order to stay home and raise their kids full time. Corporate moms torn between work guilt and home guilt, bumping up against the glass ceiling on the job and unwilling to work 60 hours a week to make law partner, began to opt out.

  Since then, the job of mothering has acquired new dimensions and ambitions as a growing population of mothers choose to pour all their energies into it. (More fathers are tackling the stay-at-home role too. But less than five per cent of families are “run” by men.) Women began to make motherhood an all-consuming vocation in a way it never has been in the past, when homemakers had too many chores, and too many children, to focus exclusively on parenting.