Thinking Out Loud: On The Personal, The Political, The Public And The Private (v5.0)

by Anna Quindlen

  This is how public opinion works: People come to stand for something, and part of their humanity is forfeited in the process. Movie stars complain about this, but at least they get a house with a pool in the bargain, celebrity status, and the celebrity life. The ordinary folks who do extraordinary things face something more daunting. Norma McCorvey stood for legal abortion but had to have her baby because Roe v. Wade came too late. Karen Ann Quinlan’s parents tended her for years after she became the symbol of the right to die.

  And Mary Beth Whitehead has her daughter some weekends. Together they embody the false promise of surrogacy. “There’s a piece of me that wishes it never happened,” she says. “My children may meet people they’ll want to marry and they won’t be accepted because of who I am.”

  It would be good for everyone in the business of passing judgment, and those who do it as a hobby at the dinner table, to see her as she says this, staring out into a backyard full of toys, wondering whether her children will have to give up someone they love because once, in the white glare of the world court, their mother refused to do the same. “Time heals,” she said. Scars stay.

  MEN AT WORK

  February, 18, 1992

  Overheard in a Manhattan restaurant, one woman to another: “He’s a terrific father, but he’s never home.”

  The five o’clock dads can be seen on cable television these days, just after that time in the evening the stay-at-home moms call the arsenic hours. They are sixties sitcom reruns, Ward and Steve and Alex, and fifties guys. They eat dinner with their television families and provide counsel afterward in the den. Someday soon, if things keep going the way they are, their likenesses will be enshrined in a diorama in the Museum of Natural History, frozen in their recliner chairs. The sign will say, “Here sit lifelike representations of family men who worked only eight hours a day.”

  The five o’clock dad has become an endangered species. A corporate culture that believes presence is productivity, in which people of ambition are afraid to be seen leaving the office, has lengthened his workday and shortened his homelife. So has an economy that makes it difficult for families to break even at the end of the month. For the man who is paid by the hour, that means never saying no to overtime. For the man whose loyalty to the organization is measured in time at his desk, it means goodbye to nine to five.

  To lots of small children it means a visiting father. The standard joke in one large corporate office is that the dads always say their children look like angels when they’re sleeping because that’s the only way they ever see them. A Gallup survey taken several years ago showed that roughly 12 percent of the men surveyed with children under the age of six worked more than sixty hours a week, and an additional 25 percent worked between fifty and sixty hours. (Less than 8 percent of the working women surveyed who had children of that age worked those hours.)

  No matter how you divide it up, those are twelve-hour days. When the talk-show host Jane Wallace adopted a baby recently, she said one reason she was not troubled by becoming a mother without becoming a wife was that many of her married female friends were “functionally single,” given the hours their husbands worked. The evening commuter rush is getting longer. The 7:45 to West Backofbeyond is more crowded than ever before. The eight o’clock dad. The nine o’clock dad.

  There’s a horribly sad irony to this, and it is that the quality of fathering is better than it was when the dads left work at five o’clock and came home to café curtains and tuna casserole. The five o’clock dad was remote, a “Wait till your father gets home” kind of dad with a newspaper for a face. The roles he and his wife had were clear: she did nurture and home, he did discipline and money.

  The role fathers have carved out for themselves today is a vast improvement, a muddling of those old boundaries. Those of us obliged to convert behavior into trends have probably been a little heavy-handed on the shared childbirth and egalitarian diaper-changing. But fathers today do seem to be more emotional with their children, more nurturing, more open. Many say, “My father never told me he loved me,” and so they tell their own children all the time that they love them.

  When they’re home.

  There are people who think that this is changing even as we speak, that there is a kind of perestroika of home and work that we will look back on as beginning at the beginning of the 1990s. A nonprofit organization called the Families and Work Institute advises corporations on how to balance personal and professional obligations and concerns, and Ellen Galinsky, its cofounder, says she has noticed a change in the last year.

  “When we first started doing this the groups of men and of women sounded very different,” she said. “If the men complained at all about long hours, they complained about their wives’ complaints. Now if the timbre of the voice was disguised I couldn’t tell which is which. The men are saying: ‘I don’t want to live this way anymore. I want to be with my kids.’ I think the corporate culture will have to begin to respond to that.”

  This change can only be to the good, not only for women but especially for men, and for kids, too. The stereotypical five o’clock dad belongs in a diorama, with his “Ask your mother” and his “Don’t be a crybaby.” The father who believes hugs and kisses are sex-blind and a dirty diaper requires a change, not a woman, is infinitely preferable. What a joy it would be if he were around more.

  “This is the man’s half of having it all,” said Don Conway-Long, who teaches a course at Washington University in St. Louis about men’s relationships that drew 135 students this year for thirty-five places. “We’re trying to do what women want of us, what children want of us, but we’re not willing to transform the workplace.” In other words, the hearts and minds of today’s fathers are definitely in the right place. If only their bothes could be there, too.

  THE WAITING LIST

  November 16, 1991

  It took four days to find a clown. Choco had a party already, Corky had a party already, Abracadabra had a party already, and Buster had a family emergency.

  A friend passed on the number of Marcia the Musical Moose. “Hello,” said the machine, “you’ve reached the home of Marcia the Musical Moose. My animal puppet friends and I aren’t home right now—we’re out grazing.” Marcia the Musical Moose passed on the numbers of four other clowns, all female. I had visions of women clowns getting together in support groups, talking about how male clowns get all the good gigs. Marcia the Musical Moose was gende but firm. “You’re a little late,” she said.

  The real problem is that I am right on time. I was born in 1952 and my daughter is not going to have a clown at her birthday party. Pin the tail on the baby boom. Somewhere between a third and a quarter of all people living in America today were born between 1946 and 1965 and if you think you’re dred of hearing about us, you should try being one of us.

  It’s been one waiting list after another, from the time they ran out of saddle shoes in the third grade to the back order for the bunk beds for the boys. Never alone. “Nora Ephron already wrote about this,” said a friend. See what I mean? I have derivative thoughts, I’m on a waiting list for a clown, and I have a bad cold. “Oh, that cold,” another friend said. “Everyone has that cold.”

  I watched the runners come out of the starting gate for the New York City maradion and swore I saw at least a few of the people who applied for my first job. Those were in the halcyon days when you’d go to see an apartment and there would be six other people looking. “Were you at the march on Washington in 1970?” one would say. We’d part, familiar strangers, only to meet again in Lamaze class (June of ’83) or the headhunter’s office (crash of ’87).

  There was the afternoon in 1986 when 2.4 million of us, all with Jeeps and roof racks, moved out of America’s cities to the suburbs at one time, all vowing to come back frequently for the theater and dinners in Chinatown. It was like watching birds migrate, if birds shopped Ikea.

  More white Haitian cotton sofas were sold between the years 1975 and 1985 than at any other tim
e in our nation’s history. An adaptable retailer, who could go from rolling papers to framed posters to collapsible strollers to relaxed-waist jeans, could make a bundle. No one has properly tied the boom in weight-reduction programs and hair weaving to the fact that one out of five Americans was attending a high school or college reunion sometime in the last decade.

  My mother told me about sex, but not about demographics: Look, we all went a little crazy between D-Day and the Kennedy administration, and therefore you are never going to order from a catalog without having the items you want be out of stock.

  My kids have a right to know. They are part of a baby boomlet that began in 1978. No one knows how big it will finally turn out to be; all we know is that when we lent out our maternity clothes they went around more times than a chain letter, and for years the vocabularies of everyone we knew were confined to these words: Aprica, Isomil, Nuk. If you yell “Kate!” in a crowded Kiddie City, there’s a stampede.

  I heard of a woman who was on a waiting list to have her labor induced.

  I’m going to tell my kids that none of this has anything to do with them personally, that it is inevitable that if there are 187 applicants for every one place at the college of their choice, someone—well, actually 186 someones—is going to have to go elsewhere, and that there will always be a line for the new Disney film. “Enroll now!” says the flier from day camp. If you call in January they say sadly: “Oh, it’s too late. We already have Jusdn, Jason, Alexander, Christopher D., Christopher K., Matthew, Benjamin, Ben, and Jonathan. We can put you on the waiting list.”

  Thousands of little girls turn three this month, all of them named Elizabeth. I finally unearthed the number of Violet the Clown, who had played the living room once before and was, incredibly, available. “You cut it close,” she said. Balloon animals are a growdi industry. So is what American Demographics magazine calls “the anti-aging market.” The makers of Metamucil must be pleased.

  “You’ll never get into a nursing home,” warned a friend. Enroll now for the waiting list. Arthrids? Oh, everyone has that arthritis.

  MOM ALONE

  March 18, 1991

  Last year Twentieth Century-Fox released a little film it made for around $18 million, which is lunch money in Hollywood. It was called Home Alone, and was about a small boy accidentally left behind while his family went to France on vacation.

  You could tell it was a fantasy because his parents flew first-class and left the kids to their own devices in coach without being arrested by customs agents or spat upon by their fellow passengers, and the family lived in the kind of house you dream of owning if you ever win Lotto, with no fingerprints around the light switches.

  Perhaps because it bore no relation to real life, except that two guys tried to rob the house just before Christmas, the film became a monster hit, with box-office grosses that are now just shy of twice the gross national product of Grenada. It also became controversial because it contains violence. The sole residue of Home Alone for my children has been a tendency to mimic the boy in the film by placing their palms on their cheeks and screaming, disconcerting those who have not seen the movie and boring those who have.

  The movie made a great impression on me.

  It reinforced my sense that people who make movies are always to one side of the right track, on what in real life would be called a service road.

  There is nothing remarkable about a child taking over the house, eating ice cream, watching videos, and ordering pizza. The concept reminds me of the old question: Why isn’t there a Children’s Day?

  Answer: Every day is Children’s Day.

  The movie that really needed to be made was different: Mom Alone, the story of a woman whose family goes to Disney World and leaves her accidentally in her own bedroom, where she finds inner peace and her manicure scissors.

  Scene one: Mom goes into the bathroom and stays there undisturbed for five minutes for the first time in a decade.

  Scene two: Mom eats dinner sitting down, without sharing it with anyone, especially anyone who begs to taste it, then spits it out and says, “How can you eat that stuff?”

  Scene diree: Mom reads a book that is not by Maurice Sendak.

  Scene four: Mom sleeps through the night.

  And when the burglars come, Mom says, “If you try that again you will get your head handed to you,” in a voice so terrifying that the burglars flee. In Orlando, unwrapping the guest soaps in the hotel and putting them in the toilet while Dad tries frantically to call Mom (amusing plot twist: Mom has taken the phone off the hook), the children would recognize Mom’s warning as one they have heard, and ignored countless times.

  I have other ideas for women’s films: The Godmother, in which all the Corleone sons have been gunned down and the daughters take the family legit with small accessories stores and a chain of birthing centers; Dances with Mom, in which a woman goes to the wilderness to find herself and discovers she’s already pretty darn evolved, and Bonfire of the Vanity Fairs, in which a female investment banker almost hits someone in the Bronx, puts on the brakes in time, and has an epiphany in which she realizes she is wasting her life imitating crass men and what she really wants is to develop housing for the homeless.

  Mom Alone alone would generate controversy. The Sensitive Men lobby would suggest that it denigrates fathers. This is in direct contrast to television, which has produced a number of shows reflecting those millions of families in which mothers have left to join rock ‘n’ roll bands and fathers are left caring for their children alone, humorously.

  The organization that Phyllis Schlafly runs, whose name always slips my mind, would say that no mother would want to spend a vacation alone beneath the down comforter watching Waterloo Bridge and eating Oreos when she could grab a plane and be standing in line at the Magic Kingdom that very day.

  Uh-huh.

  None of that will matter to movie people. All they care about are the grosses and the sequel. They’re already planning a sequel to Home Alone and if I know that inventive industry that brought us Beverly Hills Cop II, it’ll be a lot like the first, except terrible. (The kid will put his palms on his cheeks and scream again. Trust me.)

  Mom Alone—Again. Scene one: Mom winds up on the wrong plane on her way to Sea World and goes to LaCosta, where she has a pedicure and gets to finish some sentences.

  It’s not a reality-based film like, say, Pretty Woman. But there’s an audience out there.

  BABES IN TOYLAND

  July 31, 1991

  The news that Barbie had been caught shoplifting sent shock waves through the world of little girls.

  “Why did she do it?” said one. “Barbie had everything. She had jumpsuits, business suits, and an astronaut uniform with a lavender helmet. She had a Corvette, a beach cottage, and Ken.”

  Quickly I riffled through the newspaper, where there was a sidebar to the main arrest story by a child psychologist: “Barbie’s Booboo—What to Tell Your Children.” It said that petty theft often masked deeper problems and was a cry for help.

  “It was a cry for help,” I said. “A manifestation of some need, perhaps unmet in childhood, for affection and a feeling of belonging.”

  I thought of Barbie, with her impassive feline face and one-and-a-quarter-inch waist. I wasn’t buying it. I explained that it might have been a mistake, that Barbie might have slipped those pantyhose into her Sun-n-Fun tote bag intending to pay for mem, and then had just forgotten. It occurred to me that Barbie might have been set up by foreign toy manufacturers who wanted to flood the market with cheap imitations, dolls named Ashley or Melissa with lounge-singer wardrobes and boyfriends named Rick.

  Like so many parents, I had learned my lesson from the Pee-wee Herman scandal of 1991. Over the years, the people in children’s television have usually fallen into one of three categories: father (Captain Kangaroo, Jim Henson), puppet (Big Bird, Lamb Chop), or animated (Daffy Duck, et al.). Despite the suggestion by the Reverend Donald Wildmon some years back that Mighty
Mouse appeared to be snorting cocaine in a cartoon, these characters rarely get in trouble with the law.

  But Pee-wee Herman was none of these. Suddenly that summer there were stories everywhere telling parents how to explain to children that the weird little guy in a bow tie and lipstick who appeared on Saturday-morning TV with a talking chair and a pet pterodactyl had wound up in the clink, charged with exposing himself in a triple X movie theater.

  At seven one morning, looking at the tabloids, I knew that before my first cup of coffee I was going to have to face two small boys and explain the difference between cartoon characters and real life, a difference I was a little fuzzy on myself, having lived through the Reagan years. So I did what anyone would do under the circumstances: I hid the papers.

  “If they don’t get their questions answered by their parents, where will they?” one child psychologist said to a wire-service reporter.

  Simple: They’ll get their questions answered on street corners and in the back of the bus to day camp.

  After archery, I did explain the difference between characters and the actors who play them, the difference between being arrested and being convicted, the difference between private and public behavior, as well as the rules for keeping your pants on, which I can assure you we’ve been over a hundred times.

  I explained that even grown-ups make mistakes, and that despite published reports, what the actor who played Pee-wee was accused of doing was in no way comparable to mass murder, although in his mug shot he did look like a member of the Manson family. This made it easier for the kids to separate television and reality, although for a long time afterward they kept asking who played Peter Jennings on the evening news.