In Spite of Everything

by Susan Gregory Thomas

  Imagine what it would be like to inhabit Holly’s clear, peaceful psyche! Those demons, for people like me, have been sitting on our shoulders since the mists of early childhood began burning off in adolescence, which makes us available to lecture to our minority peers like Holly about their ethnographic patterns. But obviously we can’t understand Holly’s relationship to her parents any more than she can understand ours. Holly wants child-rearing advice from her mother because she trusts her. Holly’s own mother is her model “Mom.” When people like Holly encounter a food ad with the words “homemade—just like Mom used to make!” they think: “Yum!” For people like me, though, that same gee-whillikers cheer makes something inside us snicker and sink at the same rate. We want to be that mom, but we don’t know the first thing about her. Often, instead, we start by deciding what kind of mom we don’t want to be.

  As much as I admired my own mom, it was clear to me from the get-go that she and I would not occupy the same segment of the mother continuum. Take, for example, sleep. Other than breastfeeding, sleep ranks as the top point of concern for first-time parents of newborns. After the first month or so, many parents begin to start sniffing out the fallacy of their own parents’ recollections whenever they’re offered as counterpoint to the current state of nighttime affairs: “Well, goodness, honey, we just laid you down, and you went right to sleep—you never fussed.” One can only guess how many Gen-X parents around the country who have been sucker-punched out of sleep for the fifth time that night wonder, while trying yet another strategy that might soothe their little biscuit back to sleep: Really? That’s really how it went, Mom? Amy, a Louisiana-native friend whom I met when her four boys were all under five years old—and who is every bit the bright-eyed, yes-we-can, ass-kicking mom (the kind who, irritatingly, always seems to have extra organic snacks at the playground for your children, too)—snorts at such reconstructive memories. “I’ve never heard of a baby who just falls asleep,” she snaps. “What were they giving us? Dramamine? Benadryl? Bourbon?” No comment.

  What Amy did is what so many other X parents have done: used the cribs as laundry hampers, bought a king-sized mattress, flopped it on the floor, and piled everyone on. This sleeping arrangement, called “the family bed” or “co-sleeping,” was popularized by William Sears, M.D., the leading attachment-parenting pediatrician and Generation X’s Dr. Spock. The co-sleeping setup means that you keep the babies and toddlers in bed with you so that you can nurse them down to sleep and throughout the night, cuddle them if they wake up, and just generally mammal them up. In X territory, the family bed presents as a highly contentious issue, and not necessarily because the American Association of Pediatrics strongly advises against it on account of suffocation concerns. Ask new X parents, and they’ll likely tell you that yes, though they’ve had some of the weirdest, fraught encounters of their lives with other parents over the family bed, pro or con, people rarely brought up suffocation as the chief source of distress (that’s the domain of the grandparents, who send frantic emails citing various studies).

  Although there are those who sit in the middle, most people, particularly mothers, are apt to be in one camp or the other. One woman whom I barely knew at the time, for example, made it her mission to convince me not only that I was wrong to do the family bed thing, but that I was also actively damaging my children and family life. I can’t remember how she found out about our sleep setup, but she was positively implacable on the subject and harassed me every time I saw her, which was daily since our children went to the same preschool. On the other end of the continuum, another woman—also a relative stranger at the time—confided in me out-right that she felt that people who “forced” their children to sleep alone were like Nazis—not in the inappropriately casual, lowercase way in which people often invoke the term. She meant the actual proper noun “Nazis.”

  Here’s the thing: If one wishes to trace the primal legacy of on their own floor, crying alone, one need look no further than the family bed. Or at least that was the thing for me. I heard the con arguments: that there is no lasting damage from forcing babies to cry it out at night, that they need to learn how to soothe themselves, that they don’t remember it anyway, that you need your sleep. Totally got it. But having unplugged from my own matrix, my feeling was: Not on my watch. The goal of the crying-it-out method seemed to me, at root, to instill a form of Pavlovian “learned helplessness” in which babies would learn that no matter what they did to summon help, no help would come. So how would one conduct a longitudinal study that would prove that there is no lasting damage from this? What would be the adult echo of infant self-soothing? How about booze, smokes, drugs, and crippling codependence? I remembered many nights as a child jolting awake from a nightmare, alone in the dark, and becoming so riven with fear that I was virtually chloroformed back to unconsciousness by it; I remembered Ian, clutching his elephant stuffie, deserted in his cold room. I didn’t mind what anyone else wanted to do, but I wasn’t taking any chances with the crying-it-out thing. And since neither Cal nor I did drugs or drank anymore, rolling over wasn’t a big concern. Moreover, it is said that a nursing mother has a somatic sense that remains alert to the infant beside her, and I found that to be the case. Another perk was that it allowed the baby and me to stay mostly asleep all night; instead of everyone having to wake up in a panic every few hours to nurse, I could just roll over, like a dog mama, and let her latch on. It worked for Cal because he grew up in a culture that talks a good game about the dangers of “spoiling” babies and young children but is, in fact, one of the mushiest, cuddliest baby-spoiling societies in the world.

  The family bed also worked because neither Cal nor I was interested in sex. We didn’t scuff around it awkwardly, as had been our custom; it didn’t even come up. Weirdly, my mother was the only one who hinted at it. “Aren’t there certain conjugal … matters … that might emerge?” she asked. What? It was the first time my mother had ever acknowledged that sex existed, other than the official conversation that had ambushed me at bedtime one night when I was five years old (after which my only question had been: “Have you told Uncle Emmett about this?”). “No, there are not,” I snapped. And thank you for suddenly making it your business now. Cal and I were on the same page about full-time babysitters, too. Whereas my mother’s motto had been “One can’t pay enough for good help,” Cal’s had been “You can’t trust anyone but your family!” Every household was populated by aunties, uncles, grandparents, cousins; there was always someone to watch the children. Children always went to the grown-up parties, and in fact, there were no grown-up parties; all parties were for families. Getting tired, ning? Take a nap under the mah-jongg table!

  But for all the focus that his upbringing had trained on families, Cal had not felt as though a great deal of attention was paid to children, at least not insofar as their individual needs and personalities went. Be a doctor! That was the extent of the guidance, and the guidance was harsh and unvarying. Moreover, as stated, he had always felt like an outsider, not just in the company of Americans but in his own family; they didn’t really understand him. Marveling at our instinctive attention to our children, Cal reflected on his own childhood. “I wish someone had done for me what we’re doing for the kids,” he said. “I never knew what I was, or what I wanted to do. Until now, really.” In fatherhood, Cal was seeing who he was for the first time. Just as the wedding star chart had predicted.

  But what he was finding was different from what many fathers find. Usually dads, even Gen-X dads, are a little more casual about child rearing. Fathers are credited, historically and psychologically, with bringing the outside world and its values into the home. Naturally, as social conditions have evolved to produce a generalized equality of the sexes, so have the specific dad job requirements, but the fundamentals still persist. Psychology texts inform us that the relative esteem in which the father holds his children directly affects their sense of status and worth at large. For example, dads are more likely than moms to
roughhouse and, in so doing, teach children about appropriate aggression, self-defense, the limits of fair play. Dads are more likely than moms to encourage risk taking, which helps impress on children the particular contours of their prowess, as well as simple grit. Because dads don’t typically sweat the small stuff, they let kids see that a little rule relaxing won’t collapse the whole system. My own dad, when the good twin aspect of his Gemini dichotomy was activated, had been this way when I was little. My dad, now that Zanny was here, was essentially AWOL. Cal wasn’t surprised. But I actually was. Before I had had the babies, my dad had noodged me about it. “So, when are we going to see little Jasper or Jarvis running around the old Thomas place, Suze?” he might let drop during the rare phone call. Or the more inscrutable: “Better step it up there, little darlin’, before the Ancient One progresses further into the dark of night.” Huh? It was weird. I’d be thinking: Why would you care about my having children when you barely make time to call me? But at the same time, I noted, and filed, such comments. Dad loved babies and little kids; he had been a perfect father when I was little. Maybe he was waiting for the reprise. I held out hope, albeit on a long and tenuous rope.

  The rope snapped soon after Zanny was born. Dad showed up at the hospital (drunk, I later found out), but his interest waned almost instantly. Wild with excitement and glee, I had sent him updates and albums; they landed in the void. On September 11, 2001, I watched the twin towers collapsing into dust from our kitchen window, clutching five-month-old Zanny. This was before Cal started working from home, and his office had been about ten blocks away from Ground Zero. But my deadline for an article had forced him to stay home just late enough to escape being at work at the moment of impact. With the phone lines down or jammed, my mother and Joseph sent frantic emails and chat messages every five minutes to see if we were okay; hours later, calls and messages from friends I hadn’t seen in years poured in; an English couple that Cal and I had met briefly on our honeymoon tracked us down from their country home in northern France. My father? Nothing. I finally called him a week later, trembling. Just wanted to let you know that we’re not dead, I said. Silence. Well, he said. Glad to hear it.

  I squeezed my Zanny and kissed her fuzzy baby head: Here was his granddaughter, his only grandchild. I had little reason to sustain connection with him after that.

  Cal occupied the pole diametrically opposite my father. He watched Zanny’s every action and reaction as closely as I did. In fact, he was downright noodgy, but I didn’t mind; he was the most adoring, attentive parent I’d ever seen. He worried that she wasn’t comfortable (“This onesie sucks! I’m tossing it!”); that certain positions made her unhappy (“She doesn’t like that hold—you have to hold her like this, or she gets upset”); that certain foods were too difficult for her to digest or that she just didn’t like them (“It wasn’t that stomach bug—it was the avocado you gave her, seriously”); that the toys we had were not sufficient to stimulate her development (“This is the worst goddamned shape-sorter I’ve ever seen—who gave this to her?”). We had mainly lived on takeout during our pre-baby years together, and while that continued during our collective postpartum period, all that changed once Zanny started eating solid food. Cal took over the kitchen. He loved cooking; he had always been better at it than I was. I lined up more work; I was better at juggling than he was. We were a great team, I thought.

  Again, our setup drew concern from the grandparent section. How wonderful that I had taken so powerfully to motherhood, my mother said—and how miraculous Cal’s devotion to fatherhood was! What a lucky baby Zanny was to have two such adoring parents! Now, don’t attack her just yet, as she simply wished to ask the question: Were we really going to be able to get anything done? Were we certain that we didn’t need a babysitter? Couldn’t we ask around for the name of a good service? She had always found a good service invaluable; it would only provide the most qualified applicants. No thanks, we said; we’re good. For her part, Cal’s mother was flat-out apoplectic. What kind of a man was her son, working from home? And cooking and changing diapers? He was a house-husband, that’s what! Why wasn’t he out finding a job, to provide for his family? He was not ambitious! He was lazy! Why wasn’t the mother (me) taking care of the house?

  These reproaches were enraging, and it felt as if all the goodwill that Cal’s mother and I had stitched up over the years was getting yanked out at the seams. “So, it’s more important to her to uphold some dumb-ass, retrograde idea of manhood than it is for you to be a good father?” I would rail. Cal shrugged. “That’s how she is—you can’t do anything about it,” he’d say. “Plus, it’s guilt talking because she knows that’s how she raised me.” It was true: She had basically raised Cal to be a housewife. Just as it is true that the easiest way to discover whatever is unhealed from your childhood is to have children, it is true that you can learn what was good about your childhood by having children; you find yourself bucking the former and reflexively enacting the latter. Cal had loved tending house as a child, so he was doing it now that he had a child. He was more than good at it, he was perfect.

  So? So what if some facets of traditional gender roles were topsy-turvy in our new family? Wasn’t that what the women’s movement had fought to encourage—the empowered woman, the feminized man? Wasn’t this what our generation was supposed to be doing? Moreover, by working from home and raising our child ourselves, weren’t we not only offering our daughter egalitarian role models, but also avoiding the cycle of exploiting immigrant mothers who worked as nannies to send money back to their own children abroad? What part of the way in which Cal and I were raising our child was not an obvious reflection of having it all? Whatever, parents! We were going to do things our way. Everything is different now.

  I wonder, as I step back to survey all of us as peers, if there has ever been a more defensive generation of parents. When I asked for her reflections on the subject, my in every way excellent pediatrician, Philippa Gordon, told me that she routinely sees X parents “ferociously advocating for their children, responding with hostility to anyone they perceive as getting in the child’s way—from a person whose dog snuffles inquiringly at a baby in a carriage, to a teacher or coach who they perceive is slighting their child, to a poor hapless doctor who cannot cure the common cold.” What she seemed to be saying is that X parents somehow have developed the idea that their children cannot handle reality. It’s as though we’re subjecting them to the emotional corollary of everyone’s favorite Travolta teen beat classic, The Boy in the Plastic Bubble. “There is a feeling,” Dr. Gordon went on to say, “that anything interfering with their kid’s homeostasis, as they see it, is an inappropriate behavior to be fended off sharply.”

  I giggled sheepishly on hearing this, recalling the first time Cal and I took Zanny to the park. It was a fabulously gorgeous spring day: People were out biking, kite-flying in the meadow, having picnics. As Cal and I huddled around our six-week-old baby girl, who was lying comfortably on a blanket and contentedly gazing up at a cherry tree, I glared out at the scene: What the fuck were people thinking, playing Frisbee? Didn’t this strike anyone as dangerous? Why were so many dogs unleashed, just galloping around wherever? And what about all these bees? This whole situation struck me as a death trap, a suicide rap. Within fifteen minutes, we packed up, outraged. When, a few weeks later, I confessed this park incident to my first real mom friend, Genina, she shared with me that as she had been strolling her newborn son, Sam, an acorn had dropped from a tree and pegged the top of the stroller, triggering her reflexive primal shriek, “What the hell is your problem?” Addressed to the tree.

  Whatever your take on our parental forebears may be, you can say with confidence that they were not screaming at bees and trees to back off from their children. They were, experts say, more concerned about their children’s behavior toward others than the other way around. But this state of psychic affairs may also highlight what makes X tick, as a group—specifically, a reaction to how they themselves
grew up. When I spoke about this to the child psychiatrist and a chair of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Dr. Michael Brody, he said simply: “You all are doing what all parents do: trying to heal the wounds from your own childhoods through your children.” Yup. Given this, is it really all that surprising that we’ve become attachment-parenting zealots—that Baby Boomers accuse us of being family values neocons, Eisenhower Era throwbacks? In trying to protect our children from experiencing the kind of anxiety and neglect that we suffered as kids, we are apparently not being able to separate our own feelings from our children’s. “Generation X parents seem to have mistaken emotional ‘enmeshment’ for ‘attachment parenting,’ ” Brody pointed out.

  It’s a really good point, and I totally get it. But what can you do? As a new parent, I couldn’t help feeling—still can’t, albeit to a lesser extent now that my two older children are school-aged—that I would rather hurl myself in front of a bus than for my kiddos to get their feelings hurt. Naturally, people who don’t have children, as well as older generations, all respond with variations on the theme “You can’t protect them from everything, and it’s not healthy or even right to try.” To this I again say, yup—and anyone with any cranial twitch fiber knows that what you say is true. But knowing that never seems to change my feelings, and judging from my peers’ comparably cognitive dissonant behavior, it’s the same story for them. Self-awareness doesn’t necessarily seem to be an effective salve. We can self-dissect—even self-eviscerate—to our snarky, laden hearts’ content, but The Drama of the Gifted Child reminds us, like the monster in the closet, that we “continue to live in [our] repressed childhood situation, ignoring the fact that it no longer exists.”*