Gentry
"Perspectives"
May 2006 |
Secrets of Motherhood
The Difficult Truth.
Gentry's Christine VanDeVelde speaks with candor and humor about being a
mom today. There is something about
motherhood that nobody tells you: motherhood obligates you to associate
regularly with people that you otherwise would have absolutely nothing
to do with. Such as the AWOL mom who in a breathless phone call from her
Mercedes -- with the top down -- lets you know her son won't be helping
the rest of his class do cleanup at the wetlands because he "just
doesn't feel like doing that today." Or the strong-arm mom who begs you
to write a letter of recommendation for her child’s private school
application all the while assuring you that the school where you sit on
the board is their absolute first choice but, once admitted, she
blithely neglects to inform you her child is enrolling elsewhere.
And you can't extricate yourself from these tight
spots or tell these types what you really think because your own
children are hostages in these situations by virtue of their school,
their sports, or their friends. So you are forced to pay the ransom of
spending time among people with whom you have absolutely nothing in
common and who also make your blood boil. You can only look forward to
the day when your child graduates or stops playing soccer and you can
get these miscreants, stinkers and all-around bad actors out of your
life.
Meanwhile, watch out for one of the worst of these
types-- the entrants in what the late playwright Wendy Wasserstein
dubbed "the Mommy Olympics," women who compete to prove and/or assert
their self-worth through the perfection of their children.
Wasserstein's rude awakening came at an all-purple Barney birthday
party, where the chitchat among the moms ringing the room convinced her
that "all of the two-year-olds are sleeping well enough to take their
SATS tomorrow." Yes, the qualifying runs start early in this competition
where, as Wasserstein noted, "toilet training is now a status symbol
like diamond rings and the size of apartments." (Wasserstein was a New
Yorker, here it would be the number of acres in Woodside.)
And it only gets worse. Today, it may be
proficiency in potty training, but ten years down the road it’s their
children’s superior athleticism, fluency in Mandarin Chinese, record
number of AP courses, and perfect SAT-II scores. It’s not an
exaggeration to think of such relentless one-upmanship as a form of
aggression. In fact, those who have studied aggression in “queen bee”
girls who excel at establishing their superiority found that they
learned such behavior at home. As their children age, “queen bee” moms
rev up their jockeying for social power by lobbying for preferential
treatment for their daughters and sons in everything from Little League
team slots to teacher assignments and by seeking the shrewdest, fastest
inside track for their children whether that’s nonstop tutoring or
summers in Nepal. It’s almost as if these parents believe they live in a
world where the odds are unfairly stacked against their children when,
in fact, our world looks a lot more like Lake Wobegon -- where all the
children are above average.
One of the nice surprises of parenting for me was
that the shared experience of raising a child seemed to rise above
politics, social background, race and net worth. The park, the school
parking lot, class cocktail parties and Barney birthdays were the
equivalent of the water cooler in the workplace – a place to connect,
share information and catch up on each other’s lives and the latest
episode of “Alias”. There is no question that raising children can be a
tough, taxing and tricky experience in 2006, but the relentless
competitiveness of the Mommy Olympics make it impossible for parents to
be genuine with each other. It’s difficult to do the bonding we need to
survive the stressful experience of parenting amid envy, social
ambitions and status games
My favorite life coach Martha Beck, in a recent
piece entitled “Who’s On Top?”, wrote that scientists have found that
baboons, which apparently share about 95 % of our DNA, also share the
psychological trait for competitiveness in common with some of the
parents we know. In fact, Beck says, “Some Asian philosophies refer to
rank-obsessed human thinking as ‘monkey mind’.” But just like the ethos
of your neighborhood school yard, some baboons are extremely
competitive, while others are less worried about their children getting
into the Ivy League. So when you’re next gathered around your own
version of the watering hole, whether it’s the soccer sidelines or the
class bake sale, it’s my advice to stand next to the moms who are
willing to admit that their children got a mere B+ in geometry or warm
the bench at basketball games or prefer comic books to Dostoevsky.
They’re far more simpatico and much less monkey-minded… Happy Mother’s
Day! |
