I
recently read an article in a parenting magazine that raised
concerns about the role of the mentally well in helping the mentally
ill to parent. Its author quite rightly suggested that the line
between well and unwell is disconcertingly thin. She lists, among
several other examples, a boy she grew up with “whose mother
insisted he eat Popsicles only while in the bathtub, nude, to keep
her house and his clothes spotless.” “There are all
sorts of crazy,” she writes.
Indeed. But what I found
most worrisome about this mother’s odd, maybe even pathological,
practice was that it struck me as a really, really good idea. The
boy got what he wanted, the Popsicle, and the mom got what she wanted,
clean clothes and a clean house. Plus the Popsicle surely
would have served as an incentive to the boy to get into the bath,
so a clean boy must have emerged from the scenario as a bonus. Crazy?
Or brilliant?
In another parenting
article specifically on the topic of excessive neatness, the author
relates how his own mother now wishes she’d “dusted
and vacuumed a little less and played a little more,” but
she’d believed that keeping a clean house was what “a
good mother had to do.” He fondly recalls not the dust-free
surfaces and clean carpets in his childhood home, but the times
when his mother would “put on a Connie Francis album and kick
off her shoes and we’d dance in the living room, the housework
(at least for a little while) be damned.”
Words to the wise, surely.
As those of us who are parents have learned (or resisted to our
peril), children make us more flexible. They demand we be more accommodating,
less rigid beings. If we’re lucky, they help us to be more
fun. And that’s all for the good. But what if there are some
bottom line requirements entrenched in our psyches that, hard as
we try, we just cannot dislodge? For some of us, it’s a guaranteed
period of quiet every day. For others, it’s the need to appear
presentable in public. For most, though, it’s probably the
house thing. I have one friend who can abide nearly any degree of
household disorder, as long as there are no strewn coats or jackets
anywhere in sight. I envy her. To my own chagrin, I require a much
more pervasive degree of household order.
But what of it? I have
given this issue of household neatness a good deal of thought since
my son was born six years ago, and I continue to feel that, on balance,
he is better off if I have the sense of order
I need. So: he must put his toys in his toy bins at the end of the
day; he must put dirty clothes in the laundry basket; he must keep
his shoes in the under-stairs rolling shoe bin, and so on. My husband
has adopted similar habits, and the child we are expecting next
month will him or herself eventually be expected to get with the
program— joyless though it may sound.
But, as I say, I have
thought about this issue a lot. Mostly my reflections take me to
my own childhood when the chaos and disorder of family life produced
a more debilitating brand of joylessness. We were a nuclear family
of seven living in a large suburban house in Hackensack, New Jersey.
In fact, it was a very large house, given that it was a two-family
with a semi-finished attic and a semi-finished basement. In total,
there was 3,800 square feet of space in that house and my brothers,
parents, and I filled every inch of it. It had two kitchens, three-and-a-half
bathrooms, two dining rooms, two living rooms, and nine bedrooms,
plus numerous closets and large storage rooms. My grandparents had
died early in our childhoods leaving one of the floors vacant, and
then the rest of us and our things just mushroomed. Much as my parents
would have benefited from the rental income of the first floor apartment
(which was the reason they’d bought the house in the first
place), the material fallout from the seven of us, five kids and
two adults, had just spread too far for them to imagine condensing
back into a mere 2,500 square feet.
And the fallout continued
to spread until, one by one, we fled the scene. I was the first
to leave in 1986 after more than twenty years of life lived in what
was more-or-less a disaster area. As I write, I cannot help but
be aware of the metaphorical implications of the words I find I’ve
chosen. The term “nuclear” family carries with it connotations
not just of the “containment,” both familial and national,
so characteristic of the Cold War era, but also of detonation—
and detonate we did. Our things, as I’ve said, mushroomed;
the fallout was everywhere; the disaster area
became nearly uninhabitable. My parents lacked the disciplinary
wherewithal, of themselves or of us, to harness order. We lived
amidst debris.
I could speculate about
what made it so hard for my mother and father, both committed, loving
people, to inspire healthful organizational tendencies: she had
deep feelings of inadequacy induced in childhood by an emotionally
remote father and exacerbated in adulthood by the myth of the marvellous
mother so prevalent to her generation; he (my father) also bought
into this myth and saw housekeeping as her role alone, while he
worked doggedly to uphold the complementary myth of the super-able
provider. Whatever their wellsprings, my parents’ combined
temperaments just didn’t give rise to domestic tranquillity.
Physical discordance was everywhere. My mother wept often. She was
always overwhelmed. She was frequently angry. We stayed out of her
way.
I read once that women
whose own experiences of being mothered were unsatisfactory tend
to avoid or postpone becoming mothers themselves. And I suppose
it is no accident that I am fully forty and quite respectably (even
happily) married, but am expecting only my second and almost certainly
my last child. To be sure, I have proceeded methodically. I have
acquired degrees, a tenured position, a reasonable work-life balance,
and a 750 square-foot house. The modest dimensions of this last
acquisition have had more to do with the exorbitant cost of property
in Dublin, Ireland, where I now live, than with any conscious desire
to be short on household space. But short on space we are, and Freud’s
theory that there are no accidents often comes to mind whenever
I am paring back our household possessions to those things that
are functional, pleasurable, or aesthetic. If an item is none of
these, it goes. The local charity shops know me by name. But one
happy result of my continual de-cluttering is that our very tiny
house has clear thoroughfares. Our photos are in photo albums. I
always know where the car keys are. True, I fight the accumulation
of anything and everything as though my life depends upon it and
I drive my husband a little bit nuts. But I tell him that clean
doesn’t matter to me as much as neat— I just don’t
ever want to be swallowed up by our possessions. The sort
of worry most likely to keep me awake nights will center on our
space limitations: where will all the new baby’s things go?
Is it safe to throw out last year’s bank statements? Could
a small corner of the attic be turned into a computer area, or would
it be absurd to have to climb a ladder all the time to get our email?
One thing I am sure of,
though, is that I have a greater sense of well-being, with my professional
rewards, my small family, and my small, orderly house, than my mother
ever did. Mine is a life that, I realize, may itself sound a bit small, possibly a bit restrained. In all honesty, I wouldn’t
mind being able to loosen up a bit. I must remind myself that “cutting
the rug” with my children would doubtlessly bring them more
joy than watching me vacuum it all the time. Still, I can’t
help but feel that a parent’s genuine well-being, however
it is derived, will necessarily benefit the children. I also feel
that mine will be better off in the long run with a mother who isn’t
undone by the sight of her living room. So, for me— for us—
having a win-win plan for Popsicles is entirely sensible.
mmo : october
2004 |
