The cult of momonality.

Much of the criticism of Erica Jong’s Wall Street Journal essay Mother Madness has centered around the idea that attachment parenting is not to blame for the fact that American culture isn’t more progressive.  Fair enough.  I agree with you there, Madeline.  But that doesn’t mean her entire essay was “pointless,” as Babble blogger Katie Allison Granju described it in a response on Motherlode.  I think Jong’s skewering of the “orgy of motherphilia” we’ve all witnessed of late is appropriate and veracious. 

That’s probably because, before I started writing at Strollerderby, I had never heard the words “attachment” and ”parenting” buttressed up next to each other.  Never.  Add that to the list of other phrases regular folks don’t use: helicopter parents, free-range kids, co-sleeping, baby-wearing.  I’d never heard of any of it.

In 2005, when my daughter was born, I didn’t even know it was possible to feel bad about not wearing your baby in a tie-dyed sling.  But by 2006, I did feel a bit left out when I walked into the East Village bar where I produced a comedy show and saw I was the only person who’d left their baby at home, thinking to myself, “Maybe I need one of those slings.  They are awfully cute.”

So here we are in 2010, bickering and hen-pecking about baby-wearing.  Jong wrote, “You wear your baby, sleep with her and attune yourself totally to her needs.  How you do this and also earn the money to keep her is rarely discussed.  You are just assumed to be rich enough.”  She makes no bones about her distaste for all of this when she says, “attachment parenting comes with an exquisite progressive pedigree.”

Frankly, I couldn’t agree more.

I’m not a feminist scholar, I’m not a parenting expert and I haven’t read Fear of Flying.  I’m a divorced woman, a single mother.  I come from blue collar stock.  I was raised in a small town in upstate New York and I moved to New York City a decade ago with a dollar and a dream.  Since then, I’ve learned a lot about people, how we interact and where we intersect.  I’ve learned that the urban elite (and those who are covered in sweat trying to get there) often have a myopic perspective.  I’ve learned that certain enclaves of folks living in parts of Brooklyn and Manhattan think it’s fancy to do things that farmers and agrarian peoples do.  And that’s, I think, what irks me most about the preciousness of the “pedigreed progressives” Jong is talking about.  Do you all have to prove how easy your lives are by making them so damn hard?

My parents kept a garden when I was growing up.  They picked vegetables out of the earth and we ate them.  They pickled cucumbers and peppers, they canned tomatoes.  They didn’t do it to be “green,” they did it because it was natural.  It wasn’t fashionable - it was food.  Not only that, but gardening was something to take pleasure and pride in.  Growing tomatoes wasn’t something my Dad did because it was trendy, or because he felt he had to prove himself.  Gardening wasn’t just another thing on an endless list of things he had to do to conform to a lifestyle.  (Like knitting, eating rare cheeses and listening to indie bands.)  Farming – and being a farmer – was tradition in my Dad’s family.  He was a carpenter by trade (Oooh - a laborer!  How endlessly charming!) but he kept a garden because soil was a part of his essence.

My Dad died in 2008, but if he were alive today to read about the debate over the political implications of attachment parenting, he’d say, “What a bunch of baloney.”  And for good reason.  I’m not saying we shouldn’t consider the effects of our actions, that we shouldn’t be contemplative about our place in the world and the ways in which how we live affect the whole – or that women don’t have a right to take being a mother seriously.  But I am saying that it doesn’t really matter if you wear your baby in a sling or not.  It just doesn’t.

If you wear your baby in a sling, great.  If you let your kid cry it out at night, good.  If you have tried everything and don’t really understand parenting theories, if you feel lost but are still doing your best to get through the first few years of being a parent, super.  Good for you.  Because the truth of the matter is, no one knows what they’re doing as a parent.  No one.  We can trust our gut, we can follow the advice of medical experts and parenting pundits, but none of us can be sure if all the effort we’re putting in will pan out in the end.  Well-meaning, attentive parents end up with bratty kids.  Absentee mothers and drunken fathers produce star students and extraordinarily kind adults.  It happens every day.  Ultimately, we don’t have as much control over what happens to our kids and who they become as we wish, but we love our children and we care for them and we do what we think is best because that is the natural order of things.

Sure, my ex and I put our daughter in bed with us if she had trouble sleeping as an infant and yes, I owned a Baby Bjorn, but I honestly hardly used it.  I pushed my daughter in a stroller when we did errands and I held her in my arms quite frequently throughout the day.  I didn’t hold my daughter to create a particular bond between my daughter and I, nor did I push her in a stroller to be cold and unloving or to teach her independence.  I did those things because they came naturally to me.  And I did what came naturally to me because I didn’t know anything about parenting theories.  And I didn’t feel guilty about the things I did or didn’t do because I didn’t know I had to.

So that’s why I’m writing in defense of Erica Jong.  Jong says, “Our obsession with parenting is an avoidance strategy.  It allows us to substitute our own small world for the world as a whole.”  She goes on to talk about the ways in which obsessive parenting results in a lack of left-wing activism.  I don’t know about that.  (I agree with Katie there.)  I think a lot of obsessive parents are obsessive environmentalists and are very engaged in the liberal agenda.  But I do agree with Jong that a hyper-focus on our children is unhealthy.  And indeed that a hyper-focus on our children is one thing, but a hyper-focus on the accoutrements and trappings of parenting is another.  Are the organic clothes and the locally-designed/manufactured diaper bag and the high-end stroller and the wooden toys and the developmental classes really about the kids?  To some extent, sure.  But to some extent they are about us – about proving how good we are, how hard we are trying, how much we want to get this right, dammit!  They are about exerting control.  They are about being the type of person who makes informed choices.  To some extent, they are about being better.

And that last part I understand fully.  So fully it brings me to tears.  I love my daughter ferociously.  I would be nothing without her.  She makes me want to be better every single day: to get my finances together, to make my bed, to be organized, to eat breakfast.  She inspires me to achieve, to dream, to succeed.  I want to provide a safe and secure home for her.  I want her to know that she can tell me anything, that she is a part of me and that I will never abandon her, even if she’s in trouble.  I want her to come to me with her troubles before they become troubles.  I want her to never feel afraid.  And because I want all of those things, I spend a large part of my day hugging and kissing my daughter and saying, “I love you.”  I’m not perfect.  And I don’t try to be.  And that is really the heart of what I think Erica Jong is telling us.  Jong is asking women to stop being imprisoned by the notion of perfection.  I’m not saying that co-sleeping and baby-wearing and living green and anything else on the progressive parent’s agenda is wrong or bad – or to blame for Sarah Palin’s popularity.  In and of themselves, I think the ideals of attachment parenting are wonderful.  But for those of you who are surrounded by the paraphernalia of perfect parenting - is it working for you?  Or are you making yourself sick loving your children and hating your life?

Yes, this all reminds me of this summer when Jennifer Senior’s essay was at the center of a Mommy Maelstrom.  But what about the pointless pursuit of perfect parenting?  Jong is trying to remind us that we are making mountains out of molehills and patting ourselves on the back for doing so.  When my daughter was born, I wanted to be a perfect parent.  I did.  I bought a fancy diaper bag and a fancy enough stroller and I went to a Mommy lunch and I wanted to enroll in Mommy and Me yoga and make the baby food and do all of it.  After a few months, I realized I couldn’t afford that lifestyle.  And the women I was trying to engage with who could afford it knew I couldn’t.  They could smell my inferiority (which I think stinks of Tyson chicken nuggets and store-brand string cheese).  They said things to me like, “You live in Harlem, really?  Do you feel safe there?” 

And so I mommied alone, and I took my daughter to the park in her stroller and I let her watch Baby Einstein videos while I blogged about how much I loved her.  And when she got bigger, I worked a day job and I did shows at night and I mothered my daughter, and I fed her McDonald’s a few times and I put her in bed with me and I made her cry in her crib.  I never felt righteous or guilty about any of the ways in which I mothered my daughter.  The only thing I felt – and still feel righteous about – is my enormous love for her.

I yell at my daughter when she poops her pants.  I ignore her sometimes when I’m working.  She whines a lot.  She’s a bit of a cry-baby drama queen.  She annoys me.  She thrills me.  I don’t pretend I’m doing this right.  I don’t pretend she’s perfect.  I agree with Erica Jong that “there are no rules.”

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