Four moms in a room?
Eight opinions, all of them contradictory and at least half of them
involving a significant waggle of pointed fingers. As someone who makes it a
point never to use “parenting” as a verb, I do find that other women tend to
keep up a steady stream of vitriol towards the, um, “momming” choices that
others make. The incoming missives from every other country tell us that we’re just
plain doing it wrong (Eskimo moms knit whale blubber booties! French mothers
teach their children how to debone an ortalon before preschool!) And that lady
on the cover of Time magazine, giving
her son a last nip of breast milk before he heads off to college and switches to beer? Seems
like everyone has a quick thousand or so words they want to share about her particular mom choice.
As soon as I’d jumped into this mom gig (the job that
sucks up your entire life and tosses you out like a spent shell a mere 18 years
later, just like real corporate America), I realized that I was not a good fit with
the other mommies. I liked my kids just fine, but I seemed to lack the requisite number of opinions. I couldn’t really work up
enough passion in discussing my choices for diapering, sleeping and eating, let
alone have enough energy left over to tell other moms why they were doing it
wrong. I’ll let you know, from hard experience, that “whatever” is never, ever
the appropriate response at a Mommy & Me session. It sends off signals of
weakness that causes the other mommies to emit low, snarling growls of displeasure.
I’ve spent many years since assiduously skirting the hot-button
issues, realizing that revealing any of my mom-choices would leave me open to
the wolf pack. When a mommy talked about co-sleeping, I brought up the extortion
racket – aka jewelry party – she was planning. When she brought up
breastfeeding, I looked down, pointed and chirped, “Cute shoes!”
But it turns out that there’s no statute of limitations on
telling another woman that she’s doing it all wrong, so, sixteen years after I
celebrated my first Mother’s Day breakfast-in-bed, I found myself at the center
of an opinion maelstrom.
The mom choice I’d made seemed pretty simple: Emma wanted to spend her junior year of high
school studying in Beijing, and I said, “Sure, sounds like fun. Just let me sell that extra kidney to fund
this adventure, and you’re good to go.” On her end of things, the experience has
been a great one, and she’s due home in a couple weeks with a mastery of
Mandarin, a globally minded set of friends and a much broader worldview.
On my end of
things, however, the finger pointing continues.
It started before she even got out of the country. I
mentioned Emma's plan to another mom and – I am not making this
up – the first two words out of her mouth were “Sex! Alcohol!” I thought that
perhaps she’d suddenly changed the subject and was telling me about her
weekend, but it turns out that no, she was just sharing her conviction that,
as soon as the plane arrived at Beijing International, those exchange students
would be getting busy and getting plastered. I thought of telling her that, so far
as I remembered, sex and alcohol were not the sole province of the
Communist Party (much as they’d like to get exclusive rights for resale to us weak imperialists), but I just smiled and nodded, something that I found myself
doing more and more in the ensuing months.
I began to realize that my experience – letting my little
bird fly to her homeland – was an incredible mirror into the motivations and
secret worries of all the moms around me. There was a fair contingent of open,
adventurous types who saw it as great fun for Emma: “This is a life-changing
experience! Good for her!” There were those who focused, positively, on how I
fit into the picture: “What a great mom you are for encouraging her to do this!”
But there was a long
line of disapproving mommies queuing up behind Mrs. Sex & Alcohol. While I
was on my volunteer shift at Crisis Nursery, a staff member asked about Emma while
we were all riding with a herd of two-year olds in the elevator. In that tiny
space, I got two immediate and emotional reactions – one staffer got all
misty-eyed at the thought of Emma's opportunity, and the other one
practically shouted, “No way! No way would I ever let my kids get that far away
from me!”
During a pause in a customer lunch, I brought up Emma’s
impending trip, and the woman I was with visibly started, asking quite seriously, “Does
our government even allow that? Because
of, you know –" and here she lowered her voice and looked furtively around the company
cafeteria to whisper – “communism.” She seemed convinced
that I was in cahoots with Obama, that Kenyan, to arrange these godless shenanigans.
After this steady drip of other people’s opinions had soaked
me to the skin, I found that I could begin to ignore it, and even have a
little fun. Sometimes I’d bring up the topic just to see what the reaction
would be. It was often unpredictable and usually very interesting, and I found big
bundles of mom-emotion lurking behind the most mild-mannered faces.
I’ll need to keep that attitude in mind, because one of the things
Emma is doing this summer is attending a recruitment camp at the Air Force
Academy, with a thought to applying there for college. In the highly pc
circles in which I move, there isn’t a statement more guaranteed to freeze faces with displeasure than the words “Military Academy.”
In fact, one brilliant friend has already unfurled her Mom Flag and declared hotly, “People in the military get
killed, you know!”
True, but at least they aren’t having Sex & Alcohol, I
wanted to tell her. Every mom knows that those are just for exchange students,
not soldiers.
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