ROLL THE BALL, ROLL THE BALL

A while back, I found myself chatting at a cocktail party with a much older man, a very distinguished and well-known attorney.  He had had children late in life, so I asked him how he was enjoying fatherhood.  He gave a long rueful sigh and said, "Well, you know it's a lot better now that they are 7 and 8 and can have an actual conversation.  When they were smaller, it was just tedious being around them.  All you do is roll the ball, roll the ball, roll the ball."  I laughed out loud because anyone who has spent an afternoon trying to entertain a very young child knows that it can be incredibly boring and repetitive.  I was also surprised by his candor.

Of course, you would rarely catch a mother making such an admission.  And the mother is more likely to be spending larger chunks of her time rolling the ball, rolling the ball, rolling the ball.  Now Helen Kirwan-Taylor of the Daily Mail has written an editorial entitled, "Sorry, but my children bore me to death!"  (Thank you to the sharp-eyed reader who forwarded this to me.)

I think she is a little over the top in her expressions of a complete lack of interest in her children's activities (she makes it sound as though she is never interested in her kids), but she makes a number of important points:

I know this is one of the last taboos of modern society. To admit that you, a mother of the new millennium, don't find your offspring thoroughly fascinating and enjoyable at all times is a state of affairs very few women are prepared to admit. We feel ashamed, and unfit to be mothers . . . The trouble for a mother like me is that not being completely and utterly enthralled with, dedicated to and obsessed with one's children is a secret guarded, if not until death, then until someone else confesses first . . .

Psychotherapist Kati St Clair has listened to the frustrations of scores of mothers. 'Women now feel great pressure to enjoy their children at all times,' she says. 'The truth is, a lot of it is plain tedium. It's very unlikely that a mother doesn't love her child, but it can be very dull. Still, it takes a brave woman to admit that.'

I am not a mother, but I am concerned about the way motherhood is portrayed in our culture as the ultimate in joy and fulfillment.  I believe that having a child can be a joyful and fulfilling experience -- but we ignore the downside at our peril, or at least at the peril of all those mothers out there who experience the downside and have no socially or morally sanctioned way of admitting that there is a downside. 

I think kids are great.  I have thoroughly enjoyed watching my niece and nephew grow up from earliest toddlerhood into the bright and engaging teenagers they are today.  I was glad to reap the rewards of spending quite a few days playing endlessly repetitive games with my toddler niece -- but I only did it in small doses.  I also got to pat myself on the back for spending my time doing a Good Thing and I got to bask in my niece's resulting hero-worship of me.  But I have no hang-ups about admitting that a lot of my time with her when she was very young was mind-numbingly boring.  But if you're the mother, and it's your kid, that's a lot harder to admit.  You're supposed to find the experience of rolling the ball, rolling the ball, rolling the ball rapturously worthwhile as though it is the highest possible human calling.  And that's gotta be a heavy load to carry.     

Comments

[mythago]

As a mother, I see something else going on here besides the author's awareness that hyperbole sells.

It's not true that mothers are never supposed to pretend that childhood is boring. Moms complain to each other about having to read Green Eggs and Ham for the 9,295,284th time.

BUT--that's not the case if you are in a social class and community where overachieving genius babies are de rigeur, and the mark of a good mother is how fast your kid rips through the milestones. You can't be bored in that milieu, because boredom suggests that your kid is boring, and therefore isn't a superbaby. It's not "boring" when your child learns to read, or appreciates Mozart, or learns to walk early. "Boring" is when your kid does the same, non-super-intellectual thing over and over again. And to admit that is to admit that your child may not be ahead of all the others.

(When The Dragon Queen was a baby, my husband and I joked that we were going to start casually dropping references to her (actually non-existent) Greek lessons--"Oh, yes, you have to start the on the classics early while their brains absorb information so quickly!"--and then seeing how many people rushed out to find Greek tutors for their kids.)

[Sydney]

Well, my mom for one told me that she had no regrets at all about working 80+ hours per week until I was 5. She said that it was at that point I had really begun to get interesting, and that mostly babies sleep, cry, eat, and s***, and that you spend all yout time with toddlers chasing them around and telling them "no" all the time. Probably she was exaggerating slightly, but still I'm not offended.

[Richard]

Helen Kirwan-Taylor’s piece was spot on. Like you, Happy, I’m childless by choice, though I’ve thought a great deal on the subject of parenthood, and I’ve been a keen observer of parents, and of how society portrays parenthood.

I see parents who mostly aren’t having a very good time being parents. Sure, they have their moments with the kids, and they will tell you how they wouldn’t change things for the world, and I believe that they believe that. How could their biology let them feel any differently? But I see exhausted parents trying to control their kids in everyday situations. I see parents snapping orders, often disobeyed, and giving them “last time” warnings again and again. I see siblings fighting among themselves, embarrassing their parents for the tenth time in half an hour.

I see parents with more kids than they can reasonably afford. Forget about funding college, they’re just trying to keep them in clothes. I see parents worried that they will not be able to supply their kids with what the Jones’s kids have. I see their kids demanding the latest fad attire and electronic gadgets, all costing hundreds (thousands?) of dollars a year, and parents scared to death they might not be able to fund it all.

I see parents sacrifice their own individuality and interests upon the altar of being “good parents.” This means 24/7 focus on the kids, even while at work, available by cell phone at all times. They have zero time for who they used to be, and now know next to nothing of the world beyond their own homes. Their kids need daily transportation to soccer practice, dental appointments, the math tutor, a friend’s house …

I’m sorry, I’m over your word limit. I hope you’ll forgive me this time. But, yes, I agree that society has indeed “portrayed [parenthood] in our culture as the ultimate in joy and fulfillment.” It's time to reevaluate.

[ballgame]

Great points on your post, HF. For a while in college, I used to babysit. It was great. (I even got paid the ultimate compliment by one of my charges: I was "better than television!") Kids can be totally charming … in small doses. The idea of being a parent … with its 24/7 … is just incredibly daunting, and while I sometimes look at parents with envy, eventually the phrase "all the time" pops in my head and I'm keenly aware of what a rough road it must often be.

If I may indulge in a little 'pie in the sky', it just strikes me how f***ed up our 'industrial nuclear family' setup often is. I mean, there are tons of folks (who aren't professional caretakers) who would love to have children in their lives on an intermittent basis, and there many over-stressed parents who could use a break, but it seems to be such a hurdle to bring those folks together in a safe and consistent way.

[Sandy]

I had a hard time mustering much sympathy for this upper-class woman with a nanny. Just how hard can she have it? I kept waiting for her to say there was something she enjoyed doing with her sons. Anything. Just *one* part of parenting that she found enjoyable - and it never got mentioned. I ended up feeling much sorrier for her children, and hoping that they never grew up to read this interview.

I've always been all for ripping away rose-colored maternal glasses (aka "the mommy myth" or "new momism" as Susan Douglas & Meredith William call it), but this article pretty much (almost literally?) throws the baby out with the bathwater. I found myself wondering if some mothers in the UK are even more screwed up than American mothers, especially since I read this article a few weeks back: Let's Celebrate. There's Never Been a Better Time for Mothers - this sentence struck me, especially: "British society, never child-friendly, has become positively hostile."

I think it really depends on what you read if you think that children in are culture are portrayed as the ultimate fulfillment - the last ten years have in fact seen a huge number of "momoirs" (including blogs, books, magazines like Brain, Child magazine, LiteraryMama.com)that if anything, portray parenting (especially traditional motherhood) as exhausting, mind-numbing, exasperating, etc.

[Sandy]

Uh, I should say that meant that I hope her sons never read the interview, not that I hope they never grew up to read it - that sounds like they'd be better off not growing up.

[Ismone]

My mom refers to the time when all six of us were young and at home as the "zombie years." Now that my parents are older, and we're pretty much gone, I worry sometimes that my mom hasn't "made enough friends" isn't "challenged enough at work" and should spend more time doing things that she likes to do. Which usually makes me chuckle because I sound like the mom. But really, we trashed our parents' adult social life. For years they didn't spend time with friends except for our friends' parents.

My friend S. had a game he would play with his niece, where he would put sock puppets on his hands and have them talk to her. It was so he could watch TV and keep her occupied at the same time. One of the sock puppets did not talk, which was the one he broke out when he was particularly occupied with what was on the TV.

[David Thompson]

I don't think much of the false dichotomy being presented here. It's not the parents' job to entertain their children, nor to foist the job off on someone else. When I was a wee'un, my parents generally kept us within eyeshot to make sure we didn't maim ourselves or each other (as soon as we were out of eyeshot, we did exactly that), but they always had their own activities and we were expected to occupy ourselves without bothering them.

[Arwen]

As a mom of two, I think what's happening for some of us urban parents is that our kids can't go outside and play the way they once did. I just spent a week with my Grandfather in a small town; I barely saw my elder son, because he was outside, and safe there. We got along much better with less contact.

Anyway, I also think different people have different interests re: ages. I actually really like the "roll the ball" years, because language acquisition is SO! COOL! to me, and seeing the completely acid-trip-esque interpretations that little ones come up with to explain the world is my absolute favorite. There are other ages I find more tedious. Any great power struggles, for example. Really: I'm not going to let you use the chef's knife if you scream; you've done this already and it hasn't worked; GIVE IT UP for cryin' out loud. I get tired of kids not being adults and listening to my reasonable explanation and then moving on. *g*

[Moi]

Of course motherhood can be boring and tedious. So can reading opposing counsels brief. Both motherhood and lawyering have been glorified by the media. Both have also been ripped apart by the media. It's all in what you choose to recall seeing/reading.

My husband is far better at "playing" with my kids than I am. In my opinion, it's a personality issue, not a gender issue.

And, I feel no need to pretend that I find my kids enthralling all the time. Perhaps some of the moms around me are pretending, or maybe they're better at playing than I am.

Finally, I agree with you to an extent about the trend to make moms feel as if they're not good moms if they don't find their kids to be enthralling, but I think that you and the women in the article exaggerate it.

I love my kids and I love to be with them. But, I don't love playing with them 24/7. That's why I had 2. They now play with each other while I blog and read blogs/news, etc. It's a good thing.

[Sydney]

There was a study done by Ed Laumann a few years back that asked adults to rate a variety of activities they performed throughout the day. Among them were working, doing housework, childcare, watching television. I don't remember all the results, but one thing did stand out to me: People rated watching tv above childcare. Of course this was a large study with a big sample size, but still. Interesting.

[Moi]

Sydney--I recall that study and that statistic and don't find it to be at all surprising. Taking care of kids is work--hard work--just like any other job. And, just like any other job, aspects of it are boring as hell and monotonous as hell. But, in my opinion, the rewards are far greater than any rewards obtained from a "real" job. I can assure you that no job that I've ever held, from waitress, to concession stand worker at the movies, to working in the law school library, to my jobs as an attorney--has ever been nearly as rewarding and fulfilling as my "job" as a mother.

And, Richard, I suppose that this is directed to you as well. I don;'t sacrifice my individuality in order to worship my kids 24/7. I sacrifice myself for my kids because I love them more than anything else in this world. I don't always "have a good time being a mom." At least 60% of it is far from fun--just as w/ any other "real" job. But, the point is not to "have a good time." The point is to provide my kids with sustenance, shelter, love, support, and guidance as possible. I love them and it makes me happy to make them happy. What's so bad about that?

[Barbara P]

ballgame, I really like your idea of people having more "access" to kids, without knowing how exactly this would be possible. I remember thinking when my daughter was a baby how I felt like I had too much "baby-time" in my life at that point, but I was sad about the idea that it would be the ONLY baby time in my life (assuming my daughter stays an only). I guess your own kid is much more special, but honestly, I really enjoy all babies in small enough doses :o)

It's a little like having to eat a ice cream for a week and then not getting to eat it again all year. Saying you don't like the ice-cream overload says nothing bad about ice cream generally. (And FTR, I would never dare to make such a claim against ice cream!)

P.S. Sorry I went over the word limit on an earlier comment. I totally forgot. By the way, for people who don't have the necessary software for word counting, here's a web site you can use:
http://javascript.internet.com/forms/word-count.html.

[Cassandra]

Sydney--I read about a similar study (it might have been the same one) where people rated childcare very low on activities they enjoyed, but still rated their children as one of their highest sources of fulfillment. Which makes sense to me--I love TV as much as the next sad pop-culture junkie, but it's not going to ever play a super-significant role in my life, unless I wind up writing for it (at least, I hope not, because that would just be sad).

I'm not a parent, but the way it seems to me, and the way my mom has made it out to be, it seems like childcare is the ultimate labor of love: just because you always love your children doesn't mean you always have to like them. My mom says I was a pretty idyllic baby (though my brother wasn't, heh) but in my pre-teen to mid teen years we had some pretty awful moments. Now I'm 18 and we're really close--I like the attorney's point about conversations. My mom liked arts and crafts with small children, but I'm sure she prefers bemoaning the passing of the CCPA with me to watching Little Mermaid for the 83rd time in a row.

[TangoMan]

There is more to life than feminist narcissism. However, we're all free to set the course of our own lives. It's only fair though, that those who chose not to have children not expect the children that the rest of us have raised to support them in their old age. Childless people, rather than being leeches upon society, should fund their own social security and medicare benefits.

This topic reminds me of this article on Desperate Grandmas.

[The Happy Feminist]

I have no idea what "feminist narcissism" is, but somehow I have the feeling that it refers to any interest a woman may have in things other than her husband and chidlren.

Of course, having children is never a narcisstic exercise.

[Richard]

>>> Childless people, rather than being leeches upon society, should fund their own social security and medicare benefits.

Tango- My DREAM is to fund my own retirment and health care. If you know of any way this leech can legally opt out of SS and Medicare, pass it on, man!

[TangoMan]

Richard, keep saving and take no more from the system than you put in. Right now we are running a $45 trillion unfunded deficit (the GDP of the entire US economy for 4 years) just for medicare. The medicare premium structure doesn't collect enough to deliver the promised services in the future, so because it is built on a poor actuarial basis it depends on intergenerational wealth transfer - the children transfer their wealth to pay for the healthcare of their parents. There we have a moral obligation which simply uses the gov't as a financial intermediary - transferring money from child to parent via taxation. The problem is that childless people don't produce, and invest in, any future workers, so what moral claim can they make to expect other people's children to pay for their medical care?

With medical procedures getting progressively more expensive, and with people extending their lives for longer periods, with the benefit of further expensive medical procedures I might add, the system is headed for an actuarial cliff. In my estimation, the most likely outcome is going to be severe gov't rationing of healthcare for elderly people. This is where your savings will afford you better medical care.

As for solutions, either we get the gov't out of healthcare, or we get the gov't to actually impose strict actuarial principles, which means severe medicare rate increases starting now. The intergenerational wealth transfer model is falling apart with the lowered birth rates we're seeing today, especially from those in the higher SES.

[The Happy Feminist]

Let's get back on topic people. The topic is pressures on parents, especially mothers, to be utterly enthralled by their offspring. Does such pressure exist, how does it manifest itself, what effect does it have if it does exist, etc.

This actually wasn't intended to be a piece advocating having children or not having children and U.S. healthcare funding is waaaaay off topic.

[Sandy]

I think such unrealistic expectations about parenting (especially motherhood) were more the norm a generation ago. However, I imagine that feminism has contributed to it indirectly - with smaller families (and fewer opportunities to care for siblings or babysit), and more choices in general, I would guess that modern women are around infants and children much less than at most times in the past. It is much easier to idealize childcare or having a baby when you've never actually done it.

Also, despite feminism, there are years of advice, nostalgic stories, etc. from the early 19th c. onwards on motherhood as the pinnacle of the "cult of domesticity" (see Rima Apple & Janet Golden's collection "Mothers & Motherhood: Readings in American History for a glimpse of this) - and this is not entirely gone today.

[Richard]

>>> Let's get back on topic people.

Killjoy! :)

>>> Richard, keep saving and take no more from the system than you put in.

That's not going to hard. Can I have my interest too?

[Lindsay Beyerstein]

I wonder if parents can't shorten the boredom period by cutting short the period in which they treat their children like stupid people.

I'm just speaking from my own experience, but I know that my family takes pride in addressing the pets in complete sentences. I think some parents prolong baby behaviors, and the attendant boredom, by talking to their kids in babytalk and entertaining them with babyish things.

[Battlepanda]

Does this remind anyone of the that was making the rounds earlier? It all feeds back to this slightly creepy societal background assumption that motherhood must be the Greatest Thing Ever in every woman's lives, or else they don't deserve to breed. Read the comments that follows the Daily Mail editorial if you are in any doubt that a great swarth of the population thinks this.

It's such patent nonsense. One thing that's frequently forgotten or deemphasized is the fact that "babies are boring" is a perfectly mainstream and socially acceptable view to hold -- for men. I see no suggestions that they are unfit parents for saying so. As long as women are pressured into conforming to the stereotype of mom who lives to fingerpaint with toddlers and clean up the mess afterwards and men are not, women are going to end with most of the baby-entertaining duties. In the same way, as long as women are pressured into conforming to the sterotype of the neat freak of the relationship and men are not, women are going to end up doing most of the housework. Curiously enough, whenever something gets designate by society in one way or another as "woman's work", standards go up so high for that activity that it leaves us with no time for a career outside the home or a sense of self outside of the family. Fancy that.

[battlepanda]

Ack! somebody. Close that tag for me, I beg of you...

[Douglas, Friend of Osho]

Mythago: Thanks for pointing out that moms who express compunction over child-rearing aren't routinely flayed. That hyperbole is getting more tiresome all the time. This journalist strikes me as the sort who has to have something wrong in her life; how serendipitious this dovetails with the vitally important task of selling ink. When, oh when, will the travails of the overachieving/overpaid class cease to be held up as what we all go through? By the way, I liked your little prank about the Greek lessons. Keep it up

Lindsay Beyerstein: Yes, in a word. My four-year-old daughter still likes Dr. Seuss, of course, but speaking to her in complete sentences has seemed to produce that happy effect. And I think it goes a long way towards relieving the tedium of bringing her up. Not that it's all that tedious.

Tango Man: If my daughter adopts your attitude, I'll know I've failed as a father. By the way, if it does come to rationing healthcare for the old (a dubious scenario if we lift the cap on Social Security taxes), I'll take it with some stoicism. Ever been to an old folks' home? My ex works in one and I'll take death in a trailer at 70 over "life" in one of those hellholes.