In Spite of Everything (17 page)

As phenomenally delicious as having children often is, it can also be phenomenally sad for Xers. The old truism about finally being able to understand, and sympathize with, your parents and their choices after you have your own children often just doesn’t hold up for many of us. Rather, we find ourselves wondering how our parents could have acted the way they did. Cal, though one of the few, was not the only person my age with a good relationship with his still-married parents. I do have some friends who not only had none of these childhood issues with their parents, but also remain on excellent terms with them. I love hearing stories of their upbringing much in the same way that I like to read books like
Eat, Pray, Love
or
A Year in Provence
, whose narratives recount life experiences so remote from my own financial and familial circumstances that they function as refreshing weekend trips to virtual reality. But even more, I love seeing those friends with their parents now because it gives me the idea that it might be possible to have this kind of relationship with my own children when they are grown.

Take my friend “Holly,” for example. The eldest of three, Holly grew up in a solid middle-class home with a smart stay-at-home mother and a stable, no-frills, fishing kind of dad. Her complaints about her parents are that they are kind of provincial; her mom can be casually stinging, and her dad, she says, is relatively boring and unimaginative. But the basic point is:
So?
I’ve known Holly for
twenty years, and her position on her parents has never varied: She loves them and is grateful for her happy, normal childhood. Holly and her siblings went on to attend prestigious colleges and graduate schools; they became experts in American Modernism, opera, and neurobiology; they have traveled to interesting places and have had complicated, grown-up relationships. Holly’s adult life is nothing like her parents’. She is a single mother living in New York City and working on the highly competitive, ridiculously overeducated sales force of a high-end antiques dealer. But what makes Holly a freak by our generation’s standards is that instead of resenting or comparing the differences in their lives, she has renewed admiration and appreciation for her mom’s graceful management of the daily needs of three children, essentially single-handed. Holly’s mom, as ever, is a source of genuine comfort, support, and inspiration to her. In fact, in talking about the demise of her own marriage, Holly often reflects that her upbringing is to blame only in that it is hard to find a mate whose own background matches the stability of her own. “Most of the men I’m attracted to are complex and interesting—which I love and want—but they have these tortured interior lives because of their childhoods,” she says. “Basically, I’m not that emotionally complicated because my childhood was, well, good. It is impossible for me to understand what it is like to live so constantly with such demons.”

Imagine what it would be like to inhabit Holly’s clear, peaceful psyche! Those demons, for people like me, have been sitting on our shoulders since the mists of early childhood began burning off in adolescence, which makes us available to lecture to our minority peers like Holly about their ethnographic patterns. But obviously we can’t understand Holly’s relationship to her parents any more than she can understand ours. Holly
wants
child-rearing advice from her mother because she
trusts
her. Holly’s own mother
is
her model “Mom.” When people like Holly encounter a food ad with the words “homemade—just like Mom used to make!” they think: “Yum!” For people like me, though, that same gee-whillikers cheer
makes something inside us snicker and sink at the same rate. We want to be that mom, but we don’t know the first thing about her. Often, instead, we start by deciding what kind of mom we
don’t
want to be.

As much as I admired my own mom, it was clear to me from the get-go that she and I would not occupy the same segment of the mother continuum. Take, for example, sleep. Other than breastfeeding, sleep ranks as the top point of concern for first-time parents of newborns. After the first month or so, many parents begin to start sniffing out the fallacy of their own parents’ recollections whenever they’re offered as counterpoint to the current state of nighttime affairs: “Well, goodness, honey, we just laid you down, and
you
went right to sleep
—you
never fussed.” One can only guess how many Gen-X parents around the country who have been sucker-punched out of sleep for the fifth time that night wonder, while trying yet another strategy that might soothe their little biscuit back to sleep:
Really?
That’s
really
how it went, Mom? Amy, a Louisiana-native friend whom I met when her four boys were all under five years old—and who is every bit the bright-eyed, yes-we-can, ass-kicking mom (the kind who, irritatingly, always seems to have extra organic snacks at the playground for
your
children, too)—snorts at such reconstructive memories. “I’ve never heard of a baby who just
falls asleep
,” she snaps. “What were they giving us? Dramamine? Benadryl? Bourbon?” No comment.

What Amy did is what so many other X parents have done: used the cribs as laundry hampers, bought a king-sized mattress, flopped it on the floor, and piled everyone on. This sleeping arrangement, called “the family bed” or “co-sleeping,” was popularized by William Sears, M.D., the leading attachment-parenting pediatrician and Generation X’s Dr. Spock. The co-sleeping setup means that you keep the babies and toddlers in bed with you so that you can nurse them down to sleep and throughout the night, cuddle them if they wake up, and just generally mammal them up. In X territory, the family bed presents as a highly contentious issue, and not necessarily
because the American Association of Pediatrics strongly advises against it on account of suffocation concerns. Ask new X parents, and they’ll likely tell you that yes, though they’ve had some of the weirdest, fraught encounters of their lives with other parents over the family bed, pro or con, people rarely brought up suffocation as the chief source of distress (that’s the domain of the grandparents, who send frantic emails citing various studies).

Although there are those who sit in the middle, most people, particularly mothers, are apt to be in one camp or the other. One woman whom I barely knew at the time, for example, made it her mission to convince me not only that I was wrong to do the family bed thing, but that I was also actively damaging my children and family life. I can’t remember how she found out about our sleep setup, but she was positively implacable on the subject and harassed me every time I saw her, which was daily since our children went to the same preschool. On the other end of the continuum, another woman—also a relative stranger at the time—confided in me out-right that she felt that people who “forced” their children to sleep alone were like Nazis—not in the inappropriately casual, lowercase way in which people often invoke the term. She meant the actual proper noun “Nazis.”

Here’s the thing: If one wishes to trace the primal legacy of
on their own floor, crying alone
, one need look no further than the family bed. Or at least that was the thing for me. I heard the con arguments: that there is no lasting damage from forcing babies to cry it out at night, that they need to learn how to soothe themselves, that they don’t remember it anyway, that you need
your
sleep. Totally got it. But having unplugged from my own matrix, my feeling was: Not on my watch. The goal of the crying-it-out method seemed to me, at root, to instill a form of Pavlovian “learned helplessness” in which babies would learn that no matter what they did to summon help, no help would come. So how would one conduct a longitudinal study that would prove that there is no lasting damage from this? What would be the adult echo of infant self-soothing? How about booze,
smokes, drugs, and crippling codependence? I remembered many nights as a child jolting awake from a nightmare, alone in the dark, and becoming so riven with fear that I was virtually chloroformed back to unconsciousness by it; I remembered Ian, clutching his elephant stuffie, deserted in his cold room. I didn’t mind what anyone else wanted to do, but I wasn’t taking any chances with the crying-it-out thing. And since neither Cal nor I did drugs or drank anymore, rolling over wasn’t a big concern. Moreover, it is said that a nursing mother has a somatic sense that remains alert to the infant beside her, and I found that to be the case. Another perk was that it allowed the baby and me to stay mostly asleep all night; instead of everyone having to wake up in a panic every few hours to nurse, I could just roll over, like a dog mama, and let her latch on. It worked for Cal because he grew up in a culture that talks a good game about the dangers of “spoiling” babies and young children but is, in fact, one of the mushiest, cuddliest baby-spoiling societies in the world.

The family bed also worked because neither Cal nor I was interested in sex. We didn’t scuff around it awkwardly, as had been our custom; it didn’t even come up. Weirdly, my mother was the only one who hinted at it. “Aren’t there certain conjugal … matters … that might emerge?” she asked.
What?
It was the first time my mother had ever acknowledged that sex existed, other than the official conversation that had ambushed me at bedtime one night when I was five years old (after which my only question had been: “Have you told Uncle Emmett about this?”). “No, there are
not
,” I snapped. And thank you for suddenly making it your business now. Cal and I were on the same page about full-time babysitters, too. Whereas my mother’s motto had been “One can’t pay enough for good help,” Cal’s had been “You can’t trust anyone but your family!” Every household was populated by aunties, uncles, grandparents, cousins; there was always someone to watch the children. Children always went to the grown-up parties, and in fact, there were no grown-up parties; all parties were for families. Getting tired,
ning
? Take a nap under the mah-jongg table!

But for all the focus that his upbringing had trained on families, Cal had not felt as though a great deal of attention was paid to children, at least not insofar as their individual needs and personalities went. Be a doctor! That was the extent of the guidance, and the guidance was harsh and unvarying. Moreover, as stated, he had always felt like an outsider, not just in the company of Americans but in his own family; they didn’t really understand him. Marveling at our instinctive attention to our children, Cal reflected on his own childhood. “I wish someone had done for
me
what we’re doing for the kids,” he said. “I never knew what I was, or what I wanted to do. Until now, really.” In fatherhood, Cal was seeing who he was for the first time. Just as the wedding star chart had predicted.

But what he was finding was different from what many fathers find. Usually dads, even Gen-X dads, are a little more casual about child rearing. Fathers are credited, historically and psychologically, with bringing the outside world and its values into the home. Naturally, as social conditions have evolved to produce a generalized equality of the sexes, so have the specific dad job requirements, but the fundamentals still persist. Psychology texts inform us that the relative esteem in which the father holds his children directly affects their sense of status and worth at large. For example, dads are more likely than moms to roughhouse and, in so doing, teach children about appropriate aggression, self-defense, the limits of fair play. Dads are more likely than moms to encourage risk taking, which helps impress on children the particular contours of their prowess, as well as simple grit. Because dads don’t typically sweat the small stuff, they let kids see that a little rule relaxing won’t collapse the whole system. My own dad, when the good twin aspect of his Gemini dichotomy was activated, had been this way when I was little. My dad, now that Zanny was here, was essentially AWOL. Cal wasn’t surprised. But I actually was. Before I had had the babies, my dad had noodged me about it. “So, when are we going to see little Jasper or Jarvis running around the old Thomas place, Suze?” he might let drop during the rare phone call. Or the more inscrutable: “Better
step it up there, little darlin’, before the Ancient One progresses further into the dark of night.” Huh? It was weird. I’d be thinking:
Why would you care about my having children when you barely make time to call
me? But at the same time, I noted, and filed, such comments. Dad loved babies and little kids; he had been a perfect father when I was little. Maybe he was waiting for the reprise. I held out hope, albeit on a long and tenuous rope.

The rope snapped soon after Zanny was born. Dad showed up at the hospital (drunk, I later found out), but his interest waned almost instantly. Wild with excitement and glee, I had sent him updates and albums; they landed in the void. On September 11, 2001, I watched the twin towers collapsing into dust from our kitchen window, clutching five-month-old Zanny. This was before Cal started working from home, and his office had been about ten blocks away from Ground Zero. But my deadline for an article had forced him to stay home just late enough to escape being at work at the moment of impact. With the phone lines down or jammed, my mother and Joseph sent frantic emails and chat messages every five minutes to see if we were okay; hours later, calls and messages from friends I hadn’t seen in years poured in; an English couple that Cal and I had met briefly on our honeymoon tracked us down from their country home in northern France. My father? Nothing. I finally called him a week later, trembling.
Just wanted to let you know that we’re not dead
, I said. Silence.
Well
, he said.
Glad to hear it
.

I squeezed my Zanny and kissed her fuzzy baby head: Here was his granddaughter, his only grandchild. I had little reason to sustain connection with him after that.

Cal occupied the pole diametrically opposite my father. He watched Zanny’s every action and reaction as closely as I did. In fact, he was downright noodgy, but I didn’t mind; he was the most adoring, attentive parent I’d ever seen. He worried that she wasn’t comfortable (“This onesie
sucks
! I’m tossing it!”); that certain positions made her unhappy (“She doesn’t like that hold—you have to hold her like
this
, or she gets upset”); that certain foods were too difficult
for her to digest or that she just didn’t like them (“It wasn’t that stomach bug—it was the avocado you gave her, seriously”); that the toys we had were not sufficient to stimulate her development (“This is the worst goddamned shape-sorter I’ve ever seen—who gave this to her?”). We had mainly lived on takeout during our pre-baby years together, and while that continued during our collective postpartum period, all that changed once Zanny started eating solid food. Cal took over the kitchen. He loved cooking; he had always been better at it than I was. I lined up more work; I was better at juggling than he was. We were a great team, I thought.