Annie is the most enthusiastic US Open fan in the family, second only to her father, who is so avid that the word “fan” doesn’t really do justice to the passion with which he experiences every game. I’ve actually heard Annie say that US Open week is her favorite week of the year. But this fall, Annie was with her sister, Lily, in Bali in September, beginning a four month backpacking trip that would take them through Bali, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Nepal, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia and Hong Kong. They each worked for months to save money for this adventure, eventually christened “Wickin’ around Asia”.

As my own mother has pointed out, this trip was my idea. (Something about “chickens coming home to roost”). While I admit that a post college gap year of travel was my suggestion, in my wildest dreams I did not imagine that Lily would enlist Annie, and that both of my older daughters would be wandering around Southeast Asia for four months. Nor did I anticipate the Nepal portion of the trip,  a three week hike to Everest Base Camp. This excursion was guided by an organization out of Kathmandu, highly recommended by a friend who had done the trip with them. But still.  The whole trip, especially Everest, lent to new meaning to the words “worlds beyond my control”.

They left at the end of August, and quite honestly, I think about them all the time. There is a persistent low level of anxiety in my days now that doesn’t go away.  I miss their presence more than I did last year, when they were safely ensconced in college. (Walter has occasionally pointed out that as Lily spent her college years in Baltimore and Cape Town, “safe” is sort of relative ).  But this feels different. They are very far away.

Before they left, they agreed that they would check in at least once a week, no matter what.  I promised that I wouldn’t worry as long as they did so, a baldfaced lie.

And off they went.

So for this year’s US Open week, it was just Walter, Tally and I. Late one night I was listening to Chris Evert’s commentary on the match between Serena Williams and Bojana Jovanovski.  I was stunned by how mean her comments were. Sorry Chrissie, there is just no other word to describe it.  She was negative, competitive and in some cases, downright spiteful.  Wondering if I was reading too much into the moment, I turned to Walter for a reality check, just time time for him to say,” Wow, what’s the matter with Chrissie Evert?”

No male commenter had trashed the male players the way Chris went after Serena. After a few days,  I started a blog entry about the match, tentatively titled, Why are women so hard on one another?, but then realized I’d covered that question pretty thoroughly in Tiger Mother Wars.  Nonetheless, it stayed in my draft file throughout the fall, and in the back of my mind.  I thought it again when Walter returned from a tennis game a few weeks later and said one of his (male) friends had mentioned what ” a —– Chris Evert had been during the Serena Williams match.” (Note to Self:  Painful when you actually agree that this adjective appropriately describes the behavior of a powerful woman.)

This question popped into my mind again one during one my Mind to Mind groups this fall.  This Thursday group is beginning their third year together, and is one of the highlights of my week.  Jack, a gay Dad with a middle school daughter,  has just joined them. Jack jumped right in, and his perspective about motherhood has been eye-opening.  In one discussion about an encounter with another mother ( not in the group), Jack said, ” God Damn, you mothers are hard on each other! As a Dad, I get a free pass. I remember other mothers gushing over the fact that I could change Sara’s diaper ! Like it’s some example of extreme nurturing. Y’all are brutal on one another.”

Like I said, having Jack around has really opened our eyes about some things.

Fast forward to the beginning of October. Lily and Annie are now in Kathmandu, acclimatizing for their trek to base camp. About ten days into the trek at Tenboche (about 14,000 feet), they both got a vicious case of food poisoning. They called home, miserable, cold and sick. They were staying in an unheated wooden lodge, sleeping in sleeping bags, and taking turns throwing up in a bathroom down the hallway. As wretched as they were, I felt they were being being responsible. Their guide had stopped the trek,  given them re-hydration powder, and they were resting and recovering, albeit not comfortably. Lily had even texted my mountaineering friend Susan, to be sure that they were not mistaking food poisoning for altitude sickness.  Susan sent them detailed instructions about what to do if it did turn out to be altitude sickness, including the directive that they must descend from altitude as soon as possible. They promised to do this, and the next day I got a text from Lily saying they were much better, resting for a day, and then resuming the climb to Base Camp.

And then nothing.

I went about my days uneasily, trying not to count the days passing without contact. I reassured myself that no news was good news. I reminded myself that they were steadily climbing up the Himalayas, and cell phone service was likely to diminish and then vanish. I woke up every morning and the first thing I did was turn on my phone, praying that a text had appeared during the night. On Saturday night, ( day six), I went out to dinner, re-organized my entire closet from top to bottom, burst into tears, and woke my husband up at one am. When I told him that I hadn’t heard from Annie and Lily since October 17th, he looked at me with alarm he didn’t try to hide. We tried to estimate where they where, based their on their planned itinerary, subtracting the two days they’d had to stop and recover from food poisoning. It appeared like they should have reached Base Camp a few days ago and now be descending. Walter called Gokyo, the owner of the trekking organization, and sent emails to their guides. He looked at me and said, ” I don’t know what else to do.  I feel like I should get on a plane to Nepal.”

Walter’s phone buzzed at three, with an email from Gokyo, reassuring us that Annie were Lily were fine, and he had talked to them a week ago, immediately after the food poisoning incident.  He was trying to reach their guide, but had been unable to do so. He reminded us that reception in the mountains was tricky, and promised to let us know as soon as he did.

It was now 4:00 am and I was terrified.  The kind of terrified you can only be when it’s the middle of the night, your children have been MIA for a week, and you remember every word of  ”Into Thin Air”. I curled up in a ball on my bed, clutching my phone, staring at the ceiling. For one of the very few times in our very long marriage, it was apparent  that Walter was as worried as I was.

At 4:30, my phone buzzed. It was an email from a woman I didn’t know.

Dear Donna,

Your girls may have told you that they met me during their travels in Nepal. They had just finished the hardest day of the trek and I had done so the same day before. We commiserated.  A few days later Annie saw me walking through Tenboche. I had just arrived. Seeing them in such a state really moved me… I have two girls 25 and 26. To their credit ( and yours!) they were doing everything they should and seemed to have everything they needed. My guide had a powdered electrolyte replacement that we left with them.  I worried about them and asked my guide if we should turn back. He assured me that they would bounce back quickly, and they looked healthy in spite of their Montezuma’s Revenge. They are making memories.

The trek for me was physically, mentally, and emotionally daunting. I am glad I did it and so very, very grateful that I was born in the USA and for our standard of living. I admire your daughters’  spunk and vitality and level of responsibility.  They are two pretty brave, audacious ladies. Just thought you would like to know from one mom to another!

Hang in there Donna,

Francie Mortenson

I don’t think I’ve ever been more grateful in to my life to anyone in my life than I was to Francie Mortenson, a total stranger, who wrote to me from Kathmandu. I didn’t hear from Lily and Annie for several more hours, but the kindness and empathy in Francie’s email made me feel like I wasn’t alone in the middle of the night, thousands of miles away from my two oldest, maybe sick, missing children.  She put herself in my place, mother to mother, and reached out to me.

I don’t know know about you, but I depend upon the kindness of women like Francie.

And the girls? This text arrived this morning.

“Still alive and kickin.”

NO COMMITMENT NECESSARY!! was prominently positioned in the center of my email flyer.

I reasoned that a dead of winter (no kids sports games) Saturday morning 11:30-1:00 (after gym, before lunch), drop-in (no commitment!) group might attract a few Dads on a few Saturdays. Mostly, I did it for the mothers in my existing Mind to Mind groups who wished their husbands could have some exposure to reflective parenting.

Nobody came.

While I didn’t expect a mad rush through the doors of my office, I was a little surprised by the lack of response. Somewhat deflated, I asked my husband and my friend Peter what they thought the problem was.  Both had almost exactly the same answer. (Peter):  “Bad call. You should have picked two Saturdays, one in January and one in March, made them pre-register and pay up front. “( Husband): (Sigh)”Donna, you don’t understand how men think. If you give a man the option of NOT making a commitment, he will take it every time.”

Well. Good to know.

The experience did offer a silver lining however, in that it made me begin to reflect on the male mind. Frankly, for the first time in quite awhile. (Note to Self: ummm.. Note to self ).  Throughout this long, cold winter, it’s been lying dormant, this question of the male mind, and all the things I don’t understand about it. We all know that men are from Mars, women are from Venus, and that they think differently.  And I don’t mean to suggest that there is only one male mind, or that all men think the same way. Obviously. But both Peter and my husband  intuitively responded to my drop-in group idea from a shared experience that was completely foreign to me.

And I’m kind of curious about it. Or more specifically, what it offers to parenting.  Yup. Just in time for Father’s day, and with apologies to the great Bard, I come to praise Caesar, not to bury him.

The differences in the way that boys and girls think is a subject that preoccupied many of my groups this Spring.  At Mind to Mind, the pivotal distinction seems to be the issue of WORRY. Laura had her whole group crying with laughter as she described the way her sons think.   But she was quite serious when she said, “ I worry that they don’t have enough anxiety. I keep waiting for them to get some.”  As she explained it, “ Anxiety has taken me a long way in this world. I can’t help but feel like they could use a little. They never worry about anything! They need some! ”

Worry is so endemic to mothering that I used to joke it was infused into the delivery room air.   Most mothers I know immediately take on a disproportionate amount of family worry, leaving fathers largely free to… well, not worry. Or at least not worry about the kinds of things I worry about where my children are concerned, which is, (Lily): “Basically, everything”.

The question of why we do this is a good one, but demands another blog.  (Next: Mind to Mind with the Maternal Mind).   But I’m starting to wonder if men are on to something. Frankly, not worrying about “basically everything” seems a far better option. I am beginning to believe that it’s one of those aspects of the male mind that I don’t understand, but should probably be celebrated.   Let’s just say, it’s certainly offered some balance in my family.

A case in point.  Last winter break, we took a family trip to South America.  I decided that we should spend Christmas tucked away, en famille, in a cozy corner of Patagonia.   From a tiny picture on a website, I chose “Remota,” conveniently located in Puerto Natales, a town (you guessed it), in a remote corner of Chilean Patagonia. In fact, Puerto Natales is about as far south as you can go in South America before you get to the cluster of tiny islands from which you can depart to Antarctica.

So at six am on Christmas Eve, we departed from El Calafate ( popularly advertised as the “end of the earth”) in Argentinian Patagonia, and drove for six hours through some of the most extraordinarily beautiful landscape I’ve ever seen. This was somewhat lost on my children. Two intimidating border patrols later, we pulled up at Remota, starving, exhausted, and cranky. In howling eighty mile an hour winds, which (I learned belatedly), is a typical summer day in Patagonia.

Behold Remota.

Remota was designed by German Del Sol, a Chilean architect, to reflect sheep shearing sheds,  which was the main industry of Puerto Natalas. (Until meat processing took over, but I digress.)  The surrounding landscape is spectacular and the hotel is designed the maximize the views. It’s largely glass, and black wood. The entire building groaned in the wind. Annie said it looked like the hotel in The Shining. The rooms are located at the end of long, unheated wooden corridors, which I imagine mimic the chutes through which sheep pass to get to the shearing facility. Lily ran off to check out the “spa”, where even the pool was designed to reflect the tubs that the sheep were dipped in before shearing. Lily returned to demand that we find new accommodations.

There was not a soul in sight, so I suggested that everyone go to their rooms, unpack, and regroup.  My husband went to sleep. No children appeared at my door for awhile (undoubtedly occupied by plotting ways to kill me), so I decided to read In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin. This beautiful book describes Chatwin’s journey through Southern Patagonia in the 70’s, but should you find yourself feeling stranded, alone, in Patagonia on Christmas Eve in a gale force winds, it’s pretty much the last thing I suggest you read.

I’m really not a nature girl. I think it’s beautiful, but untamed nature scares me. Overwhelming displays of untamed nature scare the wits out of me. So I threw down In Patagonia and began to worry. What we would do if one of the kids got sick? We were literally at the end of the earth in a hurricane. If there was an airport in existence, it must be closed. (There was, and it was).  We were a six hour drive from Calafate, which felt more like Everest base camp (not that I would know), than civilization. What could I do about dinner? There was nary a Christmas decoration in sight, not even a tree. It was unlikely that the chef was making a Buche de Noel. How could I get us out of here? Where could we go? How would we get there?

Walter woke up, stretched, and suggested that we go to town for lunch. I seriously contemplated the possibility that Remota was the hotel in ”The Shining” and he’d gone mad in his sleep. Lunch? Town?? Grimly, I reminded him that we were not in Soho. He shrugged, gathered up the kids and went down to the front desk to find a taxi.

No taxis. There were bikes available but even the man at the front desk thought that was a bad idea. Or at least I think that’s what he was saying as he threw himself in front of the bikes to block our access.  So Walter decided that we should  walk the two miles into town. I protested that it was dangerous and reminded him that, at home, the weather would be considered a hurricane.  Walter said we’d be fine. And off we went.

By the time we got to Puerto Natales my ears were ringing from the wind, and we were all helpless with laughter.  The largest thing in Puerto Natalas is a statute of the Milodon, a prehistoric giant sloth, evidence of which was found in one of the caves near town. (My friend Chris didn’t believe this story till we googled it one night at dinner, so I’m attaching a link for all you disbelievers out there. Not that I blame you.)

Annie and the Milodon

We ended up at Mama Rosa’s, which is a great place to land, should you find yourself at the end of the earth,  We had amazing pizza, Annie had a blue margarita, I drank a glass of wine, and Walter taught Tally a bar game involving a piece of string, a ring, and a hook , which she won every time. We saw fellow travelers, mostly trekkers, laughed, observed the staggering scenery, and relaxed.

By the time we returned to Remota, it was full of  wind-burned guests who had returned from trekking. As the lights came on and dining room filled, the spare aesthetic became strangely beautiful instead of forbidding. Lily wafted down the stairs waving a Bellini, a treasure she had been (inexplicably) searching for all over South America. Dinner was delicious (wild turkey), it stayed light till 10:30, and we traded stories about the hapless plans we’d made to bolt, while agreeing that we all were very happy to be there.  All in all, it was the “cozy family Christmas tucked away in Patagonia” that I’d envisioned, though not what I’d imagined.

If Walter hadn’t been around to shove us out the door into the howling wind, Christmas Eve would have been a very different experience.  And increasingly, I appreciate the part of the male mind that doesn’t sweat the small stuff. As for Remota, it turned out to be the highlight of our trip. I would return there in a New York minute.

But not without Walter.

We were away for the weekend and Tally was on a sleepover with her good friend, Sara. At some point on Saturday night her phone “pocket dialed” an old number in her contact list. If you don’t have teenagers, “pocket dialing” occurs when you sit on the phone in your back pocket, which then inadvertently dials a random number programed into your phone book. In this case, it was the number of Dylan, a boy she had met four years ago at a 4th grade dance, and never spoken with since. Immediately a text appeared on her phone.

“Who’s this?”

Tally checked her recent calls, and realized that she had pocket dialed Dylan. Total pandemonium in Sara’s bedroom. After extensive consultation with her war council, Tally responded with,”Who’s this? You texted me.”

I don’t have the details about the rest of the text conversation, but what began as a snarky exchange between two teenagers rapidly escalated into a heated standoff between two strangers, each convinced that the other was “dissing” them. Eventually Dylan threatened to post Tally’s telephone number on Craig’s List.  Tally replied that such an action was illegal and she would sue (!) him.

With that closing threat, Tally turned off her phone and went to sleep. However, within twenty minutes, Tally’s number was on Craig’s List, posted under a provocative picture of a largely naked hispanic woman, along with the information that she was only in town for two days. (Note to Self: Screen Craig’s List more carefully).

So the next morning, when Tally turned her phone back on, it immediately began to ring. And ring, and ring, and ring, all calls from men interested in her services.  An increasingly frightened Tally began trying to reach us. Unfortunately my phone had no service, and my husband’s blackberry had been stolen the night before (Note/reminder to us all: Technology can fail).

So, (god bless her) Tally called her older sister Annie. Annie wanted to call Dylan’s parents, but decided to check in first with her older sister, Lily. Lily awoke to two hysterical sisters on the phone, one sobbing, and one furious.

After a futile attempt to reach her parents, Lily decided to call Dylan, and left an irate message on his cell phone.

Not a bad plan, except Tally hadn’t called Dylan- or rather, her phone hadn’t.  At some point in the intervening years, Dylan lost or upgraded his phone, and his “old” number had been reassigned to someone else.  Who turned out to be Emerald, a twenty-four year old porn star in Austin, Texas.

Correction: An increasingly pissed off twenty- four year old porn star in Austin, Texas, who evidently believed that Tally needed to be taught a lesson.  So she posted Tally’s number under a picture of herself, on a page that advertised the services of transsexual escorts.

Lily is nothing if not intrepid, but I suspect this moment tested even her considerable powers.

Nevertheless, she handled it well. She apologized for the misunderstanding, explained that Tally believed she was talking to a fourteen -year- old boy, and had not intended to insult Emerald. She asked Emerald to please take Tally’s number off the transsexual escort page, and apparently Emerald assured Lily that she would.

Of course she didn’t.

By the time Tally finally reached us, she was hysterical.  Every time she turned her phone on, it rang incessantly (who knew there were so many men interested in trans-sexual escort services in Austin, Texas on Sunday morning?). We told Tally to leave her phone off, but other than that there really wasn’t much we could do.  My husband called a lawyer the next day, who informed him that what Emerald had done was of course illegal, and advised him to forget about it. We changed Tally’s number and got her a new phone, one she now password protects so it can’t pocket dial anyone.

I hear stories like this every day (well, not quite like this, but you get the idea), in Mind to Mind groups. If someone brought this tale to group, I imagine  we would spend a lot of time discussing how well this story illustrates what we all try so hard to make real to our children; the idea that the internet is public space, a world where small mistakes, the normal developmental stumbles of adolescence, are grossly magnified by public scrutiny.

And then we would talk about ways to protect our children, because they won’t understand the lesson we just discussed in such depth.  The internet is the new normal, the only world they know. It creates connections, promises intimacy, and as far as they are concerned, makes the world a smaller, not larger, stage. When we tell them not to put pictures up on their Facebook page that they wouldn’t want a college admissions officer, potential employer, or their grandmother (take your pick), to see, it has absolutely no meaning to most fourteen- year old children. Their brains can’t yet conceive of future consequences, their grandmother probably can’t use a computer, and the metaphor is lost on them.

I’ve learned this lesson over and over again the past few years and it’s changed my views about children and technology. I used to believe that technology offered relatively benign tools and exciting new ways to experiment with creating an identity, the fundamental developmental task of adolescence.  It really wasn’t all that different, I thought, than the notes I would exchange all day, every day, at school with my girlfriends, only to go home and spend the entire night on the phone with the same girls.

Mea culpa. I was completely wrong. It’s not the same thing at all.

For while technology does indeed offer exciting new ways to to experiment with identity, I’ve come to believe that few are benign. Identity is, after all, created in the context of relationships. That’s what makes us human, rather than, err.. machine. So while my friends and I practiced trying on various identities with one another through notes and phone calls, these attempts were embedded in the intimacy of real relationships. and largely, protected by them. It seems to me that it is the disembodied, disconnected quality of cyberspace relationships that makes them ultimately so unfulfilling, or at their worst, inhumane.

My older daughters seem to recognize the difference. They use technology to collect and disseminate information, not relationships. Both use Facebook far less than they did when they were younger, and increasingly, they call, rather than text.  But at fourteen, they were still entranced by the possibility of being in contact with their friends 24/7,  and didn’t understand that the quality of those friendships would change as a result of being public. Frankly, neither did I .

So these days, I am a lot more interested in protecting kids from technology than exploring it’s possibilities. We’ve talked a lot about “technology curfews”  (I’m indebted to my friend Lisa for the term) in Mind to Mind groups this year.  These are night-time deadlines where all computers, cellphones and blackberries are turned off, and in many cases, surrendered and removed from the room.  Increasingly, I hear parents support this idea. And every parent I know who has tried a technology curfew reports that their child is happier.

For ideas about how and why to protect your children from technological “relationships,” Sherry Turkle is a professor at MIT who has been studying artifical intelligence and technology for twenty years. Her new book (2011), Alone together: Why we expect more from technology and less from ourselves, is eye-opening on the subject of technology and intimacy, and describes an evolution in her thinking about technology that is similar, and far more informed, than my own. Common Sense Media is a not-for-profit organization that reviews and rates media, with the goal of protecting families and children from the dangers of the internet.  My friend Catherine Steiner-Adair is writing a new book, due out in the fall, about how to nourish healthy relationships in the age of technology.

Finally, give yourself a technology curfew. Turn everything off at 9:00 pm, and tell your children to call the land line. Buy an alarm clock so you don’t wake up to your blackberry screen. Resist the impulse to check your Droid at your child’s soccer game (trust me, they notice).  Limit the time you spend fooling around on the computer during the weekend. Never, ever, under any circumstances check your phone when having dinner with your child (or in my opinion, anybody else).

I tried this, while writing this blog. I liked it.

I can completely understand why people think I might feel passionately about it. My favorite email on the topic was from Nick, (he of  ”letting dogs be dogs” ).

Donna-

I assume you have  read this and have strong opinions.

Nick

You have to love a man who gets right to the point.  And certainly many of Chua’s parenting practices appear to be diametrically opposed to the central tenet of reflective parenting, namely that one’s child has a mind of her own. And that as parents, we seek  to understand, respect and err.. well, value it.

So when Chua says, “Chinese parents believe that they know what is best for their children and therefore override all of their children’s own desires and preferences,” it’s easy to get excited. One of the mothers in one of my groups called her a “rabid bitch.” But to be perfectly honest, whenever I hear or read a phrase that begins with “(fill in the blank here) mothers do it better,” my eyes roll back in my head and I stop paying attention.

Chua for one, claims the excerpt misrepresents her, and that Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother describes her journey away from tiger mothering as part of a process where she learned to reconcile the values of her Chinese immigrant mother and the experience of her 13 year-old daughter Lulu.

While this strikes me as a bit disingenuous (the title “Why Chinese Mothers are Superior” could not have been intended to promote civil discourse on the topic), I’m inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt.  We all begin mothering with preconceived ideas, feelings and experiences (conscious and unconscious), that are the result of our own experience of being mothered.  And most of us transform many of these ideas in the course of interacting with our own children, just as Chua describes.  Unless of course, your own mother did it perfectly, in which case, I’d really like to hear from you. So while the excerpt was clearly edited to be as provocative as possible (quelle surprise), Chua’s book describes a journey that is essentially Reflective Parenting 101.

How then, to explain the hysteria with which almost everyone has responded to it?  I think this is the most interesting point of the whole brouhaha. Unfortunately, it requires confronting the fact that the harshest, most unforgiving judges of mothers are often, well …. other mothers.  A mother in one of my groups told me today that Chua has received death threats.

Why we do this, I still don’t know. It’s not exactly productive. But I’ve experienced first-hand, both as a mother, and in my research. And I lived it on a national scale a few years ago when my partner Wendy Ettinger and I made a documentary film called Baby I’m Yours. Baby followed the lives of three first -time mothers over two years and was based on research I’d done for my dissertation.  The rationale for both dissertation and the film was simple: we argued that there was a lack of research that explored the experience and development of mothers from the perspective of the mother. This results in a monolithic, idealized cultural model of a “good” mother that traps women in guilt and has little relevance to the actual experience of mothering.

So Wendy and I set out to explore what mothering meant to mothers.   Baby followed three very different women, Robin, Keelin and Susanna, from late pregnancy through their baby’s second birthday. In our view, the whole point of Baby was to show the many ways in which it was possible to be a good mother, including deciding as Keelin did, that her husband was far better suited to the role. (One of the great moments of the movie is Keelin’s conclusion that mothering is “a man’s job”). To the extent that I thought about the reception of Baby at all (Note to Self: Ahhh… the blissful ignorance of academia!), I imagined mothers united in solidarity and relief around a picture of motherhood that offered multiple possibilities about how to do the job.

Oprah’s producers discovered us near the end of editing the film, thanks to Naomi Wolff, who had just written Misconceptions, a memoir about about her own experience of becoming a mother.  Oprah’s producers invited us, along with Naomi and Robin, to appear on a show that opened Oprah’s seventeen season, entitled  Things Your Mother Never Told  You About Motherhood. The episode opened with several clips from Baby, among them a moment in which Susanna, mother of twins, turns to the camera and asks in her impeccable British accent, “Why doesn’t anyone ever tell you that this SUCKS eighty percent of the time?”

I wasn’t a complete idiot. I knew there was going to be some fallout from that.  But I never anticipated the vitrol with which Susanna, the movie, the episode, indeed the whole idea of speaking honestly about the experience of motherhood was attacked.  Things Your Mother Never Told You About Motherhood generated the largest viewer response in the history of Oprah, half positive, half appalled.  Some mothers expressed relief and support for the notion of a “warts and all” depiction of motherhood, while others thought we were all not only bad mothers, but bad people.

In a brilliant stroke, Oprah’s producers invited one of the most vehement members of the later group (time has mercifully blurred some of the details and I can’t remember her name), to express her views in a follow-up show, What Mothers Honestly Think About Motherhood.   Susanna flew in from London, and Naomi attempted to moderate a round table discussion between what was rapidly devolving into two camps, apparently determined to fight to the death.  This episode in turn generated yet a third show,  which even I didn’t watch, because I was sick to death of the whole thing.

Flash forward nine months. Baby opened at the Tribeca Film Festival, just in time for Mother’s Day. The screening was followed by a panel luncheon attended by about three hundred women. The panel included Wendy and I, and several smart and interesting women, among them Meryl Poster, then co-president of production at Miramax, fresh off the success of Chicago.  Kate Betts, the moderator, asked the panel a question about combining motherhood and work, and Meryl responded quite forcefully that it was her right to do both. Someone in the audience told Meryl that she had no right to judge non-working mothers, and within five minutes, the entire luncheon turned into a catfight between the working and non-working mothers in the audience.

Needless to say, not exactly the response we had envisioned. After the reception to Oprah, perhaps we should have been prepared, but I never would have guessed that a room full of such sophisticated and intelligent women could so easily be dumbed down by the topic of motherhood.  At the end of the luncheon, Lucy Danziger (then and now the editor of Self), her blue eyes even wider than usual, came up to me and said, ” WOW. You should’ve filmed that.”

I wish we had, because the evidence of our shadow selves might come in handy in the Chua debate.  Surely, surely, surely, we are beyond this, beyond defining motherhood (not to mention ourselves) as a fierce competition to see who does it “better”? Is this really what our children mean to us?  A product we get graded on?

Seriously girls. We have to do better than this.

“Mom, I think I have to be a psychologist.”

This didn’t seem like such a bad idea to me, but Lily’s tone was tragic.

“That sounds interesting,” I ventured cautiously.” You would be really good at it.”

“MOM! I am an international relations major. For four years I have been studying public policy and economics so I could go work in Africa with women and children. I spent half of last year in CAPE TOWN! How am I going to save the world as a psychologist?

For once in my parenting career I had the right answer, at the right time, for the right child.

“One person at a time.”

(Note to Self: YES!!!)

I don’t think it ’s coincidental that Lily’s re-thinking her future right now. Last weekend her father and I suggested that she take a post-college “gap year,”  to think, work odd jobs, fool around, and experiment a bit, with no particular plan in mind. I think this used to be called adolescence. In any event, it’s certainly what I did in high school, demonstrating particular aptitude for the “fooling around” piece.

Lily’s been far too busy for this. I realize that this sounds bizarrely privileged in the middle of a recession, but the truth of the matter is that she could use a year off.  She’s been working toward her “next step” since sixth grade. And while there aren’t any Grand Tours in her future, we are going to (modestly) fund one.

As you  can see, this is creating a certain amount of confusion for Lily.

Last month, Valerie, a mother in one of my groups, mentioned a documentary that she was anxious to see. It’s called “Race to Nowhere”, and while I still haven’t seen it,  the title resonated immediately. A few days later I brought it up in another group and  every parent in the group laughed, sighed or grimaced in recognition. As Susanna said, ” That sounds like my life.”

The idea of a “race to nowhere” has stayed with me for weeks, rattling around in my subconscious. I think it was the impetus behind a call I made to my daughter’s school, protesting a big science test scheduled the Tuesday after Columbus Day. And it must have motivated the scene in my kitchen a week later when my (eighth grade) daughter came down to breakfast and recited her schedule for the day. Double photography, morning meeting, PE, lunch, English, History, French, Math, and the rescheduled science test after school.

“Take the morning off” I said, astounding us both. “Go back to bed.”

I went to a morning meeting, smug in the belief that I had granted her some relief from a schedule that seemed a little, well… insane. When I returned home  at 11:00, I discovered her sitting at the kitchen table “getting ahead ” on the homework she wouldn’t be able to do after school, because she had three soccer games scheduled that week.

Completely frustrated by the confines of her schedule, (not to mention her life),  I made a radical decision.

“Quit soccer,” I announced grandly. In my house, this is tanamount to treason. She looked at me as if I had sprouted horns and fangs.

“My coach would KILL me,” she wailed. “DAD would kill me! And what about ‘my responsibility to my team’, and ‘honoring your commitments,’ and all OTHER stuff you’ve told me my WHOLE life? WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT???,” she cried, as she burst into tears. “I HAVE TO GO TO SCHOOL RIGHT NOW!!”

It’s not easy, racing to nowhere.  But how do you stop?

(Note to self: Not that way.)

This question has preoccupied one of my Mind to Mind groups all fall.  Six of the seven mothers in this group have children applying to different schools for next fall. Every mother wants their child to go a less pressured, less intense, more thoughtful school than the one her child currently attends. Nobody wants her/him to continue doing four hours of homework a night. Yet the implications of this desire are enormous. If your child attends a kinder, gentler school, how does that affect her chances of getting into a good college? Shouldn’t she be challenged and go to the “best” possible high school she can attend? What about the issue of “living up to her potential?” How do know what her potential is?  What is a good college? Isn’t it the school that’s the right fit for her? How do you (or they) know what the right “fit” is? How can you know what it will be five years from now?

And how do you subdue your own anxiety long enough to even consider these questions in an environment so competitive that the real question feels like, “Where will she get in?”

Nobody in our group has the answers to all these questions. But for an hour and a half a week, the world slows down long enough to think about them. I think that’s a beginning, though it’s far from a solution. Those of us who want to slow down our children’s education face, as we used to say in graduate school, a set of “overdetermined circumstances.” The rest of the world seems to be rushing headlong in the opposite direction, trailing yes, ( you knew it was coming), India and China.  It’s hard to think about an education as a process, when the prevailing ethos is all about product.

But I’m persisting in this quixotic quest, emboldened by my group and the disturbing realization that my daughter’s education offers her no time to think. This was her schedule this week:  Science test, English powerpoint presentation, Latin vocabulary quiz, Fench quiz, history test,  math test, science lab/quest (whatever that is), Latin quiz, make-up French test from last week.

So while I can’t offer much in the way of solutions, I do know this about the race to nowhere:

I quit. I am stopping right now.

One child at at a time.