I have barely finished this interview about the mommy wars--you'll have to sit through an ad--and I'm shaking. I'm shaking.
The interview features novelist Meg Wolitzer who has written a book titled "The Ten-Year Nap," about women who leave work to raise their kids. Once their kids turn ten, they feel "derailed," "vulnerable," and react by starting inane businesses called "Wuv Cards" ("There I am really lampooning the idea of suburban boredom").
Wolitzer says that of course it's different when your kids are young (even though "you don't have to use your brain" for things like nursing them), but then once they're ten, staying at home turns into a retroactive tragedy because "there is something inherently appalling about really intelligent people, in any context, not using their minds."
Which, as she has just explained, you don't do as a mom.
Hence the "ten-year nap." Stay-at-home mothers are asleep.
"I was judgmental of women I had known and liked," Wolitzer confesses, "who had given up careers...and [now] they weren't sure what they were doing." Later she claims she realized "Who am I to say" whether their choices were wrong or right...but the first sentence of her book remains, "All around the country, women were waking up."
Of course Wolitzer does claim to understand why moms might 'go to sleep' if they're lucky enough to have the choice. Here is her reasoning: "[M]ost people don't necessarily have a passion, or even something they're so good at, that they can't wait to get back to."
So they just mark time with their rugrats.
In an effort to be charitable, let me just say that That Really Really Hit Me Wrong.
Speaking only for myself, I've found that motherhood has taken every ounce of intellect and focus I've got. Kids are all subtext. You have to watch them like a 5th-season "Buffy." It's all between the lines, it's what's not being said, it's the silences and the timing and the context. I've had to work much harder to understand my daughter than I ever did to figure out what to say about a blowhard like Derrida. And how well I understand her matters, as opposed to proving whether I know poststructuralism.
I mean, you pass your defense, who cares? But the moment you realize your 13-month-old is melting down about bedtime because she fears she'll never be able to draw again if she stops now, and you say "You can draw again tomorrow morning!" and her whole face changes...THAT means something. You just stepped outside your parameters, you just made an intuitive leap to an essentially alien mind, and you eased a fear which might seem outlandish or trivial to you but which was desperately important to the little being who felt it.
And you know what? It's no less fraught when they're ten. My daughter is nine, and whereas she's certainly more independent in many ways, she also needs me more than she did when her world was simpler. She needs to tell me about her friends, her thoughts, her feelings, and now I have to imagine myself into her world to try to see it through my own eyes--to try to grasp the bigger picture from the necessarily more limited one that she gives me. It's still a leap, though a very different kind. And it matters just as much. Even more.
Well. I feel mean. So I'm going to say that people who call stay-at-home motherhood a "ten-year nap" are probably people who never could make those kinds of leaps, so they're covering their feelings of incompetence and inadequacy by reducing motherhood to breastfeeding and calling it a kind of sleep and "lampooning" its "suburban boredom" with condescending assurances that "most people" don't have anything better to do anyhow.
Thanks. Thanks so much.
Meg Wolitzer is probably very copacetic and this whole interview is just one of those unfortunate things where everything comes out wrong. It happens. As a blogger, I know that it is possible to COMPLETELY screw the pooch, to think you're saying one thing and discover that you have said something totally else, and ohmigod. Wolitzer throws out enough ill-conceived caveats ("Who am I to say?") to make me believe that her intentions were probably good.
But man.
