Maternally Challenged

The Great Big Lie

I'm sitting here watching American Idol, and seeing the damage that we--our public education system and the self-help industry in particular--have done to an entire generation (or two) of American youngsters. I saw evidence of this today in the cafeteria of my daughter's elementary school, which had two big banners on either side of the stage. One said, "You can triumph and come to skill" and the other said something like, "You can be great if only you will." This, as it turns out, is a quote from a poem by Edgar A. Guest, who in my book comes in a close second to Helen Steiner Rice as "suckiest poet of the 20th century."

Guest wrote a lot of pablum, but it unfortunately still seems to be popular pablum, and it fits in nicely with the educational mantra these days, which is, "You can be anything you want to be." Not true. Not even close. But our kids are being told this, and believing it. It is spoon fed to them every day and I, for one, am fed up.

One of the reasons "American Idol" fascinates me, in a morbid way, is the early auditions. You see the weirdos, the entitlement junkies, the tone deaf, the hopelessly clueless, the occasional raw talent, the carefully groomed for stardom...the whole gamut. Two, in particular, stuck out tonight. One was a woman who was making her third try. Very Mariah Carey-esque, which is not a style I like; my own theory was that she had a good voice but that it had all been done before. She was the aural equivalent of a William Faulkner imitator--not to equate Mariah Carey with William Faulkner (which God would strike me down with lightning for even thinking) but because there are so many bad Faulkner imitators. She got canned. She couldn't believe she got canned. She wept. She railed. She protested. "I worked so HARD for this!!" she screamed, as though that alone made it inevitable. "You don't understand!" Simon (the meanie) says, "I do understand." She left, not believing that wishing could not, at this point, make it so.

The second was a girl who was tone deaf. She was the first to admit it. The next question, and a reasonable one, was, "So why are you here?" She started to get all emotional. "I am not a singer," she said, speaking between her sobs, which precipitated some unfortunate mirth among the judges (but come on, it WAS funny)...her thinking was that she could BE the next American Idol who COULD NOT SING. Because they could TEACH her.

Because wishing can make it so. Because you can be anything if you set your mind to it. Because you can be GREAT, if only you will.

What swill.

I'd love to be a ballet dancer. Unfortunately, even before I developed arthritic knees, I developed a butt the size of Toledo. Dancing was my first ambition and it was never in the cards. Fortunately, I grew up in a period before this "you can be anything" crap was being ladled onto every school lunch tray, so I got over it. Today I get a thrill from watching ballet; my early ambition informed my current enjoyment. Same thing with singing. At one point I had a decent alto voice and sang in some choruses. At some point, my voice--what there was of it--went away. It's just not there anymore. Today I sing in the car, and I appreciate, with passion, the people who CAN sing. Somewhere along the line, I also learned where my real strength lay: writing. That's the one I stuck with, and it's paid off.

These people are not going to get over it these disappointments. They're going to spend years--decades--learning the lesson that talent DOES matter. Enthusiasm counts, singing for pleasure in the shower is a lovely thing, but there are times when you either have the chops or you don't. This is Simon's role on the show, and sometimes he's mean about it, and sometimes it's obvious he enjoys being mean, and I'm pretty sure that in his private life he is a gold-plated jerk--but still: his is the voice of reason. Sometimes it all boils down to this: you are not good enough. Or, you are good in your own idiosyncratic way, but you are not what we are looking for. And if the market is not looking for you, then you do you own thing, figure out a way to pay the rent, and see where your passion takes you. Which is what artists all do anyway. Wallace Stevens was an accountant or a lawyer, I forget, but he had a day job. Herman Melville worked in the U.S. Patent Office, even after he wrote Moby Dick.

I heard a radio interview the other night, late at night, with a singer-songwriter. I don't even remember the program, but the interviewer asked the singer (a woman) what her current projects were. Clearly, he was expecting news of some tour or record deal. "Actually," she said, "I'm working in a bookstore." Here was a talented person who had not found commercial success, but pursued her art anyway. And got a day job to pay the rent, as generations of artists before her have done. The interviewer actually gasped. He reacted as if she had confessed to turning tricks on the corner. Puh-leeze.

We live in a culture which worships fame, and we have taught our children that they are all geniuses, and that anything is within their reach if they just squinch their eyes shut and wish really really hard. What we should be doing is to teach them to look for their strengths--the real strengths, not their inflated ideas of what they think their strengths ought to be, based on years of watching too many Disney Channel chanteuses (and I use the term loosely). Realism is a good thing.

I think "American Idol" can be a great teaching tool; I watched it tonight with my 10 year old (who assured me the other day, "I can sing as well as Vanessa Hutchinson [no, I didn't know who she was, either], but nobody recognizes my talent.") My job is to give her a healthy reality check. Yes, she has a nice voice. Does she have an inflated sense of her abilities too? You bet. If it takes making her watch Simon Cowell bring a few people back to planet earth ("Idiot," I just heard him say to some idiot--righty-o there) to get the idea across that wishing alone won't make it so...then shlock TV is serving a rare and useful purpose. I think we should use it. God knows it needs to be good for SOMEthing, right?

Thank You, Mr. Shaw

Last year, my husband gave me an Ipod, and it's changed my life. If you are a mom, listening to music is one of those pleasures that goes away with motherhood--like Sunday morning sleep-ins, or leisurely caffe lattes. You play music in the car and the kids hate your choice, so Elmo it is. At home, there's always stuff to do, and the background noise is incredible. Listening to music--really listening--used to require sitting still with a CD player and headphones, and it required peace and quiet. I had the CD and the headphones, but the sitting still part....rarely happened. Then I got the Ipod, and I discovered I tunes, and the pleasures of downloading, and the fact that one can fold laundry and load the dishwasher and do all kinds of things while in a musical world of your own. I began to listen to pieces I hadn't really listened to in years. And this is where Robert Shaw comes in.

Robert Shaw, in case you don't know him--and any serious classical music enthusiast will--was the pre-eminent choral music conductor of our time. I might never have heard of him, either, except that I was lucky enough to be born in the suburbs of Atlanta at a time when he was the conductor of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus. I went to public school in Fulton County, which at the time was no great exemplar of academic achievement--but it did have a terrific county-wide music program, led by a man whose name I recall as Eugene Robinson, and Mr. Robinson (who was extremely handsome and thus the object of many schoolgirl crushes) had an in with Robert Shaw. As a consequence, there were those of us with decent voices who participated in a lot of choral activities down at Symphony Hall under the direction of Robert Shaw. It was, I now realize, a most singular piece of extraordinary good fortune.

I don't remember all the things we did with Mr. Shaw (he was always "Mr. Shaw," and we were scared to death of him) but I do recall the Beethoven Bicentennial, which would have been in 1970, where we sang, among other things, "Christ on the Mount of Olives" and the "Kyrie" from his Mass in C Major. There were other concerts, including a Christmas concert from some year that escapes me, at which we sang the "Hallelujah Chorus" (of course), "The Shepherd's Farewell" from Hector Berlioz's "L'Enfance Du Christ" and "Dona Nobis Pacem" (Give Us Peace) from Bach's Mass in B Minor. (I mention these in detail in case anybody wants to download; they're all contained on Shaw's Choral Masterpieces album.)

I remembered these things, of course, but I had filed them away in the back of my mind until one day recently I decided to find them on I tunes and download them. I was walking across the parking lot to Sears, as a matter of fact, when I plugged into my Ipod and the first bars of "Christ on the Mount of Olives" came in. I still remembered most of the alto part. But what struck me then was the memory of my mother sitting in the audience (my sister wasn't interested, and my dad stayed home with her). For the first time, I thought about what it would have been like to be her at that moment, and to hear that amazing music, and to see her daughter up there on the stage helping make it. I could put myself in her place, and if it had been me, watching one of my own daughters, I think my heart would have burst. Maybe hers did.

The gift Mr. Shaw gave me was not just the gift of music, which would have been rich enough; it was the gift of a kind of spiritual insight which it took years--decades--to ripen in me. Now I am 51, and I suffer from depression, and in recent months it's been particularly bad (with brief episodes of lucidity). But the consolation of music is not just a phrase; it's real. It is balm to my soul; it is water on arid soil. Mr. Shaw did not condescend to us; the works that he chose for us to sing appear on some of his best-known recordings, sung by  some of the best voices ever assembled in one place. They are also, many of them, about pain that is impossible to put into words: the longing for peace, the longing for transcendence. Ecstasy. In a dark time, these are pieces of light.

Robert Shaw died in 1999, and just before his death he led a performance of Beethoven's 9th Sympthony at the Kennedy Center in Washington that is legendary for its brilliance. Grown men wept. I was living in Washington then and I had a chance to go, but I let life get in the way, a three-year-old underfoot, the tickets were expensive, and I thought: next time. There would be no next time. I wouldn't have been able to get close enough to say thank you anyway, so this will have to do. Thank you, Mr. Shaw. Thank you.

The Problem Ain't Cinderella

Peggy Orenstein has written a piece in the December 24, 2006 issue of New York Times Magazine (sorry--I'd give you the exact URL for the article but you have to pay to see it now--cost is minimal, though, and all you have to do is enter "Cinderella" as a search word to find it) entitled "What's Wrong with Cinderella?" Orenstein is lamenting the staggering number and variety of "princess" items being marketed to young girls these days. The craze began about six years ago when Disney (who else?) came up with the idea of packaging all of their most famous female characters--Ariel the Mermaid, Cinderella, Snow White, Belle from Beauty and the Beast, even Pocohontas--as a "princess" product. Little girls ate it up, to the tune of $3 billion (that's billion with a "b") this year, up from $300 million in 2001. Mattel has brought out a slew of "princess" Barbies (which is confusing; I thought Barbie always WAS a princess), and even Dora the Explorer has debuted with a FairyTale Dora doll. All of which makes an old-line feminist mom like Orenstein apprehensive. Is all this Prince Charming crap going to sabotage her efforts to instill feminist values in her daughter? Will her daughter take this retrograde role model seriously?

I think Orenstein is missing the forest for the trees. Yeah, there's a shitload of princess stuff around, but it just happens to be pink and sparkly. Let's not forget the success of Bratz dolls (I call them Slutz, but I've also heard them referred to as My First Trollop dolls, which I kinda like), who are not "princess-y" at all but who have been pulling in big bucks from little girls, via their mommies, for about three years now. And let's not forget Build-A-Bear Workshop, which is one of the slickest ways I've seen lately to suck money out of your wallet: a store that caters to little girls and their desire for their very own teddy bear (or cat, or pink poodle, or whatever) with its very own heart inserted during the production process, with special noises that you can pick out, with a registered name all its own....and, naturally, lots and lots and lots of clothes and accessories to buy to go with. Just walking past that store will cost you $50; if you actually go in, you risk having to get a second mortgage. My kids over the years have conned me into going in there on three occasions--the last time, ostensibly, to spend their own allowance money, but of course I ended up ante-ing up too, being the craven idiot that I am--and guess what: the creations they walked out of there with, the stuffed animals they could not contemplate living without for one more hour, that's how bad they needed them, are now gathering dust on various shelves in their rooms.

It doesn't matter a hill of beans whether people are out there selling princess stuff to our little girls. They could be selling Wall Street Tycoon Barbie, or Greenpeace Activist Dora (hmmm...that might not be so bad) or Diane von Furstenberg bean bags--WHAT they're selling doesn't matter half as much as the fact that they are selling it, and in such staggering amounts. Kids these days are expert consumers at a mind-blowing age; my daughters' consumer savvy has already far eclipsed mine, if by "savvy" you mean awareness of brand names and logos (as distinct from value). The other day I was brushing my hair when my 10-year-old joined me in the bathroom to do the same. She looked at my jeans and said, "Nice logo, Mom. Very cool." I looked down and saw a swan. I had to read the tag in the back before I understood that this was Gloria Vanderbilt's logo. I'd bought the jeans off the sales rack at Kohl's for about $15, and I guarantee you I had no idea they were Gloria Vanderbilt jeans, nor would I have cared. But Rebecca knew.

No, the problem isn't that little girls buy princess stuff. If Disney didn't market princess stuff, my kids (and lots of other little girls) would find lace curtains to dress up in, or one of my old bridesmaid dresses, or something, and they would make themselves princesses, or brides, or something of the sort. Little boys will dash around wearing Superman capes, too. As a generation of two of feminist ought to have learned by now, some behaviors like this are genetically hardwired: little girls tend to play with dolls, no matter how many trucks you give them; little boys tend to play with trucks, even when you give them dolls. What kind of fantasy role model kids imitate at 6 or 8 or 10 is of concern to me, but it's ultimately of less concern than the fact that my daughters are both being bombarded with the message that in order to be happy, and popular, and socially accepted, they must buy, buy, BUY! baby. It's a message I strenuously try to counter every single day but it's like bailing out a boat with a tippy cup when the waves are washing over the sides. I get help in that regard from a fantastic organization called the Center for a New American Dream, which is always coming up with ideas to live more simply, buy less and fight the proliferation of junk in our lives. But it's an ongoing fight. The amount of pure-D crap marketed to kids these days will blow you away.

Princess, schmincess. This is not a feminist issue, Peggy. If you look past the sparkles and the tulle, you'll see that it's really an environmental and moral issue. Those Cinderellas you're so worried about are made of plastic--that's a petroleum product--they are manufactured most likely in Third World countries by people who make shit wages, probably via production methods that contribute to global warming, and they are marching into the stores by the millions. When the money has flowed out of our wallets and into the coffers of Disney Inc., and their top executives are enjoying the good life along pristine stretches of Malibu beach that the rest of us are banned from, and our little girls outgrow their princess phase--which they will--where do you think all those tons of plastic will wind up? Melted into a park bench? Now, that's a fantasy world for ya.

The Slog

Trying to write while one is depressed is like trying to write in a foreign language. It's like typing with mittens (and my typing skills are shot to hell, too). In two days of working on a book review, I have managed to come up with 500 not-that-great words. A whole 500.

Coal mining would be easier.

Six Years Ago Today

Suzanne:

Today is your sixth birthday, and therefore the anniversay of the day I became a Veteran Mother. The second time was tinged with nostalgia and fear and excitement: I knew this would be my last baby, I was terrified of the postpartum depression hell I had been through after Rebecca was born, and I couldn't wait to meet you. I had been waiting for you--for you, specifically--for a long time. From the moment I knew I was pregnant, I felt a leap of joy and I thought, "Oh! It's Suzanne!" There was no doubt in my mind that you were a girl, and what your name would be. (What would have happened if your father had objected? Interesting question.) The fact that you arrived at all is a mystery and a miracle; we had given up on having another baby, I was about to turn 45, and that was that. Or so we thought--and then that little double pink line showed up again, and I couldn't believe it. Didn't believe it, in fact, and when there were some signs of early trouble I resigned myself to another miscarriage. "No need to come with me," I told your dad on the day of that second sonogram. "I know what it's gonna say. I'll be fine." And then, before I'd even gotten myself settled on the table properly, the technician said, "Well, there's the heartbeat," and I had to ask her to repeat herself. Twice. I have never felt such explosive joy in my life. It was like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, the Vienna Boys Choir and the Robert Shaw Chorale had simultaneously burst into the last movement of Beethoven's Ninth, all at the same time. And nine months later, there you were: much smaller than your sister, red-faced, with an almost invisible white fuzz covering your head so that I knew right away: you would be a curly-haired girl.

Now you are six. Your nickname is Tiny Heinie, because your little tush is still small enough to fit into the palm of my hand, but that's just one of many nicknames, because you seem to collect them. Ladybug. Bunny. Babylove. Love Bug. Babychild....the list goes on. You are incapable of merely walking; you cavort, you jete, you tippytoe; the lifeguards at the pool are always yelling at you: "Slow down!" But you can't. You give great big huge crushing hugs, surprising in their strength from a creature so small. Those curls materialized, all right, and these days you fiercely refuse any effort to contain them or render them more ladylike, and the result is a tumble of hair that seems to be a physical manifestation of the energy that's bouncing around inside that little head of yours. What a beam of light you are. What uncomplicated joy you bring into our lives. What on earth were we thinking, to believe that we could ever have been complete without you?

February Looms

Dunno why, but this is the worst time of year for me. Short days, short temper, short on inspiration. And then there's the January realization that, once again, we have gone absolutely fucking insane buying gifts for the kids. We know this because half of them are still in the closet, unopened. But the Hello Kitty tent I bought seven years ago, which is held together at this point with duct tape, is still getting hauled out every week.

Next year, I swear I'm going to give my kids a package of brown paper bags and a box of crayons. Maybe I'll throw in an orange.

The ghost of Christmases past haunts me every time I open a closet around here, even though lots of my consumer excesses have gone to the Salvation Army--like the Interactive Winnie-the-Pooh we bought Rebecca for her third Christmas, which you programmed by inserting a computer chip in its butt, after typing in your child's name, the names of her friends, her favorite stories and songs, etc. I spent $100 on this thing and I was so excited about it I couldn't wait for Christmas morning. David goes up and gets Rebecca and brings her downstairs while I set up the Pooh to greet her. Rebecca was still a little groggy when this mechanical bear suddenly whirs into life and a droopy little voice says, "Hullo, Rebecca." Her response:

"EEEEEEEEEEEEEEKKKKKKKKKKKKK!!!!!!"

The Pooh never got played with. Eventually Rebecca could bring herself to touch it--she seemed to regard it as a kind of Special Education student among her regular teddy bears--but then she dropped it down a flight of stairs and the Pooh developed a clacking kind of speech impediment in his jaws and I finally ditched the thing. When I think of the $100 I spent on it I want to cry, but that's probably nothing compared to the thousands of dollars Rebecca will spend someday on a shrink, telling him/her about the time her parents tried to scare her witless.

So you'd think I'd have learned, but no: a couple of years ago we bought Suzanne a mechanical bear that asked for hugs and wanted to be fed, and had its own special bottle that it slurped from. Suzanne played with it for a day and that was that. But it was only $30.

This year Suzanne had her heart set on an interactive ballet game, which came with a battery-operated mat that told you where to put your feet and a plastic "barre" on which our budding dancer could practice. "Bo-ring" was the pronouncement. And the thing is, I knew that. I knew it before I ordered it. But, in thrall to my child and the idea that no wish go unfulfilled, I bought that piece 'o crap anyway.

And now it's Suzanne's birthday coming up. More presents. She doesn't play with half the stuff she has already. This is madness. Kid-driven, consumer madness.