All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood (27 page)

Over the years, she has also been forced to reckon with the financial consequences of her decision to stay at home. She recalls one of the road trips she took with Mae in her junior year, touring some of the schools in New York State’s university system. They quarreled bitterly. Mae thought the quality of some of them was so low that it was a waste of time to apply. “And I was saying, you’d
better,
” says Gayle. Those colleges were what she and her husband, who owns a small mail-order business, could realistically afford.

As Mae was growing up, Gayle conveyed to her the idea that she could go to any college she wanted, so long as she worked hard enough. It was a useful illusion, one spun primarily out of love—to make Mae feel secure, to make her feel optimistic, to make her feel confident and powerful and motivated in a world that is in fact sometimes scary and hard to navigate. “You raise children to think the world of possibilities is theirs,” says Gayle. “And we somehow think, ‘Oh, we’ll make enough money,’ or, ‘Oh, they’ll get in on a soccer scholarship.’ And then, all of a sudden, they’re eighteen and it’s like, ‘Oh no, you can’t go to college there.’ ”

On that road trip, Mae called her mother’s bluff. She assessed with a gimlet eye the limitations of the world around her and declared she didn’t like them. That was when Gayle realized that this spell she’d cast, this story she’d so lovingly told, was perhaps as much for her own benefit as it was for Mae’s. “We,” she tells me, “had been living in that dream world too.”

ERIK ERIKSON, ONE OF
the most innovative psychoanalysts of the twentieth century, wrote about these moments of existential review in his work on the human life cycle. He famously argued that all of us go through eight stages of development, each marked by a specific conflict. That he thought to extend his model to include adult life—to even conceive of adulthood as a series of hiccups and pivots rather than an unbroken forward march—has given his theory remarkable staying power, and the stages of adulthood he identified are very relatable. In early adulthood, he argues, we must learn how to love rather than vanish in a mist of narcissism and self-protection. In mid-adulthood, he says, we must figure out how to lead productive lives and leave something behind for future generations rather than succumb to inertia (“generativity versus stagnation,” he calls it). And following that, the challenge becomes learning how to make peace with the experiences we’ve had and the various choices we’ve made rather than capitulate to bitterness (“integrity versus despair and disgust”).

Some modern researchers believe that these adult stages are overstated, even fanciful inventions. But the parents of adolescents often describe them to the letter. They talk, as Gayle did, about hoping to fight off stagnation going forward, though they face a diminished range of career options. And they talk, as Gayle did, about looking backward and integrating the choices they’ve made into a narrative they can live with. In Erikson’s words: “It is the acceptance of one’s one and only life cycle and of the people who have become significant to it as something that had to be and that, by necessity, permitted of no substitutions.”

Women may be especially susceptible to these moments of self-reckoning. According to the 2010 Current Population Survey, 22 percent of all parents of twelve- to seventeen-year-olds are now fifty or over, and 46 percent of them are forty-five and over. What this means, practically speaking, is that a substantial number of today’s mothers of adolescents are either in perimenopause—experiencing hot flashes, sleep disruptions, and changes in sexual desire—or in menopause itself. Many women pass through this stage with little turmoil, just as many adolescents pass through puberty with little ado. But others struggle with melancholy and irritability, seeing in their condition a mirror image of their teenagers, whose fertile years are just beginning. (A pair of well-designed studies from 2006 found that the risk of depression during perimenopause either doubles or quadruples, depending on whose numbers you consult.)

Gayle, happily, says that she loves seeing her daughters bloom. It’s a form of compensation rather than a rebuke. “I get a lot of pleasure watching them change from girls to women,” she says. “Their sexuality doesn’t bother me at all. Being closer to death does. I just think,
God, I’m old.
”

She isn’t old. She’s just fifty-three. Still, she gestures toward the living room, where Eve is sitting. Gayle had her at thirty-eight. “I look at her,” she says, “and I think,
When I was her age, it was almost forty years ago.
”

REGRET SHOWS UP IN
all kinds of strange dress. Sometimes it comes out purely as questions about oneself—the career one should have pursued, the lifestyle choices one should have made, the spouse one should or shouldn’t have chosen. The mere presence of adolescents in the house, still brimming with potential, their futures still an unclaimed colony (“My girls are about to make choices of their own,” Gayle told me), sets off a fantastical reverie of what-ifs.

But sometimes this regret comes in the form of doubts over how we’ve raised our children—over parenting itself. This regret can be subtle, and not necessarily about things we’ve consciously chosen to do. Some of the worst pain, in fact, can stem from the things we
failed
to do, or the errors we made that our kids have seen, or the rotten habits we failed to conceal and our kids have now made their own or decided very aggressively to reject. Children bear witness to some of our most shameful behaviors and worst mistakes. Most parents can tell you with grim precision what they were, and the pain those habits and episodes inflicted.

It doesn’t help that adolescents often take a harsh, unnuanced view of their parents’ flaws and mistakes. It becomes the device they use to push their parents away—to distinguish themselves (“I will not become you”), or “individuate,” as a psychologist would say. They know how to transform their worldview into a weapon, into observations very precisely tailored to hurt. One of Calliope’s go-to phrases that she sometimes uses to hurt her mother, Samantha says, is to tell her that she has turned into her own mother—and the last person Samantha would like to be is her mother, whom she considers terribly cold and neglectful. During one argument, Calliope even called Samantha by her mother’s name. “I knew that was hitting below the belt,” Calliope says.

The most profound parenting regrets I hear, though, come from Michael, Carl’s father and Beth’s ex-husband. When we sit down to speak, I can tell that Michael isn’t the kind of guy who
really
regrets. He considers himself a lucky man, all in all, and believes that his kids will ultimately sense his good intentions. But when his kids are giving him grief, his mind loops back to the days when he and his ex-wife were hammering out the terms of their divorce and he failed to press her for joint custody. “It would have been a fight in court, it would have continued the circle of fighting, it didn’t make sense,” he says. “But I can still regret it.”

He knows he’s paid a price for it, especially with his older daughter, Sarah. “My relationship with her has always been fractured,” he says. “We’ve never been totally comfortable together.” He recalls the day a couple of years ago when she graduated from high school. There she was, radiant and full-grown, a young woman who’d gone to a great public high school and gotten a near-f scholarship to an even finer private college—his own daughter! he never even
went
to college—yet he felt awkward, estranged, grounded amid a swarm of airborne balloons. “The graduation’s over,” he remembers, “and it’s like, ‘Okay, where’s everybody going?’ And the answer is, ‘Everyone goes to Mom’s.’ ” He gestures away from himself, to an imaginary other location—
Mom’s.
“So I’m over here”—he points to himself—“all dressed up, thinking,
I can probably invite myself, but it’s not going to happen.
It’s almost a feeling of . . . helplessness. She’s my daughter too.” He can’t talk about it without detaching a bit, switching from the first to the second person. “It’s like you’re not part of this,” he says. He reflects on this sentiment and then owns up to it. “That’s how I felt. Like I wasn’t part of this.”

And when his son, Carl, is feeling cruel, or angry, or even merely defensive, “he’ll say, ‘Sarah doesn’t want to see you; she doesn’t like you,’ ” says Michael. “If he wants to throw me off, that’s pretty much where he starts.” Michael means it when he says, “starts.” These assaults sometimes escalate in unbearable ways. “It’s like having an argument with one of your friends who’s being vicious,” says Michael. “And then, you sit around and think,
Does what he said apply? Does it not apply?
” And in some cases, Michael decides, it does. “He’s made me cry before,” Michael admits.

outcomes

Gayle’s middle and youngest daughters, fourteen and seventeen, are easygoing and placid. They may have their moments of adolescent testiness, but they usually speak with affection when they’re around their mother, and this morning they move quietly through the kitchen, taking up their morning chores without complaint.

And then there’s Mae, who also spends time with us in the kitchen. She’s a lovely-looking girl, a long-stem rose like her sisters, but the air around her vibrates; there’s a sense of vigilance about her, a worry, as if she already knows the road ahead will be hard. She’s my kind of girl, truth be told. Anyone who has early intimations of life’s difficulties is my kind of kid. I was that kind of adolescent myself.

“Am I peeling?” She turns around and shows her mom her back. She, like both sisters, is wearing a tank top; she also sports a discreet stud in her nose.

Her mother answers that she isn’t.

Mae was always different. Gayle could see she was an anxious kid, even at five. In fifth grade, when cliques started to form, Mae was having trouble with her best friend, Calliope, Samantha’s kid, and there was little that Gayle could do to ease her anguish. “Mae would have this thing, where Calliope was mad at her; she didn’t know why,” recalls Gayle. “So she’d follow her around and say, ‘What did I do?’ And I’d have to say, ‘Do not do that.’ ” Just the memory of it makes her cringe, both reexperiencing her daughter’s misery and knowing she had to let her cope with it on her own.

Then, in eighth grade, Mae started cutting herself. Gayle didn’t know anyone else whose child struggled with the same problem, though she’d heard and read plenty about it; this was an enlightened generation of parents in an enlightened community. So Gayle did what she could: she found her daughter a therapist to talk to, and she learned to listen and, when appropriate, to offer advice. And her daughter got better. Looking at her now, you see a pretty, extraordinarily thoughtful kid who’s gotten herself almost a full ride through a great university.

But looking at Mae, one also sees fairly clearly what Adam Phillips means in
On Balance
when he says that happiness is an unfair thing to ask of a child. The expectation casts children “as antidepressants,” he notes, and renders parents “more dependent on their children than their children are on them.”

Just as important, Mae is a good example of why producing happy children may not be fair to ask of
parents.
It’s a beautiful goal—one I’ve readily admitted to having myself—but as Dr. Spock points out, raising happy children is an elusive aim compared to the more concrete aims of parenting in the past: creating competent children in certain kinds of work; and creating morally responsible citizens who will fulfill a prescribed set of community obligations.

The fact is, those bygone goals are probably more constructive—and achievable. Not all children will grow up to be happy, in spite of their parents’ most valiant efforts, and all children are unhappy somewhere along the way, no matter how warmly they’re nurtured or how stoutly they’re protected. There are, in the end, crude limits to how much parents can do to shield their children from the sharper and less forgiving parts of life—which, as adolescents, they stumble on far more regularly. “For a child growing up,” Phillips writes, “life is by definition full of surprises; the adult tries to keep these as surprises, rather than as traumas, through a devoted attentiveness. But sane parenting always involves a growing sense of how little, as well as how much, one can protect one’s child from; of just how little a life can be programmed.”

To this day, Mae feels things more deeply than her peers. And Gayle, possessed of a calm, unfussy Midwesterner’s temperament, does not blame herself for this, as perhaps another parent might. She has as much compassion for herself as any mother can expect to have, knowing she’s done all she can humanly do for her daughter. “It’s not that I feel inadequate as a mother,” she tells me. “I feel the inadequacy as a human to solve
any
other human’s problems. You can only help another person so much.” But that doesn’t mean it’s easy. When I ask if she’s learned how to better cope with having an anxious child over the years, she answers immediately: “No.”

AND YET HOW PROUD
Gayle is of Mae! How amazed, how full of admiration! There came a moment when I mentioned Erik Erikson out loud, wondering if Gayle had ever heard of him. Gayle said he sounded familiar, but no, not really. Mae, who’d been silently lingering at the kitchen counter, left the kitchen, went upstairs, and retrieved a copy of a book by Erikson, which she’d been reading for psych class. She plunked it down in front of her mother. Then she quietly left the room.

Gayle smiled at me.

“That’s the kind of thing you live for,” she said. “You
want
them to be better than you. You want them to be smarter and do more things and know more things.” She picked up the book and scanned both its front and back cover. She’d already mentioned to me that she loves Mae’s writing, loves her mind. “Gosh. I didn’t read this when I was twenty.”

And that’s just it. In spite of our mistakes, here they are, thoughtful and accomplished human beings, gesticulating with our mannerisms and standing at our height.