Executive Times

 

 

 

 

 

2006 Book Reviews

 

To Hell With All That by Caitlin Flanagan

Rating:

**

 

(Mildly Recommended)

 

 

 

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Housewifery

 

Fans of Caitlin Flanagan’s writing for The New Yorker will be pleased that her fine writing talent is available for enjoyment in book length with her debut, To Hell with All That. Packed with verve, opinions and occasional insights, To Hell with All That tackles the topics of motherhood, housekeeping and the many conflicting roles of women. Some readers will take her far too seriously, and those individuals are the best targets for purchasing gift copies of this book. Here’s an excerpt, from the beginning of the chapter titled, “Executive Child,” pp. 143-149:

 

 

Sometimes when I sit at my desk orchestrating my children’s lives efficiently completing hot lunch order forms and day camp applications, ordering team T-shirts and birthday party presents by the dozen I feel more like an executive assistant than a mother. My children lead lives like those of corporate vice presidents, their days planned months in advance. I have Miss Moneypenny’s romantic attachment to my little bosses, as well as her sterling loyalty and eagerness to stand in the shadows, taking pleasure in the achievements impossible with­out her steadying, invisible hand of the loved ones.

In short I am a modern mother, one whose love for her children is manifested not only in a primal concern for their safety and nurture but also in the selection of activi­ties and classes that shape the hours of their childhoods. Striking the perfect balance between structured and un­structured time is one of our central preoccupations. Intro­duce the phrase “overscheduled child” as a conversational gambit in my circle, and you’ll get an earful: it’s a damnable practice, a pox on family life, an oppressive force weighing down on all that is most cherished and magical about childhood. Yet midway through this heated oration, there is always a moment when the speaker realizes that this de­rision is hitting uncomfortably close to home. In tones at once defensive and adamant, a declaration is made: “Of course, my kids aren’t overscheduled.” Just as the defini­tion of a nymphomaniac is a person who has more sex than you, an overscheduled child is one enrolled in more classes than yours. We may cavil about the burden that all of this places on family life, but none of us is prepared to stand down: come T-ball sign-ups or tennis camp regis­tration, we’re all there, checkbooks in hand.

Theories about the evolution and meaning of this kind of parenting are legion, but in my case the enrollment of my small children in a roster of activities had nothing to do with their academic prospects or intellectual develop­ment. It had only to do with the fact that after they were born, I began losing my mind.

 

I remember the first year and a half of my children’s lives as being marked by a combination of elation and the low-level depression that dogs shut-ins the world over. My husband had taken a big corporate job to pay for the type of motherhood I had chosen to pursue, which in­volved round-the-clock worry about the babies and ex­tremely infrequent separations from them. He was gone from seven in the morning until seven or eight at night, and I was lonely.

The babies and I were invited many places to a gathering of mothers in the park, to a meeting of a twins-only playgroup at a friend’s house and I would mark these events on my calendar, sincerely intending to go to them. But when the appointed hour arrived, something always went wrong. One of the babies would suddenly demand an unscheduled feeding, or they would both sud­denly knock off into a deep sleep, which only a fool would fail to recognize as a sign from God himself that it was time to make a cup of tea and chat on the telephone. It was my friends from work whom I longed for full of gossip and talk of important matters not the mothers in the park, who were either just as depressed as I was or spilling over with talk of diapers and breast milk and colic, topics with which I was similarly obsessed but which cheered me not at all to discuss ad infinitum.

Slowly the invitations dried up, and I became one of those out-of-sync, somewhat pitiable mothers, patrolling the streets with my enormous stroller during odd hours, spending far too much time in front of the television in my zip-front chenille bathrobe, getting in trouble at Star-bucks for letting the babies pull bags of coffee off the rack while I was reading. My sister called from London and tactfully suggested I get a weekend babysitter and go out with my husband a little more often. My mother thought I should go back to work. People were starting to get a little worried about me.

And then one day I managed to get the three of us to the Westside Pavilion shopping mall for a desperately needed change of pace. We were performing a tour of in­spection of the top floor, when I caught sight of several mothers purposefully pushing their strollers through the double doors of an establishment I’d never noticed be­fore. I rolled my own stroller over and took a curious look at the yellow letters painted on the plate glass window: TUMBLE CAMP. It turned out to be a children’s gym, with classes starting for babies as young as six months. I’d heard of such places, but I had thought they were for older children. Inside I was given a roster of classes, in­formed that tuition was nonrefundable, and shown the elaborate security procedures, whereby individual name tags would be printed by the computer every lime we took a class. I joined immediately.

If motherhood abruptly wrested me from the world of adult enterprise, Tumble Camp put me back in busi­ness. It restored to me many of the things I had missed from work: an inflexible schedule, a sense of purpose, and colleagues engaged in a common pursuit. The classes were blessedly short and as focused as a board meeting: we sang a song, the mothers jollied the children through an obstacle course that changed every week, there was some free time, and then there was a good-bye song and hand stamps for the kids. The program was supposed to incul­cate skills in the children balance and coordination, and so on but I knew that was a bunch of hooey. Every normally developing kid gains those skills naturally if he spends enough time in a playground or a backyard. But I wasn’t there to improve the children; they were already perfect as far as I was concerned. ‘What I liked was that I had a series of climate-controlled, time-limited, intensive little seminars to go to and a way of imposing structure on the endless, ungraspable days of early parenthood.

In due time I discovered that Tumble Camp was not the only game in town. There were also classes at outfits called Fit for Kids and Bright Child, and I enrolled in them, too. Our church nursery school offered a parent­-toddler program once a week, which turned out to be a kind of pre-preschool, its core philosophy reminding me of the old Texas expression, “I’m fixin’ to get ready to start.” The zoo had classes for toddlers, as did the Natural History Museum and the YMCA. Before long we had something to do every day of the week; sometimes we had to eat lunch at McDonald’s or the mall food court because we had two engagements. The boys, I’m sure, would have been just as happy with a daily trip to the park, but they took to the new routine willingly enough, and some of the classes we loved. We took Music and Mo-lion from a beautiful young woman known to us as Miss Simona, and we all became quite taken with her. Patrick would murmur her name when he was falling asleep, and I would think of her brown eyes and complicated per­sonal life (her husband had recently left her) whenever I played one of the two sing-along cassettes she had sold to us for forty dollars.

My life began to improve. The babies learned the one thing none of the classes taught how to talk and with that my loneliness began to abate. One day when I was loading the backpack for class, I sneezed, and from somewhere down near the floor a tiny voice said, “Bless you.” In that moment I realized that what my shrink had been telling me every week was in fact true: the babies would get older; things would get easier. On a sunny Oc­tober day the boys started nursery school five mornings a week. When I walked through my front door after drop­ping them off, my footsteps echoed on the hardwood floors of the empty house, and I realized that a chapter of my life had come to an end. I gave away the chenille robe and took the safety rails off the boys’ beds. A few months later, when I was tidying up, I found one of Miss Simona’s cassettes in a kitchen drawer, and I threw it in the trash. We had emerged.

 

If you find the excerpt entertaining, chances are you’ll enjoy the rest of To Hell With All That. If you thought of a particular person when you read the excerpt, buy the book for that person.

 

Steve Hopkins, July 26, 2006

 

 

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The recommendation rating for this book appeared

 in the August 2006 issue of Executive Times

 

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