I’ve always considered myself a Mom, absence of young children notwithstanding.
I look like somebody’s mother, I sound like anybody’s mother, and heaven knows I act like everybody’s mother. I advise, I worry, I scold, I applaud, and then I worry some more. As a teacher, I consider myself the mother of about 150 kids every year — and all of them are in college.
I just thank God I am not responsible for their tuition payments.
Or their janitorial services.
My students line up outside my office door at all hours, as if I were some kind of emotional ATM machine. True, I am consulted primarily about English department and university matters, but I also hear stories about family difficulties, relationship problems, and financial predicaments.
I am asked to give fashion advice (“Don’t pierce what cannot easily be unpierced” is my latest mantra). Decorating advice (“Don’t buy a futon”). Advice on how a young woman can get the best deal at a used-car lot (“Bring a guy, or at least be accompanied by a girl with a very short haircut”); also how a genuinely nice young man with no obvious scarring can convince a young woman of his acquaintance to give him the time of day (“Don’t try”).
My opinions on matters of the heart, soul, and pocketbook are sought by those not yet calloused enough to understand that, in all three areas, only the head and gut reactions of those involved actually matter. This sort of incidental mothering is one of the best things I do.
I have a suspicion that “incidental mothering” is the best lots of women are cut out to do. Not that I haven’t experienced what my friend Bonnie calls “baby lust.” (In case you are thinking “You could still have a child of your own,” I want to quote Fran Lebowitz: “Why not have your first baby at 70, when your husband is already dead and your career is over? Then you can really devote yourself to it.”)
But just as almost everybody loves kittens — even those who don’t particularly like cats — everybody loves babies — even those who would not be especially good at the daunting and demanding job of actually raising them to adulthood.
As an unbiased observer of children past the Baby-Gap stage, I can say without the risk of traumatizing any one individual: Kids, especially after they exhibit signs of their actual personalities, are exhausting. For example, Kathy, a young friend with two toddlers, is currently trying to toilet-train them. From her account of this endeavor, it is simply astonishing that any of us are walking around without wearing either Pampers or Depends. I suspect that mothers everywhere deserve far more applause than anyone in an MBAundefinedprogram has ever received for the accomplishment of helping the youth of America manage their own business.
Because I do not have small children to raise, I can also be as neurotic as I wish without fearing that a minor under my aegis will carry lifelong scars. This is important since children envision even the most normal of women as desperate creatures, which means that I would have been regarded with more than mild trepidation as a primary caregiver.
You think I’m exaggerating? Have you ever met an interesting person who declared, without hesitation, “My Mom?undefinedShe was the happiest woman you could ever meet.” No, all intelligent children believe their mothers to be, at best, unfulfilled and, at worst, worthy of portrayal by the erstwhile Tony Perkins or Tony’s mom in The Sopranos. Nobody cool ever had a happy mother. Yet few mothers have ever described themselves, at least in public, as “wildly unhappy” about the assigned role as “mom.” Line up the numbers and the meaning is clear: somebody is fibbing.
Being a mother is a tough gig. Only the strong and the patient should take the job.
