Off The Night Table

Motherhood by the Book

This is one of the "Off The Night Table" columns I wrote for the late lamented Metropole magazine. The reason for the shocking shortness is that my challenge for these columns was to discuss several books on the same subject in a thousand words or less. The good part was that the books didn't have to be in print -- that's where we got the name for the column; the bad part was that I can't write a note to my husband asking him to please pick up some milk on the way home in under a thousand words. So every month I'd write this huge bloated essay and then have to "trim" it, feeling as if I were amputating my own limbs in the process. I did learn something about concision, which I forgot as soon as I decently could.

I am not a parenting-manual kind of parent. My collection of mothering manuals consists of works by authors who agree with me, or books I can laugh at.

I read the first of them years before I had a child: Immaculate Deception: A New Look at Women and Childbirth in America, by Suzanne Arms. Arms wrote brilliantly and fervently about the abuses of the modern American birth: the high cesarean rates, the indifferent postpartum care, the abundance of unnecessary medical interventions, the depressingly low numbers of breastfeeding mothers. That was some thirty years ago. Very little has changed, as Arms points out in her recent follow-up Immaculate Deception II: Myth, Magic, & Birth. When she wrote her first book, the information she presented was largely unavailable. Now it's just unavailing.

Of course, the good news doesn't stop at birth. Once you're a parent, your life is completely crushed into an unrecognizable fragment of its former self. For notes on the emotional and physical toll of this destruction, check out The Mask of Motherhood by Susan Maushart. For details on the financial and social ruin, see The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World is Still the Least Valued, by Ann Crittenden. Then go find The Baby Boon: How Family-Friendly America Cheats The Childless by that bitch Elinor Burkett, just so you'll have someone other than yourself you want to kill.

But cheer up. Read "I'll Never Have Sex With You Again!": Tales From The Delivery Room. My favorite story is about a woman whose delivery nurse found out that the laboring woman's husband was a director. So the nurse starts pitching a screenplay she's written -- a lovely Texas Chainsaw Massacre kind of thing. My extra favorite story is about a man who thought he was being "the understanding, sensitive male" during his wife's labor. He lovingly explains that apparently she's in transition, just like they learned about in Lamaze. Before he can blink, she decks him one right in the face. "They didn't teach that in Lamaze, did they?" she inquires.

But I was speaking, initially, of advice books. I mostly can't read current ones, but I enjoy the really really old ones -- the ones that give sober advice on how and where to hire the best wet nurses, say. My husband, on a trip to England, picked up an ancient black volume called The Mother at Home; or, The Principles of Maternal Duty, by the Reverend John S. C. Abbott. It actually has some decent advice, about how you should never lie to your kids or tell them to or not to do something without a backup plan in case they're feeling ornery; but for the most part, it's so extreme that I can read it feeling safely removed from reality. I mean, these days most advice books are telling you to relax, calm down, take it easy on yourself. Not this one, guys. If you don't do your job exactly right, your innocent little daughter will grow up to lose her virtue (he wouldn't go into any detail on that one, so I'm not a hundred percent sure what it means, but it does sound nasty) and your son might become just like a boy the author knew of, who was such a fiend to his poor widowed mother that he eventually burned down her house (with her in it, natch) and was locked away in a cell where he promptly dug out his own eyes. So get on the ball, moms.

There are a few more recent advice books worth looking into. One of them is called Special Delivery, edited and partially written by Shirley Jackson, and like much of her work extremely out of print. The best piece in it is Jackson's "Who is Boss?", about a weekend spent with "a family in which the two small children were being brought up entirely by the force of reason," God help us all. The other book is Miss Manners' Guide to Rearing Perfect Children, by Judith Martin. Martin, like Jackson, is firmly against the idea that children are adorable little noble savages. "We are all born ignorant and oafish," she says bluntly. "What infant ever considers, when it can't sleep, that someone else might want to?" Her book is full of practical advice for those struggling to civilize their offspring, and manages to be joltingly funny in the bargain. Good reading for those nights you're stuck sitting up with an untired baby or a toddler with a croupy cough. Just keep it away from the childless. We don't want to scare them off.

Got a question or comment?
Write to the Book Lady.

If you found this essay helpful,
please visit the Filthy Lucre page