Ayelet Waldman’s Bad Mommy and Michael Lewis’ Home Game

Welcome to "Threeway," a regular Double X discussion feature in which three contributors dissect politics and culture from distinct points of view. Our first discussion among Hanna Rosin, Stephen Metcalf, and Meghan O'Rourke is about three recent parenting memoirs. This is part 2. Read part 1 here [2] and part 3 here [3].

Hanna [2], Meghan,

Before I take up the specifics of your post, I should lay out what kind of father I am, and what kind of household constellation my wife, my children, and I have made. First, my wife is a corporate lawyer whose work is less flexible, more demanding, and vastly more lucrative than mine. We fell naturally into a more or less 50-50 split as parents, though the sad truth is, my wife—because she is the wife, my wife, or a born manager?—creates the organizational framework of our children’s (two daughters) existence: She buys their clothes (an on-the-fly LSAT problem by which you handicap caprices of shifting taste and growth spurting), books their after school classes, and lays out the calendar of appointments and obligations, and on and on, by which a modern child makes his or her way through early life. I’m boots on the ground: I take them to said doctors, I make them dinner, I load and unload the dishwasher, I changed diapers when our girls were babies, I take them to the park on spring afternoons.

This division of responsibility was both organic and present, by implication, in my relationship with my wife from its very beginning. She was traditionally ambitious, I am not. Or put another way: To have been an absentee father without being a deadbeat one, I would have to marry a woman I would never have married, and taken a job I never would have taken.

Having framed my answers, let me boil the part of your post directed at me, the token father, down to three related questions. First, an ungendered question: Why does parenting appear to be shot through, with every successive generation, with more and more guilt-ridden second-guessing? Then a very gendered one: Do women still bear most of the brunt of this, and if so, why? And finally: Is the Lewis book a sign that the neurosis of parenting, like the neurosis over weight gain and looks erosion, is now finally transferring over to men?

My own pet theory about the heightened intensity of parental neurosis is a mash-up of three genuinely great books (I should say here, I find all three books we’re discussing to be useless trash). Ann Hulbert’s book Raising America takes the reader through a century of child rearing theories, and has the unexpected result of casting a Zen-like balm over your own worries—as you read about how preposterously fucked up and over-determined pretty much every parental choice has been since the Edwardians, it’s kinda hard to get too excited about your own. (‘Twas ever thus, shantih shantih, or somesuch.) The second is Barbara Ehrenreich’s masterful Fear of Falling, which describes the uniquely anxious state of being middle class, and how a fear of loss of status focuses especially intensely on one’s children, who, courtesy of the meritocracy, are not guaranteed to reproduce your social class. And the final one is the sadly mostly forgotten Haven in a Heartless World, in which Christopher Lasch describes the creation of a professional apparatus of experts meant to exploit this fear.

To sum up: The more fragmented, individualistic and competitive a society, the more the common institutions with at least some child-rearing function—the church, the public school, the actual village—decay, the more the responsibility for the life outcome of your child is both radically unsure, and yours alone. That is an awesome responsibility, and until recently it was Lasch’s experts—parenting clinicians like Spock and Ferber—who rushed into to fill the vacuum created by the loss of the village. But the experts have come to seem cold and judgmental; a relic of another time. In the place of the technicians now come the ostensible sympathizers, peer-like voices that produce a kind of writing which is not really writing at all, to my mind: an Eat, Pray, Love style of channeling the anxieties and aspirations of a mass-reading audience. Waldman’s is pitched to the aspirations: I am wealthy, well-connected, famously married, yet I have these issues too! Armstrong is pitched to the anxieties, and carried off by the supposed hilarities of the harried Everywoman.

Michael Lewis is another matter. Can this “Guy Guy” charmingly stand in for the millions of new fathers coming online, who are saddled by the legacy of feminism? Lewis sells a story the way he no doubt once sold bonds: with an easygoing charm (that word again) that slyly suggests, “if you believe every word I say, hey, that’s on you.” I say this as a fan of his work—though the fandom is as slight as the work. A Lewis book is lightly felt, lightly delivered, and structured around an ingenious and feel-good premise (Moneyball being one good example) that a few minutes of light cogitating can dismantle. One’s feelings for Lewis finally deepen a little when he takes on fatherhood. Can he appropriate what for me is a total existential journey whose joys and agonies shook me out of my lifelong moon calving, and turn it into a package of Staypuff anecdotes? Of course he can; but not without making me hate him.

For me, parenthood has been a total engagement with life. I find it brutal, grueling, harrowing, and as a result, truly joyful. I do not especially want that experience taken from me, rinsed through a breezy journalese, then tarted up with some larfs about the haughty eccentricities of the French. I do not think Lewis’s book bodes well for the future of the genre. If a father has made his way into 2009 as an absentee, he doesn’t care to read about what he’s been missing; if he is in the shit, as we’re fond of saying in my house, then to have someone else’s self-regard steal the experience from you, for fun and profit, is kind of a non-starter.

Meghan, I’m curious how all this hits the ear of someone for whom children is still in the future? Do these books, such books, and the stories from the frontline told by your friends, make you feel about the prospects of parenting? Do these books hold anything but academic interest to someone without kids?

Read Meghan's response here. [3]