Marya and Nick approached the Jewish question with a lot less emotion. “So I said to Nick,” said Marya, “that I’m perfectly willing to bring up our children as Jews if he’ll just agree to raise them as Giant fans. And Nick said, ‘No, we’ll bring them up as Giant and Redskin fans, and when they’re eighteen they’ll get to choose for themselves.’”
Nathaniel and Benjamin, the theology of football notwithstanding, will—it’s been agreed—be raised as Jews.
Needless to say, determining what it means to “be raised as Jews” can be rather tricky, with O overheard explaining matter-offactly to a playmate, “My daddy’s Jewish and my mommy’s Christmas.” But yesterday she came home from camp announcing she’d just learned a new foreign language, “Oy vey.” Milton and I will continue to keep our mouths shut.
One striking aspect of two married couples living together in the same house over time is that we become witnesses to each other’s marriage. We hear each other’s irritated “yes, dears.” We notice each other’s cold glances and stormy brows. We read the subtext of unspoken resentments. We vibrate to the urgency that’s buried beneath a quiet, “I need you here—now.” And if the marriage we’re witnessing belongs to our very own son and daughter-in-law, we’re paying more than ordinary attention.
But along with taking note of the expectable everyday tensions of married life, Milton and I are having the pleasure of seeing, day after day, what a mutually loving, respectful, modern, truly egalitarian marriage looks like. And we’re giving ourselves some credit for what we see.
Just last week, in fact, when I was rinsing off some saucers and cups in the sink, Alexander walked into the kitchen and, in mock amazement, stopped dead and stared. “No offense, Mom,” he said, “but I think this may be the first time in my life that I’ve ever actually seen you washing dishes.”
He exaggerates, of course. But not by much. For when he was growing up—in a household four-fifths of which was male—the prevailing rule was Women Don’t Do Dishes. And having watched his father, with equal adroitness, put on an apron and whip up breakfast, or put on a baseball mitt and field a ball, or put him to bed while I finished writing an article, he (and both of his brothers) acquired a broadened, enlightened view of what it really meant to be a man.
Now I’m not prepared to claim that Milton and I have a “truly egalitarian” marriage. But he was, from the start, more involved with the house and the kids, with the domestic side of life, than any other husband that I knew. And if he believed that women were born with a gene that, unlike men, equipped them to tolerate changing dirty diapers, there were plenty of other things he was willing to do. Well before the Women’s Movement was raising men’s consciousness, my husband knew that in order for our family, with three children and two working parents, to stay afloat, he had to pitch in.
Alexander does more than pitch in. He does half. And he does it without being told what he has to do. And, unlike many husbands and wives, who stake out separate realms of expertise—the daddy barbecues, the mom wipes bottoms; the daddy does playgrounds, the mom does pediatricians—both he and Marla can, and do, do it all.
Milton and I watch with awe when Marla goes straight from work to dinner with a client while Alexander takes full charge of the kids—making pasta, changing diapers, giving baths, putting on pajamas, reading separate stories to Isaac and O, providing them each with a final bottle or sippy cup or juice box, and then persuading them to go to sleep. We also watch with awe when Marla, taking pity some mornings on Alexander, lets him ride his beloved bike to his office while she, cool and polished in her size-zero suit and swept-up hair, takes full charge of some often recalcitrant kids—getting them fed and dressed, and loading and locking them into the car, and then (this, of course, is during rush-hour traffic) driving first to Olivia’s camp and then to Toby and Isaac’s day-care center and then to her office.
Is all of this always accomplished with sweetness and light and a touch of humor and great good nature? Certainly not. There is grumpiness. Sulky silences. Frustration. And sometimes, when Marla or Alexander inquires of the other, “Are you okay?” the answer is a snarky, “Okay? Why shouldn’t I be okay? You’re walking out and leaving me with three children.”
If Marla and Alexander have been having more ferocious exchanges than that, they obviously have been doing so out of our earshot. We’ve never once heard them conducting a serious fight, though Milton and I have engaged in one or two, or three or four, during their residence. But we held them behind closed doors, replacing our usual snarls and roars with hisses and whispers, sparing our children the knowledge that after forty-six years of marriage all marital conflicts may not yet be resolved. I must confess, however, that on a couple of occasions I’ve been tempted to get Alexander and Marla involved, tempted to offer them absolute proof of the rightness of my position and, in my closing arguments, to persuade them to convict and sentence Milton. (And maybe even award me emotional damages.) Luckily, before I went public—though justice was on my side—I got a grip on myself.
It is our observation that our son and our daughter-in-law already have a pretty good grip on themselves.
Another observation we’ve made about Marla and Alexander, but it’s also true of our other two sons and their wives, is that they almost always choose to socialize as a family with other families rather than ditch the children and go out on a weekend date with other couples. This lack of what, when Milton and I were the parents of young kids, we called “grown-up time,” is surely due in part to economics, for what with the high price of baby-sitters and just about everything else, even a fast-food dinner and a movie can wind up costing a hundred dollars. But maybe some other reasons for the absence of grown-up time are two-career guilt and current childrearing theories, which may be persuading parents that they can’t possibly be good parents unless they spend every free moment with their children. Oh, and one more thing: We’ve noticed that fifteen minutes after the kids fall asleep, their exhausted parents are ready for bedtime too.
Leaving only JuJu and Papa, the wide-awake septuagenarians, ready to party.
In the second half of August, Steve and Jeannette drove down from Manhattan for a visit, upping the resident grown-ups temporarily to six and changing the balance of power to a mighty two adults for every child. Our plan was to play with the children, wear out the children, put them to bed, and then for us six to enjoy some grown-up time.
Jeannette, who started out as a friend of Nick’s, has been part of our family for what seems forever, having moved here from Taiwan and living with us while she went to school, and growing so dear to our hearts that she became our sons’ “almost sister” as well as an “almost daughter” to Milton and me. Although she had been in no rush, there came a time she was ready to marry, but none of the men she was meeting seemed to be what any of us considered husband material. And so I telephoned Phyllis, whom I have known since age seventeen, and asked about the status of her son Steve, and learning that he was single, unengaged, and marriage-minded, I told her she had to tell him that he had to call Jeannette immediately. There was a little resistance on Phyllis’s part (“Everybody wants to fix him up”) and a little resistance on Steve’s part (“Do I want my mom and her girlfriend to fix me up?”) and then he called. The rest, including a beaming Milton walking Jeannette down the aisle, is history.
I want to take a moment here to say that I think it’s our duty—everyone’s duty—to fix up single women and single men, preferably for purposes of matrimony. We who actually know them surely are better than those computer dating services at figuring out their potential compatibility, plus it’s exceedingly unlikely that any person we fix up is going to turn out to be a serial killer. Fixing up women and men has its risks—“How desperate do you think I am?” “That was your idea of a nice human being?”—but we shouldn’t be discouraged by matchmaking failures or even by matchmaking catastrophes. For eventually, like me, you may after many misses make the perfect match, turning two people?
??two strangers who wouldn’t have met if we had minded our own business—into one quite happily married couple.
And now the happy couple is spending three nights on the floor of Milton’s second-floor office, where, they insist, they sleep better—buffered by quilts and sleeping bags—than they ever do in their bed back home in New York. They are, as they always are, quite perfect houseguests.
Olivia, who’s in love with her uncle Steve and her aunt Jeannette—whom she calls by her Chinese name, Aunt Ching Yi—hangs out with them every moment they’re around, making only one wistful complaint: “How come they always sleep so late in the morning?” This means O is waiting impatiently, bursting with questions to ask and games to play, when they wander down to breakfast at 8:30, so eager to be in their presence that, given the choice between swimming with them or getting her ears pierced, she chooses swimming.
I sit by the pool with Toby, who’s happily chomping on the fist he has stuffed in his mouth, as Olivia, with some final instructions from Milton, demonstrates her back flip for Steve and Jeannette, and Isaac is introduced to total immersion underwater in the sheltering arms of his mother and his dad. Listening to the grown-ups shouting, “Good job,” and O and Isaac yelping with pleasure, while a soft breeze blows through this flawless summer day, I am full of smiles and tears at the same time, full of the difficult knowledge that I can’t, as a poet once put it, “cage the minute within its nets of gold.” I am achingly aware of the fragility of these fleeting sunlit moments, set as they are within a wider world of deprivation and danger and grief. And I am achingly aware of how very little I can do (though I have to keep doing it) to try to make the world better for my children, for their children, for everyone’s children.
At which point Toby produces a major poop, effectively putting a pungent end to smiles, tears, poetry, and aching awareness.
On Sunday night Alexander and Steve took complete charge of dinner from drinks to dessert, and the six of us did indeed have some grown-up time, though, having exhausted ourselves in the process of trying to wear out the children, we were ready to head to bed by ten o’clock. On Monday, Steve and Jeannette drove back to New York, and later that day I said to O, “Tell me, what was your favorite part of their visit.” She thought about this for a while and then replied with a satisfied smile, “Everything.”
Everyone in the house, it seemed, was satisfied with everything. But satisfaction here has a very short shelf life.
On Tuesday morning, coming down to the kitchen unusually early, I opened the door without turning off the alarm, causing it to ring out loud and long on the third floor and scaring the hell out of everybody up there. Alexander, who hates our alarm precisely because people fail to turn it off, roared with outrage from the top of the stairs, “Do you ever frighten bad guys with that [many expletives deleted] alarm? Or do you only frighten good guys, like us?”
All this before we even got to breakfast.
And at breakfast total chaos descended, with Isaac screaming for incomprehensible reasons and Olivia engaged in a world-class sulk and a yowling Toby repudiating his pacifier, his bottle, and his bowl of warmed rice cereal both with and without bananas and applesauce.
“We should have slept late today,” Milton whispered to me, as we tried unsuccessfully to be helpful. “Oh, yes,” I whispered back in sympathy, reminding myself that there definitely are minutes I don’t want to cage within their nets of gold.
CHAPTER FIVE
Where Have All the Playpens Gone?
Milton is out of town for the night and I’ve immediately acquired another bed partner. It’s Olivia, with whom I have arranged, in my husband’s absence, a sleepover date. Instead of spending the night on the third floor with her mother and father and her two brothers, she is happily snuggled underneath my quilt, having already showered with me, picked us a movie to watch, and convinced me that while we’re lying here in our nighties watching Ice Age, we ought to be fortified with a couple of lollipops.
It is all quite cozy.
But O doesn’t want me popping out of bed every now and then to do a few chores across the hall in my office. Nor does she even want me on the floor right next to the bed knocking off some crunches and some leg lifts. She expects me instead to be spending every minute at her side, watching the movie and sucking my lollipop. She expects, and she is getting, my full attention.
Meanwhile, Marla is giving Toby a bath and because he loves it so much they linger, filling the room with the sound of splashing and squeals. And Alexander wrestles with Isaac, whose current state of desperate discontent is being expressed in operatic decibels. Each of us, in other words, is occupied completely with one child, which seems to be all, at the moment, we can handle. So how do just two parents handle three?
How did we?
I’m convinced that raising children was much easier when Milton and I raised our children. Not easy, heaven knows, but a lot less difficult than it seems to be today. I remember, for instance, piling hordes of kids—maybe eight or nine kids—into the front, back, and way back of our small station wagon, back in those good old bad old days before the use of seat belts and car seats was mandatory. Now, however, loading and locking the children into the car strikes me as a deeply daunting experience involving, as it does, all kinds of straps that cross over and under thrashing limbs and then buckle tightly in inaccessible places. I wonder if parents of Alexander and Marla’s generation register how tough it is to simply get their kids in and out of the car, though watching Milton and me as we bitch and moan and growl at each other might give them a hint. For the klutziness we demonstrate in attempting to extricate Toby from his bouncy seat is pitifully on display when we’re installing him or Isaac or O in a car (and equally on display when we’re removing them). Slow learners doesn’t even begin to describe us.
“Please, Isaac,” I’ll sometimes whine, “you know where this damn—I mean, darn—strap goes, so work with me, won’t you?” But Isaac, whose arm or leg or neck I’m inadvertently twisting, is usually in too much pain to help. And Olivia, when she offers assistance—“No JuJu, Papa, no! You do it like this!”—does so in the same exasperated tone of voice that her father uses when showing us, yet again, how to set the clock on our TV. Not surprisingly, Milton and I, when we’re baby-sitting our grandchildren, avoid—whenever possible—going anywhere we can’t get to on foot.
We acknowledge, of course, that car seats save children from injury and death and recognize, though we grumble, their necessity. But when it comes to another basic change in child-care equipment—the disappearance, the banishment, of the playpen—we simply cannot fathom why the parents of young children have permitted this.
We need a national Bring Back the Playpen movement. I’ve already written lyrics for a “Where Have All the Playpens Gone?” national song. Milton and I reject the misguided argument that playpens are cages for children (though cages are where certain children we’ve met belong). And though it’s too late for Isaac and O, we’d like to succeed in bringing back the playpen in time for Toby and all the significant grown-ups in his life to reap its benefits. Which are, as Milton and I recall from our days as the grateful parents of playpenned children, as follows:
The playpen provides a clean, well-lighted place, a small room of one’s own, where a crawling child can be—from time to time in the course of a day—safely and, we insist, happily deposited. Equipped with toys, stuffed animals, and other entertainments, the playpen enables a child to play, explore, practice standing and sitting, examine the world without encountering possibly fatal temptations and thus without having to hear a prohibiting “Stop!” or “Get away from that!” or “No!” Ensconced in his own private space, he learns to entertain and even to soothe himself while the grown-ups, unencumbered, eat a meal, make a bed, do the dishes, read a newspaper, and even go to the bathroom all by themselves. Indeed, I’d like to recommend as the motto of this Bring Back the Playpen movement, a stirring Free to Pee—Not You, Just Me.
There
are those who’ll undoubtedly argue that my advocacy of the playpen is actually a form of child abuse, a callous disregard for the needs of a child to either roam freely or—even more important—to be carried, held, steadfastedly attached. But while I recognize the mutual gratification of holding and being held, the glued-to-each-other parenting that I see in some families today strikes me as Attachment Theory run wild. For surely we should be able to provide a steady, secure, and loving connection without insisting it’s necessary to constantly carry and sleep with and date our child. And surely, although I will never succeed in converting the true believers, there must be plenty of sensible parents around, parents like Alexander and Marla, who don’t seem to overdo the attachment thing and who just need to be convinced that they will have much easier lives if we BRING BACK THE PLAYPEN.
I think that another reason why my friends and I had an easier time raising children is that many, many more parents today consider it unacceptable to let their children cry themselves to sleep. They sit with their kids, they hold their hands, they stretch out and snuggle with them, and they take them—if all else fails, and sometimes well before all else fails—into their beds, insisting they can’t let their children lie there feeling lonely and frightened and abandoned, and citing other cultures where everybody in the family sleeps together.
The parents of my generation, at least the parents that I knew, did not do this.