In this in-depth, two part piece Mimi O’Connor, writer and mother, interviews Jennifer Senior about her book All Joy and No Fun. Finally someone speaking the truth. Sing it sister!
Pssst…Did you hear? Parenting sucks.
That seemed to be the general reaction to New York contributing editor Jennifer Senior’s 2010 article on modern parenthood, “All Joy and No Fun.” The intense and enthusiastic response to the piece inspired the journalist, and mother to a toddler boy at the time, to dive headfirst into the rough and murky sea that is 21st century parenting.
The result is All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood, an entertaining and informative, enlightening—and yes, comforting—anthropological look at middle class parents of today. Senior embedded herself in the kitchens and living rooms of families with children of all ages—from newborns to adolescents—and visited communities across the country. All Joy and No Fun mixes this on-the-ground reporting with research on everything from sex to sleep to money and delivers a portrait of today’s parents, and what they find (ahem) challenging about raising kids.
The author, who moved to Park Slope earlier this year, talked with us about Facebook feeds full of idealized pumpkin patch photos, Texas parents who are just a crazy as Brooklynites, and the possible effect of living in a rent-controlled apartment next to a multi-million dollar brownstone. Plus: what she learned about making parenting easier and more enjoyable, and how being a parent in Brooklyn is different from doing it across the river.(for more words of wisdom from Senior, check out her TED talk).
When the New York story was published there was this feeling that you kind of blew the lid off the fact that being a parent can be taxing, and can kind of suck. Was that your experience?
I had people saying, “Thank God someone is saying it.” That’s what I got…. But to me what was surprising was that there was a pent up demand for it…I hadn’t been a parent for very long!
Why do you think it inspired that sense of relief? Why do you think it’s sort of this dirty little secret?
First of all, one of the themes in my book is that we have now utterly sentimentalized children in this way. Having a child now is sort of, for the middle class — and especially for women — it’s really the equivalent of what getting married was in Jane Austen novels…So I think there is this huge kind of sentimental attitude towards kids. That’s number one. [We live] in almost a filiarchy. [Kids] almost determine the family dynamics and are the center of things. So I think it was probably surprising to see someone say, “You know, it wasn’t always like this.”
I also wonder: we are all inundated by social media—Facebook in particular—and I’m so interested in the curating that people do on Facebook and how they make their families look incredibly perfect… I think that [posts like those] stood in stark contrast to what my story was saying. You know, it would be Halloween and you’d see the perfect picture of the child in a pumpkin patch [on Facebook]. You’d see all this great stuff and maybe the magazine story was not a sharp rebuke to that, but kind of showed the underbelly. [The article] talked about what happened in the ramp up to those photos; [The kids] might have been crying in the car on the way to the pumpkin patch.
Also, I think if you confess to feeling less than entirely fulfilled by parenting or by your children then there might be the suggestion that you’re doing it wrong. Or doing it unwell…So it might be an indirect indictment of your own parenting. It’s self-incriminating to say that you’re frustrated. You run the risk of somebody actually thinking that if your kids aren’t “doing it” for you, it must be something you’re not doing for your kids.
Now that you’ve been out in the field, how vast is the gap between the idealized super-parent and the real parent?
I think for women it’s way worse. That was my big takeaway…The second chapter in my book has this couple named Angie and Clint. And there’s this moment in there that for me, was a huge revelation.
Everywhere [I went] on my book tour, and every talk that I give — even if I’m at the Atlanta History Society — somebody who’s read the book mentions Angie and Clint. Because here’s the thing: At some point towards the end of the chapter I said to [Angie], “What do you find more difficult? Home or work?”
Angie is a psychiatric nurse. She works 80% of the time. She works nights. And she said she found it more difficult to be at home. She found that harder. And her job was to work with psychiatric patients who often had psychotic breaks. They would bite her, they would hit her, they would scream. Some of them were very difficult cases. But she said she found it much harder at home. She said at work she knew what she was doing and at home she was never sure if she was good at her “job.” I actually asked her if she thought she was a good mother and her answer was, “Sometimes.”
Her husband worked at a desk. He worked at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport at a [rental car] company. I asked him the same question and he said, “I’m definitely more comfortable at home.” And I said, “Really? Why?” Because I’m thinking desk job: totally peaceful. He said, “Because at home, I’m the standard.” Basically, his word went [at home].
That to me was everything, because I don’t feel like any woman — or at least very few women — would feel comfortable saying that. [I think] women walk around with this sort of idealized version of what a mother is supposed to be. They are utterly tyrannized by it. It can be a fictional version. For me the fictional ideal is Tammy Taylor on Friday Night Lights. Every time I screw up I feel like I should be more like her. And I have to remind myself of course — she’s fiction. Somebody wrote her; she’s not real.
But the point is, I think for women, the distance between their self-image and the idealized mother is far greater than the distance between the male self-image and the idealized father, or their own internalized image of their own fatherhood. I think it’s really huge for women and even if those images are just hovering at the margins of their consciousness, I think most women really feel them.
What are your thoughts on the cartoon of over-zealous and anxious New York and Brooklyn parents?
It’s every bit as bad in Texas. It really is. They’re football lunatics there. You would not believe it. They make Brooklyn parents look, I would say, slightly calmer… They are also anxious about academic achievement and in parts, less anxious about academic achievement. They want their kids to go to one of the good UT schools. But they are 25,000 times more anxious about athletic achievement. So they are giving their kids, as one mother pointed out to me, “muscle milk when their kids are seven.” So they can do football when they are seven years old and bulk up.
They have private little league coaches and batting tutors. They are so sports obsessed… It’s just a different kind of mania surrounding their children. Just to be fair to Brooklyn parents, I think there is the same type of zealotry and neuroticism, it just comes out in different outlets… We’re all crazy… I thought New York was going to be outlandish but it turns out this neuroticism seems to extend well beyond the coast. It’s clearly consigned to the middle class.
What kinds of techniques for managing the stress of parenting and finding time for yourself as an individual did you observe, and what seemed to work?
Going back to [the example of] Angie and Clint: When he said, “I am the standard,” the other thing that Clint did is he had no problem saying, “Ok, I’m going to go for a bike ride now.” Angie had a ton of problems [doing] that. There are women across the board feeling completely unentitled to take time off. [Women] did not feel nearly as comfortable claiming their leisure prerogatives as their husbands did.
At the end of that chapter I say that maybe women should start taking their cues from some of the enlightened men in their lives — the ones they think are really good fathers — but [not] feel any shame in taking an hour for themselves. Because some of it is just getting over that feeling of shame. [Women] think that they’re not owed it. They feel bad that they go to work and they feel bad that their kids throw their arms around their legs before they leave the house.
One life hack [of mine] is based on the research of this husband and wife team named the Cowans. They did this study where they had two groups of mothers and fathers who were pregnant. [For one group], they didn’t do any intervention. With the other group, they asked, “How are you going to divide the chores when the baby comes along?” And because they are based in Berkeley, that had lots of nice, sweet, progressive Berkeley parents and all of them said, “Oh, we are going to divide things 50/50.”
And the Cowans said, “No, no, no, no, no. That doesn’t work out in real time, in real life. It never is like that. Get granular and say who is going to do what.” So they had everybody in this group say exactly who was going to wake up on which nights, who was going to do the dishes versus who was going to do the laundry, who was going to peel out of work when the kids were sick. They tried to make a contract as granular [as possible], and those couples were in much better shape 18 months [into parenting]…So this had lasting effects.
I never did that with my husband. But what it taught me is that if you can get granular and plan things out ahead of time, you can steal more time back in your life and have fewer fights. You can get some feeling of control back. So if on Tuesday I know I need two hours of work time, and I want an hour to go to the gym, and I want an hour to do errands and an hour to see a friend, I say all that to my husband on a Tuesday about what I want for the weekend.
That way when the weekend comes we are not arguing in real time in front of my child about what we want. It’s so much easier and it works out. You block it out. You plan it. I know that sounds really small, but it’s so much more effective than the kind of vague women’s magazine [advice of] “plan date night.” What does that mean? No. Here’s what you plan: You plan your work, you plan your leisure, and do it all ahead of time and literally put it on the schedule. That gives people control.
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Mimi O’Connor writes and occasionally parents in Brooklyn. She will let you know what Bill Murray is up to @themimioconnor.