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Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

Breaking the silence
It is time to tell the secrets and share the pain of Japanese internment.
By Rahna Reiko Rizzuto
[02/18/00]

He loves me, he loves me not
Race was never an issue in my life -- until I fell in love.
By Eleanor Stacy Parker
[02/17/00]

Love strands
My daughters are part me and part their father. The evidence is in their springy, curly, ready-to-dread hair.
By Susan Straight
[02/17/00]

Torn to pieces
Brothers and sisters in foster care, rarely adopted together, are routinely split and scattered, never to see each other again.
By Nell Bernstein
[02/16/00]

Beware of "women's culture"
Francine Prose issues a stern warning in the New York Times about market-driven pablum for women -- who are as silly, powerless and narcissistic as a gender can get.
By Jennifer Foote Sweeney
[02/15/00]

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Well, yeah. But there's a pretty easy balance. You treat a kid with respect and as an adult you talk to them as if they're smart people. But you don't throw at them the trappings of adulthood and you know, the darker stuff. I've seen people throw that at kids -- they prick them. Parents do too. They lean on them too hard with their own problems. They don't need that. They want to know their parents are pretty invincible. And then they want to play. That's it, you know. Let them play.

They certainly don't want to think, "I hope Dad doesn't break down again." Growing up, my parents were pretty invincible. And that's important. That allows you stability in your brain to develop other interests outside your family. No kid should have to worry, "Where am I going to be tomorrow?"

And that's primarily in the formative years, I would say, like from 0 to 8, maybe. Those years should be trouble-free.

Obviously, my mom was a master, so she took care of that with Toph. So by the time he and I got together, it was pretty easy. She had done all the real work.

So do you feel that you were pretty consistent? Do you feel that you raised Toph the way you felt your mother would have done?

Yeah. Absolutely. She was a parenting genius. I'm not the only one who would say that. She taught for many years and had hundreds of kids and I think almost all of them would say that. You define a genius as someone who almost never has to second-guess what their instincts say, who knows things without ever having to be told them. Obviously, a lot of people are like that, parenting-wise -- parenting is an instinctual thing -- but a lot of people aren't. And lot of people have to read books.

What do you think about parenting manuals?

I've never read a word of one. Nor will I ever. I'm sure that there are a lot of helpful ones out there. I don't know much about it, though. That's a different world. Like my mom, I kind of feel like I know it all, and I'm not going to let someone tell me what's what. But I don't read any self-help anything. It's a genre I know nothing about.

Why did you decide to leave Chicago?

Gotta go. You can't stay and fester in the community of your childhood. I don't want to say that it's always bad -- fester is a tough word to use -- but you know, because you have a young 'un with you, it doesn't mean you can't move. And do. And I think in the long run, your child is going to respect that.

But how did you justify that to yourself? You decided that you were going sell the house, sell the furniture, take your child out of school and move across the country to a place neither of you had ever lived before.

We couldn't afford to stay there. This was Lake Forest. This was not a cheap place to live.

But the Bay Area isn't exactly cheap, either.

In Berkeley, we were paying about a $1,000 a month for a house. Beautiful little street, nice neighbors, which I imagine would have beat our mortgage out there in Lake Forest by a mile. And my sister, Beth, was in law school out in Berkeley, so everyone had sort of put their life on hold for a while anyway. So at that point, if you're a kid, and you're 8, do you want to be in a town where everyone knows exactly what happened to your parents? Or do you want to move?

So we got a fresh start. In a few weeks in our new school, no one knew anything. Kids don't care.

But clearly they picked up on the fact that you were a lot younger than the other parents.

Yeah, sure, they picked up on that. But that just made it more fun.

I once lived with an old friend from high school. That was hard. I think we are especially vulnerable as single parents. We think that it will be easier to live with other people, but once you are sharing space with another person, your child becomes their roommate, too. And then they assume parental rights.

And you want to strangle them. The people around people like you and me are under a lot of weird stresses. They don't know what it's like. They sometimes want to second-guess you, which makes you want to throw them off a cliff. And I have severed relations here and there with people. I mean, after six years of doing this stuff and then they try to second guess me: It's like, "Well, I'll see you in hell."

But we have young friends. And a lot of times, their ignorance comes through. Obviously, 10 years down the road, they're never going to second-guess the decision of a fellow parent. Nor would they now second guess the decision of a 40-year-old parent. But they feel like they can do that with us. And that's a problem. Because nobody knows better.

But on the one hand, there you are walking around the PTA meetings saying: "We're special, we're different, we're better, we're stars, we're the thing, we're the new thing. We're the thing that nobody here can ever be because we're young and free." You want it both ways, right? Because you also want to have the fabulous power of reinventing parenthood in a way that seems more interesting. And yet you don't want to lose the authority that comes from seniority and experience.

They're not at all mutually exclusive.

Why not?

Just because you're reinventing it? By innovating it, do you mean that you lose your grip on authority?

By insisting that you are not them. You define yourself as not being an older parent: You are not old, dumpy, boring, unable to play soccer. But at the same time, (in the book) when you have to prove your own authority to a friend, you scream: "I am a 40-year-old mother. Don't ever forget that."

Right. You want it both ways. Obviously. You want the moral authority. But you think that you know a bit more because you're closer to the age. You probably think that your fellow parents are woefully out of it, and don't know what's what. I mean the closer you are to your daughter or brother or sister's age, the more you feel like you can relate. And that means the world when you're raising a kid, right?

But there's also the danger that being too cool of a parent will cause your child to rebel.

I never rebelled. Not in any conventional way. I wanted to please my parents. When I liked an album, I wanted them to like it too. I was desperate to make connections with them, and I really liked doing that. So I don't ever identify with the idea that you try to upset your parents in some deliberate way. I didn't understand that. I never thought of it as an antagonistic relationship. It's not that way with Toph and I because we're part of the same thing. It's a partnership.

Do you feel that it's more of a partnership because you are his brother, not his parent?

No. It's always been exactly the same. We've never been like brothers, like brothers who grew up together. It's always been a hybrid of brother and parent ever since he was born. And it's still that way.

I think that for people in our children's situation, it's less likely for them to rebel.

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