MARILYN PENN: MEASURING OUR LIVES WITH COFFEE SPOONS
http://politicalmavens.com/
Here are a few of the topics that have been covered or reviewed in the New York Times during the past week: mothers of autistic children finding it difficult to date; brides resorting to gastric feeding tubes in order to lose weight before the wedding; mothers being too harsh on each other’s parenting techniques; mothers monopolizing the role of parenting, rendering fathers irrelevant; breast-feeding mothers relinquishing their sexuality to their maternal desires. It certainly seems that as women have risen to occupy the highest echelons of professional accomplishment, we are increasingly being force-fed a diet of whining and junk food for the mind. It used to be that these subjects were relegated to women’s magazines like Cosmopolitan, Ladies Home Journal or Ms, much as celebrity news was once confined to movie magazines or pulps like People, Us and their spinoffs. Today, even the Wall Street Journal has its equivalent of Page Six, not to mention its real estate porn page featuring the week’s most exorbitant sale.
Print newspapers used to be the last bastion of serious news or articles of significant general interest. Now in a desperate attempt to stay afloat, they have dumbed down their offerings and abetted the navel-gazing focus of a moribund feminist agenda. If we are to believe what we read, we live in times of great anxiety when it’s harder than ever to find a mate, sustain a relationship and raise children. Compared to when? The massive waves of immigration? The great flu epidemic? The depression? The Second World War? The polio epidemic? The cold war? Vietnam? Didn’t all of these epochs produce great hardship and stress for individuals and families?
My mother was born in 1910 and came to this country at age 12 from Poland where her family existed in near-starvation during the First World War. By 1936, she was the mother of a 2 year old child with polio and had incorporated her brother and his two young daughters into her own family after his wife was institutionalized for depression and atttempted suicide. Several years later, I was born into this extended family struggling to support itself and deal with the ripple effects of devastating physical and mental illnesses. There was no time to write about the difficulty of raising a boy who had to undergo multiple surgeries, was periodically in a wheelchair or a leg brace and would never be able to play sports or ride a bike. Nor was there time to discuss the trauma of dealing with children who lost their mother due to incomprehensible circumstances. Members of the family learned coping mechanisms, some more productive than others, but we didn’t view ourselves as victims nor did we consider that our problems were greater than those of other people. Instead, we dealt with the silent, stranded remnants of the holocaust who entered our home with frequency as my parents attempted to rescue their “landsmen,” the Jews from their hometown who managed to survive the camps.
For people who had dealt with war, poverty, hunger, dislocation and immigration, survival itself was a gift, raising a family was a duty yet also a privilege and dealing with what came your way subsequently was simply life happening. My family was not unique; most of my relatives had similar tales of woe which they accepted as their burden while they “made do,” an expression that is anathema in today’s society. Nobody wants to “make do” anymore. If they can’t fix their own problems, they want the government to do it for them. If that fails, they need a support group and a walkathon with a ribbon. When I read about women who put tubes in their noses to avoid looking fat in wedding pictures, or women who vehemently debate the choice to breast-feed, or women who choose to marry, choose to divorce and wake up late to the realities of what strings come attached to these life choices – I think about my mother who raised 4 children, worked hard at my father’s business, cooked for at least 7 people every day of the week, welcomed everyone to her table for all Jewish holidays and somehow found the energy to walk several miles daily. When I consider her strength of character and her insistence on finding pleasure and happiness amid the rubble, I compare it with the petty, nit-picking of educated, privileged women writing about such very small things and I wonder whether to call this progress. There is an infinite number of possibilities for disorder in each of our lives; when most of them get magnified into cases deserving public attention, we are seeing self-awareness slip into solipsism. In the Sunday Times article about anxiety, actually written by a man, the great author Flaubert is summoned for a quote that I should like to direct at most of the complaining writers and their bean-counting editors: “Shut up and get on with it!”
Comments are closed.
