Thinking Out Loud: On The Personal, The Political, The Public And The Private (v5.0) by Anna Quindlen
Authors: Anna Quindlen
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question of how their parents felt about things, about sex and love and drugs and bigotry—not the broad outlines of their positions, but the nuance, the thought process, the history, and the background. He said that he thought it took most kids a long time—until they were adults, really—to figure out who their parents were aside from their position as personal adjuncts. “But it’s all right there for our kids,” he said, holding the galleys of the book.
I write about kids differently now, but for the same reason I did when I wrote about weaning and sibling rivalry instead of parental leave and abortion notification statutes. I write aboutkids for my own sake, so that someday I can tell my own that I did the best I could to enjoin those who clobber the defenseless and disregard the concerns of the young. I write about them as the surest way to find out what I’m really made of, just as having diree children taught me that day by day, minute by minute. And if the collateral effect of that is that someday my children will read my words and think that I stood up for them in public as well as in private, I will be happy with what I’ve done.
THE DAYS OF GILDED RIGATONI
May 12, 1991
Breakfast will be perfect. I know this from experience. Poached eggs expertly done, the toast in triangles, the juice fresh squeezed. A pot of coffee, a rose in a bud vase. A silver tray. I will eat every bit.
Breakfast will be perfect, except that it will be all wrong. The eggs should be a mess, in some no-man’s-land between fried and scrambled, the toast underdone, the orange juice slopped over into the place where the jelly should be, if there were jelly, which there is not. Coffee lukewarm, tray steel-gray and suspiciously like a cookie sheet. I get to eat the yucky parts. I know this from experience.
Today is Mother’s Day, and the room-service waiter at the hotel is bringing my breakfast. No handprint in a plaster-of-Paris circle with a ribbon through a hole in the top. Nothing made out of construction paper or macaroni spray-painted gold and glued to cardboard. This is a disaster. Any of the other 364 days of the year would be a wonderful time for a woman with small childrento have a morning of peace and quiet. But solitary splendor on this day is like being a book with no reader. It raises that age-old question: If a mother screams in the forest and there are no children to hear it, is there any sound?
It has become commonplace to complain that Mother’s Day is a manufactured holiday, cooked up by greeting-card moguls and covens of florists. But these complaints usually come from grownups who find themselves on a one-way street, who are stymied each year by the question of what to give a mature woman who says she has everything her heart desires except grandchildren.
It has become commonplace to flog ourselves if we are mothers, with our limitations if we stay home with the kids, with our obligations if we take jobs. It’s why sometimes mothers who are not working outside their homes seem to suggest that the kids of those who are live on Chips Ahoy and walk barefoot through the snow to school. It’s why sometimes mothers with outside jobs feel moved to ask about those other women, allegedly without malice, “What do they do all day?”
And amid that incomplete revolution in the job description, the commercial Mother’s Day seems designed to salute a mother who is an endangered species, if not an outright fraud. A mother who is pink instead of fuchsia. A mother who bakes cookies and never cheats with the microwave. A mother who does not swear or scream, who wears an apron and a patient smile.
Not a mother who is away from home on a business trip on Mother’s Day. Not a mother who said, “You can fax it to me, honey” when her son said he had written something in school and who is now doomed to remember that sentence the rest of her miserable life.
Not an imperfect mother.
The Mother’s Day that means something,
I write about kids differently now, but for the same reason I did when I wrote about weaning and sibling rivalry instead of parental leave and abortion notification statutes. I write aboutkids for my own sake, so that someday I can tell my own that I did the best I could to enjoin those who clobber the defenseless and disregard the concerns of the young. I write about them as the surest way to find out what I’m really made of, just as having diree children taught me that day by day, minute by minute. And if the collateral effect of that is that someday my children will read my words and think that I stood up for them in public as well as in private, I will be happy with what I’ve done.
THE DAYS OF GILDED RIGATONI
May 12, 1991
Breakfast will be perfect. I know this from experience. Poached eggs expertly done, the toast in triangles, the juice fresh squeezed. A pot of coffee, a rose in a bud vase. A silver tray. I will eat every bit.
Breakfast will be perfect, except that it will be all wrong. The eggs should be a mess, in some no-man’s-land between fried and scrambled, the toast underdone, the orange juice slopped over into the place where the jelly should be, if there were jelly, which there is not. Coffee lukewarm, tray steel-gray and suspiciously like a cookie sheet. I get to eat the yucky parts. I know this from experience.
Today is Mother’s Day, and the room-service waiter at the hotel is bringing my breakfast. No handprint in a plaster-of-Paris circle with a ribbon through a hole in the top. Nothing made out of construction paper or macaroni spray-painted gold and glued to cardboard. This is a disaster. Any of the other 364 days of the year would be a wonderful time for a woman with small childrento have a morning of peace and quiet. But solitary splendor on this day is like being a book with no reader. It raises that age-old question: If a mother screams in the forest and there are no children to hear it, is there any sound?
It has become commonplace to complain that Mother’s Day is a manufactured holiday, cooked up by greeting-card moguls and covens of florists. But these complaints usually come from grownups who find themselves on a one-way street, who are stymied each year by the question of what to give a mature woman who says she has everything her heart desires except grandchildren.
It has become commonplace to flog ourselves if we are mothers, with our limitations if we stay home with the kids, with our obligations if we take jobs. It’s why sometimes mothers who are not working outside their homes seem to suggest that the kids of those who are live on Chips Ahoy and walk barefoot through the snow to school. It’s why sometimes mothers with outside jobs feel moved to ask about those other women, allegedly without malice, “What do they do all day?”
And amid that incomplete revolution in the job description, the commercial Mother’s Day seems designed to salute a mother who is an endangered species, if not an outright fraud. A mother who is pink instead of fuchsia. A mother who bakes cookies and never cheats with the microwave. A mother who does not swear or scream, who wears an apron and a patient smile.
Not a mother who is away from home on a business trip on Mother’s Day. Not a mother who said, “You can fax it to me, honey” when her son said he had written something in school and who is now doomed to remember that sentence the rest of her miserable life.
Not an imperfect mother.
The Mother’s Day that means something,
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