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Executive Times |
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2006 Book Reviews |
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To Hell
With All That by Caitlin Flanagan |
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Rating: |
** |
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(Mildly Recommended) |
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Click on
title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Housewifery Fans of
Caitlin Flanagan’s writing for The New
Yorker will be pleased that her fine writing talent is available for
enjoyment in book length with her debut, To Hell
with All That. Packed with verve, opinions and occasional insights, To Hell
with All That tackles the topics of motherhood, housekeeping and the many
conflicting roles of women. Some readers will take her far too seriously, and
those individuals are the best targets for purchasing gift copies of this
book. Here’s an excerpt, from the beginning of the chapter titled, “Executive
Child,” pp. 143-149: Sometimes
when I sit at my desk orchestrating my children’s lives — efficiently
completing hot lunch order forms and day camp applications, ordering team T-shirts
and birthday party presents by the dozen — I feel more like an
executive assistant than a mother. My children lead lives like those of
corporate vice presidents, their days planned months in advance. I have Miss Moneypenny’s romantic attachment to my little bosses, as
well as her sterling loyalty and eagerness to stand in the shadows, taking
pleasure in the achievements — impossible without
her steadying, invisible hand — of the loved ones. In short I
am a modern mother, one whose love for her children is manifested not only in
a primal concern for their safety and nurture but also in the selection of
activities and classes that shape the hours of their childhoods. Striking
the perfect balance between structured and unstructured time is one of our central
preoccupations. Introduce the phrase “overscheduled child” as a
conversational gambit in my circle, and you’ll get an earful: it’s a damnable
practice, a pox on family life, an oppressive force weighing down on all that
is most cherished and magical about childhood. Yet midway through this heated
oration, there is always a moment when the speaker realizes that this derision
is hitting uncomfortably close to home. In tones at once defensive and
adamant, a declaration is made: “Of course, my kids aren’t overscheduled.” Just as the definition of a
nymphomaniac is a person who has more sex than you, an overscheduled child is
one enrolled in more classes than yours. We may cavil about the burden that
all of this places on family life, but none of us is prepared to stand down:
come T-ball sign-ups or tennis camp registration, we’re all there,
checkbooks in hand. Theories
about the evolution and meaning of this kind of parenting are legion, but in
my case the enrollment of my small children in a roster of activities had
nothing to do with their academic prospects or intellectual development. It
had only to do with the fact that after they were born, I began losing my
mind. I remember the first year and a half of my children’s lives as being
marked by a combination of elation and the low-level depression that dogs
shut-ins the world over. My husband had taken a big corporate job to pay for
the type of motherhood I had chosen to pursue, which involved
round-the-clock worry about the babies and extremely infrequent separations
from them. He was gone from seven in the morning until seven or eight at
night, and I was lonely. The babies
and I were invited many places — to a gathering of
mothers in the park, to a meeting of a twins-only playgroup at a friend’s house
— and I would mark these events on my calendar,
sincerely intending to go to them. But when the appointed hour arrived,
something always went wrong. One of the babies would suddenly demand an
unscheduled feeding, or they would both suddenly knock off into a deep
sleep, which only a fool would fail to recognize as a sign from God himself
that it was time to make a cup of tea and chat on the telephone. It was my
friends from work whom I longed for — full of gossip and
talk of important matters — not the mothers in the
park, who were either just as depressed as I was or spilling over with talk
of diapers and breast milk and colic, topics with which I was similarly
obsessed but which cheered me not at all to discuss ad infinitum. Slowly the
invitations dried up, and I became one of those out-of-sync, somewhat
pitiable mothers, patrolling the streets with my enormous stroller during odd
hours, spending far too much time in front of the television in my zip-front
chenille bathrobe, getting in trouble at Star-bucks for letting the babies
pull bags of coffee off the rack while I was reading. My sister called from And then
one day I managed to get the three of us to the Westside Pavilion shopping
mall for a desperately needed change of pace. We were performing a tour of inspection
of the top floor, when I caught sight of several mothers purposefully pushing
their strollers through the double doors of an establishment I’d never
noticed before. I rolled my own stroller over and took a curious look at the
yellow letters painted on the plate glass window: TUMBLE CAMP. It turned out to be a children’s
gym, with classes starting for babies as young as six months. I’d heard of
such places, but I had thought they were for older children. Inside I was
given a roster of classes, informed that tuition was nonrefundable, and
shown the elaborate security procedures, whereby individual name tags would
be printed by the computer every lime we took a class. I joined immediately. If
motherhood abruptly wrested me from the world of adult enterprise, Tumble
Camp put me back in business. It restored to me many of the things I had
missed from work: an inflexible schedule, a sense of purpose, and colleagues
engaged in a common pursuit. The classes were blessedly short and as focused
as a board meeting: we sang a song, the mothers jollied the children through
an obstacle course that changed every week, there was some free time, and
then there was a good-bye song and hand stamps for the kids. The program was
supposed to inculcate skills in the children — balance and
coordination, and so on — but I knew that was a
bunch of hooey. Every normally developing kid gains those skills naturally if
he spends enough time in a playground or a backyard. But I wasn’t there to
improve the children; they were already perfect as far as I was concerned.
‘What I liked was that I had a series of climate-controlled, time-limited,
intensive little seminars to go to and a way of imposing structure on the
endless, ungraspable days of early parenthood. In due
time I discovered that Tumble Camp was not the only game in town. There were
also classes at outfits called Fit for Kids and Bright Child, and I enrolled
in them, too. Our church nursery school offered a parent-toddler program
once a week, which turned out to be a kind of pre-preschool, its core
philosophy reminding me of the old My life
began to improve. The babies learned the one thing none of the classes taught
— how to talk — and with that my
loneliness began to abate. One day when I was loading the backpack for class,
I sneezed, and from somewhere down near the floor a tiny voice said, “Bless
you.” In that moment I realized that what my shrink had been telling me every
week was in fact true: the babies would get older; things would get easier.
On a sunny October day the boys started nursery school five mornings a week.
When I walked through my front door after dropping them off, my footsteps
echoed on the hardwood floors of the empty house, and I realized that a
chapter of my life had come to an end. I gave away the chenille robe and took
the safety rails off the boys’ beds. A few months later, when I was tidying
up, I found one of Miss Simona’s cassettes in a
kitchen drawer, and I threw it in the trash. We had emerged. If you find the excerpt entertaining,
chances are you’ll enjoy the rest of To Hell
With All That. If you thought of a particular person when you read the
excerpt, buy the book for that person. Steve Hopkins,
July 26, 2006 |
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The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the August 2006
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/To
Hell With All That.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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