Two more books discussed in my Mom Salon class over the last month…
Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood by Michael Lewis
Lewis is well known as the author of such bestsellers as Liar’s Poker and The Blind Side. This book comes from a collection of essays he did on slate.com. Lewis’s wife, Tabitha Soren, suggested he write these pieces, saying something along the lines of: If you’re going to be such a slacker Dad, you might as well make some money on it and do some writing about your experiences! (Ok, I’m totally making that up, but the columns were her idea. And I’m glad to hear they were ok with her, because he does expose quite a lot of their private family life.)
Lewis is an excellent writer, and he crafts a beautiful essay, so it’s a pleasure to read this book, for starters, because it’s so well-written. And even though it’s a book about fathering, I chose it for my Mom Salon so we moms could have a chance to see things from another point of view. (One of the students said her husband saw what she was reading and said “Why are you reading that book?!”)
Lewis begins by telling us that he didn’t have much by way of a role model for fathering, and that his own father, though beloved by his children, was rather absent from family life, particularly when things needed to get done (as they always do when children are involved). So throughout the book, he presents himself as kind of muddling along, taking instructions from his wife – a sort of second string parent who is expected to muck up rather than succeed (sports metaphors are rampant in the this book, and they are apt). He says he is one of these new modern dads who must be forgiven their incompetence.
And so as he begins to father after the birth of their first child, Lewis is not really certain what he is meant to be doing, or what he should be feeling, and he notes:
“. . . this persistent and disturbing gap between what I was meant to feel and what I actually felt. Expected to feel overcome with joy. . . I often felt puzzled. Expected to feel outraged, I often felt secretly pleased; expected to feel worried, I often felt indifferent.” (p. 14)
He notes that:
“. . . all around me fathers were pretending to do one thing, and feel one way, when in fact they were doing and feeling all sorts of things, and then engaging afterward in what amounted to an extended cover-up.” (p. 14)
Lewis’s pieces take us through a multitude of fathering experiences as he and his wife parent three children. He describes an entertaining visit to a French Gymboree class, an attempt to “Ferberize” his child, the jealousy of the older child when a younger sibling appears, his own trip to the hospital after an ice skating mishap, and more. While I don’t always agree with his parenting choices, his pieces are mostly entertaining—many laugh-out-loud—and often insightful. To the degree that I suppose I will be able to understand what it feels like to be a father, I have learned something from this book.
Next book was The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined Women by Susan J. Douglas and Meredith W. Michaels.
This book, published in 2004, describes something the authors call “the new momism,” which is the idea of a perfect mother that surfaced in post-feminist America, and how the media contributed to creating this unattainable image.
The book is smart, packed with supporting information from a variety of sources, and includes smart and interesting analyses of popular culture. The tone is amusing and often, as one Mom said, “snarky,” so it makes for entertaining reading (although the pop cult references are a bit dated by now).
Some of what the book is saying also overlaps in some ways with Ayelet Waldman’s Bad Mother, the idea being that there is this image “out there” of what a proper mother ought to be, and if you don’t match up, well then, you’re not a good mother (you may even be, as Waldman says, a bad mother). Douglas & Michaels describe how they think this new image developed, a model that is in some ways a throwback to the non-working 50s housewife, and why it is so frustrating. According to this image, mothers are supposed to love what they do, all of it, every minute of the day. They take great joy in their roles, and they need no other reward or occupation. If so if you don’t feel this way, well then surely something is wrong with you, so bring on the guilt!
This is, of course, a great oversimplification of their message, but we found it rang true, and that we all struggle with figuring out how to take on the Mom role in a way that works for us and for our families, even if we don’t think we’re matching up to some societal ideal.
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