So I read an anecdote lately that went something like “I was at a dinner party of 18 people and none of them like their mother.”
This has been percolating in my brain, and I have been taking a little informal poll since then, working into any conversation possible “so, do you like your mother?”
I’d say about ten percent of people I’ve asked will admt to liking their mothers. Now, this is entirely not statistically accurate, because I know a lot of people who grew up in harsh circumstances, and I’ve also mostly asked women.
But it has been thought provoking. I think any parent who takes the time to really think about it knows that the end goal is not to have your kids like you. I’m a big believer in the “your kids will have many friends but only x parents (where x is usally 2)” school of thought. Even so I harbour some of the fond fantasies that nuture us in moments like the one at 4 am when, after 45 minutes of nursing resulting in one almost asleep Noah, the damn cat jumps up to share the lap and startles the babe into instant high-play alertness. You know the ones – that we will have long mother-son hikes in the woods all his life, and then when he has won the Nobel Peace Prize he will attribute his love for all things nuturing to his parents, especially his mum and those hikes.
And I carry the fears that if we don’t go to mother goose (but we did) and pay for baby signs and go to that (but we are) and attend playgroup (may skip today to work) and go swimming (friday) that he will end up culturally deprived and feel isolated and misunderstood and have a series of bad mysogynistic marriages and an addiction problem and end up in a gutter muttering “selfish bitch!” over and over – meaning, me.
But now I have developed a more realistic yardstick and I offer it to you all. It’s called dinner party parenting. And it goes like this:
No matter how hard I try, the chances are good that at some dinner party in the future, my son will amuse his compatriots with tales of the horrible ways I embarassed him, or failed to understand him, or the ways in which I still drive him up the wall.
As long as these tales are told in a comfortable home, with good friends and good food at the table, and there is laughter about it and not a stunned horrified silence, my job will have pretty much been done.
