Emotional Disclosure

Posted September 07, 2007

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When you were little, did your dentist ever give you one of those plaque-disclosing tablets? After you chewed it, your teeth would turn purple wherever there was a crust of tartar, and then you could try to scrub it off with your toothbrush? Yesterday when "Rocket Man" on the car radio made me burst into tears, I was thinking how Elton John is like a kind of emotion-disclosing tablet for me. Put on anything from Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, for instance, and I'm suddenly under the musical black light, with all my weirdo feelings glowing purple. Partly this is because Elton John was the only music of ours my parents could stand to listen to in the car, and so I can easily get Tiny Dancered into a profound kind of nostalgia. And partly it's just my usual sad happiness -- the state I seem to inhabit more or less constantly. But lately it's something else too.

And I'm not just talking the PMS, which used to occupy about as much time every month as a breadbox, but now is like one of those termite tents that turns your house into a giant wrapped gift even while it fills with poison -- and then the exterminators forget to come and ever remove it. We're pretty much living full-time inside the poisonous tent.

But that's not it either. It's that we were reading Ginger Pye to the kids (this is an excellent book, by the way), and when Rachel accidentally rubs her coat -- the coat that Mama made her, doubtless without spilling Zinfandel on it and getting her own hair twisted into the bobbin -- against a wall of fresh plaster, and the red turns orange in spots and looks awful, Mama suggests that they not go near any more wet plaster with their coats on. "Mama did not scold, but then, Mama never scolded."

I seem to have come to a moment in my life where the parenting skills of even a fictional character can make me feel bad about myself. I picture kids ankle-deep in a stream in the dappled sunshine, lunging after minnows and smooth stones before skipping barefoot home to chores and supper, and I worry that my children just aren't having enough of a carefree childhood. They seem like happy kids, these kids of mine, but I worry that I'm too -- I don't know. Too controlling. Too purposeful. I talk about feelings too much. All the other kids are laughing in the stream, getting the rolled-up bottoms of their pants wet, and mine are just marching soberly behind me, holding up the train of my intensity.

And it's not just Mrs. Pye. It's that I read in People magazine that Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore never fight. They never fight! (Not even about the gutters? Not even while Ashton Kutcher is poking dispiritedly into the broken gutter with a stick? Not even about where the permission slip is and who lost it and where and why? Us either.) It's that I saw a commercial for a carpet spray, and it's not even the meticulous pretend house that made me feel rotten -- it's the gracious pretend mom. A heap of muddy boys are tumbling through the house, and she's just like, "Sheesh, mud! Thank gracious for Spray Away!" Instead of, I don't know, damning them while she chases them out of the house with a vacuum hose. Or having the kind of kids who would never even come tumbling muddily into the house to begin with -- not because the house is so pristine (hello, fossilized borscht potatoes!), but because the children don't want to deal with the sighing and the eye-rolling and the lecture on housework and the gendered division of labor.

And even as I write that, I can sit myself down into my own feminist theory class, and raise my hand, and call on myself, and I can discuss the way images in the media perpetuate sexism and unrealistic expectations about women. I can say that being socialized as a multitasker really makes it hard to be the kind of person who can live in the moment -- since somebody has to make lists in their head all day, and not lists out of colored sand that you blow away like a mandala teaching you about the fleetingness of everything. The real lists. Of the things that really need to get done. But still. I don't really want to be the Carpet Commercial Stepford Pod Lady. I probably don't even actually want to be Demi Moore -- although I wouldn't mind Freaky Fridaying into her body for a while. But Mrs. Pye. I'd like to be a little bit more like Mrs. Pye, who would never have -- even if she could have -- Googled "plaster toxicity children skin" and called the poison control center. I'm sure of it.

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by Catherine Newman

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

Dalai Mama Dishes

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

Emotional Disclosure

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