Camy
Matthay
5708
Bellbrook Road
Brooklyn,
WI 53521
608-455-2712
2139
words
©2002
S
is For Shame, F is for Fury, M is for Mothering:
By
Camy Matthay
As
a well-educated woman who had elected to be a stay-at-home mother, I was an
enigma. I wasn’t into Jesus, ironing
male garments, or particularly indolent.
Yet my choice was perceived to reveal a flaw of character, a
weakness. I was supposed to buck up
and go back to work. But I just
couldn’t do it. That made a lot of people uncomfortable, and most of my critics
wore heels. I endured, from liberals
and self-identified feminists, endless variations of the question "What is
a bright women like you doing at home?"
They were platitudes, ironically, meant to compliment, but shocking
insofar as they implied the judgment that mothering and child rearing were
occupations reserved for stupid, unambitious women.
I
didn’t respond well to the encouragement that I could mother at a distance or
to the idea that I could trust my left hemisphere and popular culture to direct
my life. I wasn’t conforming to their formula for a successful life and they
rewarded me by demoting me from their social tier. That stung, but when I looked at my infant son, my heart sang and
I was among the Queens in the Universe.
The
“suits” made me miserable -not because their agendas tempted me, but because I
couldn’t get them to understand where I was -how complete, correct, and natural
it felt to have a baby with you all day long.
In the company of the career-minded, the explanations of love and
attachment I offered fell on deaf ears.
I may as well have had the flu
-rather than a baby. “I would
get over it,” they said. In their
company, I found myself gripped with shame and a quiet fury.
I
took some solace in the fact that non-parents were simply ignorant. But others
did have children –some with
nannies, others who were tucked away in “great” childcare facilities. “Facilities”, I would think ungraciously,
their babies are in “great facilities.” I hated their smiley-face
callousness. I didn’t understand them
at all.
* * *
Being
a mother at home was hard at first. I
had not expected to be so reproached or to feel so isolated. At that time, I was living in New York City
where the pressure to be economically competitive was particularly
intense. Sheer loneliness forced me to
get over the reservations I had about meeting women whose commonality revolved around
a book whose title I could barely pronounce without blushing: The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding. The word I kept stumbling on was not
“breastfeeding” –although that was bad enough, but the word “womanly.”
All
of my misgivings, however, crashed at my first La Leche League meeting. Encountering this extended tribe of caring
women marked the beginning of one of the most significant chapters of my
life. Over the course of a few years,
these women, , helped me to claim a language that dignified my life as a
mother, and eventually my life as a
parent of school-free children.
Just
as any new language broadens meaning, this maternal one too, was altering my
perception of myself my work, and society.
It was a troubling lens. So many parenting practices and child-rearing
conventions struck me as absurd. For example, although having pretty things
to keep baby “safe” and “entertained” was prescriptive, all that hardware:
bassinettes, cribs, swings, play-pens, and strollers spoke to me of deprivation, of an irrevocable loss of
human touch and warmth that babies require to grow best in health and
happiness. It agonized me to see so
many parents preoccupied with baby stuff, with their baby’s “look,” and to see
them become increasingly detached from feelings and responsibilities I was
trying to uphold and to honor.
In
the conversations I had with these parents who had delegated the primary task
of child rearing to strangers, words like “nurturing,” “ protection,”
“conscientiousness,” and “perseverance” that described my daily life in the
deepest ways couldn’t seem to scratch the veneer of ambition that cloaked their
desire for self-importance. What they
seemed to want most of all boiled down to social status and classy vacations. We full-time parents were viewed as relics,
or worse, as losers. But if trying to
validate the human rights of children required “losing,” then that, in fact,
was what we were deliberately doing. We were walking the talk of our
convictions about the emotional needs of children and modeling this simple
creed of childhood: delight and liberty.
The
conversations we mothers (and fathers too) had were important. Our words validated our work, and it was a
constant source of delight that as our children became increasingly verbal and
self-reliant, that this language, descriptive of human relationship, began to
include them –so that words like: “generosity,” “ responsibility, “
“forgiveness,” and “freedom” were acknowledged, defined, and redefined in our
households.
* * *
In
my own family, this conscientiousness, as well as certain lifestyle choices
(e.g., no television, nothing plastic bigger than a cabbage) bound my family
together and shielded us to a great degree from Logo culture. Heedful as I was, something big and incredibly
invasive was coming down the road and I didn’t catch on to it until it nearly
crushed my doorstep.
As
the proverb "we don't know who discovered water, but we're certain it
wasn't a fish" reminds us, ubiquitous parts of our environment and culture
can remain invisible or transparent until we are somehow jolted out of -what we
will forever after see as- our selective blindness.
One
day I had such an epiphany; I crossed paths with a trio of school age
children. They were unusual somehow,
but I couldn’t put my finger on it right away.
They were lively and engaging, and had not lost that wonderful
earnestness that characterizes so many preschoolers who have strong
passions. Also -and this was no small
thing- they looked at you when you
spoke to them.
I
hadn’t met children like this before, who understood the intricacies of easy
dialogue –who were naturally engaged, and so, engaging individuals
themselves. Most of the children I knew
made me feel unintelligible or headless –like an adult in a Calvin and Hobbs
cartoon. These kids were charming,
sparkling with enthusiasm, and I was completely smitten.
What
were they doing out of school I wanted to know? Oh, they didn’t go to school, they explained, in fact, they had
never gone to school. That this
information“ gave me pause” was an understatement. I had stumbled –by accident- onto the best extension of the
attachment style of parenting I had been practicing for years. I was as astonished by the possibilities
these joyous and inquisitive children represented as I was disturbed by the fact
that I had taken for granted the inevitability of schooling my own children.
I've
preserved that moment in my mind, defeating the tendency of time to soften its
edges, because it is a reminder of my hubris, of a time when my distance from
the center felt so great I believed I couldn’t be reached. I had forgotten that the kind of defensive
acuity you can achieve when you withdraw from centers of influence predicates
that you know where those arenas are.
In this case, I hadn’t questioned the assumption that school was
inevitable, much less been able to think about its necessity or purpose. Those unschooled children, however, were a
measure of the difference between education as something that is done to you by
someone else, and education as a conversation you have with the world where
ever you are and wherever you go -throughout your whole life.
Why
had I come so close to yielding to the state the power I had to shape my
children’s lives? Blindness. Complicity to convention. Of course, I might
have found out about homeschooling sooner if the fraction of families electing
this alternative was larger than it is.
According to most estimates it hovers around 2% of all families with
school age children. I also might have
found out about it sooner if states advertised this option as a legal
alternative. But our nation’s policy
makers are, of course, deeply committed to the treatment of children as
capital, as little economic soldiers to be crammed full of facts and sent out
onto the battlefield in the best interests of the American Empire. Our nation has no interest in liberating its
necessary human infrastructure or “corrupting” itself with utopian dreams.
I
had been so prepared to be stoic and “cheerful” about that first day of school;
it bothered my conscience for a long time.
Eventually, I realized that although our society will grudgingly accept
the idea of a mother committed to her infants, the conventional expectation is
that she will ultimately be enormously relieved to wave good-bye at the big
yellow bus so she can resume her “real” life in the market place. All the government propaganda that
sweepingly claims it takes two incomes to raise a family supports this
idea. Most of the women and men I knew
who received the same training I did to join the ranks of the professional
class (I abandoned) support this idea.
And they often support this idea despite the fact that an economically
unjustifiable portion of their income simply goes back into the overhead of
their jobs, and what is leftover, in millions of dollars every year, goes into
the binge of irresponsibility and indulgence, raping and wasting, that is
euphemistically referred to as “shopping.”
Blind
to the larger moral issues, their children are warehoused and socialized to
accept capitalistic orthodoxy, including: the “necessity” of being taught in
order to be educated; the “inevitability” of competition; that schools are
equitable conveyor belts for ambition and mobility; that academic pedigrees are
the locus of social status; that making money is an adequate goal for life’s
work; and that consuming the world will compensate for the loss of freedom and
ways of living that they have left unexplored.
In
the last decade that I’ve been unschooling my children, people –especially
parents of schoolchildren- have always been interested in knowing why my
husband and I have not sent our children to school. I can usually tailor a response to pique their interest and
sometimes garner more than a modicum of respect. But, I rarely say what I really want to say, i.e., that the whole
educational system is flawed to the core because it necessarily cripples the
social consciousness of children.
Indeed, the sort of persons that are socialized within the current
educational establishment are often so inculcated with exaggerated competitive
attitudes and with the idea that individual material gain is the best measure
of “success”, that they are unable to imagine a world organized much
differently. I no longer ask these
parents the comparable question: “Why are you sending your child to school?”
because to our mutual embarrassment they so often have no idea.
* * *
For
a long time now, the state, in collusion with corporations, has been supporting
the wholesale relinquishment of child rearing to institutions and capitalistic
agendas. Given that all thinking is
rooted in and shaped by the activities in which people engage, I believe one
thing our society is increasingly suffering from is the loss of maternal
thinking and behavior -and I say “maternal” without intending to deny for one
minute that mothering work, with the exception of breastfeeding, is as suitable
to men as it is to women.
The
world could be organized for human happiness, beauty, biodiversity, community,
cooperation, and freedom. But to the
extent that people retain their associations and dependence on institutions and
ideologies that preoccupy them with money, acquisition, and power, I worry that
the entire globe will be reduced to the vocabulary and currency of economics,
and that other languages with far greater altruistic content -like the maternal
one I’ve been speaking - will be increasingly demeaned as subjective opinions,
“fashions,” or "tastes" of no social consequence at all.
Those
of us who have assumed the responsibilities of caring for children full time
and live deliberately at the periphery of mainstream society know a great deal
about another kind of life. That
knowledge is powerful because its standing rests in the continuum of the human
biological experience. We can state our
position very clearly: the day-to-day raising of children, the sensitivity,
flexibility, resourcefulness, and patience it entails, offers a generous
blueprint for the kind of work that needs to be done to build a better world. .
. . a world, for example, filled with many more people who can conduct their
lives with love and compassion for others, and who are seriously concerned to
secure for all the necessities and advantages that they seek for themselves.
Remember
what Che Guevara said: A good radical education is about loving people first
and wanting for them what you want for yourself.