Thinking about St. Anne at Christmas

 

December 24, 2020

From my childhood until I was married at 30, my Christmases had three noteworthy aspects: gathering with my mother’s family, the celebration centered on bringing a pine tree into the house and decorating it with ornaments above and presents below, and the story of Mary and Joseph traveling to Bethlehem—at least as it was filtered through my decidedly non-Christian Unitarian Universalist churches. Santa wasn’t really part of my direct experience; we rarely if ever had Christmas stockings, and no one except popular culture tried to fill my head with stories about a jolly old man with a white beard. To young Amanda, opening our gifts on Christmas Day was surely the heart of the experience. There were SO MANY presents that my aunt always called it “Pig’s Christmas.” My grandmother, perhaps making up for family money and status lost with the picture cord factory in the Great Depression, made sure there was always a multitude of gifts to unwrap. A family rule was that everyone had to watch everyone open every single present—no presents could be opened when it was time to tend the feast in the kitchen—so the whole thing took hours. The present-opening ritual was always capped off by a visit from the Table Fairy, an idiosyncratic guest who left inexpensive practical presents such as office pens or a fresh box of paperclips on everyone’s dinner plate. The Table Fairy ensured that as the presents under the tree dwindled, no one would selfishly lose interest in the process of watching the unwrapping because everyone could look forward to have one more gift just before dinner, to be opened simultaneously.

If you had asked me as a teenager, I probably could have told you about Mary and Joseph, as could most American children who grow up in a superficially secular society that nonetheless shapes itself around the rhythms of the Christian holiday cycle. The UU churches I attended as a child taught me to love Christmas carols and to know the basic outlines of the story of Jesus’s birth. One year my brother had a part in the Christmas pageant, playing Joseph. He had a line reassuring the ass who carried Mary to
Bethlehem: “There, there, Small One.” We spent so much time finding the right tone for this line that it became a family byword for years afterwards. But the recitation of the classic Christmas story, which I encountered on Christmas Eve, really functioned as a prelude to the main event of unwrapping a seemingly endless supply of presents. No one did the work to connect the dots between Christmas presents and the gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh that the kings brought for baby Jesus.

My primarily secular understanding of Christmas changed when I married a Roman Catholic husband. Neither of us was going to convert for our marriage—he is too dyed in the wool of theism to understand Unitarian Universalism as a religion at all, much less one he would practice; and becoming a Christian would require me to believe multiple things that I find impossible. But we respect the importance of each other’s faiths and from time to time attend worship at each other’s churches. Until we had actual children, I assumed that the challenges of raising an interfaith family would be central to our marriage. But our distinct theologies lead us to the same fundamental values, and our children’s major challenges have little to do with our religious orientations. The interfaith quality of our family is peaceful and enriching rather than a source of conflict.

Attending Catholic services even once in a while did transform my experience of the major Christian holidays. I was so surprised when I realized that there were Trinitarian versions of the familiar Christmas hymns, which even in UU form are already much more theistic than I am entirely comfortable with. I couldn’t belt out lyrics about “the offspring of the Virgin’s womb” with the same kind of gusto I sang about fields and flocks or the silent night. But over decades of marriage, my appreciation for Christmas has only increased, while I have backed off of Easter altogether. I began to understand Easter as the spiritual centerpiece of Christianity. It was not, apparently, a holiday about rabbits and jellybeans and finally the blessed return of springtime, as my various UU churches took care to emphasize for our members who are come-outers, so wounded by the churches that rejected their sexuality and feminism and generally questioning spirits that the traditional, resurrection-oriented Easter triggers their deepest hurts instead of offering them the promise of salvation. So I decided to let my husband shape Easter for our family, providing a festive ham-oriented meal on his request each year, but leaving the candy buying and church-going priorities to him (though I did continue to supervise egg-dyeing and hunting until the teenagers took over that one for themselves). Most years now I don’t even try to get the children to a UU Easter service as well as the essential Catholic mass. But Christmas—perhaps because it is a holiday with a baby at the core—has taken on many new valences to me over the years.

Christmas first began to grow new meaning for me when our first child was a toddler. We hadn’t tried to travel for her first Christmas, when she was five months old. That year, perhaps in a misguided effort to recreate my childhood Pig’s Christmases, we spent three days trying to keep her attention by opening all of her presents between nursing and a precious few naps. But we discovered it didn’t really feel like Christmas when it was just the three of us, so in following years we packed ourselves up and traveled 800 miles east to my family or 2,000 miles west to his. It turns out that there is nothing like traveling with a baby at Christmas to help parents feel both empathy with and sympathy for Joseph, and especially Mary, great with child, riding Small One in search of a hospitable inn. Sure, travel with fractious children and many bags and teeming, keyed up crowds in 21^st century America is hellish; but at least we knew that at the end of the ride our families would meet us at the airport and whisk us home for homemade spaghetti sauce and a futon made up with many warm blankets. Mary did not complain the way I did; but she was filled with the same love for her infant that I had.

My sense of connection to Christmas shifted again as my children grew old enough to participate in the pageant at my UU church, always held on the Sunday before Christmas (not Christmas Eve, which was reserved for a short homily; caroling culminating in the whole church singing Silent Night in a darkened sanctuary, the light from a single candle slowly spreading around the encircling congregation, one person at a time; and, of course, frosted cookies). The church I attend now, in the Universalist Midwest, tends not to use the opportunity of the Christmas pageant to relate the birth of Jesus. Our hard-working Director of Religious Education develops a new script every year, with evergreen woodlands, or elves, or once even a screaming latke at the center. I don’t much look forward to attending the pageant, which always feels like amateur acting rather than worship to me; but I definitely see the value of the children learning to take on these varied roles and the older members appreciating their efforts. My older child, inhabited by a level of stage lust I’d never previously witnessed in person, will take on any role asked of her, and is a very reliable narrator because she is naturally LOUD, even if she has to learn to slow down. My younger child, full of stage fright, will always try to participate but can’t always bring herself in front of all the loving eyes of the congregation. For her, the breakthrough year was the time she could manipulate a shadow puppet behind a screen.

Where is Christianity and the connection to Christmas in that reflection about non-nativity pageants, you ask? Well, it’s admittedly a bit more tenuous. Traveling with older children was easier than with infants, but we started staying home on Christmas to allow them to be in the pageant; and being home also makes it easier to go to both a UU service and a Catholic mass (a feat, by the way, that makes it very hard to feed a family on Christmas Eve; no time to cook, and the only restaurant open in Wisconsin is McDonald’s). But around the time of the pageant years, the UU Religious Educator Sophia Lyon Fahs’s words often got repeated at Christmas Eve services and on Facebook memes, words that make the birth of Jesus once again a universalizing experience: “Each night a child is born is a holy night.” My children might not have been sent to save the world, but their lives are sacred; I can treasure them; and I can try to raise them to bless the world despite our imperfections and brokenness.

And now this year. 2020. The year of the pandemic. This year my older child is 16, the same age Mary was when the state sent her off to Bethlehem, nine months pregnant, to be counted with her husband’s family (this version of a census never made sense to me, and still doesn’t; what kind of government counts people where they come from instead of where they actually are? One that doesn’t care about efficiency but does care about controlling people, I suppose). We aren’t staying home this pandemic year because the state insists we do; in fact, in Wisconsin the state’s power to order us home has been severely attenuated. But we are staying home voluntarily because we treasure other people’s children and the elders that they love and depend on. In the absence of church services, what does the Christmas story have to teach us this year?

My 16 year old hopes that she won’t be at home next Christmas; she has applied to spend it with a host family in another country. If she is away, I will miss her terribly. My thoughts turn to Mary’s mother, St. Anne, who is of course never pictured at the nativity in the manger, where Joseph was Mary’s only human companion. What was that first Christmas like for Anne? I wondered how she felt about sending her own pregnant child off with a much older man, even one to whom she was betrothed. Giving birth leads as easily to death as to new life. How much anguish did Anne experience, worried about how her beloved child would manage in childbirth, especially without her mother’s comfort to carry her through?

I do a little superficial research about St. Anne (and ask friends more knowledgeable about church history for a boost). I am shocked to learn that their mother-daughter story is one that is about familial separation well before the first Christmas. Anne and her husband Joachim do not appear in the Christian Bible. Instead, their story is related in the Gospel of James, which the Bible’s compilers decided to exclude from the canon.[1] Anne and Joachim are wealthy, and pious, but refused from certain desirable statuses because they are childless. Anne miraculously conceives—the Immaculate Conception—and gives birth to Mary. Anne cossets her child Mary throughout her infancy, but delivers her to the temple to be raised by priests when Mary turns three, as a way of offering thanks for the gift of her life. Did Anne ever see Mary after that? Was the first Christmas only one of many in which mother and daughter were apart? The tradition seems murky. For a while, teenage Mary, alarmed by a pregnancy she cannot hide or explain to the satisfaction of the priests, takes refuge with her cousin Elizabeth. Was Mary still connected with her family but fearful of the prospect of her mother’s wrath at the pregnancy? Depictions of Mary and Anne in the medieval period show mother teaching daughter to read, suggesting that then, at least, the church accepted the idea that they had an ongoing relationship, even if they were not together when Mary birthed Jesus.[2]

But 2020’s Christmas lesson is a poignant one for me. For 2000 years, Christians have celebrated the mother and son, Mary’s bond with Joseph solidified by the birth of the precious baby Jesus. But what of the mother Anne and daughter Mary, separated at the time of travail, by an unholy conspiracy of state and social dictates? Were they not also a family? Christmas is a time of family celebration but also of family put asunder.

Photo by my mother, Kerry Mueller, the artist.

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[1] Why is the Gospel of James excluded, you ask? Read it for yourself here or here. It’s shockingly different from the more familiar gospels, and not only because a midwife attends Mary’s labor in a cave instead of a manger.

[2] Pamela Sheingorn, “‘The Wise Mother’: The Image of St. Anne Teaching the Virgin Mary,” Gesta 32 1) (1993): 69-80, https://www.jstor.org/stable/767018

Reflections on Our COVID Scare: Food Inventory

One of the most stressful aspects of the lockdown has been managing the food inventory. Very early on in the pandemic I was actually shocked by the account of a prominent Washington DC person who said that she had been going to Whole Foods every single day. By contrast, our family decided we would send me out once every ten days to our basic grocery store, with an occasional supplementary run to Trader Joe's. We shifted that strategy a little bit when it became clear that there were COVID outbreaks in meatpacking plants across the country and the meat supply was threatened. I stopped buying meat at the grocery store and started going to local butchers whose meat sources are out of the factory food chain.

This approach was meant to minimize the chances of our catching or sharing the virus, but it had some real downsides. Something you wanted but not at the store? Then you're out of luck until your next ten-day run (yeast, flour, I'm looking at you). We don't drink a lot of milk these days, but we do use it as an ingredient. A half gallon might run out in 24 hours if the kids decided to make a lot of pudding. But our last gallon went bad before we finished it. And the actual trips to the store have been enormous runs, taking multiple grocery carts and multiple hours.

The issue with being quarantined, instead of just conservatively cooperating with the lockdown, however, is that you don't have any warning that it's coming. You can't decide that on Saturday you're going to stay inside for 14 days and go to the grocery store now. If you have active reason to believe that you might be contagious, you can't just mask up and go out to prepare. You have a moral obligation to stay home starting immediately. The quarantine order just falls on you.

The news from our doctor that we should quarantine came about halfway through our 10-day grocery cycle. That meant we were still good for a while, but that we couldn't go out and replenish the stuff that was going to run out during our quarantine. Did I have enough meat (probably)? Milk? No, definitely not. Flour and yeast? This gave me the most anxiety, since my family has been devouring homemade bagels and loaves of oatmeal/flour bread at the rate of about one batch every 36 hours.

I got especially worried when I realized that in our case, it was both the adults who were potentially contagious. Of course we wanted to protect our kids. But could we really hand over responsibility to them for feeding themselves and us for a two-week period? If we were actively feverish in the bedroom, I don't think we would have had a choice. But my husband and I did continue to be in charge of cooking for them and ourselves on a regular basis, and I did keep kneading the dough (hoping that cooking would kill any virus). I just hoped that if we got truly sick, there was enough canned soup and rice in the house for the children to feed themselves. I worried particularly about my picky eater, who started off lockdown cooperatively eating whatever was offered but has backed off of that in the past month. I asked her sister what they would have done about eating if we got sick, and she told me today that "[she] probably would have yelled at [her] sister a lot."

This is hard to manage, and stressful. I see now that I absolutely have to have a fourteen-day supply of food on hand at all times, just in case. I'm grateful to be wealthy enough to keep a well-stocked pantry, to have older children who can manage the stove and oven, for the previous owners of this house who let us keep their backup basement fridge.

Reflections on Our COVID Scare: Masks

As soon as the nurse scheduled us for COVID tests, I looked at CDC guidance. It seemed completely impossible for the two adults in the house to isolate from the teenagers who needed food and parenting (not to mention keeping up to the recommended sanitation procedures, which involves cleaning surfaces all the time). But thanks to a timely gift from a friend, we did have masks that we could wear to keep ourselves from coughing our viruses (or whatever) onto our kids. So, my husband and I have been wearing masks almost continuously in the house since Thursday.

Our masks are cute, and mostly I was entertained by wearing them instead of annoyed. I noticed that the mask hides my double-chin, which I appreciated. At one point over the weekend, though, I'd had enough, so I betook myself to an isolated spot in the house and did some reading or chores by myself, without a mask on. And every once in a while it seemed too warm under the mask. Overall not too onerous to wear.

But in the grand scheme of thing, given the choice between wearing a moderately annoying mask and possibly protecting my children, or having a comfortably naked face and possibly infecting my children, it seemed pretty obvious that I shouldn't complain. So I wore the mask. I'm sure you would do the same for your own children, as almost anyone would.

And I thought to myself over and over again, if someone would wear a mask to protect their children at home, why wouldn't they do so in public to protect strangers?

Living the Dream

Every summer, my husband and I go to see the financial planner. I hate it. For me, it's like going to the dentist. Except for in my life as a busy mother, going to the dentist is a nice little vacation--I get to sit still with my eyes closed and no expectations that I say or produce anything for half an hour.

One thing I particularly loathe at the financial planner's office is the "Dream Wall," a cloud painted wall decorated with clients' dreams for themselves and their futures. It's the kind of thing that you would expect...early retirement, open a bed and breakfast, sail around the world. I've always reacted viscerally against the Dream Wall, and every year the financial planner asks me again if I'd like to share my dream on the wall.

As I anticipate with dread our next visit to the planner this summer, I am starting to discern why I hate the Dream Wall so much. I'm not opposed to dreams. But, there are two problems.

1. I am already living my dream life. I really can't ask for more than I already have: meaningful work, a solid, fascinating, and basically happy family, a good church community, and, most days, the chance to swim.

2. Money, which is what the financial planner is positioned to work on, can't buy me what I dream of. I want more rest, more time each day to read novels, more time to do the work of my soul, more time to get exercise, more time to enjoy my children.

My problem is that I can't always remember that I am already living out my dreams. I get so wound up in the daily problems that I forget--as a friend was kind enough to remind me this morning--that my joy resides in my daily activities, the intriguing and confused comment of my child, her excitement about a new idea, the chance to go to sleep in a house that has so much space I can't possibly keep up with the labor of tidying, much less cleaning it.


The financial planner would probably say that the purpose of the Dream Wall is to help me realize how much of my dream I already have, and how to put aside money for the other things I might want in the future, like retirement, or a college education for my kids. But those things aren't dreams for me. They are icing. My dream is the day, not the night.

Declaration of Mutual Dependence

The baby has to learn to sleep independently, to sleep through the night by herself.. It’s developmental.

Yup, that’s what most parenting advice would have you believe. The baby has to learn to sleep by herself in order to develop her independence as a human being.

Some advice even tells you to let the baby cry and cry by herself for long stretches of time until she learns that you won’t come to her in the night. At night, she has to be independent.

Of all the parenting advice I’ve read in the past few years, that’s the biggest bunch of crap I encountered. The baby doesn’t need to learn to be independent. The baby needs to learn that she is secure, that her parents (i.e. mothers with milk and breasts) will come to her during the night to bring her food and comfort if that’s what she needs.

And this is the parenting advice that taught me just how ideologically loaded most formal parenting advice is. There isn’t just an agenda in most parenting books, there is an ideology. Back when I was up with my babies multiple times during the night (last week?) I often wondered what the parenting advice in the Soviet Union or Red China said about a baby’s sleep and independence. Perhaps that they need to sleep through the night for the good of the collective?

But it also strikes me this morning that urging a person to grow up to be independent is dysfunctional in another way. When I became a mother, I lost so much of the independence that being an American has conditioned me to treasure. I can’t set my schedule, do the work my soul burns for at the moment I need to do it, take a shower, get dressed, or even sleep unless all my other ducks are in a row. Is my husband available to watch the children? How many minutes are left on that DVD? Is the school open? Will they please, please, please settle down and go to sleep so I too can get the rest I desperately need?

And I also desperately need those children, the ones who are carrying around my heart.

Raising children to be independent does not prepare them to be parents themselves. It trains them to resent the ways in which parenting (or at least mothering?) curtails their independence.

Maybe this week we should celebrate our mutual dependence, rather than our individual and national independence.

How’s Your Water?

I’ve never been much of a fan of the balance metaphor as a way of describing our lives and our work as being in competition with each other. When I picture “work-life balance,” I imagine a woman holding up heavy burdens, maybe bowling balls, up in the air while she walks around trying not to fall over. The only time I felt that the metaphor really worked was in the introduction to Mama, PhD, where the editors remind us that when a dancer’s body is in balance, every muscle is working. That, at least, felt validating and true.

Perusing Samantha Parent Walravens’ Torn: True Stories of Kids, Career & the Conflict of Modern Motherhood, I was struck by the observation of my college classmate Alexander Bradner. Bradner writes, “Children need their mothers—not nannies or daycare workers—to narrate the mundane, introduce so many joys, and assist with so many pains…But women need a public voice, external affirmation, internal feelings of triumph, money of their own, and a mental life beyond worry and logistics. Only those free to fulfill their early promise have a chance of living through their fifties and sixties without debilitating regret. So we should be able to work as well.” (“Muthering Heights,” p. 110).

For me, Bradner’s observation triggered something. We need our families, or, writ more broadly, our lives. We need our work—something satisfying that makes a contribution somewhere beyond our selfish inner pleasures. We need life, and we need work. They are not burdens; they nourish us. Granted, they nourish us in different ways, and it usually is hard to cultivate them simultaneously.

I have not fully worked this out, but it also seems to me that work and life usually interpenetrate. Show me a mother who does not think about her children when she is working. Show me a worker who never does any “work” while off the job. I acknowledge that you can’t drive your bus while you’re at home. But I have loaded the dishwasher mentally while trying to go to sleep often enough to suspect that downtime nourishes our ability to do our jobs in important ways.

So now I am in search of a different metaphor, a metaphor that acknowledges that work and life are not just burdens, but needs. And that projects the notion that work and life are mutually reinforcing, not undermining.

Today I am trying out the metaphor of water instead of work-life balance. Water consists of hydrogen and oxygen. We need them both individually, and we need them together. We need them to be connected correctly, in the right proportions, at the correct angles. Let’s try it out. Instead of asking your friend, “How is your work-life balance?” ask them “How is your water today?” and see what you learn.

I Should Have Made the Tag "Mothering," Not "Parenting"

My favorite magazine, Brain, Child: The Magazine for Thinking Mothers runs a debate in each issue. Usually I am intrigued by the topic but frustrated by the actual “debate,” because the authors tend to construe the question so differently that they talk past each other rather than with each other. But the debate in the current issue comes out of a long-standing colloquy between the co-editors and for once offers a true binary: should they change the subtitle to include “parents” more broadly, or should they stick with “mothers”?

            I am a longstanding equality feminist, rather than a difference feminist, so I was surprised to find myself coming down on the side of keeping mothers in the title.

            As I thought it through, however, I realized that in recent years I have often told myself that it is motherhood, rather than my experience as a woman in American society, that is the source of my mid-life radicalism. Before I had children, I could function socially as a man. I was the ideal worker (granted, in a profession I love and feel privileged to participate in). With a few notable exceptions that ended up mostly harmless (and which I was privileged to be able to see as exceptions), I have been able to dodge sexual harassment and sexual violence. I benefited from the changes in laws and social norms in the last quarter of the twentieth century that enabled me to be taken seriously for what my hard work and talents produced.

            Motherhood, however, reminded me of my deep animal nature. I put my body on the line—twice—with pregnancy and childbirth (and in another era would not have survived the effort to bear a baby who weighed almost 11 pounds). My thinking brain went on a short hiatus as I coped with the demands of a sleepless child. My schedule revolves around the needs of my children. The topics I think about—personally and professionally—are deeply different from what they used to be. People who don’t know me—and some who do—call me “mom,” though they never would have called me “babe” (not that I was ever a babe). I struggle to remain even a good worker while I aspire to be a good mother, hitting neither target most days. My husband, who is involved with the children, has not appeared to have his fundamental relationships in the world changed, as I have. I am unconvinced that American fathers do experience the sorts of transformations that American mothers do. My experience of gender, in short, has broken over the lines of motherhood. Biology did not make me a woman, but motherhood has.

            One of science fiction writer Sheri Tepper’s novels, The Gate to Women’s Country, is set in a post-apocalyptic United States (spoiler alert!). Women and young children live in gated forts, cultivating art and science. Men live in warrior groups outside the forts, doing what they do best (in Tepper’s jaded view)—fighting with other groups of men. Men and women “hook up” (to use a horrible term that actually fits this situation too well) at regular intervals to allow for reproduction. Boys live with their mothers for a while after birth, then they go live with the men. As they hit puberty, they choose: run the gauntlet back to their mothers’ homes in Women’s Country, or stay with the men? Most stay with the men. But increasing numbers return to Women’s Country, scorned by most men but enjoying the company of a heterosocial society that the women are cultivating. The kicker? The spoiler—it turns out that the men who live outside Women’s Country are not actually the fathers of the boys they welcome to Men’s Country, nor of the girls who stay with their mothers. The women have preserved reproductive science and technology, and while they allow the warriors to believe that they continue to father children, only those men who have returned to Women’s Country are enabled to become fathers—either through trickery on the women who foolishly fall for the warrior men, or the old fashioned way with women in on the secret. In a bit of nastiness that is classic Tepper, the women in fact periodically provoke wars with other forts of women, in order to cull the numbers of aggressive men. The leaders of Women’s Country are carefully breeding violence out of humans, cultivating a society in which womanhood is the norm, and cherishing the men who are willing to prioritize art, science, and community life over patriarchal manhood.

            This turns out to be how I feel about changing Brain, Child’s subtitle. They are doing some really important work at that magazine, excavating with care, honesty, and wicked funny humor what motherhood implies in the twenty-first century US. Some men are brave enough to cross through the gauntlet, read the magazine, and even write for it. Even though the title seems to set it aside as Women’s Country. We want those men, and we need to hear from them. But let them preserve the space where motherhood—which remains a different experience from fatherhood—sets the norm.

Mother's Day

The preschool teachers at my three-year-old's school have put up a marvelously simple and moving display this week, in celebration of Mother's Day.

Each child was asked to bring in a picture of a special woman. The teachers put those pictures into the middle of a circle. Around the edge of the circle, like petals on a rose, are a series of statements by the children about why the woman is special.

I stood, stunned and smiling so broadly, when I read the statements. "My mommy is special because she takes me to the grocery store." "My mommy is special because I love her." "My mommy is special because she holds me." My daughter's said, "My mommy is special because she plays with me (and she takes me to the JCC)." They were all like that. Nothing remarkable--just the day-to-day things that mothers do routinely, often just to keep afloat, sometimes to hang out with their kids.

The kids didn't talk about the "special" things that mothers do, like take them on outings or buying them fancy toys (OK, one did, but that kid was in the other class!). Or having fancy educational pedigrees or prestigious jobs or clean houses.

I have been a mother now for almost seven years, and it was never so clear to me what makes a great parent. It's not anything extraordinary that we do. It's just living our lives carefully and lovingly with our children.

Thank you, preschool teachers, for teaching me that lesson.

Amy Chua’s Dogs

The last line of Amy Chua’s notorious Battle Cry of the Tiger Mother is “I’ve just told Jed that I want to get another dog” (229) This will be the third dog acquired in her family over the course of her children’s childhoods, as narrated in the memoir.

For anyone who was under a rock in January or has forgotten because of the revolutions in the Middle East, politics in Wisconsin, or the tsunami in Japan, Battle Hymn recounts Chua’s struggles with her younger daughter Lulu over playing the violin. Her book launch included the publication of a stomach-turning, unrepentant excerpt of the introduction to Battle Cry in The Wall Street Journal. In the excerpt, and in the book as well, Chua contrasts “Chinese parenting” and “Western parenting.” Chinese parenting—which Chua actually takes care to acknowledge is neither universally Chinese nor exclusively the province of Asians—demands from children obedience, focus on academics and the high arts, never coming in second, and the repudiation of a wide range of leisure activities. Western parenting, by contrast, fosters children’s self esteem, encourages them to find their passions, permits less than stellar achievement in school, and celebrates athletics. In Chua’s version of Chinese parenting, excellent participation is insufficient—her children must win their music competitions, earn the chance to take lessons with the most exclusive teachers, and play at Carnegie Hall (which they do).

I have to admit that from the start I have felt a certain amount of sympathy for Chua. Not because of her professed parenting style—which I do not share—but because it was clear to me that she was writing in a confessional mode. I don’t know why, but Americans seem to have a blind spot when it comes to confessional writing. I got a taste of this myself when I published an editorial on civility that kicked off with the tale of my shouting at my husband for eating my daughter’s breakfast of salami. Why on earth would any self-aware person write doing something she knows other people will criticize roundly, if not to make a point about it? But some of my readers missed this nuance and took me to task for a behavior I had already privately apologized to my husband about.

Chua’s MO is similar—she spends scores of pages building up her self-portrait as a tyrannical mother bent on making her child into a violin prodigy in order to show her moment of conversion and new outlook on parenting. The unpaginated epigraph for the book declares, “instead, it’s about a bitter clash of cultures, a fleeting taste of glory, and how I was humbled by a thirteen-year-old.” By the end of the book, Chua has lost her battle with Lulu over the violin and permitted her daughter to choose her own activities. Lulu chooses tennis. Although she does not win every match, her daughter understands that her losses are in service of her learning the game—which she is determined eventually to win. Chua reconciles herself to her daughter’s putting away of the violin in favor of a mere athletic competition by celebrating her instinct to win. If Lulu will no longer win all those violin competitions that she was pushing her into, at least she can make herself into a tennis champion.

Chua’s overt message is that she has learned that her daughter will not be a failure if she chooses her own activities. Using Chinese parenting on a Western, rebellious second child ended up driving her away; Lulu, she realized, was on the brink of replicating Chua’s immigrant father’s past, alienating himself (in every sense of the word) from his own Chinese parents. But Chua swells with pride to see that Lulu has internalized the drive to win, even if it is in tennis. This is where Chua loses me. The major shortcoming with Chua’s conversion is that she does not let go of her basic tenet that the purpose of parenting is to raise successful children. If the arena can’t be high culture, she will find a way to live with it (and even subtly try to give her daughter tips for winning). She does not question whether “Western parenting” has the same goal as Chinese parenting—to raise children to succeed.

Parenting—even in the ambitious “West”—does not have to have the children’s success as a goal. As I raise my own children, I hope I am leaving their ultimate success up to their own desires. Instead, my focus is to raise children who 1) are decent human beings and 2) use their talents to bless the world. Indeed, I feel so strongly about this second point that I had Rebecca Parker’s poem “Choose to Bless the World” read at each of their dedications. I want them to love themselves and their neighbors to make the world a better place. I think they will probably need certain tools (like a solid education) to accomplish some of their goals in this complex world of ours, but no one needs wealth, status, or a wall of trophies to do either one.

Which brings me back to Amy Chua’s dogs. Why does she include the dogs in the memoir? They are right there in that opening epigraph—“a story about a mother, two daughters, and two dogs”—and the introduction of each new pet into the family opens parts two and three, a counterpoint to chapter one, “The Chinese Mother.” Coco, Samoyed #1, she learns is very bright but stubborn as all get out, like Lulu refusing to cooperate in Chua’s plans for her to walk. Pushkin, also a purebred, starts out ugly, turns into a swan, but remains stupid. Chua realizes that she simply cannot make the dogs succeed the way she has pushed her daughters (why it does not occur to her to raise show dogs, I am not certain). With her husband’s help, she laughs at herself for asking in the heat of a fight about the girls, “What are your dreams for Coco?” She concludes, “My dogs can’t do anything—and what a relief. I don’t make any demands of them, and I don’t try to shape them or their future. For the most part, I trust them to make the right choices for themselves. I always look forward to seeing them, and I love just watching them sleep. What a great relationship.” (166)

Those dogs, I think, embody the third layer of Battle Hymn, the one that argues for parenting as an act of love and decency rather than success. Chua would love to parent her children the way she does Coco and Pushkin, but even after her conversion, she cannot shake the idea that the job of the parent is to make her child a success. It’s hard to tell whether Chua knows that this is what she wants to do. The dogs appear at key moments of the book, but she exhibits no other self-awareness that would suggest she knows that other reasons for parenting exist.

I can’t tell if Amy Chua has written the most brilliant self-satire I’ve ever read or if Battle Hymn is a desperate (and wildly successful) cry for help broadcast to the world at large. But I do know what those dogs are doing there.

*All page numbers refer to Amy Chua, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (New York: The Penguin Press, 2011).

Inside the Rotunda

You won’t see pictures of the Family Space inside the Rotunda of the Wisconsin statehouse, where signs and greeters ask photographers to respect children’s privacy.            

For much of the afternoon that my family joined the occupation of the People’s House last Saturday, my husband and I took turns taking our younger daughter to the bathroom, begging her to overcome her fear of flushing. When I had a few moments to look around, I was dazzled. Not by chaos, but by community. Away from the slogans of the marchers outside and the microphones, drums, and musicians on the ground floor, a few good folks created a space where parents can bring their children to participate in the struggle for Wisconsin’s future.

            Beyond the makeshift “Family Space” signs was an improvised children’s play area, complete with toys, paper and markers, books, snacks, drinks, and, most astonishingly, a chair for nursing mothers. We arrived in time for the 4 p.m. story hour. My older daughter threw herself into coloring, while my younger daughter sampled crackers and an apple. I was treated as though I had as much right to make decisions about the space as those already there. Should we, my fellow parents asked me, request people to take their shoes off when they arrived? When I came back, would I bring a lesson about the history of the labor movement?

While my husband took a turn with our daughter’s recalcitrant bladder, I chatted with the woman who seemed most at home. When I asked her who had donated the snacks, she said simply that she had brought them; she accepted money from me only reluctantly, though graciously. She told me, “we are teachers, librarians, professors,” as if that explained everything.

The spirit of the beloved community swept me up. I intuited that the women waiting in a never-ending line for the restroom would let the potty emergency jump the queue. When I saw a spill, I found the paper towel stash and cleaned it up. When my daughter returned, underwear and pants soaked, I found a diaper for her in the community supply. A delivery person from Ian’s now world-famous pizza sated my children’s hunger. On our way out, I was proud to tell another mother feeding her children in a dark, cold corner that she would find welcome upstairs.

            When I first reflected on my time in the Rotunda, I thought there was probably a metaphor in my daughter’s reluctance to use the bathroom, something about the mess we make when we reject public facilities. But the most important metaphor is the character of the occupation itself. Amidst the protest signs plastered on the wall were posters from the public creating community there. The “Medic Staff” reminded us to please wash our hands and watch our steps on the hard marble stairs. I learned where I could get an ID bracelet for my children, in case they got lost. A “free store” offered a host of useful supplies. A timetable listed the upcoming workshops in civil disobedience.

The people in the Family Space and in the Rotunda embodied our basic values of democracy and decency. All comers are equal participants, no matter when we arrive. We should gladly share with our neighbors. Together, we can educate, clothe, feed, and shelter our children. When we combine our money and our talents for collective enterprises, in the name of what we value, we are more than we can be alone. I do not know their names or if that space can be recreated under the new restrictions placed on those entering the capitol. But I do know that the women and men and children in the Rotunda demonstrated what the public good can be—precisely the point under debate in the “budget repair bill” and now the proposed state budget.

[note: I wrote this in February, 2011]