I Don't Want to Be Your Grandma

Dixie said something that had me nodding my head and gritting my teeth, both. She commented on my Mother's Day post about how, at her church, they give all women flowers on Mother's Day because "all women mother somebody."

Does anybody else think that is just really, really insulting? Do all men "father" somebody? And how come "mothering" is a verb with a meaning separate from "giving birth to" or "providing DNA for," but "fathering" is not? We don't assume all men have a deep primordial need to be dads, but we're sure all women need to mother. We don't see adult men in the store and assume it's OK to let our kids run up and grab them, but it's OK with strangers who are female. And let me just rant about this, please, because it always drives me insane. Even though I'm past the age of possible motherhood, now people assume I am filled with some thwarted Granny Genes or something and reallyreallyreally wish I could act in some grandmotherly way toward them or their children. This is so not true, and if they knew how I felt about it, they wouldn't even suggest it would be fun to call me "Mom."

I have known people with whom I've had to create some distance because they wanted to cast me in the role of Alternative Mother, sort of an adjunct to their own, not-quite-so-cool mom, as if this were a compliment to me and as if my own lack of offspring were something that needed to be assuaged, perhaps by allowing me to cook for them. Because the Cult of Motherhood is so pervasive, people think that there is some deep, dark reason I didn't have kids. Many think I couldn't, and that's OK. Who knows--maybe it's true: I've never been pregnant, so I don't know if it were ever a possibility. Never, not once. Because--hello!--I knew from the earliest I can remember that Kids Are Not For Me.

A much darker supposition, one that really makes me question whether or not people live in the 21st century or are still stuck back in the Eisenhower administration, is that I didn't have children with The EGE because I didn't want to bring "mixed-race" babies into a hostile world. People used to kind of sidle around that question, but in most cases they could see the steam begin to rise behind my eyes and quickly backpedaled. I have had people say, "Oh, but you would have been such a good mother!" and, more sinisterly, "Oh, but The EGE would have been such a good daddy--how could you not want that for him?" It is a tribute to my upbringing that these people still have only one exit to their alimentary canal.

Because motherhood is such a huge, huge deal and such a major expectation, and anyone who doesn't go along with the program is suspect and must be pitied or scorned or brought into the fold. People have offered to let me be a surrogate to their kids, be a godmother, be an Auntie Mame, etc.. I do not know why this is, because I have never been shy about saying, "I. Do. Not. Like. Children."  Perhaps they think I'm putting on a brave front to cover my misery.

Women are not supposed to say that. We can say we don't like men, we can say we don't like teenagers or old women or, if we run in redneck circles, we can say we don't like members of various minorities. But we cannot say we don't like children. We are immediately suspect: are we secretly child abusers? Were we ourselves abused? Has some trauma ruined our lives?

I can't speak for anyone else, but me? There was no trauma. I have no desire to hurt children or make their lives miserable because--hello, again!--I have no desire to be around them. And here's the deal: I didn't like kids when I WAS one. As an only child, I spent lots of time alone, and I had these elaborate story-telling games I created that went on for days--I'd make these villages all across my bedroom floor, made from blocks of wood and boxes and pieces of tile and carpet. They didn't look like much to anyone else, but they were the landscapes for huge adventures. My mother didn't really know what I did with these--I had to have the door shut when I was weaving the stories--but I'm guessing she stood outside and listened to me talking to myself and understood enough that she never disturbed what surely must have looked like a huge, floor-covering mess, letting it stay for days at a time before urging a temporary clean-up so she could get in and vacuum. I never let other kids in my room when these constructions were set up--the idea of someone else touching the bowls of porridge (caps from Coke bottles) or the stable where the horses lived (a basket) was horrifying. Other kids were noisy and asked too many questions, and were rough and clumsy, knocking things over and moving Important Buildings. They always wanted to play board games, which I kept hidden so I could claim I didn't have any.

In short, I found other kids a complete nuisance. They baffled me then, and they baffle me now. People who coo about the innocence and freedom of kids--do they really remember being kids? Playing with other kids? I always wonder, because little kids are pretty much heathens. Left on their own, they hit and bite, take stuff that isn't theirs, eat boogers and fondle themselves in public. They aren't toilet trained and see nothing wrong in playing with their own waste. They will try to eat anything they come across, including things they find in the cat's box. They will cheerfully break your stuff just as readily as they will break their own. It's the whole thing about whether kids are born innocent and pure and are corrupted by a corrupt world or are born little heathens who have to have the rough edges sanded smooth by a civilized society. I believe the latter, of course, although I question the part about "civilized society." I could offer proof, some of the most stunning gleaned from the summer I worked as a bus driver/camp counselor for the YMCA.

So, anyway--back to my point: not all women are mothers. Not all women have any desire to be mothers, nor do they want to mother you or your children or wear your Motherhood Flowers. They don't need to be pitied, and they don't want to babysit (oh, lord: I forgot that! People used to offer to "let" me babysit, as if I had some deep need to be around toddlers and they were generously going to let hang out with theirs. Like I was perfect because I would be so eager to hang out with their children that--wow!--they wouldn't have to pay me! Score! (I babysat once in my life. I was four.))

People are now beginning to see me in some grandmotherly role, and at some point it's going to become annoying. You can't say, "Oh, hell, no. Are you crazy?" because that's just rude. But having to gently explain that, no, you do not need to borrow someone's kid to feel better about your life--at some point I'm going to get snotty, I can tell.

Last night we went to a concert and dance. It was in the gymnasium at a local community college, and they'd put panels of carpet down on the basketball floor and, in the middle, had arranged a teeny, tiny, teeninsy square of rubber tiles. That was the dance floor. It was sad and laughable and baffling, all at the same time, sending the message: "We knew we could get more people to come if we advertised this as 'a dance,' and to do that, we had to provide a 'dance floor,' but we really don't see the point of dancing and don't actually want any of it to occur here, so here's this. Whaddaya think?"

So, sure, they pulled in the half-dozen couples in the area who do ballroom dancing and will show up for any advertised dance, and we went (we're not ballroom dancers, not by a long shot). And we all made some valiant efforts, scraping our way around the rubber tiles in the middle of a basketball court, people in the stands on either side eating meatballs from paper plates. But for the most part, the square of dance floor in the middle of the room was taken over by a gang of female toddlers whose mothers seemed to think this little square of space had been provided not for people to do something so foolish as dance, but so that they, the mothers, could show off the utter charmingness of their daughters, who toddled and leapt and twirled and squealed and tackled each other while their mothers, oblivious to the people waiting to take the dance floor and do the rhumba or the cha-cha-cha, took video. I watched the older women in the audience, who looked on with faces that clearly said, "Awwwwwww! I want one again!" and who just as clearly thought this was a much better use of the space than for adult couples who might want to dance with each other. Ah, childhood innocence! Ah, motherhood! So much better than having to touch your husband, that old coot.

Which explains rather a lot, you know?

What was I thinking, if not "Awww, how cute!"? I was thinking that this is why we are where we are. That the mothers should have already started teaching their children that public space is "public," and that they don't get to do whatever they want in the spaces they have to share with other people. But their mothers are of a generation that didn't learn this themselves. They weren't the least bit embarrassed at getting in the way of people who paid money to come dance (we weren't among those, so that's not what I'm grousing about: I can't do the rhumba, anyway). We are all supposed to think this is OK, though. More than OK--we're supposed to be entranced by children, indulgent of children, enamored of children.

No. As adults who aren't the parents of a child, we owe that child no more and no less than we owe any other living creature: we owe it respect. We must protect it as we would any other creature needing protection--whether that creature is a small animal or an infirm person, a toddler or someone very old. So if we see it in imminent danger, we would intervene. But the idea of it "taking a village to raise a child"? Oh, sure, it sounds so lovely. But try it. Try living it. See a child stealing candy from the bin at the grocery store and go up and lecture the child and spank it [yeah, yeah, yeah--I know The EGE and I are of the last generation of children who actually got spanked (he would say "beaten") and learned from it and know we are better people for having had parents who spanked us] and force it to take the candy to the manager and apologize. See how warm and fuzzy and village-y you feel when the parents assault you and then take you to court.

Where was I? Oh: motherhood. Right.

Not all women are maternal. It doesn't make them better or worse, to be envied or pitied. Try thinking of women as women, just as you think of men as men. They are not "mothers" or "grandmothers." They may be, but first, they're just people, people who may or may not have any maternal feelings and may or may not find your children adorable. Which is a really good reason to keep your child from grabbing onto their legs in line at The Dreaded Wal-Mart, you know?