Daily Blague

In Monday's Times, there was an Op-Ed piece by Judith Warner that I would have linked to, but I'd already posted the day's Loose Links and couldn't be bothered. This morning, though, I found that it had provoked The Biscuit Report to do something that it normally doesn't: talk about Baby Biscuit. I hope to come back to this matter after lunch, but I'll post now in hope of comments.

Ms Warner writes about a tendency among parents (one she does nothing to document) to put their children where their spouses ought to be in their love-lives.

If you flip through the magazines aimed at moms this month, you'd be hard pressed to find much talk of romance, unless you count all the articles on modern marriage's lack of romance, which are legion: Working Mother pleads, "Make Time for Your Valentine." Good Housekeeping insists, "Men can be romantic." Child magazine offers tips on "Staying Lovers While Raising Kids." And Parents, acknowledging that marriage with children often feels "about as romantic as changing a dirty diaper," offers advice for getting "back in the groove," like establishing "no-sex nights." (Absence makes the heart grow fonder?)

In many marriages, erotic love has been supplanted by what The New Yorker once called "the eros of parenthood." Up to 20 percent of couples now report having sex no more than 10 times a year, qualifying them for what the experts call "sexless marriages." Many mothers freely admit to preferring their children's touch to their husband's, without regret or shame.

Where did our love go? Look no further than the adorable little girl on the cover of this month's Parents, clutching a huge, red-sequined heart in her chubby little hands. According to a recent report by the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University, children are a "growing impediment" to a happy marriage.

What this tells me is that there are a lot of parents who haven't grown up themselves, and that, basically is the point that Amy makes at TBR when she writes about "attachment parenting":

The Wikipedia entry on attachment parenting is a bit of a caricature of it -- describing a parenting style in its maximal forms and with all the other cultural choices that are more-or-less associated with it. I would lean more toward the minimal description: raising your children secure in the knowledge that too much love won't hurt them. Lots of parents who "do attachment parenting" are anxious, rigid, and obsessive about the rules they follow, about what they must do for their kids, about, generally, doing everything right. So, for that matter, are lots of other parents. There are all kinds of 'systems' out there, and they do make parents crazy. Lots of families involved in "attachment parenting" end up with a rigid division of labor in which the mother is basically completely responsible for the kids and must be incredibly available to them, and the father is busy at work all the time. So, too, do lots of families who don't "attachment parent". Parental anxiety and preoccupation with their kids is real, and no doubt it does put a real strain on some marriages, but my own observations (anecdotal of course, but I didn't see any hard citations in Ms. Warner's essay, either) lead me to believe that parents become preoccupied with their kids because their marriages aren't so great to begin with, not vice-versa. If a husband works 80-hour weeks and the wife is busy with kiddie activities all the time, or if both work all the time and spend their little spare time in a "quality" way with the kids, then yeah, I'll bet the marriage is going to suffer. And it'll suffer whether the toddlers are still nursing and sleeping in the parents' bed.

It has always seemed to me that many children are conceived faute de mieux. What do we do now, honey? How do we sustain this relationship beyond what's looking more and more like its natural expiration date? Divorce is no longer frowned upon, but I suspect that it remains wrenching and humiliating for most people. I am not saying that many babies are born in order to save marriages; that would be wildly overdramatic. But I sense that many couples turn to parenthood as a way of turning away from the deep friendship that distinguishes marriage from a legitimized love affair. This kind of friendship is never as easy as it looks, and it requires change on both sides, as the spouses literally grow closer together. The time to begin working on this friendship is the moment when it begins to require it; that is, at the very moment when one begins to wonder if one has chosen the right mate. It is an awkward, even sickening moment, and children simplify everything. Instead of growing together, spouses become "mommy" and "daddy." Mind you, I am speaking only of couples that drift into parenthood or yield to family pressure. There are lots of loving couples who know exactly what they're doing when they decide to have children, and who know themselves well enough to live up to their commitments. But I don't think that such people constitute a majority of parents. The self-consciousness of the magazine articles that Ms Warner cites alone suggest that they're not. 

What happens next, faute d'amitié, is the withering of the attachment between husband and wife, and the intensification of parental feelings that Amy mentions.

Here, it seems to me, the fundamental question is one of narcissism - of whether the child is seen as an extension of the parent or as an autonomous person. As someone for whom neither childhood nor parenting was ever straightforward, I've concluded that children never match their parents' love, and that they don't understand this until they have children of their own. It is the role of a parent to help a highly dependent baby become a highly independent adult, and the leading edge of independence sets the child apart from its parents. I have always been surprised by the weedlike persistence of my unwillingness to recognize my daughter's independence. Oh, she might do whatever she likes - so long as she remains, in ways that I like, a reflection of me. I've had to learn to be proud of her. Disconnecting the longing to see her grow in my direction from my behavior has proved to be difficult and painful.

Everything was so much simpler when paternal authority went unquestioned, and when marriage marked a woman's move from one kind of servitude to another. Yes, sir, it sure was simpler.

The heading refers to a great limerick by Felicia Lamport Kaplan. Anybody ever hear of her?