Why “The Mother’s Handbook?”

Sunday, January 11, 2009

abstract

I was raised by an emergency room nurse. She spent her entire professional life making life and death decisions, arguing with doctors, and running from one crisis to another.

What she didn’t do was put up with nosy strangers.

Some of my fondest memories of my mom are of watching her interact with other people. In her philosophy, rude strangers or busybodies were to be ridiculed.

When “one-size fits all” pantyhose first came out in the seventies, she bought two pairs. She wore one, and then decided to return the other to the store. The idiot store clerk didn’t understand why. They fit everybody, right? My petite mother jumped up and down, in the middle of the supermarket, for a few minutes, looking like a yo-yo on steroids, while rolls of nylon cascaded down her legs. The astonished manager gave her a refund. Finally.

In the late seventies, stores started asking personal information when you tried to use a credit card. No one does that now, of course, but back then, it became commonplace to ask what the purchaser did for a living when accepting a credit card. If my mother was in a good mood, she’d tell the nosy clerk that she was independently wealthy. If she had had a bad day, she’d tell them that she ran a house of ill repute.

This attitude extended to my sister and I. She would always try to answer our real questions, believing that kids should always be told the truth. But when it came to questions about parenting style, she never broke down to the old, “because I said so.” Her answer: It says so in the Mother’s Handbook. She could never find her copy; we just had to believe her.

The Mother’s Handbook told her that we needed to wear sweaters when she was cold. It told her that children’s rooms needed to be cleaned regularly. It said that we needed to eat our vegetables.

I have searched used bookstores for my entire adult life and have never found a single copy.

Now that I have four children, I have to admit that I have resorted to quoting the rumored Mother’s Handbook on occasion. I have always wished that there really were one. It would be great to be able to find all the answers, to all of the parenting mysteries, right at your fingertips. Despite the spate of self-help books for parents, I still consider parenting to be a ‘fly by the seat of your pants’ operation.

Hands down, though, I would rather deal with the terrible twos than with other parents. I have yet to find a self-help book on how to deal with nosy relatives, mothers of perfect children, crotchety old men, or parent-teacher conferences. As a physician myself, the same problems applied—how do I take this junk seriously?

My answer, unfortunately, is that I don’t. I never did. I have made my reputation among my children’s friends’ parents and their teachers.

I don’t promise that you will find answers here that will solve all your problems. I do promise that you will be socially ostracized if you try any of my advice. The good thing is, you really didn’t want to talk to any of them anyway, right?

Send this to the person bothering you today!