CSotD: Now comes the guilt
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Reply All is the Cathy of the New Millennium or of the 20-teens or whatever we're calling this period.
Well, no, it isn't. But you have to start somewhere, and that's the historic parallel.
Younger readers think of Cathy as a strip where this neurotic woman just tried on bathing suits and ran around screaming "Ack! Ack!" while shedding plewds, but it was a breakthrough strip in 1976, when it was new and fresh. Cathy was a young single embodiment of the frustration expressed by married, suburban Erma Bombeck who built her schtick on a foundation laid down by Betty Friedan.
The Bombeck end of that spectrum had an air of "Dear God, what have I done to myself?" while Cathy was young enough to recognize that she was spiralling around the drain but unable to figure out how to avoid being sucked in.
Lizzie is the post-feminist version, determined not to follow her forbears down the drain but having a little trouble keeping her bravado level elevated. Unlike Cathy, she's no schlub: She's fit, cute and fashionable and she's much more professionally confident and competent than Elaine Benes.
And yet …
Fascinating, funny territory.
The current riff on parenting styles has been a laugh in large part because Donna Lewis (and BTW that website has some insanely funny stuff on it) is about the age of my kids, so I read the arc both from her point of view and with a tasty dollop of generational guilt.
Thanks to Facebook, my kids occasionally turn up a friend from grade school and provide updates. It's interesting to find out who turned out well and who crashed and burned despite all early indications. When we were pregnant with the eldest, the OB warned us that kids usually turn out the way they do despite, not because of, their parents. That seems to be playing out.
We would fall under the "attachment parent" umbrella, but not at an extreme end. That is to say, not only was our eldest delivered by Robert Bradley, but we met and interviewed the developer of the Snugli, a Peace Corps volunteer who had served in Togo and wanted to recreate the experience of babies being carried in shawls but with better ergonomics and a few safety straps.
But we weren't stupid about it, and we laughed over some of the extremes of the era.
For instance, that's eldest son in the Snugli with Ann Moore. But, dear lord, no, we don't have any pictures of him with Dr. Bradley. In 1972, it was hard enough to get the father into the delivery room and the "childbirth as combination photo op and group celebration" thing hadn't quite struck. Childbirth was still between one man, one woman and one baby. Sometimes more than one baby, but it didn't include siblings, parents, friends and people you met in the hallway while you were being wheeled in.
By the time second son arrived in 1976, a father had to have a pretty good excuse not to be in the delivery room, though we had to fight like hell to stay overnight in the hospital with him a few months later when he had pneumonia.
However, there were plenty of kids whose parents were not that involved in their lives.
Sometimes it's insensitivity: You don't have to wear the kid (our second hated the Snugli anyway), but carrying it around in a plastic carrier as if it were the Thanksgiving turkey seems a bit callous.
It's hard for me to see a crying infant in a plastic dish at the grocery store without screaming, "For god's sake, pick him up!"
But maybe they were told not to. At our LaMaze classes in '76, a psychologist who was there as a father-to-be volunteered to give us a lecture on how to raise a child, which was kind of funny since half of us were repeaters and he was a first-timer.
The gist of his message was that, when your baby cries, you should check to see if it's time for him to eat, whether he has a dirty diaper or whether there is a pin sticking him (yeah, we still had diaper pins back then).
If not, leave him alone, or you will reinforce crying.
Some of the parents asked "What if he's just lonely?" but he explained that infants are incapable of that kind of sophisticated emotion, which is learned behavior.
When a few of us continued to suggest that possibly this was a place where theory conflicted with real-world experience, his wife ended the conversation with a chilly, "My husband has a Phd in psychology."
I'd love to know how their kid turned out.
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