Crow's Caws
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by Crow Cohen
Anyone who knows me will think it’s laughable that Crow is posing as your local expert on motherhood. Well, stifle those giggles, folks. Number one: I’m not proclaiming myself an expert by a long shot. And number two: the area in my life I’ve felt the least confident about over the years (besides whittling) is raising kids. But I now have the privilege at age 60 of living with my four-year-old grandson for a while.
I don’t have answers about the challenge of child rearing, but I do have some perspective.
My own mom would have rather been a career woman, but it was frowned upon to do both in those days. So she compromised by putting energy into my dad’s corner drugstore (complete with soda fountain, red leatherette booths, jukebox and pinball machine) a five-minute walk from my house. Do you believe they sent kids at school home for lunch? The assumption, of course, was that Mom would be home waiting for you with your bologna sandwich and glass of milk. I ate a lot of hamburgers and hot fudge sundaes for lunch at Dad’s store instead.
I spent the 1960s getting married too young and criticizing the 1950s. My husband and I believed we were over-protected, too suburbanized, too privileged and too conformist. By the time our first daughter was two, my husband was flying fighter-bombers over North Vietnam, and my child- raising theories were out the window. I was intensely isolated. I employed a lot of babysitters and took hikes in the desert to keep myself sane. I found my daughter often an over-whelming responsibility as well as an occasional comfort. She was good-natured, passive, and perfectly adorable. I was a nervous wreck.
Our second daughter came in 1974 when I convinced my old man to get out of the Air Force. We settled down as late-blooming hippies in Vermont. Our child-raising theories began to take root: freedom, permissiveness, non-conformity, earthiness, wholesome food (with a little organic weed thrown in for Mom and Dad to keep them mellow). We had basically a good time, but I needed to come out as a radical lesbian feminist. My (ex-) husband took our oldest daughter for a trip to Israel to broaden their horizons and never came back. The youngest stayed with me, and I raised her in the Burlington lesbian feminist community until we moved to Israel. Then I brought both kids back to the States.
Of Woman Born by radical feminist Adrienne Rich opened my eyes to the “institution of motherhood.” Rich suggested that the biggest sexist trap ever invented was the expectation put on individual women to be 110 percent responsible for the fate of their children within the nuclear family, a demoralizing form of female bondage. What about fathers? What about extended families? What about society? Why was Mom targeted as the evildoer if something went wrong with the kids? Why were women made to feel guilty at every turn if they wanted to lead fulfilling lives outside the family unit?
That’s all I needed to hear. Frankly, I wasn’t much of a kid-person back in those days. I wasn’t the self-sacrificing type or the type who preferred the company of kids over adults because they were simpler to relate to. I never babysat much as a teenager. I thought babies were cute but not as cute as puppies. My motivation for having children was in part based on intense social pressure.
Unfortunately, I swung the pendulum a little too far as our radical lesbian feminist community attempted to acknowledge the oppression of mothers among us and offered to do communal childcare. At the time, I was enormously relieved to have the burden lifted. But I was too absorbed in my coming out process and my drive toward political correctness to put the well being of my children first.
I remember some of the in-your-face kids (two of them mine) at our community events who were over-encouraged to express themselves at the expense of the adult agenda. I don’t think that was good for our kids, to tell you the truth. They needed to learn manners, respect and boundaries. Otherwise, no one would want to be around them.
I also was self-righteous, shortsighted, egotistical, intolerant of others who didn’t think like me, and prone to anger. Somehow I suspect my character defects and lack of tolerance towards children were related. I think it’s great that women nowadays have more of a choice whether or not to have children, but I’m suspicious of people who condemn children as an abhorrent species.
These days gay and lesbian child-raising styles run the gamut. Some are recreating the 1950s and making their kids the center of the universe. Some still insist that foisting children on our gatherings is a pain in the ass. Providing free childcare at any given cultural event is a thing of our radical feminist past. The African proverb, “It takes a village to raise a child,” is pretty popular these days, but American society is getting less village-like by the minute. Nevertheless, I’ve seen a lot of heart-warming cooperative child rearing in our queer communities lately. I can’t help but credit the pioneering efforts of lesbian feminism for paving the way.
Now that I find myself a custodial grandparent I’m grateful that I learned enough feminist theory from my sisters to help me mobilize my “village” so my grandson and I don’t have to be too isolated. The good news is I’m through feeling guilty for asking for help. I also believe that children need a variety of caretakers to learn flexibility and to truly celebrate diversity. A parent who feels trapped and resentful doesn’t do the poor tyke any good.
I am also enormously grateful to be given this “second chance” to be more emotionally and physically present for Lew’s childhood than I was during my own children’s growing up years. Partly, that’s a perk of grandmotherhood; but it’s also a result of figuring out who I am, how I like to spend time, and what I value so that I don’t have to devote all my inner resources to forging an identity.
Do I want to go out and adopt a few more while I’m at it? No thanks. I’m undertaking this because I believe it’s the best thing to do for my family, but I’m still not the earth-mother type.
I don’t think all women should have to be around kids, and I appreciate kid-free space. But because I’m now in a position to do primary childcare, children interest me a lot more. They bring me back down to basics. They make fresh observations about our crazy world. The younger ones are wildly enthusiastic about simple things, and they have no concept of time, which keeps them in the present – a discipline many of us knock ourselves out trying to pull off. Most of all they teach me tolerance, love, patience, and kindness. Of course, I lose it every now and then, but not nearly as much as I used to when I was younger.
As for my own kids, they’ve survived their tumultuous childhoods and have turned into extremely flexible, street-smart, opinionated loveable characters lurching through life (like their mom). The oldest is cultivating her soul under extremely challenging circumstances, and we’re growing closer by the minute. The youngest remains big-hearted and loving and is swiftly learning to stand on her own two feet – the hard way, of course. Both of them have good-sized tempers. (I wonder where that came from?)
Thanks to excellent spiritual advice and intense coaching, I have finally learned to detach with love (at the moment) from my adult children’s journeys. I’m convinced that the best I can do for them at this point in their lives is to embrace my own life as passionately as possible and help them heap love onto their sons, which is mighty easy for me · so far. All five of us live in Burlington, which means we have the privilege of continuing to grow up side by side. I wouldn’t trade it for the world.
Crow Cohen is a lesbian feminist mother, grandmother, and writer who lives in Burlington.