How to Not Suck Writing About Your Children

I do not fancy myself a book critic, really, being much more interested in writing than in writing about somebody else’s writing, and having a predisposition to look for the best in everything and everyone. But having now devoured more parenting memoirs than is good for a girl, I think the world should benefit from my wisdom with my advice to anyone considering writing about how parenthood has changed them.

I am a forgiving reader, and yet the last parenting memoir I tried reading, Neal Pollack’s Alternadad I finally could forgive no more. I forgave him the self-loathing when he is driving to Central Market in Austin, (the yuppie organics high end grocery store where I did do a lot of my shopping when I lived in Texas) in his Volkswagon Passat listening to NPR with the kid in the carseat in back, bemoaning his loss of cool. I forgave him for feeling unable to relate to the other parents at the playground because I’ve had days when the hardest part of parenting is other parents. I forgave him for writing too much about his son’s bowel movements, figuring that that will be for his son to forgive him, someday. I forgave him the preoccupation with being cool, which seems like something you should grow out of sometime in college when you realize that nobody is paying as much attention to you as you are, that people are more likely to remember kindness or passion for a particular subject than they are coolness. I forgave, until a hundred pages in when one chapter just didn’t have anything to do with the one before it or the one after it and there was no point being made I had had enough. Not only had I had enough, I composed a long letter to him in my head.

Dear Mr. Pollack –

Parents, like everyone else on earth, have things that make them unique, as well as things we all have in common. And the tricky thing about writing about parenthood is because it’s new to you, it’s hard not to believe you haven’t discovered something no one else has ever done before. The surprise of having gone from thinking about yourself first always, or maybe your spouse and yourself, to finding yourself responding to your child’s needs and forgetting your own can be so startling that you are sure this must be something new in the world. When you are overwhelmed by the the primal, the fierce protectiveness you feel and the overwhelmingly vulnerable tenderness that lies beneath it like an ice cream cone dipped in a candy shell, it’s difficult to believe that parents have been experiencing this since parenthood began.

I think that the best of parent-writing in fact comes from the belief in this unique new world that exists: you have a kid, a whole human being existing where none did before and you’re facing this challenge, the ways this person will test you, frustrate you, make you feel inadequate, and the fact that you are committed, that you have to go forward, inevitable mistakes and all. Is there a drama greater than that? You’re going to have to get over your own childhood traumas and stumbling blocks. You’re going to face judgement and disapproval and discover for yourself what works best for you and your child, disregarding what your own parents, the neighbors, and the women in perfectly coordinated warm-up suits at the park think. You will be tested in a contest of wills with this small person that proves that will is inversely proportional to body-size, you will make sacrifices you resent, and you may discover your rock and roll lifestyle gets compromised a little. That’s parenthood. Bu the rewards? When you find in your kid this treasure mine of qualities that are better than you or your partner — where could they have come from? And, oh my God, the head relaxed on your shoulder that says ‘I feel safe with you. Thanks for making my world solid.’ The rewards are abundant, even though you’re not doing for the rewards.

There could be volumes of parent-writing just on sleeping children. There is the music of their breath, the open postures, the little butts poked comically in the air, the loosely closed fists, written not in this saccharine Anne Geddes soft-focus, but in hair plastered to their damp heads, their sour-breathed reminders of what it feels like to release all concern and anxiety, the total surrender of their sleep. Parenthood is worth it for sleeping kids alone, but better than that, you get sheafs of paper from kindergarten with ‘I love my dad’ and ‘I love my mom’ scrawled across them. Sometimes, if you’re lucky you get to experience the tenderness two of your children feel for one another, get the startling insight that their squabbling sprouts from their concern, needing each others’ respect and affection. You get to share the things you love best with them, whether it’s a book from your childhood, a movie you loved, a sport or a trail, and you get to see them turn into their own people, whom you can guide but never truly control.

Mr. Pollack, it is possible to write well about parenthood in the same way we write well about any aspect of being human. It’s this thing about language, about communication, using what we share, the words we have in common, this dipper in a the of universal pool to try to give me a glimpse of something that is your unique experience, some sliver of insight or turn of phrase to jet out, arcing elegantly a stream of individuality and uniqueness.

All writing, I think has this struggle: if it’s universal, why bother writing about it, because everyone knows it, but if it’s too individual, how do you expect anyone else to get it? You get hooked on the irony of wanting to be special, just like everyone else. If you manage to navigate the uncomfortable truths about yourself that you encounter trying to write honestly about parenthood, if you avoid the cliches, the lazy shorthands for profound experience, the parenting memoir can be rewarding to read, even for the non-parent, in proportion to the rewards of parenting itself.

Sincerely,

A reader

A friend asked why I spent as much time and energy as I did on a book that annoyed me so much, and I suppose I do appreciate how my own beliefs came rushing in in opposition to what this book didn’t do for me. I don’t like putting a book down until I’ve given it a chance, and I skimmed the last bit hoping it would redeem itself. I think the negative feelings I was left with make me wonder if I am not frustrated by the weird note of alienation underlying the whole book because it resonates a little. Still, I believe in parenting as well as you can and I believe in writing about parenting as well as you can.