Selfishness
September 4th, 2008
So here is one of those little synchronicities that happen: I am busy ruminating on the discussion of selfishness over at urbanMamas, when I listened to this week’s This American Life on “Something for Nothing.” In the third act, Dirk Jamison starts describing what happened to his family when he was a kid and his father had this epiphany that working a job he didn’t like to pay for things with small pieces of the time allotted to him on this planet was a game he was unwilling to play, and took up dumpster diving. This deviated too far from the script his mother had for how one lives, of being productive, working hard, being proud of that, and the gulf between the two of them, charges of ’selfishness’ and ‘uptightness’ that were both justified, and both failed to capture the whole truth, and I started wondering how that tension plays into our ideas of the bad, selfish mother.
Here are the things I had concluded about discussing selfishness:
1) I still hate the zero-sum aspect of talking about my kids’ best interests vs. my interests.
2) What is in a child’s best interests is a value-laden, culturally relative best guess, anyway. Various sports, musical activities, and so on may be individually great for a kid, and the overall pressure of an overstructured childhood be devastating.
3) Even though it is only a best guess, that doesn’t excuse us from pursuing what is in our children’s best interests vigorously and in good faith.
4) What is in a child’s best interests, what a particular child needs, is going to vary with age, temperament, birth order, and a host of other factors. My fourth son doesn’t expect me to entertain him as his oldest brother did, and I have twinges of different feelings about that, until I remind myself that he is sweet, affectionate, clever, and very good at entertaining himself, so somebody must have done something right at some point.
5) There’s the chestnut of what a privileged position one is in when one is feeling guilt over minutes stolen to use the internet while at home with a child. (Yes. And?)
6) Finally, I think the charge of selfishness is so especially devastating for mothers because of connotations of being somehow ‘unnatural.’ Isn’t some biological imperative supposed to wipe all traces of selfishness from us? And I don’t know a mother who doesn’t feel guilt over something some of the time, because we tend to have very high expectations of ourselves.
But I’m not sure how useful guilt or accusations of selfishness are. I do know that they can eat up a lot of the time that one might spend on genuine self-care in order to come back at the parenting thing with energy and enthusiasm, whereas the time I spend flogging myself tends to lead to my most wretched moments of parenting, shrill and unpleasant moments (and thus feeding the cycle for my self-flogging, and so on). I have pretty clear boundaries about making time in my day to exercise and to keep a journal because when I haven’t had those things, the crashing and burning affects everyone in the house.
But the thing I realized listening to the This American Life is that “selfishness” is a pretty easy thing to project onto anyone who is doing what we wish we could do and feel too constrained to try. It is difficult to challenge the unspoken rules that govern our lives. The economist Steven Levitt gave a compelling TED Talk on how statistically, there is no evidence of car seats making children over the age of two significantly safer in a car accident and while I believe him, I’m not going to spend a lot of energy challenging laws on this, or facing the judgements of a community that KNOWS carseats are how a loving parent keeps a child safe. But what if that made me feel horribly constrained, unfairly restricted? Would there be anyone I could focus my resentment on so much as the ’selfish’ mother who refused to spend the money on carseats? So maybe I need to listen when I find myself seething at someone else’s ’selfishness’ to figure out what choices I have made that are making me feel constricted and resentful.
September 4th, 2008 at 10:26 am
what a great realization. i came to the conclusion late last night that one of the oft-repeated accusations of commenters regarding any critical analysis of another person, i.e., “you’re just jealous!” was actually partly true. yes, I still believe what I said about the juggle being really difficult and I don’t understand the choices she’s made. but truly? I’m jealous that I don’t have sarah palin’s resources, that i don’t have someone who can (symbolically) take the baby off my hands when i’m giving a speech and hand him back afterwards, that i don’t have the money to afford my family the round-the-clock loving and attentive childcare she’ll need if she (heaven forbid) becomes VP. so your realization fits very nicely into this. yes. when i don’t have the appropriate measure of help to run, and i see other people running every day, and i think, ‘how selfish.’ when i see other mamas going out a few times a week for late night drinks and child-free fun, i think, ‘how selfish,’ even though perhaps i’d be with them if i felt jonathan was emotionally up to giving the boys a healthy dinner and putting them to bed with the same measure of patience i’m generally able to muster at bedtime. we could *all* use a more reasoned, thoughtful approach to our judgments of selfishness — both self-imposed and external.
also, i’ve often felt unfairly constrained by the carseat requirement, and simultaneously unable to accept the judgment that i know would come were i to forego seats for my older boys (and that tiny risk they’d be injured and it would be MY FAULT). maybe that’s a small part of my enthusiasm over biking.
September 5th, 2008 at 3:26 am
“there is no evidence of car seats making children over the age of two significantly safer in a car accident”
I don’t know. A simple net search reveals at least a dozen studies that contradict this assumption. Here is one:
“The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia have found that young children (ages 2-5) who are placed in adult seat belts rather than car seats or booster seats are 4 times more likely to suffer head, brain, and other devastating injuries, according to a study in the June issue of Pediatrics”
http://bcbsma.medscape.com/viewarticle/411894
September 5th, 2008 at 9:53 am
oh, how i wish i weren’t migraine-ing and soooo tired and could respond intelligently, but suffice it to say that i hear you (or read you). the topic of selfishness is one that i consider often, most especially as it relates to motherhood (less so than just parenting). in fact, it’s my number one blog topic that’s reliably pierced through my brain-fog of the last, oh, 4 years, as something i must write about. the irony is that i do, but then i get distracted by my guilt (and my distraction-prone brain in general) about being so selfish and unproductive with my time. ha!
you are inspiring me to focus more on blogging (and the use of that form of “blog” still bothers me, but that’s a topic for another day). see? i am getting distracted again.
September 5th, 2008 at 9:57 am
did you know you can’t copy and paste your blog, even to cite something specific? interesting and cool feature.
anyway, on projection: most certainly true. i’ve always suspected this of the most vehement ranters. that should be reason enough to dismiss it altogether, yet it’s those (perhaps because they are loudest) that transmit most clearly when i’m tune in to, as anne lamott calls it, KFKD. (or however she spells it —> K-fucked.)
September 5th, 2008 at 7:05 pm
The first time I read this post I didn’t realize how incredibly timely it is for me. I think I must have been too busy resenting my husband for what I considered to be his selfish behavior. ; )
Fourth time around and I’m finally noticing a pattern to my postpartum experience: I become a wretched score keeper in my marriage. Who is working the hardest? Who is getting the least sleep? How much down time are we each getting? I can make myself absolutely miserable making little tally marks and counting them up in my head. I nearly blew a gasket yesterday when P blogged not once, but TWICE. My little fair-ometer went berserk. “How selfish!” I thought. Doesn’t he know I haven’t had a chance to bog in weeks?
There is something grossly unjust about approaching relationships in that way, and I know that, ultimately, I’m the one who pays for it because it makes me so miserable. For some reason I keep thinking about the story your second born used to illustrate the difference between making things fair and making them equal. It’s rather childish of me to expect things to be equal, but most of the time I’d say that the division of labor in our house (and the dividends get from the work we each do) works out to be fair. I don’t know what it is about being postpartum that makes me loose sight of that fact and start the whole eye-twitching, blog counting, sleep coveting routine. Maybe it has something to do with extreme sleep deprivation?
At least it’s gotten less extreme with each baby. Either I’m becoming less selfish or there’s just so little “down” time anymore around here it hardly seems worth quibbling over!
September 5th, 2008 at 7:08 pm
post script. I think I’ve actually “bogged” several times this week. It’s “blogging” that I’ve missed…
September 8th, 2008 at 11:10 am
Just chiming in to say that I bet it has *everything* to do with sleep deprivation, and crashing off hormones, and all of it….squershy Interwebs hugs to you. <3