This blog more or less all came out of my discomfort with Ma. Also with Mama. These two ladies, of Little House on the Prairie and the All of a Kind Family series respectively, have been hovering like shaming specters over everything I do. Every difficulty I have pales beside theirs, and even so they consistently manage to display grace, affection, patience, prudence, etc etc all the while raising their children to be SO MUCH BETTER BEHAVED THAN MINE.
It's...frustrating.
Yes, yes, I know: they're fictional. That gives them, no doubt, a decided advantage. But they're only very cursorily fictional. They're clearly modeled, after all, on the authors's mothers. And it all has, to my ears (eyes?) at least, the very strong appearance of truth. They were just better, is the truth of it. Better at being parents, wives, at teaching children to behave, at cleaning their houses for certain, at somehow doing it all with an often-referred to gentleness that is the most uncomfortable superiority of all. It has gotten to the point where I dread to read each night's installment for fear it will point out some new way in which they calmly triumphed over a grasshopper plague while holding their children to a standard that will always serve them well blah blah blah.
So far as I can tell, the only bright spot is that the child who has all of this read to her—my child, that is—has so far not appeared to notice any embarrassing, er, contrasts, between her own mother and Ma. She seems, instead, to be ignoring the adults entirely in favor of Laura, much as I did myself and for which I am extremely grateful. So it's only myself I have to blame when I lie there in the dark, that night's chapter read, worrying: why don't I try Mama's trick of a happy song that makes children eat vegetables? Why don't I hide a penny so they can try to find it when they're dusting? Why haven't they ever dusted, anyway? Why haven't I ever dusted? How does a person even dust?
It gets demoralizing.
And that, too, is part of what I would wish to change. A better way to look at them, these mothers, and that is to be inspired (yes, yes, except for Ma's troubling racism, which I will try to address more another time). That would be so nice, wouldn't it?
What they're reading now:
child no. 1: 101 Ways to Bug Your Teacher, Muse Magazine
child no. 2: Little Town on the Prairie, The Smart Girl's Guide to Friendship Troubles
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I love this. If it weren't for the based on real mothers' part, I think we could include Little Bear's mom too. She was perfect, wasn't she?
ReplyDeleteBut of course now I'm racking my brain trying to recall Ma's troubling racism. So I'll need another installment real soon.
Funny, I always thought that Ma was kind of holding Laura back and pressuring her to be more ladylike and less independent.
ReplyDeleteYes, Cynthia F., I always thought so when I read it as a kid, and it's true now, too, but somehow the overwhelming sense I get now is even though Laura clearly likes Pa more, and even though Ma "doesn't want to go West" which is apparently very damning in Laura's view, she still manages the whole thing intensely well. It's definitely from my mother's eye view envy sort of thing...
ReplyDeleteAnd Lisa, I refer you to, "'The only good Indian is a dead Indian.' Ma hated Indians." Said over and over throughout the book. Plus a whole, "Ma and Pa didn't like the new reverend Brown, who was supposed to be a cousin of that John Brown who stirred up all that trouble and started the Civil War." Which makes you wonder just what Pa was doing during the Civil War, but perhaps that doesn't bear thinking about...
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