Everyone is a better parent than me: "Counterblast" by Marjorie Celona

I've seen the same New York Times article about a half dozen times since it came out late last year. The main point of "The Relentlessness of Modern Parenting" is that parents today spend much more time and money parenting than they used to, and it's wearing them out. My social media accounts must think they know something about me that makes them keep putting this article in my site. They're not wrong.

When Mrs. Heretic and I had our son about a decade and a half ago, we really wanted to be good parents. We read a lot of books, talked to parents we thought were doing it right, and discussed our philosophies before he came along. But nothing went according to plan. One problem was our son's sleeping habits. We had planned to use the Ferber method (stick 'em in a crib and let them cry until they give up, more or less), but Mrs. Heretic, who is a sensitive soul, couldn't abide hearing him cry. This meant we let him co-sleep. There were a ton of books by people with credentials telling us this was not only okay, but was natural and how most of the world did it. So he slept with us. Then he kept sleeping with us until he was about ten, because he just couldn't sleep alone.

I didn't really mind, and I don't think Mrs. H did, either. But it was always a little bit embarrassing when we went to visit somewhere with friends or family, and those people told their kids to go to sleep at 8 PM and then the kids went without question, while I had to disappear for an hour in the evening in order to coax our son to sleep. We got a lot of looks like we were a couple of pretty good fools.

The same thing happened with discipline. We decided we didn't want to spank our son. We wanted him to learn to treat others like he wanted to be treated out of a sense of empathy, not because he'd catch hell if he didn't. Plus, a lot of literature made it seem like spanking was child abuse, and our son would never be a healthy adult if we did it. So we followed this plan, even though we'd both been spanked as kids and thought we turned out okay.

But our son was not the sweetest to others. And he was sometimes so out of control in public, I'm sure the first thought of everyone around us was that we were terrible parents and that what that boy needed was a swift swat on the behind. The closest I've ever come to getting in a physical fight as an adult were some of the times my son misbehaved on airplanes. Meanwhile, the parents we knew who had the nicest, best behaved, kindest kids all openly admitted they spanked their kids. We felt like we'd overthought everything. Maybe the traditional, mid-western ways of child-raising we'd be brought up on and which many of our friends and family still used were best. We ended up occasionally spanking our son (usually on an airplane when I was about to lose my mind), but we were so half-hearted about it, I think we ended up just getting the worst effects of both parenting methods.

We were two grad-school educated parents; how come every parent we knew seemed to be better at parenting than us? We were putting way more time and effort into parenting than our parents did, but not getting results that stacked up. Everyone else seemed to think parenting was easy. They had more kids than us, and theirs were all great. What was up?

Isn't this a story review?

The reason I launched into that long auto-biographical detail (longer than the actual story review will be) is to say I find the story relatable. There's not much an ordinary reader won't be able to figure out in "Counterblast" as far as what the story's about. It's not a story that hides its meaning. It's about the difficulties of parenting in the modern world, about how educated parents trying to do what experts tell them to do find themselves seemingly outparented by more capable, more grounded people who never seem to doubt themselves much.

The story's mother and POV character, Edie, is terrified of her daughter being unhappy. This manifests itself in her extreme reactions to the baby's crying. As a result, Edie has built a schedule for her and her baby where the baby is prevented from crying for long periods of time because her needs are met. Edie is both defensive about her parenting style and also afraid she's doing it all wrong, especially when confronted with how capable her husband's sister is with kids.

Edie's obsessiveness, we're told early on, leads eventually to the end of her marriage from the baby's father. We watch the couple as married parents of a one-year-old, but the story already told us in the first paragraph that a divorce is coming. The stresses of parenting will end the family. That's modern life.

The main thematic punch in the story is contained right there in the title. The "counterblast" is this:

"I am sorry for the way I am, I wanted to tell my husband. I am sorry for my narcissism and the peculiar way I navigate the world...I am sorry that I need things to be just so, that I cannot relax and do things any other way but the way in which I do them. I am sorry that I need so much time with Lou. I am sorry that I try to control my environment and everyone around me. I am sorry that I feel things so intensely and that the intensity of my love for Lou creates a kind of counterblast of rage for all other things. I am too full of love and thus I am too full of sorrow." 

There's not much more to say about it. The story gets parenting in the early 21st century as I experienced it about right.

I will add that the narrative structure does a nice counterpunch to go with its thematic counterblast. It started off making me think it would be about what a terrible husband Barry was. The narrator tells us early on that Barry gets off easy in life because he's good looking, that he can't hold down a job, that he can't finish a task. I thought the story would be about men who suck, but it wasn't. Not long after the narrator is annoyed with him for acting like an idiot on an airplane, she says this about the husband: "My husband was the only person who had ever loved me as much as I needed to be loved. Everyone up to this point had loved me in a sinister way. My husband was the first good person I had ever met."

From that point on, I felt much more sympathy for the narrator. She feels her way of coping isn't right, but she also can't correct it. She feels she is failing her daughter and husband, but to do anything else would be impossible, because the very strength of her bonds makes her unable to love in any other way.

From what I can tell about how the author reads this story, judging from her comments in the back of the anthology, I'm not sure I agree with her. A lot of parts of this story were auto-biographical for her. She got a lot of the old-fashioned advice to her modern and quasi-obsessive way of doing things. She said: "I wrote it because I was angry at all the wrongheaded advice I was given about babies--stuff I found cruel, much of it from doctors. This story, to me, is a kind of corrective--a way of saying...that any move away from love is a move toward ugliness and a move toward sorrow." That's not actually how it read to me. There seems to be a lot more ambiguity about the efficacy of modern all-in parenting techniques and a lot more realization that folk-wisdom methods often do a good job than her interpretation seems to allow. But also in this modern world, whatever technique you use, you're going to feel guilty and think you're doing it wrong, because there are legions of experts there to tell you how wrong you are.

Like I said, I found this story easy to relate to. Some fiction just seems destined to be used one day as a cultural artifact by those trying to understand the zeitgeist of an era. I can see this story, years from now, being used by sociologists studying declining birth rates in early 21st century America. We had two kids, but only one the biological route, and the themes explored in this story had a lot to do with why we did, even though once upon a time we had talked about having a house full of kids.