Rebels in White Gloves (36 page)

That her husband failed to find that balance has been for Kathy disappointing. “I think Roger’s choice to go into academic medicine was a big mistake. It’s terribly competitive; that’s where the egos go, and it means not only practicing medicine but also doing teaching and research. When our kids were little, he was simply never home.”

That absence turned out to have serious consequences. “When our daughter Karen was two, she was missing all her milestones. She was tiny, the size of a one-year-old, and just barely able to walk. And she was not getting any real help. At birth, her doctors had misdiagnosed the problem as a minor heart defect that would correct itself. I knew they had to be wrong; I was seeing this child really struggling. But they didn’t look at her as a kid; they looked at her as a bunch of test results. Finally,
they did open-heart surgery and discovered the defect was major. Here Roger was training in pediatric cardiology and his own daughter’s heart problems were being overlooked. Because he wasn’t home, he wasn’t seeing what I was seeing, or maybe he didn’t have the emotional energy to pay attention. It’s not just him, of course—it’s all of medicine. When I was delivering my fourth baby, they told me to go home; they said I was not in labor. They wouldn’t listen to me even though I had given birth three times; then the baby was born within minutes. The doctors demonstrated that same deafness with Karen; I knew she was sick, but I was made to feel that I was a nervous mother, that I should go away.

“Off and on, I’ve been angry about my husband’s absorption in his career. But he’s now seeing what he has lost by not being involved with the kids. I got the better end of the deal. I don’t envy him, and I would not wish his life on my children.”

Roger is a tall, soft-spoken, somewhat awkward and formal man—formal even with his children. He believes his family arrangement has been close to ideal. “I would have liked to have done more, but there were lots of demands on my time. If you judge it in terms of my work environment, where there’s virtually no flexibility, I’ve done everything I could to be supportive of my family. I also believe it’s best that children be with their mother; there’s a special attachment there. Men are just not as nurturing by nature. A mother’s consistent nurturing gives children self-confidence, stimulation, trust, an ability to share intimate feelings.

“Kathy could have chosen any profession but valued the welfare of our kids, which I greatly admire. Our kids understand the hardships on both sides, the pressures on the sole breadwinner, the courage required of a woman to stay home in terms of her peer relations. Though I think even Kathy’s Wellesley classmates may finally be coming to grips with limits, understanding that if you’re trying to be at the top of your profession, a strong marriage and kids may not be doable.”

“My kids probably haven’t seen my work as being as important as Roger’s,” says Kathy. “Though it frustrates them that he comes home too tired to give, they know a doctor is what people respect. When my oldest son, Rob, changed majors at college, giving up his chance at medical school, his brother Jonathan, said, ‘Well, what’s he going to do if he’s not a doctor, be a garbageman?’ Somehow, the message had come
through that those were the only choices. I want my kids to know that there are other choices, like being a teacher, which is wonderful if terribly undervalued. I don’t think that serving the community even requires a profession or public life. For most of my married life, I have served the community as a volunteer. The more that kind of parental involvement dries up, the more schools are collapsing.

“I have demanded that my kids not put me down as a woman. They respect that I gave much and that it was a sacrifice in some ways, that I could have done other things. Life involves making choices where something goes by the wayside. What I got from them is unbelievable; they’re wonderful people. But who knows what I could have done? I never experienced that other world—my few years teaching hadn’t brought accolades or even much intellectual stimulation—so I’ve never really known what I missed.”

Denied her own wish to study music as a girl, Kathy has raised, as she likes to say, a string quartet. All four of her children are accomplished musicians; they have played for U.S. presidents and won national awards. When she was not carpooling or tutoring or conducting the handbell choir at her Presbyterian church, Kathy spent her time scheduling violin lessons and arranging for accompanists and preparing recitals, including one in her living room for my benefit. “It’s, of course, the obvious thing to see my kids as somehow fulfilling my thwarted desires, to think that I’ve foisted my life on them. But that would be a terrible burden. When the fourth came along, I thought, What if he has a tin ear? By then it was clearly a family identity. If he had been miserable in music, I would have accepted that. I don’t want to be one of those skating parents. I tried not to say, ‘Everything you do is a reflection on me.’ That was said over and over to me and was really damaging. But our family is not a democracy. Adults too often abdicate their responsibility to set limits and insist on what’s best for kids. My kids did not see an R-rated movie till they were seventeen.” (She also had a lightning reflex, her kids report: If there was any nudity in a PG movie, her hands went right over their eyes.) “When Jonathan told me he didn’t want to stay at music camp, a democratic mom would have taken him home. I insisted he stay.

“My biggest fans have felt that though I wasn’t get paid or getting public recognition, as a mother I was doing a full-time job requiring the
same kind of dedication and energy and intellect. I always researched the best way to go about this or that. I don’t want dabblers. We’re committed to excellence. And I have kept my kids so busy they haven’t had time for hanging out in malls. Music has brought discipline and a spiritual dimension to their lives.”

Articulate and well mannered, all four of Kathy’s children speak their minds with confidence and strong echoes of their mother’s worldview. The youngest, Jonathan, born in 1981, wants kids, but not four: “My mom seems stressed-out having to deal with all of us. I wouldn’t want my wife to work that hard, and I wouldn’t want a job like my dad’s, where he’s barely here. Sometimes my mom’s way overprotective; I don’t like having friends over, ’cause she’ll hang around. But I wouldn’t want to have parents like my friends’ parents, who are super-rich, with huge jobs, and give their kids everything but are never home.” Stephen, born in 1979, doesn’t want to get married. “This family has been an enormous help to me in knowing where to stand and what to value. But there are many aspects of family I couldn’t commit to. I feel I’d have to be a breadwinner, but I’d want time with my kids. And I don’t think I could accept kids, or a wife, warts and all.”

Karen, born in 1974, who since her early illness has struggled with learning disabilities and after high school enrolled at Lawrence Conservatory of Music, “almost had a breakdown in high school, wondering, Am I doing music for myself or for my mother? I do think we’re living her dream. But I can live with that. At times I feel sorry for my dad; I know he doesn’t feel as close to us. There’s not much he could have done, but I wish he’d been here more. If I raise a family, I want to be with my kids. I don’t think it’s right to go off. I don’t know what I’d do without my mom. She’s been there behind me my whole life.” Like each of her three brothers in turn, Karen makes sure I know that, while at Wellesley, her mother was a presidential scholar.

The eldest, Rob, born in 1973, a graduate of Williams College, wants to be a househusband. “It’s hard to say if my mom is happy. I guess she’s happy with her marriage. They have incredibly happy moments together. If love exists, I do feel they’ve come close to it. I would like to emulate that, and to believe that love would transcend all differences. But their marriage is not a model of the marriage I want to have. So much of their interaction is so frustrating to watch. They hardly ever
seem in sync. There’s always underlying tension. I think it’s because they’re such opposite people. My mother is emotional. My dad hides every emotion; he has, like me, a strong aversion to conflict. He can’t stand fights, because they’re not rational. He clams up, and then for my mom it snowballs.

“I also push my mom away: I get uncomfortable when she gets too involved in my life. I look down on her for being so irrational, and then I look down on my dad for being so unemotional. I can’t really figure out what is an acceptable way for me to be. I see elements of both my parents in me, and I’m trying to figure out which I want to kill and which to grow. My dad feels guilty because he knows so little about music, and she places so much value on it. It’s who she is, so she makes it out to be incredibly important. I’m always in conflict: Should I be practicing tennis for my dad’s sake, or violin for my mom?

“What my mom really resents is that my dad didn’t make time to be with his kids. He threw himself into his work; that’s what he’s best at. But by the time he comes home, he’s given all he has. He has no patience with us. He’s not really a kid person, even though he’s a pediatrician. My mom felt burdened. She literally does everything here. My dad did nothing. We’ve started doing dishes, but only recently. I think she resented that we just took her for granted. That’s the central problem my mother faces, in all spheres. She was apprehensive going to her twenty-fifth reunion at Wellesley. Even though she’s of equal quality as those women, she hasn’t done as much according to what society thinks is something.

“The only goal I have in life is to be a father, a househusband. I love kids—that rubbed off from my mom. I’d like to be seriously part of children’s lives; that’s why I was leaning toward going into pediatrics. At the playground I see all these kids with nannies. The nannies have their own families but have to be parents to kids whose own parents won’t make time. I do think I’d have some of the same difficulties as my mom with staying at home, in terms of feeling unappreciated. Though I’ve already accepted my mediocrity. Not that being a househusband would be a mediocre thing to do. I would love to be a world-famous pediatrician, but if I was a father for a living, that would be equally hard, but not something I could, or would, run away from. My mother hasn’t run away from anything. She’s made her decisions and stuck with them. Whether they’ve made her happy is another question.

“There must be a self-defeating gene in our family. I think in fact my mom’s not terribly happy that she just stayed home with the kids; so many times she felt she could have done more. She’ll go to a party, encounter women who’ve done all kinds of things, and feel she’s not treated as an equal. There’s a tendency in this kind of neighborhood to devalue people who take care of kids. And what’s unfortunate with me and my mom is that we place a lot of stock in what society thinks; we too often compare ourselves with society’s idea of what’s best. I have a friend with the perfect
Leave It to Beaver
mom, and my mom doesn’t like to be thrown in the same pot with her. My friend’s mom spends her time keeping her house totally spotless and hosting parties and keeping up the appearance of a perfect family. My mother sees herself as a Hillary Clinton-type person, who has just chosen the field of raising children.

“When our quartet plays a concert, my mom gets in a complete frenzy, upset and yelling at us till we get there. Then we give the performance and she’s the happiest person in the world, overflowing with love for us. At those moments she’s genuinely happy with her decision to raise kids. I don’t think my mom gave up at all. She made the decision she thought best. Where for me to choose househusbanding, well, there’s the baggage that I didn’t have what it takes to do something else. At Williams, I had to change my major because I failed a class. That was rough. I wanted to just leave. My parents thought I could do anything, but discovered I wasn’t so good at a lot of things. So child rearing is not the only thing I wanted to do but the only thing I can do. In an ideal world, being a father would be just as important. But a pediatrician does seem a higher calling.

“As a kid I hated playing violin; I felt I was just living out my mom’s dreams and it felt like a burden. But more often I felt like I was a burden to her. I would see how hectic her life was, how often she would get upset with me if I didn’t take out the trash or something. I felt I was screwing up her life. I blamed myself for her unhappiness. I did see a lot of unhappiness, more than happiness. I always felt like she was trying to prove herself. She is what she acts, but she tries real hard to create an impression of satisfaction. She loves kids and definitely wanted to raise them, but I question whether she truly believes it’s as valuable as the alternatives. She seems to have to try real hard to prove to herself that it’s okay to be who she is.”

“We have a better marriage than the kids think we do,” says Kathy. “Kids are always an interference in a marriage. They take away opportunities for intimacy; they demand energy. Roger is not demonstrative, so our close time is not visible to them; more often they’ve seen ships passing in the night. But our cement is the love between us; Roger has provided unceasing love and is unbelievably supportive of me. Which is not to say we couldn’t have a better marriage. I would hope for them that their marriages are warmer than ours.”

In raising a family, Kathy has also found, like many in her class, a large measure of understanding and forgiveness for her own parents. “It’s not very complicated why the life at home with children that made my mother so miserable could make me happy. I loved kids and actively chose what was right for me. My mother had no choice; she didn’t love being a mother, but she wasn’t ever allowed to express who she truly was. She was much more confident and happy when she went back to work as a secretary, which became possible only because the world had changed around her. By the time she died, I understood that she had done the best she could and she understood that I had been right in my choices. I’d never heard her tell me she loved me until she was sick and dying, but I did get to hear it finally. I felt sad she had suffered so much. But I certainly don’t blame her. She was a victim of her times: I would never advocate going back to the demeaning role of women in the fifties.”