Silence, inner sanctimommy! I’m trying to find a parenting style
Don't put your baby on my dinner table, please, my inner sanctimommy said as I was on the way to finding a parenting style.
Don't put your baby on my dinner table, please, my inner sanctimommy said as I was on the way to finding a parenting style. (Parenting magazine issues for different age groups – one way to find a style.)
PRNewsFoto/Bonnier Corp.
There was an evening in the early 1990s that we had a dinner party, and the couple with a newborn put the baby – in its bouncy chair – on my set dinner table.
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Senior editor
Clara Germani is a senior editor for the Monitor, based in Boston. She handles in-depth projects, or cover stories, for the weekly print magazine and is the editor of the Monitor's parenting blog, "Modern Parenthood."
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There was no request to put the baby on the table where we were going to eat, just the parental assumption that because the baby was the centerpiece of their life, it would be OK to make it the centerpiece of my dinner party.
I was socially paralyzed. Cute baby; wonderful baby; amazing baby. But this was a dinner party of adults who, heretofore, had met regularly and had wonderful conversations over leisurely dinners.
What was I going to say? Nothing.
What was I going to do? I became a silent – but studious – observer of parenting differences, taking notes that would amount, ultimately, to my own internal parenting manual for that time in my early 40s when my husband and I finally did become parents.
That dinner party remains a vivid memory: The first shot across the bow in my experience of the “mommy wars.” Or as the latest thesis on the topic, a New York Times Sunday Style section story, called it: “differences over parenting.”
The mommy wars often center on the stay-at-home-or-not issue; but it does go beyond that to parenting styles. The Times story centers on friendships that go MIA when babies arrive, and quoted an expert who boiled it all down to the “I’m a better mother than you” syndrome.
I definitely didn’t like that mom putting her baby on my dinner table; but it had nothing to do with what kind of a mother – good or bad – I thought she was.
For me, it was about having a life. Would her choice of parenting style mean that she – the person she’d always been – was now going to be defined solely by motherhood?
I know the “mommy war” artillery is cocked and ready. And I can hear the shriek of incoming fire now, and it sounds like: “Selfish!”
But I’ll duck that. Our daughter came along after our journalism careers had taken us all over the world to experience war zones, third world poverty, super-power politics, amazing cultures, interesting friends. We had a life. We didn’t want to give it up – we wanted to share it with our daughter. We didn’t want an infant, toddler, tweener, or teen to define our lives; we wanted to set the tone and define hers.
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