Mothering a Man

Have you ever noticed most fairy tale heroes and heroines have dead or missing parents? The obvious explanation for that is that kids need to forge their own identities in order really to mature.

Beauty doesn’t have a mom, and her dad actually gets in the way of her growing up. Cinderella’s mother is dead, and dad is MIA, so she has to negotiate the female authority in her household and to establish her mature, romantic relationship entirely on her own (once the godmother supplies the dress and shoes). Even Jack must leave his mom (no dad mentioned at all in most versions) and enter the giant’s realm without any guidance. In fact, he comes back and takes care of her; he’s translated from dependent to provider in a few pages.

Kids seem to need serious independence in order to mature and thrive.

But I’m rejecting that today, on the eve of my son’s 18^th birthday, and not feeling a bit guilty. Conflicted, maybe, but not guilty.

I moved out at seventeen. I moved in to a dorm for my freshman year of college, but I never moved back home. That was it. I had been working for a year, driving for nearly two, and I waved to my mom as she stood in the driveway in her bathrobe, and was gone.

Most kids don’t do that these days, especially in Los Angeles county. In fact, most of my kids’ friends don’t even drive. LA is a nightmare for traffic and hazards. My son doesn’t have a job yet. He’s not moving out. His independence is coming a bit later.

He is not alone. Many have noted the expanded adolescence. Laurence Steinberg’s The Age of Opportunity argues that adolescence is both starting earlier and lasting longer these days. Lots of kids aren’t moving out. They can’t afford it. And it’s not such a bad thing.

There’s a case for extended adolescence having neurological benefits. Their longer period of neuroelasticity is allowing them greater ability to learn later in life, both in terms of intellectual content (they have more spots in their brains to pin new information later on), and they have greater emotional understanding and impulse control.

However, there is a serious dearth of awesome stories about nineteen-year olds living with their folks.

Harry Potter doesn’t have parents, but he finds lots of surrogates. Percy Jackson has a mom, but he leaves for school like Harry, so she’s not solving any problems for him. Violet and Klaus (and Sunny!) Baudelaire are largely fending for themselves too, so our stories have not caught up to the culture.

I guess there’s nothing exciting about living in your childhood bedroom in to your early twenties. They can vote; they can be drafted; they can be arrested;they can smoke. But they’re not driving or working enough to support themselves. How do you parent them? 

They’re legal, but dependent.

Maybe I’m just making a mountain out of a molehill. Maybe 21 is the new 18, and 25 is the new 21, and we just chill and move on. But seriously, someone ought to write the thriller about the 19-year old who has tremendous adventures and still lives at home. We could use a script down here.

Here’s some further reading, if you’re interested:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/extended-adolescence-when-25-is-the-new-181/

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/11/metaplasticity/506390/

Steinberg, Laurence. Age of Opportunity: Lessons from the New Science of Adolescence. 2014.

Reading for Character, Reading for Plot

Lettore READER Lettrice

“You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler.  Relax.  Concentrate. Dispel every other thought.  Let the world around you fade.  Best to close the door; the TV is always on in the next room” (3). When you sit down to read Calvino’s hypernovel, the narrator starts talking to you directly.  He addresses you, the Reader, in the second person, just like he’s talking to an old friend.  He draws you in, you--the Reader, by describing what can be seen as pretty generic descriptions of how people read. But just like when you read a horoscope or a Facebook quiz, the description is vague enough (and informed enough—he knows what readers do) that you can find enough truth in it and buy in to his game. 

But he addresses you as Reader.  In English this is wonderfully vague.  It is gender-neutral and judgment-neutral. The latter matters because in this book about the acts of reading and writing, there are lots of kinds of readers and lots of kinds of writers, and there is certainly some judgment thrown around.  At the beginning, though, we don’t know what kind of reader you are; you are just a Reader. 

In class I spend considerable time asking my English majors what kind of readers they are.  Do they read for plot mostly, to find out what happens?  Do they read to get to know the characters?  Some people won’t read a book unless they like or can identify with an important character.  Do they read for long, richly evocative descriptions, like Dickens’s three-page description of Mr. Tulkinghorn descending into his wine cellar for port?  Do they read to see their favorite kind of story retold anew?  What people look for in books varies, and the students sometimes form support groups for factions. 

The self-described “plot whores” hang together and defend each other.  Story above all!  The “character-lovers” share each other’s outrage when film versions give lines to the wrong character or when adaptations make the characters do something contrary to their original character. “Hermione didn’t say that!  Ron said that in the book!”  We decide how we read in relation to Calvino’s characters, and deny others like Lotaria, the overly zealous critic whose acts of interpretation seem violent attacks on the book (at one point she puts novels through a word counter and only reads the list of frequent words to figure out what the book is about! Another time, she rips one chapter out of a book and says that’s all she needs to judge the book.)  All of this helps people figure out their own reading persona, and sometimes through reading this book, they even get a bead on their writing persona. 

But this time when we talked about the Reader, the subject of identification with the Reader got a little more attention.  In English, “Reader” is gender-neutral. That means until “you” get in to the second chapter, “you” could be anyone, and it is only at that point where the Reader Calvino envisions identifies as a man, trying to meet an attractive woman, the Other Reader, that female readers have to adjust. (This confusion doesn't exist in Italian, where the word "Lettore" indicates a man, and later on, a female "Lettrice" appears.) I have read this book a dozen times, and every time it’s a little letdown.  I enjoy the pages where it feels like he’s talking to me—really to me, not the character he’s asking me to be. And sometimes I slip in to my new role as male character with more grace than others. I’m used to it, after all. The default has been male for so long, and I’ve read so many books where the protagonist is male. And sometimes I’ve gone right ahead and identified with him, because I’m trained: females are asked to assume a male persona more regularly than the converse. Still, I’m often a little jarred when I reach the point where I can no longer pretend he’s talking directly to me. 

It’s this point that stuck today, in this reading, after the Women’s Marches around the world.  The default is still male.  This book was written in a far more sexist time and culture than 21^st century America, but the default is still male.  Gender is understood by more people now as a spectrum than a binary, though, and somehow it was this strict adherence to increasingly outdated gender assumptions that made it feel dated this time, rather than the story about the guy who runs from house to house, thinking all the landline phones along his jogging route are ringing for him.  We talked about how we read and what we looked for in books, and none of those groups of character-readers and plot-fiends were divided along gender lines.  This book keeps bringing up questions about how we read and why we write, and some of the answers are changing, but the most important ones are not.  We all know who we want to identify with—the readers of novels who really enjoy books, who use them as links to understanding other people, who throw stories like ropes across the void between souls, to make friends.