Public and private
One the most valuable lessons I ever got from the Serpentine One was the importance of managing the public and private aspects of a relationship. As is often the case, she has no memory of telling me about this. We had only known one another a short while and had not yet begun to fall in love. We were talking about another relationship that had failed. And she said to me, "The problem with X and Y was that they only could make it work when they were alone. When they tried to function in public as a couple, they failed."
Before you can learn how to manage these two fronts in a loving relationship, you need to learn how to do it as an individual. And we learn that, or fail to learn, or fail to be taught, from our parents but most especially from our mothers.
I'll begin with failure. Here is what it looks like.
I was reading some mommy blogger a while ago (I can't remember which one) and she blogged about walking into the room where her daughter was watching television. Somehow, she blocked her daughter's view of the television and her daughter said, "Mommy, would you move your big fat ass."
Now, pause a moment and consider how you'd respond. And consider how your mother would have responded. I know how my mother would have.
This mommy blogger laughed. And in her blog she went on to say that she and her husband often talk to one another like that so it isn't any wonder her daughter picked it up. The whole point of her blog post was to publicly reveal her acceptance of this as inevitable; she was not going to beat herself up about this, although she could not quite bring herself to believe it was okay if it happened again. Several of the comments began with "I'm so glad you wrote this" and were followed by similar confessions—this revelation of personal failure having apparently sparked great relief in others desperate to tell the world that they too were failures.
That is why you now see restaurants with signs advising parents that they will be asked to leave if their children won't behave.
All the behaviours here make sense in isolation. Is it funny when an innocent child says something really rude? Yes it is. Do couples sometimes use what would otherwise be insults as private endearments? Of course we do. (Although I do have to say I would never say anything as crass and vulgar as what this woman's husband apparently says to her about anyone I cared about.)
What is missing is any sense of occasion, any sense of the place and company that remarks are or are not appropriate in.
I still remember the first time I dropped the F-bomb in my mother's presence. I picked it up from a new friend named Timmy in Grade school. We walked around and he used the word liberally. Like many a kid before me, I loved the word and started imitating him. And his parents used it too. His parents said a lot of things in front of the kids. I remember his mother making a joke about her pubic hair being grey because she didn't dye it the way she did with the hair on top of her head.
Anyway, I got so used to using the word over at his place that one day I blurted it out at home.
What followed I remember as being deeply unpleasant. Everything about my mother's response seemed deadly serious and earnest to me. I quickly grasped not only that I was not to use the word but also that I didn't want to be the sort of person who used that word.
I did still use it, of course. But I always used it with a sense of doubt. I could only feel comfortable using it in certain kinds of company. I used it with buddies and, like trump at Hearts, I never led with it until I heard someone else use it first. Even now in my fifties, I could not use the word in front of anyone I do not know well and even then it would depend.
The story has two sequels. Years later, I overheard my mother reassuring a young mother who had just dealt with her son saying the word. My mother said, "The hardest thing is keeping a straight face." And then told how she'd had to leave the room to laugh when I first said it. That was true although what she'd told me at the time, and I believed, was that she'd had to leave the room because she was so upset. And I believed her. Not because she was a great actress. She wasn't. I believed her because she was consistent and persistent in pushing for a standard of behaviour that did not include anything like the use that word in her home.
It wasn't just the F bomb. We weren't allowed to say "shut up" in our house. And we weren't allowed to refer to my mother using third person pronouns such as "she" or "her". Whatever private endearments and inside jokes my parents shared, they remained strictly private between them.
I, like every other kid in the universe, eventually figured out that there was a gap between the standards of behaviour that my mother demanded of us and what she herself sometimes did in private. Once when the extended family were all gathered down at P-town, and she and her sisters were alone around the piano late at night and they thought the rest of us were asleep, I overheard them singing a song whose chorus went, "My gal goes for all the guys but she only comes for me." There must have been more but that was the one and only time she let her slip show (and you can't really say that as it was a perfectly reasonable assumption on her part that we'd all be asleep at that hour). But I knew there was more.
You could dismiss this attitude of hers as hypocrisy if you think that will make you feel better but here's the rub. Those modern parents who talk about one anothers' "fat asses" in front of their children also have different standards they apply in public and in private. They have dirty secrets. And their children will also grow up to discover these things. The difference is that they don't keep the division between their public and private life up out of a proper respect for public decorum the way my mother did. They are driven by private shame. Thus this odd confessional release they get from telling the whole world that they are failures and all their readers can chime in and confess that they too are failures and everyone can get a warm fuzzy because if everyone is a failure, then no one is.
Meanwhile, families are less and less welcome in any restaurant that doesn't have golden arches out front.
Oh yeah, the other sequel. Timmy's father was later arrested for embezzlement. He'd stolen tens of thousands of dollars from his employer. The really odd thing is what he did with the money. He used every penny on a sports team he coached. The kids on his team had the best uniforms in the league. They had big team dinners with award presentations. They had great clinics with qualified professionals teaching them skills.
No, I don't think there is any cause and effect here but I do think there is a connection. It's the same lack of any sense of limits. It's the same failure to draw sharp boundaries between what is acceptable in some parts of life and others that caused this failure.
Timmy turned out okay, by the way. He is just Tim now. He was a martial arts expert for a while and has a fairly successful career as, of all things, a stock broker. He responds to his father's name the same way my mother responded to the F-bomb, which is to say he makes it very clear he doesn't want to hear it in public and he laughs about it in private. And what else could he do?
One the most valuable lessons I ever got from the Serpentine One was the importance of managing the public and private aspects of a relationship. As is often the case, she has no memory of telling me about this. We had only known one another a short while and had not yet begun to fall in love. We were talking about another relationship that had failed. And she said to me, "The problem with X and Y was that they only could make it work when they were alone. When they tried to function in public as a couple, they failed."
Before you can learn how to manage these two fronts in a loving relationship, you need to learn how to do it as an individual. And we learn that, or fail to learn, or fail to be taught, from our parents but most especially from our mothers.
I'll begin with failure. Here is what it looks like.
I was reading some mommy blogger a while ago (I can't remember which one) and she blogged about walking into the room where her daughter was watching television. Somehow, she blocked her daughter's view of the television and her daughter said, "Mommy, would you move your big fat ass."
Now, pause a moment and consider how you'd respond. And consider how your mother would have responded. I know how my mother would have.
This mommy blogger laughed. And in her blog she went on to say that she and her husband often talk to one another like that so it isn't any wonder her daughter picked it up. The whole point of her blog post was to publicly reveal her acceptance of this as inevitable; she was not going to beat herself up about this, although she could not quite bring herself to believe it was okay if it happened again. Several of the comments began with "I'm so glad you wrote this" and were followed by similar confessions—this revelation of personal failure having apparently sparked great relief in others desperate to tell the world that they too were failures.
That is why you now see restaurants with signs advising parents that they will be asked to leave if their children won't behave.
All the behaviours here make sense in isolation. Is it funny when an innocent child says something really rude? Yes it is. Do couples sometimes use what would otherwise be insults as private endearments? Of course we do. (Although I do have to say I would never say anything as crass and vulgar as what this woman's husband apparently says to her about anyone I cared about.)
What is missing is any sense of occasion, any sense of the place and company that remarks are or are not appropriate in.
I still remember the first time I dropped the F-bomb in my mother's presence. I picked it up from a new friend named Timmy in Grade school. We walked around and he used the word liberally. Like many a kid before me, I loved the word and started imitating him. And his parents used it too. His parents said a lot of things in front of the kids. I remember his mother making a joke about her pubic hair being grey because she didn't dye it the way she did with the hair on top of her head.
Anyway, I got so used to using the word over at his place that one day I blurted it out at home.
What followed I remember as being deeply unpleasant. Everything about my mother's response seemed deadly serious and earnest to me. I quickly grasped not only that I was not to use the word but also that I didn't want to be the sort of person who used that word.
I did still use it, of course. But I always used it with a sense of doubt. I could only feel comfortable using it in certain kinds of company. I used it with buddies and, like trump at Hearts, I never led with it until I heard someone else use it first. Even now in my fifties, I could not use the word in front of anyone I do not know well and even then it would depend.
The story has two sequels. Years later, I overheard my mother reassuring a young mother who had just dealt with her son saying the word. My mother said, "The hardest thing is keeping a straight face." And then told how she'd had to leave the room to laugh when I first said it. That was true although what she'd told me at the time, and I believed, was that she'd had to leave the room because she was so upset. And I believed her. Not because she was a great actress. She wasn't. I believed her because she was consistent and persistent in pushing for a standard of behaviour that did not include anything like the use that word in her home.
It wasn't just the F bomb. We weren't allowed to say "shut up" in our house. And we weren't allowed to refer to my mother using third person pronouns such as "she" or "her". Whatever private endearments and inside jokes my parents shared, they remained strictly private between them.
I, like every other kid in the universe, eventually figured out that there was a gap between the standards of behaviour that my mother demanded of us and what she herself sometimes did in private. Once when the extended family were all gathered down at P-town, and she and her sisters were alone around the piano late at night and they thought the rest of us were asleep, I overheard them singing a song whose chorus went, "My gal goes for all the guys but she only comes for me." There must have been more but that was the one and only time she let her slip show (and you can't really say that as it was a perfectly reasonable assumption on her part that we'd all be asleep at that hour). But I knew there was more.
You could dismiss this attitude of hers as hypocrisy if you think that will make you feel better but here's the rub. Those modern parents who talk about one anothers' "fat asses" in front of their children also have different standards they apply in public and in private. They have dirty secrets. And their children will also grow up to discover these things. The difference is that they don't keep the division between their public and private life up out of a proper respect for public decorum the way my mother did. They are driven by private shame. Thus this odd confessional release they get from telling the whole world that they are failures and all their readers can chime in and confess that they too are failures and everyone can get a warm fuzzy because if everyone is a failure, then no one is.
Meanwhile, families are less and less welcome in any restaurant that doesn't have golden arches out front.
Oh yeah, the other sequel. Timmy's father was later arrested for embezzlement. He'd stolen tens of thousands of dollars from his employer. The really odd thing is what he did with the money. He used every penny on a sports team he coached. The kids on his team had the best uniforms in the league. They had big team dinners with award presentations. They had great clinics with qualified professionals teaching them skills.
No, I don't think there is any cause and effect here but I do think there is a connection. It's the same lack of any sense of limits. It's the same failure to draw sharp boundaries between what is acceptable in some parts of life and others that caused this failure.
Timmy turned out okay, by the way. He is just Tim now. He was a martial arts expert for a while and has a fairly successful career as, of all things, a stock broker. He responds to his father's name the same way my mother responded to the F-bomb, which is to say he makes it very clear he doesn't want to hear it in public and he laughs about it in private. And what else could he do?
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