I Feel Bad About My Neck by Nora Ephron Read Free Book Online Page B

fathers (and mothering and fathering), but the concept of parenting was in its very early stages, if it existed at all.
    Here’s what a parent is: A parent is a person who has children. Here’s what’s involved in being a parent: You love your children, you hang out with them from time to time, you throw balls, you read stories, you make sure they know which utensil is the salad fork, you teach them to say please and thank you, you see that they have an occasional haircut, and you ask if they did their homework. Every so often, sentences you never expected to say (because your parents said them to you) fall from your lips, sentences like:
     
    DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA WHAT THAT COST ?
             
    BECAUSE I SAY SO . THAT ’ S WHY .
             
    I SAID NOW .
             
    STOP THAT THIS MINUTE .
             
    GO TO YOUR ROOM .
             
    I DON ’ T CARE WHAT JESSICA ’ S MOTHER LETS HER DO .
             
    A TIARA ? YOU WANT A TIARA ?
             
    Back in the day when there were merely parents, as opposed to people who were engaged in parenting, being a parent was fairly straightforward. You didn’t need a book, and if you owned one, it was by Dr. Spock, a pediatrician, and you rarely looked at it unless your child had a temperature of 103, or the croup, or both. You understood that your child had a personality. His very own personality. He was born with it. For a certain period, this child would live with you and your personality, and you would do your best to survive each other.
    “They never really change,” people often said (back in those days) about babies. This was a somewhat mystifying concept when you first had a baby. Exactly what was it about the baby that would never change? After all, it’s incredibly difficult to tell what a baby’s exact personality is when it’s merely a baby. (I’m using the word personality in the broadest sense, the one that means “the whole ball of wax.”) But eventually the baby in question began to manifest its personality, and sure enough, remarkably enough, that personality never changed. For example, when the police arrived to inform you that your eight-year-old had just dropped a dozen eggs from your fifth-floor window onto West End Avenue, you couldn’t help but be reminded of the fourteen-month-old baby he used to be, who knocked all the string beans from the high chair to the floor and thought it was a total riot.
    Back in those days—and once again, let me stress that I am not talking about the nineteenth century here, it was just a few years ago—no one believed that you could turn your child into a different human being from the one he started out being. T. Berry Brazelton, the pediatrician who supplanted Spock in the 1980s, was a disciple of Piaget, and his books divided babies into three types—active, average, and quiet. He never suggested that your quiet baby would ever become an active one, or vice versa. Your baby was your baby, and if he ran you ragged, he ran you ragged; and if he lay in his crib staring happily at his mobile, that was about what you could expect.
    All this changed around the time I had children. You can blame the women’s movement for it—one of the bedrock tenets of the women’s movement was that because so many women were entering the workforce, men and women should share in the raising of children; thus the gender-neutral word parenting, and the necessity of elevating child rearing to something more than the endless hours of quantity time it actually consists of. Conversely, you can blame the backlash against the women’s movement—lots of women didn’t feel like entering into the workforce (or even sharing the raising of children with their husbands), but they felt guilty about this, so they were compelled to elevate full-time parenthood to a sacrament.
    In any event, suddenly, one day, there was this thing called parenting. Parenting was serious. Parenting was fierce.