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I was an awkward twelve-year-old in suburban Ohio and she was a middle-aged mother-of-six who moonlighted as a highly successful playwright and was married to a professor and New York City theater critic. Who would have guessed that a book of her collected essays would mean so much to me? It was a bright yellow, mass-market copy that my mother had found on a grocery-store rack, and when I first discovered it I thought it was the funniest thing I'd ever read. Twenty-three years later, I still have the same old dog-eared copy of Jean Kerr's How I Got to be Perfect and after nearly as many readings, I still love it. I was hooked from the introduction when Kerr explained, "I have already achieved my life's ambition. That's something, you know. I feel like it rather sets me apart, like that nice convict who raises canaries in San Quentin." Her ambition? To sleep until noon every day. She confessed that she married her husband because he had a legitimate excuse to stay up until three (directing or reviewing plays), which allowed her to begin "each day bright and late at the stroke of the noon whistle, a splendid state of affairs which continued for two years or right up to the moment our first son was born. . . . Walter was still staying up until three, and I was seeing him during the late hours and the children during the early hours and double all the rest of the time." She had to start writing--to earn enough money to hire someone else to get up with her children. Thus her career was born. . Kerr claimed to have done most of her writing in the family car, parked alongside a road, because so far as the boys are concerned, it's not the direct interruptions at home that are hard to adjust to. I don't mind when one of them rushes in to tell me something really important, like the Good Humor man said that banana-rum is going to be the flavor of the week next week. What really drives me frantic and leads to the use of such quantities of Tint-Hair is the business of overhearing a chance remark from another part of the house. ("Listen, stupid, the water is supposed to go in the top"). Rather than investigate, and interrupt myself, I spend twenty minutes wondering: What water? The top of what? I hope it's just a water gun and not, oh no, not the enema bag again. Out in the car where I freeze to death or roast to death depending on the season, all is serene. The few things to read in the front seat area (Chevrolet, E-gasoline-F, 100-temp-200) I have long since committed to memory. So I have nothing to do but write, after I have the glove compartment tidied up. Once in a while--perhaps every fifteen minutes or so--I ask myself: Why do I struggle, when I could be home painting the kitchen cupboards? Why? And then I remember. Because I like to sleep in the morning, that's why. Now that I'm a married mother of two who moonlights as a writer and editor, I'm amazed at all the similarities, besides sleeping late, between Jean Kerr and me. There may be forty-five years between her firstborn and mine, but the balancing act of writing and mothering is very much the same. You stay up too late, pay someone to watch the kids, court your muse in fifteen minute intervals while the baby naps, and--voila!--writing happens, on good days. On bad days, you're gathering material. It's precarious, this balance. Perhaps the most famous performer of this balancing act was Erma Bombeck. For years, Bombeck wrote a widely syndicated newspaper column, "At Wit's End." Her books include The Grass Is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank (the classic chronicle of life in '60s suburban Ohio), If Life Is a Bowl of Cherries--What Am I Doing in the Pits?, and Motherhood: The Second Oldest Profession, all of which I enjoyed for years before I had children. Bombeck wrote about the overwhelming minutiae of family life and the toll it takes on poor old mom--especially if said mom isn't a Donna Reed wannabe. In Cherries, she offers encouragement for women who want something more--a college degree, a career--than "putting toilet seats down all day." "You can be like the woman who sat at her kitchen window year after year and watched everyone else do it. Then one day she said, ÔI do not feel fulfilled cleaning chrome faucets with a toothbrush. It's my turn.' I was thirty-seven years old at the time." From such a humble beginning, she wrote her way into the newspapers and hearts of America. Bombeck loved a one-liner and never shied away from hyperbole to get a laugh. Her books are often laugh-out-loud funny, with short chapters like "The Primer for Imaginative Children" which includes this advice for the little dears: "It is fun to eat. See the milk? See the butter? See the lunch meat? They cannot run. They cannot walk. They have no legs. They must be picked up and returned to the refrigerator or they will turn green. Green is not a happy color. . . . See Mommy come home. See Daddy come home. They are walking on their knees. Be kind to Mommy and Daddy. 'Look, look, Mommy, Bruce is bloody. I'm telling, Debbie. I didn't do it, Daddy.' Do you want to make Mommy crazy? Do you want to make Daddy rupture a neck vein? Then shape up, up, up." Much of her writing was intended for a newspaper audience, the same readers turning to Ann and Abby for advice, and checking out their daily horoscope. Bombeck's columns offered short respites for these women, a few minutes to laugh over the absurdities of family life. And she didn't sugar-coat reality, either. Bombeck felt that women needed to know that it was okay to express mixed feelings about motherhood, and that sometimes you just had to laugh so that you wouldn't cry. In the introduction to Motherhood: the Second Oldest Profession, Bombeck writes: "I've always felt uncomfortable about the articles that eulogized me as a nurse, chauffeur, cook, housekeeper, financier, counselor, philosopher, mistress, teacher, and hostess. It seemed that I always read an article like this when my kid was in a school play and I only ironed the leg of the trouser that faced the audience, knitted all morning, napped all afternoon, bought a pizza for dinner and had a headache by ten-thirty. For a long time I was afraid to laugh at the contrast, for fear that no one else would." After my kids were born, I discovered the domestic musings of Shirley Jackson, a writer whose work I thought I knew. When I read her conversational and lighthearted books about her children, Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons, I discovered that it's nearly impossible to believe that this is the same woman who gave us "The Lottery," one of the most haunting and macabre short stories in American literature. She enjoyed writing funny stories about her family, and in Savages Jackson sets the cozy scene in the opening paragraph: Our house is old, and noisy and full. When we moved into it we had two children and about five thousand books; I expect that when we finally overflow and move out again we will have perhaps twenty children and half a million books. We also own assorted beds and tables and chairs and rocking horses and lamps and doll dresses and ship models and paint brushes and literally thousands of socks. This is the way of life my husband and I have fallen into, inadvertently, as though we had fallen into a well and decided that since there was no way out we might as well stay there and set up a chair and a desk and a light of some kind; even though this is our life and the only life we know, it is occasionally bewildering, and perhaps even inexplicable to the sort of person who does not have that swift, accurate conviction that he is going to step on a broken celluloid doll in the dark. I cannot think of a preferable way of life, except one without children and without books--as I say, I cannot think of a preferable way of life, but then I have had to make a good many compromises, all told. Shirley Jackson's stories are long-winded and amusing, going off on many tangents before reaching the punchline with such a dry wit, I can't help but smile. I'm particularly fond of this passage about her ill-fated attempts at gracious living: Perhaps--if we did have demitasse cups, our after-dinner hour, which is complicated by the presence of children coming in and out of bathtubs and children with pressing problems in elementary reading, and dishes on the table waiting to be washed, and dogs and cats clamoring for their supper--perhaps our after-dinner hour would somehow become imperceptibly more gracious; perhaps the children, seeing us endlessly refilling our demitasse cups would tiptoe thoughtfully away from the dining room door. Perhaps if we had demitasse cups a local couple, who have no children and have shown a vast distaste for our hospitality, would come to call. Perhaps, as a matter of fact, if we had demitasse cups, we could overlook the fact that the vast distaste of the local couple was provoked by our short-tempered reception of their resentment of our children. We should live more graciously, after all. Jackson took her writing very seriously, as did her husband, literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman. He decided to marry her sight unseen when he read her first published short story in their college newspaper, and he remained her most ardent fan, although this didn't translate into help with the housework. Jackson was respected as a writer within her family and literary circle; outside of it, well, that was a different matter. In Savages, she cheerfully describes a harrowing taxi ride to the hospital--she was in full-blown labor with her third baby--and her subsequent conversation with hospital admissions: "Name?" the desk clerk said to me politely, her pencil poised.
"Name," I said vaguely. I remembered and told her.
"Age?" she asked. "Sex? Occupation?"
"Writer," I said.
"Housewife," she said.
"Writer," I said.
"I'll just put down housewife," she said. "Doctor? How many children?"
"Two," I said. "Up to now."
"Normal pregnancy?" she said. "Blood test? X-ray?"
"Look--" I said.
"Husband's name," she said. "Address? Occupation?"
"Just put down housewife," I said. "I don't remember his name, really."
"Legitimate?"
"What?" I said.
"Is your husband the father of this child? Do you have a husband?"
"Please," I said plaintively, "can I go on upstairs?"
"Well, really," she said, and sniffed. "You're only having a baby." By the time she wrote Raising Demons, Jackson's cheerful tone couldn't hide that the balancing act of writing and mothering was getting even more precarious. She suffered from addictions (to cigarettes, alcohol, amphetamines, and chocolate) and sometimes-debilitating anxiety attacks. Her health was failing and she seemed to mourn that her children had outgrown their adorable baby and toddler selves and could no longer have all their wounds healed by hugs and homemade brownies. Still, Demons draws the reader into the magic of Jackson's old and noisy and full household, where her four children's childhood fantasies and passions are indulged, their absurd conversations are encouraged, and their mother finds the time to write about it all. . Of these three writers, Jean Kerr is by far my favorite. Her self-deprecating tone is always funny, and she can also be mocking, and very tongue-in-cheek. She aptly took on gender roles (and displayed, as did the others, varying levels of resentment thereof). In "The Ten Worst Things About a Man" she opined: . [A husband] will stare at you across the dining room table (as you simultaneously carve the lamb and feed the baby) and announce, in tones so piteous as to suggest that all his dreams have become ashes, "There's no salt in this shaker." What a wife objects to in this situation is not just the notion that Daddy has lived in this house for thirteen years without ever discovering where the salt is kept. It's more the implication that only she has the necessary fortitude, stamina and simple animal cunning necessary to pour the salt into that little hole in the back of the shaker.... Because he has such respect for your superior wisdom and technical know-how, he is constantly asking questions like "Does this kid need a sweater?" or "Is that baby wet?" Personally, I am willing to go through life being the court of last appeal on such crucial issues as bedtime (is it?), cookies (can they have another?), rubbers (do they have to wear them?) and baths (tonight? but they took one last night). But, just between us, I have no confidence in a man who wanders out into the kitchen, peers into the icebox, and asks plaintively, "Do I want a sandwich?" My favorite pieces are those that deal directly with Kerr's children and the discipline she imposes. I admit that in my early days of motherhood, I felt a certain haughty disdain toward mothers who expressed ambivalence toward their children or admitted to resorting to spanking or other harsh disciplinary actions. Of course, now, nearly eight years later, I have said and done just about everything (yelling, spanking, telling my child to "go away and leave me alone!") I swore I'd never do, so I've lost the moral high ground. It's funnier down here with the sinners anyway, and Kerr's tactics amuse and inspire me. About beach visits she says: "When I see my boys dropping wet seaweed on somebody's sound-asleep face or spilling sand into an open jar of cold cream, I simply shout, 'Little boy! Stop that immediately or I will ask your father to spank you!' This stops him without exactly revealing my true identity as the parent of the delinquent." She also recommends the all-purpose threat of "If you do that one more time, I swear I'll clip you!" because "'clip' is more or less open to a variety of interpretations and leaves you more or less free to inflict such punishment as you feel up to at the moment." In her most famous story, "Please Don't Eat the Daisies" (the movie version starred Doris Day and David Niven, and isn't nearly as funny), Kerr explains that her children will never have to pay a psychiatrist to find out why their parents rejected them. Mom is all too willing to tell them--"because they're impossible, that's why." How did these women carve out time to write in spite of large families, un-liberated husbands, and busy social lives? They wrote in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, which to my generation is the Dark Ages--that bleak time before the Pill, before women's lib, before we all got our collective consciousness raised and men started doing housework. Jean and Erma and Shirley were expected to cook and clean and handle the household finances and take care of the children, all without any help from Daddy, and they expected it of themselves. All three felt obligated to preside over a home (complete with an up-to-date decorating scheme and floors you could eat off of) and to maintain a rigorous social schedule. Things are different for my generation. We have more choices, and we feel less societal pressure to be happy homemakers. So, why, if things have changed so much for women, do these fifty-year-old books feel so familiar? Why do Jean and Erma and Shirley still make us laugh? Could it be because dishwashing is the same as it ever was, incessant sibling squabbling hasn't changed any, and men still don't do as much housework as they should? Or that the demands on our time may be different, but just as demanding? Or that childrearing occurs in its own special universe, oblivious to the whims of cultural change? As a wise woman once observed: It doesn't really matter how many kids you have, because one will eat up all your time. Sure, women have more options now, but revisiting these chronicles of domestic life before the revolution shows that motherhood and marriage, and especially housekeeping, haven't changed much at all. Or at least not for the mothers I number among my friends and acquaintances. When we get together to bitch, we talk about unhelpful husbands, ungrateful kids, lack of money, lack of time, loneliness, fat, fatigue, housekeeping drudgery, marital woes, childcare problems, feeling left out of the glamorous life, anger, anxiety, frustration, and just wanting a moment's rest--the same themes running throughout Erma's and Jean's and Shirley's writing. My friends and I can and do laugh at all these things, mostly because we feel vindicated by each other's experience ("I'm not alone!" "I hate that, too!"), but also, at least for me, because it's great writing material. These writers are remarkable because they were able, somehow, to laugh at their messy lives and to find the time to write it all down so that their readers could laugh, too. They all wanted to be mothers and they wanted a life of the mind, even if it meant they had to pursue it while up to their elbows in dirty diapers. I can't help but admire the way they took all the inherent frustration in trying to appease both family and muse, and turned it into gold. They parodied the self-help regimes and fad diets that fed on their anxieties, and they lampooned the hot, new trends in parenting and decorating. Of course, they wrote about the good stuff, too, the gratifying moments, the love and laughter and how it all gets mixed in together in the maddening and frustrating and poignant dance that is motherhood. All three women also occasionally turned serious, laying bare their joys and fears and hinting at the fierce love they felt for their children and spouses. But the real laughs come with the bad stuff, and these women laid it on thick in self-deprecating hilarity. Although Erma Bombeck's name is still a household word, Jean Kerr's and Shirley Jackson's aren't. All of their contributions to the "motherhood, with humor" genre have been replaced by newer books, some quite funny and worth reading. And while I keep up with the current crop of writer/mothers, these older books deserve to be rediscovered for at least two reasons. First, they're genuinely funny. Second, they remind us that when it comes to balancing motherhood and selfhood, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
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