I spent the morning formulating some rough hypotheses on the social ideal of the selfless-and/or-self-sacrificing caregiver. I'm not talking about the jumping-in-front-of-car-to-save-child sort of S/SS behavior since with any luck that doesn't come up on a daily basis. I'm thinking instead of the received image of the S/SS caregiver as the standard against which the parent (almost always the mother) is generally measured.
One piece of evidence folks present to support the nurturing instinct relates to the parent who sees to the needs of the child before turning to her own. In the course of trailing daughter L. around this morning, I have decided that this has less to do with instinct than with my finely calibrated conditioned response built upon the premise that I have a marginally greater store of patience than my 23-month-old daughter and that this (along with greater fine motor skills and an understanding of the uses of legal tender) means I can use said patience to avert her frustration and its concomitant hollering.
Viz.: I do not holler if my bagel does not appear in the same instant as my desire for same has been conceived. Or: I do not get entangled in my own coat when I remove it and can tie my own shoes without frustration. Thus I am willing to step in unselfishly and sacrifice the timely lacing of my own shoes. But we keep an uneasy cease-fire going on the question of how much frustration is good for her as an incentive to problem solving.
Of course it's not like I'm bounding across the room to get my hand between the corner of the kitchen table and the skull of my leaping daughter solely on the basis of self interest (though I feel lousy when I'm a step too slow and she gets bonked). But the benevolent glow folks occasionally cast our way when I'm doing something like cutting daughter L.'s bagel into bite-sized pieces should be tempered a bit by the pragmatism at its root.
But in spite of the metaphysics, daughter L. is cute as the dickens (why a dickens? OED is silent on this usage unless one makes the allusive jump from the definition of dickens as a substitution for the word "devil" and its related ideas of mischief but I'm just spinning my wheels in the sand here and certainly I'm not getting any help from Wentworth & Flexner though I don't have a copy of Lighter to hand and ... and ... and oh man, I am getting off track).
Anyway, any pragmatism is certainly tempered by the fact that I love daughter L. with an adhesive strength I could not have imagined before we had her. But the ebb and flow of our daily relationship seems more complex than one is generally allowed to admit (in any discussion of it you usually end up having to shove a big stack of emotional chips across the table--see flea's sharp discussion of the Mommy Myth). Even if language organizes our world, it certainly seems like a fairly blunt instrument for shaping the stories we use to make sense of it.
I now have to disinfect the bathtub for reasons that will not surprise anyone who has bathed small children. That melancholy fact and my efforts to avoid it are probably at the root of all this sorry abstraction.
Comments