Parenting Without a Manual
with Talyaa Liera
I'm Talyaa, the poster child for the concept that there's no one right way to be a parent. I went from stay-at-home attachment-parenting mom of four to being the non-custodial parent, working as a professional writer and channel-psychic. Let's talk about throwing away the parenting manual and exploding the myths and mystique of motherhood!
Check out my personal blog at Juxtapositioning.
Mad Men is back, and I was prepared to love it. Primed with new-season promises of the glamor of 1960’s New York, with miniskirts and rising feminism, I tuned in Sunday night with high hopes.
Instead I felt icky, and I blame Betty Draper.
Have you been following the first three seasons? I confess it’s one of the few TV shows I watch. The characters are complex and finely-drawn. They seem like real people. Maybe too real: I hate Betty Draper.
I hate her in her petulant blonde perfection. I hate how she treats everyone around her, including herself, with disdain. I especially hate her apparent indifference to her children. Watching her telling them to “Go upstairs” or “Go watch TV” makes me squirm. I want to climb into my 32-inch flat screen and hug her children.
Betty Draper hits a little too close to home for me.
Are you not familiar with Betty Draper? New York Magazine put together a montage of stellar Betty Draper parenting moments that tells the whole story. My favorite line is Betty telling little Bobby to go bang his head against the wall.
Oh sure, I could sit here and decry the Betty Drapers of the world, swearing up and down on my attachment parenting Sanctimommious padded ring sling that I would never treat my children that way, nay, I would never leave their sides for a second! But honestly, I think that mostly I hate Betty Draper because she reminds me of the worst aspects of myself.
I already wrote about the inward cringe I felt when I found out my kids saw me as a hunchback shrew, claw fingers glued to laptop, screeching, “SHH! MAMA IS WRITING!”
I could rationalize all day long that I don’t feel it’s healthy [blah blah blah] for parents to be with their children all day long and that it’s not good parenting [I can't HEAR you!] for us to give up our regular adult lives and spend our days creating fun, wholesome entertainment for the kiddoes, but honestly? I have bought into the Mommy-Do-It-All role.
Which apparently Betty Draper has not. In spades. No, she is openly resentful.
And that’s the other part that hits close to home for me. Betty Draper could have been my mom. I could be her 3rd season Baby Eugene, a child of the mid-60’s, coming into being at a time when women felt less fulfilled in their roles as mothers than their predecessors did but felt no open avenue in which to unburden their longing to have a quiet moment to themselves, engage in a couple of hours of adult conversation, or maybe indulge in wild daydreams of taking off across the country in a psychadelic VW minibus.
Now we have blogging for that.
I grew up feeling mildly unwanted, though you couldn’t pay my mom enough Salem Lites or jugs of Carlo Rossi Rhine Wine to get her to admit that she didn’t want children, that she felt trapped in her role as a 4th grade teacher (when she could have been a classical pianist), and that she resented her seeming lack of freedom but walled herself off into a box that made the thought of admitting her truth more painful than the truth itself.
Based on the comments I’ve seen here at Work It, Mom, though, most of us are healthier about our ambivalence to being a parent. It sucks sometimes and a lot of the time it rocks. Are we finding the balance that Betty Draper didn’t have?
What were your reactions to watching the Betty Draper Guide to Parenting? Good, bad, or Ugly Betty?
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What I love about Mad Men is that it’s so honest that it hurts. Watching Betty did make me cringe and think and take a hard look at myself. I think for the most part I put my daughter first, but then there are times I really want her to just nap for another 30 mins so I can get this done already! and I hate it when I think it because I work full time plus part time and I have such a small amount of time with her. and no time for me.
My mother was also a teacher and neglectful and she I know wishes she remained a concert violinist.. though I feared terribly I would be the same sort of mother I know that I’m not. and if this economy ever turns around I could one.. have another and two.. go part time. But the show definitely made me think!
andrea | July 29th, 2010 at 9:51 am
Loooooaaaathe her.
Miss Britt | July 30th, 2010 at 9:03 am
I cannot take your article seriously. It’s obvious to me that you’re one of those fans who demand that Betty behave like the perfect 21st century mother. Worse, you seem blind to the possibility that Betty may be expressing her anger over her divorce and the lies that she had lived with during her decade of marriage to Don. Not only that, you’re projecting your own resentments upon the character, because of some need to have a perfect mother that still resides within you.
So, I can’t take this article seriously.
Rosie | May 12th, 2011 at 1:38 pm
I have just finished watching my Mad Men DVDs last night. The author is right women during the 1960’s were unfulfilled. With all due respect to my mom( I love her to bits), she like Betty Draper was a product of their generation. Women are not expected to have a life outside of the home. My mom who is now in her late seventies, to this very day tells me that she resented her mum , dad and my father. When I was growing up she was resentful that I worked and got a college education. My parents has never been the touchy feel type of parents. They were verbally abusive and that is what they know and that is how they were brought by. They were world war II, depression era children. Mad Men really helped me understand how my parents generation really view the world.
Ann | December 13th, 2011 at 11:48 am