Father might know best, but who cares?

by David Benjamin

“We cannot get away from the fact that a child is hard-wired to bond with mom. They know her smell, they know her heartbeat, they know her voice. I just think, why should we deny that?”
—Jenet Erickson, Institute for Family Studies

MADISON, Wis.—I wasn’t interested in my mother.

She pretty much felt the same way about me. She had a lot of grownup tsuris to occupy her attention. Besides, she was—more or less—an adult. I was a kid. We had nothing in common and, to our mutual, lasting credit, we knew it.

I mention this because the right wing of the Republican Party’s rightmost wing, led by faux hillbilly JD Vance (he grew up in a city of 50,000, elevation 742 measly feet), is advocating for (white) mothers in America to eschew careers, stay home with the children and breed like Biblical gerbils. The idea is that if boys are kept in close contact with Mom and a big litter of siblings, they will somehow turn out better than … well, I’ve turned out.

In the case of my big sister Peg, my kid brother Bill and me, this “Leave It to Beaver” ideal was otherworldly. We were not coddled, never consulted about our hopes and dreams, never tucked in, prayed over and lullabied with Mother Goose and Goodnight, Moon. We could go barely noticed for weeks.

My most vivid example of the laissez faire parenting that forged my character and steeled my spine goes back to when Mom tied Bill to the honeysuckle bush in the yard. On summer days, both Peg and I, before we could walk, had been similarly leashed, with a rope, to the shady bush between our bungalow on the Alley and my grandparents’ house on Pearl Street. Like Peg and me, Bill whined and cried, got bored with whining and crying when it drew no attention, and settled down to the job of throwing all his toys beyond leash range. However, unlike his elder siblings, rather than a renewed bout of whining and crying, Bill contrived—with his infant fingers—to untie the rope around his waist. Once liberated, Bill began to crawl, uphill, past Grandma’s house, across the sidewalk, into the middle of Pearl Street. He continued unscathed until, finally, he was discovered in her yard by Mrs. Konicek, who returned Bill to his rightful owners.

Once tied to his bush, Bill had been forgotten.

Tomah—the town where Bill had his excellent adventure—is a small, dusty speck on the map full, when I was a kid, of hard-working preoccupied grownups who were too busy (and too dignified) to coddle their children, chauffeur them hither and yon, coach them in skills and games the kids could just as well learn on their own, or to study school curricula and the card catalog at the Public Library in search of obscenity, blasphemy, Communism and homosexual propaganda.

Few of the adults among whom I circulated had enough formal education to engage in that sort of ideological surveillance. Nonetheless, as a community, these otherwise nonchalant grownups kept a peripheral eye on all the mozniks roaming the streets and alleys of Tomah. Without consulting one another, they were poised to act as a sort of child-protective association, or as stool pigeons informing on the town’s delinquents—a group with which I was marginally involved.

This unspoken ethic meant that Bill, even if he had gotten halfway across Pearl Street, stopped there and begun to whine and cry, the first driver who encountered him there would not have run him over. The driver would have parked, picked Bill up and started canvassing the neighborhood to see if there was anyone who wanted him back.

Of course, I didn’t.

When I got to school, I had to adapt to the unaccustomed focus of grownup interest, but not the sort of Stalinist brainwashing—by unionized teachers and “woke” librarians—feared nowadays by JD Vance’s thought police. It was the nuns, priests and lay people of the Catholic Church, who immersed me in a heavy flow of tendentious and condescending moral strictures, largely in catechism class, most of which entered one ear and gushed out the other. If I had a moral and social education at all from Mom and Dad, I acquired it by eavesdropping and—in Yogi Berra’s term—observing. My eventual responses were either emulation or rejection.

Mostly, I rejected. My parents clothed their kids and fed us, kept us clean and made sure we went to school. But this made little impression, because all the drama in their tenuous union—which ended after eight years—drowned out whatever good deeds and noble qualities Mom and Dad might have insinuated into my psyche. They smoked and drank to excess, they cursed and fought ferociously long into my sleepless nights. They frightened me so much that I never touched a cigarette and didn’t take my first, cautious taste of alcohol ’til I was well past thirty years. My sister, traumatized by Mom and Dad’s incendiary marriage, rejected two fiancés and stayed single ’til she died. I married the wrong woman twice—until I found the right one.

Most of the kids I knew experienced a little less tumult at home, but none of those homes even remotely resembled the blissful nuclear units depicted in the sitcoms we watched every week. “Father Knows Best” was a TV show, not a reliable guideline for childhood survival.

I wonder. What if JD Vance’s Strength Through Joy utopians were to round up a whole bunch of kids and sit them down, to inculcate family bonding, quality time, single breadwinners and parental nurture? I can’t help picturing a jar full of liquid mercury poured on to a picnic table. A team of well-meaning right-wing parents tries frantically to herd all those hundreds of elusive silvery beads from following gravity into the creases, seams and gaps on the tabletop, rolling to the ground, gathering dust, slipping into shadows and infiltrating the water table.

Hell, I spent most of my childhood slipping into shadows and infiltrating the water table.

Family engineers tend to focus on the parents, how to train, monitor and control their kids. Kids, however, whether their pastimes are baseball or Barbie, video games or Taylor Swift, resist control. They know what their parents expect of them, demand of them, dream for them. Mostly, the kids don’t give a shit.

I had to grow up to give a shit. It took me decades before I felt any interest in the circuitous and often frightening lives of my parents. I eventually came to regard Mom as a heroine of perseverance who stubbornly battled the hardships she had pretty much created for herself when she was still a child. I came to understand Dad as a lifelong charmer with an exceptional intellect that had been squandered in a backwater milieu where a keen, incisive mind found no respect or opportunity. Mom, in her last years, circled back to peace of mind through Thoreauvian simplicity and her Catholic faith. Dad, who never left Tomah, died as a repository of local history that deserved to be written down, history that I might have recorded if I hadn’t arrived too late to the source.

And Dad, true to his cool, laconic style, kept it to himself.