On moms and daughters
Welcome to Things I Ask My Mother
If we are friends, you know my mother. You don’t know her because you’ve met her, necessarily. You know her because when we talk about some work drama or how much to spend on a haircut or what to eat for dinner, I quote her. As in:
“That’s not in your job description.”
“Your hair is the outfit you wear every day. Pay extra.”
“How about a bowl of cereal? It’s a meal!”
This counsel is not just well received, but cherished. So much so that back when I could throw dinner parties, people would ask before RSVPing, “Is Nessa coming?” For as long as I have been hawking her advice to the people I love, I have been urging her to commit it to a more public realm. She is a brilliant editor and writer and the author of four books. She is an eldest daughter—telling people what to do is second nature to her! It just makes sense.
I had been unsuccessful in this endeavor until September, when her most recent novel Evening was published and I convinced her to let me interview her for Glamour about it, but also about life and work and love. People loved it. And we loved it.
We loved it because we spend a significant portion of our waking hours talking to each other. I won’t estimate here how often we talk on the phone per week. Whatever number seems outlandish, double it. Then add six. We talk about the weather and the articles we’re reading and which coffee beans we’re liking at the moment. We do some tasteful gossiping. And sometimes, I ask her about something or register some complaint, and she shocks me with a bit of wisdom so well articulated I feel like I’m on the phone with Brené Brown.
So we decided we should do that interview thing again. We should in fact do it a lot! On a regular basis! This newsletter is the venue for it. Twice a month to start, we’ll be sending out a snippet of conversation. The topics we cover will run the gamut, but I can promise that we’ll keep it interesting. It’s been almost three decades since we started talking. To date, we’ve never gotten bored.
Mattie Kahn: Are you ready?
Nessa Rapoport: I am.
Mattie: You surprised me when we were talking about doing this a few weeks ago. We were discussing motherhood as a topic, and you told me that you had never once thought about having children before you actually had them. So I want to start with: What the hell? How is that possible? You never thought about it?
Nessa: [Laughs] I was too busy thinking about falling in love to think about the children part. To be clear, I knew absolutely, without question, kids were going to be part of my life. But I wasn’t up to that stage.
Mattie: Do you think that’s a generational thing? Like, having kids was just not something your cohort thought about?
Nessa: Good question. I left my birthplace when I was 21. I didn’t get married until I was 32, close to 33. And in my generation, we had a long adolescence, or a long “emerging adulthood,” as they say now. There was no pressure at all in my peer group to get married. There didn’t seem to be any rush.
At the same time, we had to endure constant conversation about what feminism would cost women, because there was a lot of hostility, as there always is, to this new movement. There was a famous article that said a 40-year-old, single, white, college-educated woman had a greater chance of being killed by a terrorist than of getting married. There was also the finding that ambitious women in corporate life did less well. Much less well. Men surged ahead if they were married and had children, and women were too “torn” between their ambition and their children. In reality, it was men in the corporate world who were limiting women in the corporate world. Then again, I always knew I was headed for the humanities.
Mattie: You didn’t have to worry about negotiating your rise to stardom as CEO of General Motors.
Nessa: Exactly. And everyone I knew went into the humanities, spent a couple of years doing X or Y, and then did something like go to law school or medical school. I really didn’t know anyone who immediately went into finance or banking.
Mattie: Did you feel competitive with other people, though? When you were off doing whatever you were doing, taking the slow path toward adulthood, did you feel like you were falling behind? I ask because I think social media now has made people so aware of where other people are in their lives, and it promotes comparing. Is that just human nature or has the Internet made that worse?
Nessa: Well, I can’t answer that because, as you know, I’m pretty withdrawn from social media. But I think there has always been, from the beginning of time, an awareness of peer expectations and social pressure. Your counterculture mom feels that the press of these factors is part of what develops one’s character. Because resistance is essential to being an autonomous agent of your fate. You know I feel that as a Jew as well.
Mattie: I mean, duh. Well, obviously, eventually, despite your lack of advance planning, you did have children. Having not had any myself yet, I wouldn’t know, but people talk about it like there is this great divide—the before and after of motherhood. Did you feel that way?
Nessa: You’re speaking about it in the existential sense, but in the practical sense, in terms of work, which is what we were just talking about, I have three words: childcare, childcare, childcare. This entire great divide would be so ameliorated if there were a sense that an investment in our children is a requirement and that childcare is essential for all adults. It’s an absolute scandal—how American women are left on their own.
The great divide for me was in going from a person who could work as she wanted to becoming a person who had to organize her life every single day against the disruptions that are inevitable, when a sick kid needs to be picked up from school, or whose spouse is out of town and something happens. You become a person who needs to take care of X, but your child needs Y. I discovered that even with full-time help, which we were so fortunate to have, raising children is demanding in certain ways I could not have predicted. And the main one I couldn’t have predicted was no time to read.
Mattie: You have never gotten over that.
Nessa: I didn’t understand until I couldn’t do it on demand that reading is my drug of choice for calming down. I couldn’t have known that because from the second I learned to read, that’s what I did in my free time. At one of my book parties, I said, “Between reading the Times and attending to my children, it was a tough choice.”
Mattie: We knew where we ranked.
Nessa: I’m pretty sure I thanked you for forgiving me.
Mattie: At the same time, you never missed a school play or a science fair. Although I do have to bring up the time that your watch stopped and you missed my karate belt ceremony, which I’m still slowly but surely getting over.
Nessa: I’m terribly sorry.
Mattie: It was so tragic. That aside, I wanted to ask how you made time for such a dumb shit.
Nessa: First of all, I had the good fortune of working in places where I could usually leave to go to one of these things as long as I got my work done. I also knew even then that—as you have frequently heard me say—your job won’t sit with you on your deathbed. Whenever I got calls from you in the middle of my work life, and you know how many they were, if you do the math—
Mattie: We’re going to redact that number.
Nessa: I have a friend who told her four children, whom she loves, “You can’t call me from 9am to 5pm, because I’ll get no work done.” But I always took your calls, even if just to say, “Sorry, I can’t talk now.” And I hope I always called you back. I love my work life. I’ve had a remarkable set of jobs, but I always tried to remember the limit of any workplace, even when it was very benign. Another one of my aphorisms: Never trust a workplace that uses the metaphor of family to describe its culture. Because it’s guaranteed to be a dysfunctional family. So yes, work will not attend to you at the end of your life. Guess who will? I tried to prioritize you.
Mattie: I feel like I read a lot about guilt in relation to motherhood—feeling bad about being caught between your job and your kids and not measuring up in some way. Did you struggle with that?
Nessa: In general, it’s internalized misogyny to hate yourself that much or to berate yourself for not being good enough. I used to say that women and men get along so well in the workplace, because when something goes wrong, men blame women and women blame themselves. They both agree on whose responsibility it is! I think that women must stop shredding themselves. It’s not just about the example we’re setting for our daughters, who will go on to experience this exact problem, alas; it also sets a bad example for our sons. Isn’t there a lot of conversation among you about how women have to stop doing that?
Mattie: Yes, but does it stick? No!
Nessa: Took me decades. I had a wonderful male, older OB-GYN who—when breastfeeding was going very badly for me—said, “Yes, hypothetically, it is better for the baby if you breastfeed. But if you’re miserable, how will it help? First, the mother has to be happy.” That was really, really good advice, because my mother was ahead of the curve in breastfeeding four children in the 50s. And I wanted to do that, too. But he made me see: You can do only what you can do.
I so often quote my very close friend Robin, who says of raising children: “When we were young, we thought it was all psychology. And now we know it’s all biology.” We were under the illusion that every single thing we did as parents would change, shape, and detract from our children, because we were determined to be better parents than our parents. But once you have more than one child, you see how much is already decided by biology, by temperament.
You can destroy a child, but you can’t change a child. Of course, you can ruin a child by cruelty, neglect, abuse. But as your children grow up, you start to see that while you can add, enhance, amplify, offset, you can’t really change the nature of your children. Which should be a bit of a relief to new parents. Not that I realized it at the time. I was sure that your two intense, maniacal parents would have serene, pacific children. In New York!
Mattie: When I was younger and you were bossing me around, you used to say, “We’re not peers.” I found it so annoying! I think we agree that we are now friends. When did that transition happen? Or are we still both not peers and also friends?
Nessa: I think in some ways you’re never peers with your parents, right? Because if your parents say something judgmental or critical, it stings in a way that’s very different from anybody else saying it.
Mattie: Yes, that’s true.
Nessa: Last month, my cousin gave me a great filter: Are your adult children talking to you to share or to consult? I think baby boomers—and especially eldest-child baby boomers, as I am—default very quickly into the consult mode, whether or not their children want an opinion. The most important learning I’ve done as a parent, now that all of you are in your twenties and thirties, has been—to borrow a concept from Jewish mysticism—my continuing revelation that I have to condense and retract myself to give you more space to be yourselves and to state your own opinions. Several years ago, I ran into a friend in the middle of the street, and we laughed and laughed as we described how each of us was trying so hard with our kids just to keep our mouths shut! That’s what “we’re not peers” means to me now. Guess what? You’re not asking me!
But there’s no question that you and I are beloved friends. I’m blessed to have children whose company I so enjoy. And I also want to say, that’s the job of the parents—to extend themselves and meet their adult children as they are. It is not the job of the children to snip themselves into some kind of pattern to suit their parents’ hopes.
Let me add: Please do not mythologize my parenting. I am still a work in progress.
Mattie: That’s a nice bit of restraint from you. Do you ever miss being just the total authority figure in our lives?
Nessa: I’m not sure I ever felt like the total authority figure! There is an old, scary movie called The List of Adrian Messenger, and at the end of the movie, the characters peel off the masks they’re wearing to reveal who they truly are. Whenever I went to a parent-teacher conference, I would think, “Oh my God, I’m the parent.” I couldn’t believe it. I never felt like it was completely real that teachers were taking me so seriously and that I was sitting there like such an adult, consulting about my children’s fate and future. In the end, the most important thing I have is my sense of humor, although it is so dark I used to hear a lot of, “Mom, you go too far.”
Mattie: Did having children change you?
Nessa: Yes.
Mattie: So do you think it’s true that a parent can’t change a child, but a child can change their parents?
Nessa: I’m still me. I think you know that. You know me very well, and you probably know the dimensions that you’re just not interested in running into. You’re careful. And I try to be careful as well. So maybe it’s not that having children changed me, but that it made me grow. I had made a resolution to stop growing before I turned 40, because I found it very taxing! It turns out that you grow until you die. My children are my teachers.
A wise person once said to me that the goal of therapy, which you know I believe in, is not to be your best self all the time, but to have available to you the full range of feelings. I think about that a lot, because we can be so rigid in how we respond to life. The risk of getting older is that you reify yourself, and suddenly you’re spouting platitudes. That’s what I never wanted to happen, as a person or a parent.When you shake me up or challenge me, even if I feel you’re being kind of strident, you make me think.
Mattie: That’s nice, mother.
Nessa: I can’t remember how we signed off on our last interview, but I think we should sign off the same way. Didn’t I say, “I love you.”
Mattie: You said, “Love you, darling.”
Nessa: I love you, darling.
Some housekeeping: If you were a subscriber to Disaster Baking, I signed you up for this newsletter! I hope you love it and don’t hold it against my mother that her most advanced form of meal preparation is pouring a bowl of Cheerios. She’s a good person! I swear!
Nessa is The Pattern for All Womanhood!
I loved this!