This was written in the late 1990s. I had lost the file, and frankly thought I might have imagined I’d written the whole thing. And then last week, looking for something entirely else, I found it. I’ve softened a little bit on Marmee: Abba Alcott was doing the best she could in very trying circumstances (don’t get me started on Bronson Alcott, The Man and the Ego). But I’m still glad my daughter liked me better.
It is three a.m. on a Wednesday morning, and my eight-year-old daughter has been throwing up for half-an-hour. Her bed is unspeakable. She’s changed nightgowns twice. Now, afraid to go too far from the bathroom, she is lying on a blanket in the hallway, curled around her misery and muttering to herself. I do the Mom-check again: no fever, no stiffness in the neck, no rash, none of the things that would have me rousting the pediatrician out of his bed; probably a stomach bug. I sit down beside her on the hardwood floor and push her flyaway hair out of her eyes, away from her face. She asks me, in fading tones suited to melodrama and sick children, to lie down and cuddle her, so I do, shaping myself around her, half-on and half-off the blanket. She is comforted and falls asleep. I am anxious, awake, and deeply uncomfortable. I want to be asleep in my bed, if not a thousand miles away. I do not want to be lying on a wrinkled blanket on a hardwood floor next to a beloved child who stinks of vomit.
And I’m remembering Marmee.
That Marmee: the mother of Jo March and her sisters in Little Women. Impossibly wise, patient, sage and loving. Beautiful, serene Marmee. I cannot tell you how much I hate her. Because while I’m taking care of Juliana and longing for my bed, there’s a little corner of my brain that is telling me that a real mother wouldn’t feel that way. Not a mother like Marmee. Marmee would clean up the vomit and feel it a privilege. Marmee would be elevated by the experience. Marmee would make her daughter believe that nothing in her whole life has been more fulfilling than swabbing down her baby and the floor at three in the morning.
And in a sense that’s all true. I love my kids, and taking care of them is my job. But there are moments, as with any job, where the work stinks–in this case, literally. And in those moments I wonder if I”m doing this right. That’s when I go back to Marmee, the Barbie of motherhood, the impossible yardstick against which I measure my parenting.
Okay, look, I know that the fictional Marmee was Louisa Alcott’s wish-fulfillment version of her own deeply imperfect mother, as Little Women was a retelling of her childhood with all the weird bits prettied up or left out. I know Marmee was never meant to be a user’s manual for parenting. But it’s the nature of people–certainly people of my generation–to look for role models. Perhaps I do it because my own mother died before my girls were born. Maybe it’s because, with the end of the Victorian mother-worship cult, we’re left mostly with Mommies Dearest and Mommies Amok. Or maybe I was simply bit by Marmee at a young age. In any case she continues to stick with me.
She must stick with other women, too. When I finally got up the courage to dis Marmee publicly, I was not met with the cries of horror I expected, but with a rush of fellow-feeling. It’s not just me, and that’s comforting. But it also starts me thinking: I have two daughters. Do I want to perpetuate the Marmee-thing with them?
A few weeks after the night on the hallway floor, Juliana asks if we can start reading Little Women at bedtime. I wonder if I should confront the Marmee issue with her the way I did the prince issue in Cinderella (“I don’t know. Would you want to marry a guy you only met once at a party?”). In the end I decide to stay out of it and let her draw her own conclusions. About three or four chapters in, cuddled into the crook of my arm as we sit on the couch, Juliana looks up at me and says “Marmee’s kind of–I mean she’s always lecturing and telling Jo to be better than she is. If I were Jo, I’d feel like she didn’t like me the way I was.”
A little unsteadily, I ask if she feels like I like her the way she is.
“Of course you do, Mama,” she says, in the tones of one stating incontrovertible truth.
Take that, Marmee. I turn the page and begin to read again.
Now you’ve got me thinking that perhaps Alcott wrote of Marmee constantly correcting Jo as a way of getting back at her while still making her mostly syrupy sweet. (It’s been way too many years since I read Little Women and I don’t think I would want to read it again.
Some of the scolding was baked into Alcott’s childhood with the Transcendentalist notions of striving for perfection.
I have a weird fascination with Louisa Alcott. Her mother, Abigail May Alcott, married below her (Bronson Alcott was a farmer’s son with pretensions to intellectual superiority and don’t get me started about what a shit he was). Abba had a strong sense of family, but I think now would be diagnosed as depressed. She wound up being the bread winner (she took genteel jobs distributing the largess of wealthier society women to the poor in the community) because Bronson felt that his job was to sit around thinking Deep Thoughts. Abba leaned heavily on Louisa and her sisters to improve themselves when they could (one of the most pernicious things was that Bronson told both his wife and his daughter–both of whom were brunettes–that blondes like himself and the other daughters were closer to God, and therefore they were constantly in need of correction to rise to the level of virtue of the blondes). So I think, in fact, that Alcott was drawing from life and prettying it up. At least she makes Mr. March a minister with an actual job…
The more I have learned of Bronson Alcott, the worse he comes across. I wonder if his fixation on blond hair is related to Emerson’s on being Anglo-Saxon. (Nell Irvin Painter takes Emerson apart in The History of White People.)
I don’t doubt it was related. Alcott was particularly fond of the Scots (the British, who she cast as arrogant and condescending, she didn’t care for as much). I will note that while the Transcendentalists were generally very pro-abolition, they had a tendency to view people of color as long-suffering and pathetic. This comes across in Alcott’s novels.