I happened upon a mother cursing out her tween daughter on the street, on the way to pick up the Girl from school. Not an uncommon occurrence in my neck of the woods, unfortunately. Thirty blocks south it’s the other way around. You teach the way you’ve been taught, for the most part. The details of the tirade escape me, but the tone was severe and the language vile. It was a scene from the play “I Don’t Take No Mess.” The characters are interchangeable; it could be two lovers or a parent and child, two crackheads, a customer in a store, performances can be seen on any street corner or subway or bodega any given time and any given day.
The most common production often involves the somewhat inattentive bordering on neglectful parent who wants to make sure the world knows she is a tough mother and that her child readily capitulates to her demands, demands more often than not the child could not even under the best of cases, reasonably accomplish. My favorite is the eighteen-month old with foot-long legs toddling behind his or her mother but is expected to keep up with her. The mother turns her head and yells, “hurry up.”
I recently met a filmmaker from New Zealand who recalled a tale of a mother verbally abusing her child on the subway, she wanted to follow the mother to the daycare and report the mother’s behavior to school. My friend and I both laughed at the thought of this woman with her New Zealand accent snitching on this mother to the authorities. “Pardon me, but I would like to file a complaint against this mother for yelling at her daughter. She was quite rude.” Her complaint would have probably been met with the same dumbfounded glare our bartender at the dive bar we patronized gave her when she asked for a drink menu or a “book,” as she put it.
I shutter to think if the mothers have no qualms about treating their children like this in public how are they treating them at home. I so don’t want to go there, but I do. But would I rescue them? Sure, in a perfect world maybe- in truth maybe not. But would these kids come willingly? We’ve seen news footage of wailing children being removed from the most horrific living conditions, screaming for their mothers and fathers. The young girls being ripped from their mothers’ arms in the Texas raid on the FLDS compound comes to mind. Children want to be with their parents even in the worse of circumstances and in the best they just want their parents to be better at their jobs.
If parenting is a job, then who are our bosses? There are days, many more than not, it’s my three-and-a-half –year-old. My husband and I are mere serfs in her fiefdom. But the reality is we are self-employed. We choose to have children and keep them, unless of course you adopt a “defective” Russian child. Then you’re within your right to return him or her with or without a receipt. I wonder if those parents got a refund or at very least store credit. (Not judging just asking- mine were final sale)
How would our annual reviews go? “Mom, you’re doing an awesome job in the love and affection department, but we have to work on playdates. We need more of them this year. And let’s work on the housekeeping- you’re slacking on the sock matching. I’m not too happy with the way the dishes pile up in the sink either. Also Jordan’s mom lets her go to Chuck E. Cheese’s so we need to keep up with the competition.” That’s what I think my kid would say. But who knows how my kids will eventually turn out.
My girls and the tween being verbally flogged by her mother may turn out to be equally successful in life. It’s easy to assume the tween will spend most of her life trying to fill the void her mother created through countless lovers and children. And who’s to say my girls won’t spend their lives filling their own voids that I created for them. Try as I might I know there is a therapist couch with my daughters’ names on it.
But no matter what happens in acts one through five, the final scene of the play “I Don’t Take No Mess,” the protagonist as she lies across her mother’s casket always recites the same line, “ I loved my mama, she was a good mother and she didn’t take no mess.”
