Anne Lamott on hating her teenage son.
Harry is clearly having a ball at the rallies in Madison.
Who gets paid better? I've been finding the debate about union vs. non-union wages jobs very interesting. I hope that this debate helps to bring greater openness to salary discussions. To jump start my own open salary policy, let me divulge how much money I make as a blogger, freelance writer, and a as a mom. El Crapo.
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I loved this article by Joshua Foer on how he trained his brain to be memorize lots of crap.
Apt. 11d 
“Anne Lamott on hating her teenage son.”
Oh please. She’s never had an 11 year old daughter?
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I don’t know Anne Lamott’s backstory, but:
1. It’s easier to deal with these situations if there are two parents, because you have someone to talk to (although she seems to have the priest).
2. It’s silly to “hate” or get mad at your teenage children for being teenagers. Sort of like hating your wife for acting like a woman. Be a grown-up, I say (or a man, when dealing with your wife).
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I always desperately wanted Anne Lamott to keep writing about baby Samuel, even as I knew that he was going to stop being a baby and start having opinions. The link is from 2006, 5 years ago, so Samuel must be a man by now. I hope that he has the chops, and that some day we’ll see a book by Anne & Samuel.
(The back story for Anne Lamott is that in addition to writing a variety of other books, she wrote of her first year with her son, in “Operating Instructions.” So some of us, who read the book while going through the experience ourselves remember Samuel fondly).
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I agree that having two grown-ups in charge of and deeply loving their child is a big help with navigating the stormy waters. It really does help when the kid is pushing all your buttons to have someone else around to intervene. And, by pure probabilities, it’s hard for a child to press all of both parents buttons at once.
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y81,
Indeed. I was probably a rather difficult tween/early teen, but I was a daddy’s girl, and that made all the difference. With a teenage boy, it’s traditional for the boy and dad to be in an undeclared state of war, with mom shuttling back and forth keeping the peace, but if you’re the only parent, it’s harder to pull off a good-cop/bad-cop act.
Also, is it really such a good idea for her relationship to her big teenage son to broadcast their disagreements to the world? (We’ve talked about this issue with other writers, too–how can you have functioning relationships with people when you don’t respect their privacy?)
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“is it really such a good idea for her relationship to her big teenage son to broadcast their disagreements to the world?”
I agree, especially in the modern, internet world. My teenage daughter is highly unlikely to buy the sort of women’s magazine, or read the sections of the New York Times, where parenting stories like the one by Anne Lamott would have historically appeared, but she might well google one of her classmates, or even one of her classmate’s parents, and find this sort of story, which I think would be embarrassing to the classmate in question.
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I find it a bit gross when people put stuff like that about their kids on the internet- it’s not very respectful and more than a bit exploitative. (Especially, I think, when they are getting paid for it.) I don’t find the confessional style much more attractive than what one sees on Jerry Springer or the like (we even got a fight in this one!) but at least on Jerry Springer everyone agrees to be on the show. (She also violates the general rule that you should never hit someone you are not willing to be hit back by. I wish that rule would be taught to more women. Hitting people isn’t a joke.)
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Anne Lamott is a great writer and I’m eternally grateful to her for publishing not only the joys but especially the difficulties of raising a child. Relationships with one’s children are sometimes very difficult.
And as to
“It’s easier to deal with these situations if there are two parents”
AH HA HA HA HA.
Not in my experience.
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Relationships with one’s children are sometimes very difficult.
Surely. But I can imagine mine would have been even more so if my parents had put all our fights up on the internet. And that doesn’t even get to the heart of what I find unpleasant about it.
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Yeah, what CY said about Lamott. But, Lamott should ask her 17 year old son before writing an article like that. I’m guessing she did.
There’s another much more contentious story that a mother wrote about her daughter (I can’t remember the individuals involved) where I did find the airing of private information problematic. But this story by Lamott, not so much (I’ll admit, though, that I’m presuming she asked her son if it was OK).
I think we discussed the other pair here before, though. And, part of the problem is that a child’s story can also be a mother’s story. The parent-child relationship and it’s powers and privileges probably means that the mother can’t tell her story if the child doesn’t want her to. But, I don’t think the same is true about the child.
(Rebecca Walker’s book about growing up with Alice Walker, for example).
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Hitting people isn’t a joke.
Back in my day, things were different.
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Anne Lamott’s said that she runs her pieces past Sam; I don’t know when she started doing that exactly. Her book Plan B was a lot about teenage Sam although it was supposed to be a continuation of her faith journey (started in Traveling Mercies).
It is a tough one. I’ve always found Lamott’s intructions/memoir -so- much stronger than her fiction that I’m glad she had that way of supporting herself and Sam. I pretty much believe the degree of acceptable revelation is mostly between the writer and her family, and not something that other people can judge from the outside.
I wouldn’t want to say writers (read: mothers, because I haven’t often seen male writers being judged for writing about their kids) should never write about their kids, because then who will explore all that and how else do we get good stories?
But I do think writers need to weigh that against the impact on their kids, family, etc. I had a short story about a husband who was exiting a marriage because he was gay get some (very) local attention at one point and my husband and I each had different people kind ask whether HE was gay. I had to laugh ’cause it was sort of a compliment…but it also made me realize that writers are kind of screwed regardless of their choices. Since that story had very little to do with my husband.
I rambled, sorry. I think I recommended The Courage to Write before so not to harp on it but Ralph Keyes talks about this quite a bit in there.
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