I'm reading Katie Roiphe's In Praise of Messy Lives: Essays
Roiphe is grouchy because she feels she is being judged for having a messy life. She's the mother of two kids with two separate fathers, neither of whom she lives with. As a single mom, there's a lot of juggling and her family doesn't look like the happy blond families on the cover of the parenting magazines. She's a little bitter about this judging and spends a lot of time justifying her lifestyle.
My own family isn't parenting magazine worthy. The boys are blond and my sweet hubby is around, but we're still not cover-worthy. Things are pretty messy around here, even in our blond, intact-family way.
It used to bother me a lot that our family was so weird. I couldn't go to the mommy classes, because Ian would scream and hide under the table. I didn't fit into the working-mom club, because I had too many obligations at home. Everybody else was on a Disney cruise, and I was hidden away watching Mr. Rochester's crazy wife.
At a party last week, I had a long chat with a woman who was slowly going blind with macular degeneration. She was having trouble navigating the house, so I hung out with her in the kitchen where the light was better.
She has two boys, who are the same age as my boys. They are also blond and beautiful. No IEP meetings for her. But she was also wracked with the same guilt that she couldn't provide them with the perfect lives that others seemed to have. She could no longer drive them to after school activities. Even navigating family vacations was getting hard.
I talked her down from the guilt tree, and we commiserated in silence for a while.
I think that Roiphe is so defensive about her own life choices that she misses an important point. Everybody has messy lives, just in different ways. I'm not sure when it was jammed in our heads that a family had to look one particular way. It doesn't. I'm not sure that anybody is really living that life. Even the PTA president with her perfect hair has some shit going on at home.
I've been applying for jobs lately. I still plan on writing, but we could use a little more money. I also need to do something that doesn't involve sitting in front of a computer. I've been applying for jobs where the workers have neck tattooes and big boots. I'm not sure why. I think that I'll fit in better in a place where people celebrate messiness and don't pretend that it doesn't exist.
Apt. 11d 
I’ve been applying for jobs where the workers have neck tattooes and big boots.
It’s nice work, but librarians still work in front of computers all day.
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I judge Katie Roiphe because she is sanctimonious, not because of what her family looks like.
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“I judge Katie Roiphe because she is sanctimonious, not because of what her family looks like.”
That’s funny.
You too, MH.
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Mazel tov! Do we get any input on which tattoo you choose for your new job?
Messy life over here, too! Working on setting up the third member of the Rag-family for therapy. (This time its me!) Also, in the middle of a moderately messy career change, to something that may make me happier but be less lucrative. But, the good news is, if it all works out well, I may soon be a member of an evil union, and teaching to the standardized test!
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I was teaching my boys the meaning of ‘tramp stamp’ the other day, and they looked on the Intertubes for examples. Family life, it’s swell.
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“Things are pretty messy around here, even in our blond, intact-family way. ”
Well, your family is totally parenting magazine cover friendly, in just a pictorial way (you are all very photogenic and you look like a cover; I believe in enjoying that as long as you don’t let it become a burden). My family doesn’t look like a parenting magazine cover (well, unless someone is making a point).
But, I realized in high school that the blonde “girls with clear skinned smiles” had just as messy interiors as anyone else, and sometimes a lot messier (an epiphany when the blonde, popular, president of the student council sat next to me and told me that she’d decided never to love anybody because you couldn’t depend on anybody ever; yes, there was a backstory there). I had never been able (and never wanted) to be anything but the nail that stuck out, but realized the burden of the perceived perfect outer shell then.
Yes, everyone’s life is messy.
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I’m judgmental about Roiphe because I still think a lot of her messiness feels like selfishness. Maybe I could try to be a bit more generous (since fitting in, in different ways, lays different emotional and psychological burdens on each individual).
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Even though I know other people’s lives are just as messy as mine it’s still so very easy to fall into the trap of thinking that everyone but me has it all figured out. It would probably help if people talked about the messiness more but no one really wants to be the first to let down the facade of perfection. It’s also the case that there is a type of person that has let down the facade completely and their revelations seem more self-indulgent than, well, revelatory.
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I never knew that Katie Roiphe had a messy family and I judged her very harshly based on her sanctimony, assuming that it came from a sense of superiority for having some kind of perfect family. Now, oddly, I’m starting to judge her for her messy family! Which is not the right take-away at all.
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Although maybe not… based on the description of her life (and knowing nothing else), I suspect that “messy” here may translate into “decided to prioritize my own flourishing rather than my kids’.” There are lots of different ways you wind up with a messy life – having to handle abuse, disability, poverty, illness, etc. is one major way, but other people create messiness pretty much on their own.
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I love this post. EVERYBODY has a messy life but it is so tempting to just show (and see in others) the polished, put together surfaces. I love the idea of embracing the messiness, the uniqueness, the weirdness of all of our lives.
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It’s rainy, dreary and cold outside. Right about now, my skin is crawling from working from home. When my kids are a little older, I’m seeking some outside employment, too. What was once the luxury of working from home is beginning to feel like solitary confinement.
Best of luck on the job search.
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but realized the burden of the perceived perfect outer shell then.
Is that why all the young women at the library now have tattoos?
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“Everybody else was on a Disney cruise, and I was hidden away watching Mr. Rochester’s crazy wife”
Hahaha, me too. (and haha to MH and Wendy)
When I moved to New Stepford, I was shocked that suddenly no one wanted to be my friend, due to the autism and the less-than-perfect house and probably the what-the-hell-happened look on my face. That was my first encounter with a large group of people gunning like hell for Perfect UMC Lives and I had absolutely nothing to offer them.
I don’t know if everyone has messy lives – most, maybe. I think it’s less what things look like and more a matter of goals or values – I’ve found perfect as a goal isn’t really compatible with wisdom, compassion or personal growth.
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Thank you all for this. I don’t know where you live, Artemisia, but I think I’d be your friend just based on that post. Those guys don’t know what they’re missing.
Awhile ago I joined a 12 step program for people with eating disorders and I realized that it was the only place I had ever been where it was OK to stand up in a room and say things like “Life is hard and sometimes it really sucks. It can be lonely and frightening.” I think messy is a good word, because I think lots of times we’re sympathetic to people suffering a tragedy, but maybe not all that sympathetic to people who are just coping with stuff that’s kind of difficult, inconvenient. I read that book “Far from the Tree” recently, about all the different sorts of struggles people went through with their kids — alot of it pretty terrible, things like schizophrenia. What was really noticeable to me was all the families where the dad just up and left. He decided it was too much so he went somewhere else and usually started over, leaving the imperfect family behind in his quest for a perfect one. The women were the ones left picking up the pieces. It was sort of interesting that the author didn’t comment on this at all. My sense is that he expected this — he thought it was normal, maybe even OK.
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Yes. I come from an attractive blond family which placed a high premium on acting in public like we had it together, and everyone assumed our family was perfect in every way (we were once even photographed for an airline magazine and I think maybe a tourist brochure). It was both stressful reconciling the image with the reality (extreme messiness in certain ways which deviated quite drastically from the “norm”), and also dealing with the insinuations that I couldn’t/can’t understand suffering because my life was perfect and charmed (I was the popular blonde high-achieving girl in high school). Ironically, I tend towards depression and at my worst moments a feeling like I am a unique and terrible failure, which I know is no more true than that my life is better in all accounts than everyone else’s. I’m still not great at it, but I’m trying to work on not judging or make assumptions about people’s lives based on how they appear in public.
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Thanks, Louisa – right back at you. I view that experience as an important one because I had to get up and find people whose chief goal in life wasn’t to be perfect and the people I found are wonderful life-long friends. You need to be able to say to your friends, as you did in your 12 Step Program, “this is hard and scary and difficult and I’m not coping”. It’s a better life when you can help and lean on other people, rather than showing off to them or competing with them, you know?
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Yeah, I think that if I don’t know what somebody’s problems are, it doesn’t mean that they don’t have problems, it just means that I don’t know them very well.
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I have a friend whose last pregnancy involved huge mobility issues because she had a varicose vein on the vulva (I forget the name for this condition or the exact terminology–as I understand it, it was like genital hemorrhoids). It was super painful and she was only able to walk 30 minutes a day max to avoid aggravating it and she had to wear special compression undergarments. Naturally, she wasn’t going around announcing this to the world.
A lot of afflictions are embarrassing to talk about–the husband who spends hours looking at pornography, the kid having trouble at school, the hoarder parents, etc.
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To be fair to the matrons of New Stepford, shared experience is a common basis, if not an absolute prerequisite, for friendship, which is why friendships across major income or educational gulfs are not that frequent. So there is an obstacle to the formation of a friendship between someone who is hoping to send their kid to Harvard and someone with a special needs child.
It doesn’t mean friendship is impossible, just more difficult. One of my friends does have a special needs child, but we work in the same office, so we have a shared experience there. I don’t have any friends who have no commonality of experience.
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I don’t know about you all, but I have a lot more to talk about than my income or my kids’ educational level. Heck, once in a while, I can even be darn right interesting.
Sometimes the parents of special ed kids feel that they are ignored by the matrons of New Bedford and their ilk, because their kids have nothing to offer these matrons who constantly scheming to find high IQ friends for their kids.
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“So there is an obstacle to the formation of a friendship between someone who is hoping to send their kid to Harvard and someone with a special needs child.”
So one of my epiphanies was understanding how much the parent of the “special needs” child (i.e. someone who has different goals for their kid) and my own child (who, honestly, if you had to pick a 12 year old to be president, you should pick her, and, really, though no one should believe me, I say that not as her mother) is that we feel the same about our kids.
We want them to have opportunities to use their strengths, to have their moment in the sun, to be happy and loved. We feel that way when we’re behaving badly (I remember snatching the last piece of cantaloupe for my daughter at a buffet from under someone’s spoon, something I’d never have done before I had kids) and when we’re behaving well.
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Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.
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Cranberry,
Very apt.
For the non-literary:
“So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.”
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I read “Far From The Tree,” too, and had the exact same reaction as yours – why doesn’t the author explore the issue of where are the dads?!
“Life is hard and sometimes it really sucks. It can be lonely and frightening.” = very well put. There’s a great book on this very idea called “Broken Open” by Elizabeth Lesser. Highly recommended.
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“scheming to find high IQ friends for their kids”
Haha, this exactly. Before we set up a play date, one mother wanted to know what math group my (typical) kiddo was in. If he hadn’t been in the highest, I wonder if she would have made an excuse?
Mysteriously, my circle of friends hasn’t been selected for children’s median academic achievements or household income, so it includes the childless as well as the crazy woman who hangs out with a sped mom even though her kids are at Stanford and Georgetown. We have other things in common, I guess.
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“scheming to find high IQ friends for their kids”
I’m living in the wrong place, then, because no one’s beating down my door for playdates with my kids. I wonder if other parents think I am screening them when in actuality, I have no time to be social anywhere but the Internet. On the Internet, no one knows you’re wearing ratty sweat pants and the same t-shirt you wore for the past 5 days.
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I used to wear the same dress shirt for five days in a row (with a new tshirt each day), but I can’t do that now as I now have to supervise people. I managed to get more responsibility without getting more money, and I have more laundry.
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I’m not unsympathetic to the scheming IQ mommies: my lads, these days, I think I am more like a tree in the forest than a source of guidance or insight. A tree which can be shaken sometimes for money to go to the mall.
They are forming their aspirations and views by those of their friends, nothing to do with earnest entreaties from me and from their mom. Both of them, #2 more than #1, have formed some new friendships in the last year, year-and-a-half, and with exactly the kids I would have chosen if I had had any way to influence things, and sure enough they are thinking More Demanding Classes and Do Well On Standardized Tests.
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I certainly don’t go out of my way to finagle a playdate with my 2nd grader’s classmate who while sweet, is super energetic, popular and impulsive (and coincidentally, his mom, while a lovely person, did a dump and leave at my kid’s last birthday party). Is that the kid’s fault? No. Do I want my 2nd grader to be best friends forever with the charismatic, impulsive kid? No again.
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Speaking of the power of peers, I had a high school classmate who somehow managed to be closely involved with two different fatal accidents within just a few years of each other (and they were complicated recreational accidents, not your typical drunk driving tragedy). You have to wonder about that guy.
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There’s also a punk version by The Coolies (from their first album, “Dig;” their second, pleasingly enough, is “Doug.”), which the copyright cops have not yet taken down from YouTube.
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