View from East Tennessee

Best Read of the Day — The Bleat and the Perfectionist Mother

February 18th, 2005 at 12:32 am (Family)

James Lileks is a columnist for the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune, but don’t hold that against him. His blog — The Bleat — is excellent, and I don’t read it often enough. Lileks is a stay-at-home dad, and he often writes about his daughter (I think she’s pre-school age), whom he refers to as Gnat.

Today, The Father of Gnat Fisked (a blog term that I’ve gathered from the blogosphere refers to the line-by-line or piece-by-piece destruc, uh, refutation of someone else’s story or statement; I assume it’s derived from someone named Fisk, but I don’t know the whole origin. Ask Instapundit.)

That parenthetical was so long, I’m going to have to start that sentence again:

The Father of Gnat Fisked this story from Newsweek about mothers’ complaints of insanity.

The Newsweek piece is, apparently — I didn’t read it — basically about how working women who have become mothers have stressed themselves out by transferring corporate ambition to the mothering role. One woman was apparently pushed over the edge by her inability to coordinate felt piece textures for a school function. To this, Lileks says:

Raising Gnat is the most important thing I do. But she’s a child, not a project.
I don’t get a bonus if she exceeds quarterly projections.

Gnat’s dad concludes that:

The article makes a point despite itself: the perfect is the enemy of the fun. Maybe I’m the wrong person to comment on this, since I am a guy in a rather unique position. But I’ve given up great acres of work time to be here with Gnat, and the amount of free time I used to have – time I spent recharging the daily batteries – has dwindled to zip. But it’s all a trade-off. So it’ll be a couple more years until I can wander downtown again; so it’ll be a while until she’s in school and my day is my own. So what. Nothing beats the time we spend together, the look on her face when she shows me a magic trick, the hug and kiss I get when I leave her at school. Today she beat me at UNO again and I explained how Barbie glitter cards are made and we looked at a website about the solar system and ooohed and ahhed at Saturn. And that matters more than anything because she is mine and I’m her Dad, and qualifying those definitions just seems petty.

I could teach The Father of Gnat a few things regarding UNO. It’s pretty easy to win against a pre-schooler because they tend to spread their cards face-up on the table thereby enabling the adult with larger hands and better coordination to cheat. James, that’s a freebie. You can return the favor by telling me how Barbie glitter cards are made.

Read the whole thing — it even suggests a remedy to the ever-present problem of Polly Pocket creep in households with young daughters.