Wednesday, July 23, 2003

Attack of the Uber-Mommies I belong to a very nice health club. It’s also a very expensive health club, and, like my cleaning lady and monthly car detailing service, it’s one of those unnecessary expenses that I really should have curtailed after I got fired for the second time last year. Instead, I decided to settle in for a long picnic on the lush banks of denial, and am waiting for the credit card on which I charge my monthly membership to max out before I finally have to quit - or, more likely, get thrown out on my ass. What I like about my health club - other than the fact that there’s a bar on site; very handy for that post-workout drinking binge - is that it’s a poignant little reminder of the frivolous yuppie life I used to lead. In addition to the bar, there’s also a swanky restaurant, a café, a ridiculously overpriced hair salon (yeah, I go there too - shut up), a spa, a movie theater, and an underground garage that offers members three hours of free parking (which is how I justify keeping my membership, reasoning in a stunning display of mathematical sleight of mind that $25 of free parking per day times one month actually makes me money on my membership). It’s also the health club of choice for 5,999 upscale urban professionals who are still going about their lives pretty much the way I used to go about mine. When I had a real job, I used to have to get up at 5:30 every morning so I could be at the gym by six. Once there, I made a lot of new Gym Friends - hyper driven, Type A Alpha Bitches just like me, whose lives were filled with great jobs, great friends, great condos, and a great love of the 6 p.m. dirty martini. I should have known it was never going to last. Once I started working from home, I didn’t have to get to the gym that early anymore, but, feeling left out of the harried urban professional fun, I tried anyway. I soon discovered that rushing home at 8:30 a.m. to stare at a blank computer screen all day was actually counter productive, and I wasn‘t getting anything done, other than striking up internet friendships with total strangers who share my unhealthy obsession with a certain very twisted HBO prison drama and completely clogging up my hard drive with thousands of illegally downloaded MP3‘s. So now I usually get to the gym between 8:30 and 9 a.m., which gets me home by 11 - just in time for my daily one-hour creative peak. It has also opened up my world to an entirely new sort of Gym Friend: the Uber-Mommy. The scariest thing about the Uber-Mommies is that they used to be me. Or, well, they used to be what I used to be. They’re my Alpha Bitch Gym Friends fast-forwarded into family life, and the result is enough to scare anyone off of full time parenting for years to come. You see, the Uber-Mommies used to have our jobs, or jobs just like them, but they gave them up to stay home with the kids because somebody, somewhere, somehow, convinced them that if they didn’t they would be solely responsible for spawning a wave of drug addicts and school shooters the likes of which the world has never seen. So they have dedicated their lives to grooming the ideal productive citizen of the future. They’re also conflicted enough about their decision to feel the need to remind everyone else how important what they’re doing is every chance they get, usually also throwing in the comment that they “never knew what hard work is” until they became fulltime parents. The truly conflicted ones are the most insidious. They’ll try to recruit you into their world of pain, and no matter how many times you insist that you hate children - all children, including theirs - they’ll just keep chanting, again and again, as if repeating it endlessly will somehow make it true, “It’s different when they’re yours…it’s different when they’re yours…” I imagine it would be. Knowing I can’t give it back when it starts to cry would probably make me hate it all the more. Anyway. The Uber-Mommies come barreling into the health club garage at approximately the same time I do, car seats, juice boxes, and Disney videos rattling away in meticulously organized compartments in the back of their Range Rovers. In a breathtaking whirl of ambidextrous competence, they pop the rear door, snap open their double-wide strollers with the flick of one wrist while already reaching for their wide-eyed toddlers with the other, and power-stride toward the elevators, en route to the health club daycare center. Five minute later, they migrate to the locker room in a single clump of maternal camaraderie - en masse, because their older kids all go to the same private elementary school and they‘re all marching to the same schedule - amid intense discussions about school functions, benefits, garden clubs, the best decorators, and the difficulty of finding a good cleaning service on Nantucket. Once in the locker room, they pause, taking a moment to bark the day’s orders to the nannies through the hands free headsets on their cell phones, and then suit up for yoga (the stress-reducing kind; because they do, after all, have the “hardest job in the world“). They regard me with squinty-eyed suspicion, not quite sure who I am or what I am doing in their midst, and because I don’t fit neatly into their frame of reference (their Before lives or their After lives) they let me hang around and eavesdrop on their conversations. I like to play a kind of mental Mad-Lib game with myself, substituting business words for mommy words - because then it becomes just like listening to the lunchroom gossip in any company cafeteria, except with words like “play date” instead of “business meeting.” I swear I once heard one of them refer to her child’s finger paintings as “deliverables.“ Because the Uber-Mommies are so conflicted about their choice, they have attacked the career of motherhood with the same grim determination to succeed with which they tackled college, law school, and business school. But they can’t get used to the idea that they’re not managing huge staffs of 50 or more terrified underlings who are too afraid to cross them. So they’ve focused every drop of managerial energy on the one or two underlings they do have - their children, who, ironically, have all the job security they could ever need. It’s not like Mommy is ever going to fire them - and, deep down, Mommy knows it. And it’s made her bitter. It’s made her defensive. It’s made her arrogant, self-important, and self-righteous, and it‘s made her - frankly - into a shrill caricature of the competent professional she used to be. The saddest thing about the Uber-Mommies is that, under different conditions, they’d probably be my friends. And, in ten or twelve years, they probably will be. By that time, they will have long since moved to the suburbs, the kids will be wrapped up in homework, friends, and after-school sports; their husbands will still be preoccupied with trying to support the family on a single salary; and the Uber-Mommies will still be sitting around the locker room, telling me I don’t know how good I have it. Trust me, ladies. I know. 1:44:07 PM    comment []

Mars and Venus Go to Hell Big news, everybody! Satan has gone and gotten himself a diploma-mill PhD and is now walking about in earthly form as Dr. John Gray. For those of you who haven’t stuck your heads out of your caves in the past decade or so, Dr. John Gray is the evil mastermind behind the inexplicably popular “Mars and Venus” franchise. You know, how “men are from Mars, women are from Venus,” and how all of our problems with the opposite sex are simply a matter of opposing natures and conflicting communication styles. According to Dr. Gray, men are Fierce Martian Warriors. They’re direct, problem-solving, action-oriented commitmentphobes who long to roam free, hunting, pillaging, and spreading their seed across the land in a testosterone-fueled frenzy. Women, on the other hand, are Gentle Venutian Goddesses. We’re sensitive, loving nurturers who talk endlessly about our problems without ever trying to solve them, searching wistfully for our perfect soul mate whom we can cleave to and thus fulfill our true desire to stay indoors, tending home and hearth. It’s all very pretty and poetic, and, as pop-psychology metaphors go, it hangs together quite nicely. And the fact that it’s total bullshit hasn’t kept Dr. Gray from turning this sizzling pile of crap into a multimillion-dollar industry. In addition to the books - I think there were 11 or 12 at last count - there are also cassettes, videotapes, a website, a syndicated advice column, a radio show, a board game, a musical (!), plus a whole series of workshops, seminars, certification programs, and personal coaching sessions that are all conducted aboard Lucifer’s Death Star - i.e., the Mars-Venus Institute at 1-888-MARSVENUS. There was even a t.v. show for a while (hosted by that treacherous gender sell-out Cybill Shepherd, who I used to like until she went down to her basement, unearthed that dusty old Ouija Board, and transformed herself into Captain Howdy’s Handmaiden of Death). True confession time. Back when I was in my early thirties and still thinking that I needed to do something about my so-called vacuous single ways, I actually purchased - in hardcover, no less - a copy of Mars and Venus on a Date. I’m almost too ashamed to admit this now, but I bought the book because of one particular chapter heading that caught my eye: “Why Some Women are Still Single.” The logical fallacy that underlies that entire premise was not readily apparent to me at the time. I mean, think about it. There are roughly the same number of men and women on the planet, aren’t there? So it stands to reason that if there are so many single women out there, there have got to be at least one or two single men, right? Where’s their chapter? They don’t have a chapter! They don’t have a chapter, you see, because the book wasn’t really written for them! And if you go to Dr. John Gray’s website (don’t go, please - save yourself - you’ve just got to trust me on this one), you’ll see that for all the psychobabbly blather about the mutuality of the communication breakdown, the lip service paid to “working it out together,” and the sanctimonious emphasis on openness and honesty - none of this shit was created for men. Despite the fact that it has been exhaustively documented that there are just as many - if not more - men who place personal ads and join dating services as women, every single book, website, t.v. show, magazine article, advice column, and how-to video is directed at women and women only. And we buy it all. We buy it all because we have been conditioned to believe that we need this garbage. We have been conditioned from childhood to believe that we are the ones who are responsible for sustaining our relationships. Men, according to the Tao of Gray, are what they are and they’re not gonna change, so it’s up to us to understand them, accommodate them, and adapt our own behavior accordingly in order to trick them into settling down with us. In Mars and Venus on a Date, Dr. Gray opines that the reason “some women” (i.e., me) are still single is because we don’t need men! No, in fact, we frighten them! We’re too independent! We don’t need to be rescued! The poor dears just don’t know how to cope when we’re not begging them to change our oil, take out our trash, and slay the woolly mammoth so we can skin it, cook it, and serve it up for dinner. Or, as Dr. Gray puts it, “What good is a knight in shining armor when you’re slaying your own dragons?” Once you’re done brushing the giant chunks of projectile vomit off your shoes, riddle me this: as insulting as this whole premise is to women, isn’t even more insulting to men? Are men really so foolish and malleable that all it takes is one or two quick strokes to the ego and - boom - he’s down on one knee in the pale moonlight, ring in hand, ready to pop the question? “Yes, they are!” chirps Dr. Gray. And, in a helpful effort to further his hypothesis, he’s included in the chapter a handy pull-out list of “ideas” for that desperate woman approaching spinsterhood to use to get a man to rescue her. I like to refer to them as “Dependency Tips for Uppity Bitches to Fool Men Into Thinking We Need Them.” Dependency Tip #1: Ask him to help you take your cat to the vet. Because EVERY single woman owns a cat (yeah, okay, so what if I do? Shut up!) it’s a really good idea to get some poor doofus you’ve been seeing for the last couple of weeks to wrestle the little sucker into the kitty carrier in preparation for that five minute stroll to Kenmore Square. I am sure that said doofus will think of me fondly as he lies sprawled in the gutter, gushing crimson torrents from hundreds of bloody lacerations inflicted by Fluffy’s panicked claws. Maybe he’ll even have time to pop the question before he bleeds to death, so I can at least say that I was engaged once. Dependency Tip #2: Ask him to go car shopping with you. Now that’s a brilliant idea! Especially when I’m opting to trade up my Benz for the newer model - the one with the convertible top, GPS, and twelve-disc CD changer - and he finds out how much more money I make. Way to build up that fragile male ego, there, Doc! Okay, so you get the idea. What this entire gang of self-appointed Relationship Pundits does for me - not just Dr. Gray, but Sylvia Hewlett, Robin Norwood, Dr. Phil, the Rules Girls, and the rest of that merry old band of quacks and hacks - is make me wonder: if I follow their advice, what do I really win in the end? Do I really want to spend the rest of my life knowing that I’ve lied my way into my wedding gown? And what happens after the honeymoon? Do I have to keep up this charade for another 50 years? Won’t I get tired? When does the deception end? And, in exchange for sublimating my personality and selling my very soul in the expectation of a little companionship into my golden years, what am I really getting out of the deal? If I follow Dr. Gray’s prescription, I’ll tell you exactly what I’ll get: a selfish, egocentric, spoiled-rotten man-child who is so gullible that he actually bought this act, and who is so insecure and needy that nothing I do will ever make him happy. Oh sure, I’ll follow all of the instructions helpfully posted on marsvenus.com. I’ll make him a nice home, I’ll quit my job, I’ll stay home and have the 2.5 children. I’ll keep my figure through yoga and Pilates, have my face done when I hit 50, and then spend another 20 years sitting home alone while he’s out getting his frail Martian ego stroked by someone ten years my junior who’s following the Seduction Guidelines for Aspiring Trophy Wives outlined in Dr. John Gray’s latest runaway best-seller Mars and Venus Have a Back Alley Affair. As the saying goes, be careful what you wish for folks, ‘cuz it’s way too easy to get it. 10:08:28 AM    comment []

© Copyright 2003 Leslie Talbot. Last update: 8/1/2003; 1:55:21 PM.