Let's put the gloves down — parenting is tough enough as it is.
There's a scene in Coraline, the new film adaptation of Neil Gaiman's creepy children's novel, that strikes a chord with any working parent: Coraline tries to gain the attention of her mother and father, who are bent over their computers, heads down, trying to meet a deadline.
They don't even look up. "Let me work," pleads the father. The mother is even worse: she's too busy to run the home, meals are last-minute solutions from the back of the fridge, and the daughter is supposed to amuse herself. "I don't mind what you do," says the distracted mother in the original book, "as long as you don't make a mess."
At least these parents didn't hide from the kids. When I worked full-time from home, I would sometimes go out the front door, wave goodbye to my little daughter and her father, and then sneak into the study through the back door, typing all day in secret.
In Gaiman's story, Coraline discovers a portal in her family's apartment that opens into an alternate universe, where she meets her "Other Mother". This one looks like the original, but she certainly doesn't behave like her. She serves up generous meals of roast chicken, followed by frosted cupcakes. She decorates, she cleans, she thinks only of Coraline. And so does the Other Father, who plants a garden in the shape of his daughter's face. “Everything's right in this world, kiddo,” he says.
But here's the twist: Coraline truly is the centre of this family universe, and that's the problem. Her Other Mother is all-loving, all-consuming — indeed, she seems to confuse the two urges. With her black button eyes and her restless, grasping hands — nightmare exaggerations of "the mother's touch" — she is the helicopter parent from hell. Coraline's quest is to escape the clutches of this attachment parenting paradigm and make it back to her own neglectful, forgetful but — she realises — loving parents.
Gaiman writes what he knows. "I suspect the parents in Coraline, and all the books, are much more me, parodying me — my nose in a book, my head somewhere else. It's more me taking all the worst bits of me than it is my parents," he told the London Telegraph. He comes from a long line of children's authors who've shut the door on the pram in the hallway — consider Edith Nesbit, who dedicated her books to her three children, and filled them with absentee dads and frantically busy mums while children made their own fun. And dinner.
But back then, no one was expected to pay court on their offspring. Now that parenting is not only a verb but comes with its own set of key performance indicators, we're all too well aware of how and when we fall short.
Will Gaiman's elegant propaganda for working families turn children off the fantasy of the ever-available and availing Other Mother? I hope so.
I've often worried that the kids will find me out. My son was certainly cross when he discovered, in his first week of prep, that other mothers didn't work. That they picked the children up every day after school, and often bought them an ice-cream on the way home. Before then, he thought all mothers used childcare.
Ever since my eldest was born, the Other Mother has been haunting me. She is the mother I should have been, the one who always pays attention to the children. The one who isn't on the phone. The one who never has any deadlines. Usually, the Other Mother just writes opinion columns, perhaps on these pages, explaining why she gave up work to be with her children because no natural mother could do otherwise.
She's the one who says "if you're not going to look after them, you shouldn't have children", when we leave them at creche or book them into after-care or take a full-time job. She's the one who says that if parenting isn't the hardest job you've ever done, you're not doing a good enough job.
This is why, in the novel, the Other Mother shows Coraline a mirror in which she can see her real parents, and hear them say: "How nice it is, not to have Coraline around any more. . . Now we can do all the things we wanted to do." The Other Mother says that if her parents have left, "it must be because they became bored with you". Ah, but Coraline defends them, in a line to make any voice catch when reading aloud: "They weren't bored of me."
Of course, many at-home parents seem spooked by their Other Mothers too. The ones who ask them if they're bored with the kids, or quiz them about plans to return to "real" jobs. The parent wars so often devolve into this kind of shadowboxing; the parent you are, the one you might have been.
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