Take a strip of paper, twist one end of it a half-turn (180 degrees), then tape the ends of the strip together. Voila! You have a Mobius Strip. You will find it is a topological form with some amazing characteristics. For one thing, you will find that simple twist has transformed your paper from a two-sided strip into a continuous band with only one side!
That is what I hope the essays and reflections in this blog will be. I don’t want to make or take sides. I want to assume a continuum with only one side. But each stop along my Mobius Strip will present life from a slightly different angle, at a slightly different tilt. One side, but many different views, many different adventures.
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My Children are Clones! It’s a headline you’d expect to see only in a newspaper like The National Enquirer. But actually, most people speak as if cloning were taking place in their families on a routine basis. Listen to the average married couple.
I first became aware of what I was hearing years ago while a friend and I were watching a couple exchanging anecdotes about their children on The Tonight Show. This couple was famous not only for being a singing duo, but for their long-standing, presumably close and successful marriage. As they bantered that night though, they didn’t seem close. They seemed to be occupying opposite ends of a tennis court in a singles match. The wife started the story with, “My son…” The husband kept the tale in play by elaborating, “And then my son…”
The two went through the entire anecdote that way – volleying the child back and forth. “My son” – slam. “My son” – slam. My friend pointed out the oddity. The anecdote was finished, and not once had either partner used the pronoun “our.”
Yes! Something struck me as being not quite as idyllic about this couple’s marriage as the world would like to believe. And my friend zeroed in on the source of the taint. He pointed out how it was the persistent use of that singular possessive “my” – applied to a child who by rights should have been the height of the couple’s mutuality.
But then, once I’d been alerted to this usage – I found it everywhere. I found that Tonight Show couple wasn’t the exception. They were the rule. I hear most people employing that same exclusive “my” when talking about their children, as if every woman’s child had arrived by Immaculate Conception, a case of parthenogenesis – and every man’s child had been cloned from one of his cells.
The usage would be understandable, if somewhat ungenerous, in cases of blended marriages, or when one partner is dead or out of the picture. People have taken me to task for objecting to someone referring to “my” child when, for example, they are on air being interviewed by Larry King. A celebrity wouldn’t want to mention “our” child then, because this might imply the celebrity had had the child with Larry King.
That sounds like a good excuse. But in reality, it doesn’t wash. People who have biologically engendered a child together use “my” as often as couples with blended families. And like that Tonight Show couple, husbands and wives who are right there together, sometimes even holding hands, are still all respectively “My,” “My,” My.” When Oprah interviewed Jerry Seinfeld, she asked his wife, sitting front row center in the audience, what it was that she really liked about Jerry. Jessica Seinfeld thought for a moment, then said, “He makes my children laugh.”
Furthermore, the same celebrity who says “my child” will go on in the next breath to tell an amusing story about the sufferings endured in the course of remodeling “our house.” The house is no more shared with Larry King or Oprah than the child. But people seem more willing to acknowledge their spouses’ mutual investment in a house, while the children remain exclusive, each to each.
The switch in pronouns was dramatically illustrated recently in a statement issued by the mother of an abducted child. She stood before the cameras, issuing a plea to police to make a more concerted effort to find the perpetrator. “Someone took my child out of our house,” she anguished, with her husband standing in the background.
This may seem unconscionable of me – criticizing someone’s grammar when they are in the throes of one of the worst imaginable tragedies. But I’m not criticizing grammar. I’m regretting a more diffuse tragedy, one that seems to be afflicting most families. Each partner in the typical marriage is viewing the children of that marriage as the end – with the spouse as just the means. The man is acting like a sultan of old, before it was acknowledged, or even known, that women made any genetic contribution to children. The sovereign would look out over the numerous progeny his harem had produced, and he would see there HIS children, HIS heirs and successors.
For her part, the woman would allow the male his conceit. Meanwhile, she quietly maintained her sense of being the de facto power, the power behind the throne. The male was as incidental to her marriage ceremony, to her having achieved the status of wife, and to her subsequent nest-building - as the female was incidental to the man’s goal of perpetuating himself in a bloodline. The woman always knew the children were really HERS. And so it continues down to this day.
The perpetuation of this mindset seems more dangerous, more sinister to me than the actual techniques of cloning everyone is worrying over. That couple on the Tonight Show who started this whole rant are still around, still married, probably still as happy or as privately unhappy as they were those years ago. But in general, I think the use of “my” in connection with children spells trouble for a marriage. It dooms it to early dissolve, dullness, or dysfunction. This is the root that the Dr. Phils of the world so often fail to dig down to. Until people can truly, convivially think in terms of more inclusive pronouns – in marriage, and in the world at large – it will be OUR loss.
