Just Wait Until Your Mother Gets Home

In my memoir 2+1=Big I briefly touch upon the difference between my father’s role as disciplinarian and how my own children perceive me:
“My mother was a guru of parental stock phrases. Push her too far and you got either the aforementioned ‘end of my rope,’ or if you had pushed just a little farther, ‘I’ll put you over my knee.’ I can’t recall ever actually being put over her knee, so the mere threat of a spanking must have carried significant weight. Mom was also known to warn me that she would have to ‘tell your father when he gets home.’ The difference between 2011 and 1978 is that a) Jen would never even think to say this to our kids, and b) if she did my children would probably laugh at her.”

What I’ve come to realize since writing this passage is that not only does Jen abstain from ever warning our kids that she will “tell your father when he gets home,” but that I am constantly saying, in so many words, “just wait until your mother gets home.” I may do a lot of ineffective yelling (I’m working on that), but Jen is the heavy. I can (in my very worst moments) make the girls cry, whereas Jen can make them do what she says. And since making my daughters cry makes me feel like a parenting failure, we get various versions of “just wait until your mother gets home.”

There are two main strands in the explanation of how Jen came to be the heavy at chez Gaither. The first, alluded to in the passage quoted above, is the reinvention of marriage, and the roles played by husband and wife, in the last thirty-five years. When I was a child our dining room table had four chairs, only one of which had arms. The seat with arms was placed at the head of the table, and it was always occupied by my father at dinner. At my dining room table now, all of the chairs are exactly alike, and I am as likely to sit on the side, with my wife or one of my daughters at the putative head, as vice versa. I may happen to drive the family van more often when we are all squeezed in together, but Jen gets to sleep on the king –sized bed (with the baby) while I am relegated to the mattress on the floor. There is a dearth of signals that Daddy is the Head of Household.

In the absence of these signals, the second strand, the matriarchal nature of Jewish life, asserts itself. One of the children’s books in our house, Once Upon A Shabbos by Jacqueline Jules, is the story of a bear from a storybook losing its way and finding itself in Brooklyn. The bear terrorizes the grandchildren who go to the corner store to fetch some honey for their Bubbe. Bubbe then sends her husband, the children’s Zayde, to the store, only to see him return minus the honey that was taken from him by the bear. So Bubbe goes to the store herself, and when the bear attempts to terrorize her and take her honey too, “she put her hands on her hips, looked that bear straight in the eye, and said ‘Bears don’t live in Brooklyn.’” Needless to say, soon it is the bear who is the one crying about being lost and being comforted by the tough but caring Bubbe.

If I had been that Zayde, and the bear had cornered me for my honey, I would have said “just wait until Bubbe gets home.”