Book Review: The Mother Side of Midnight

Book Review: The Mother Side of Midnight

Author: Teryl Zarnow

Date: 1992

Publisher: Addison-Wesley

ISBN: 0-201-57053-X

Length: 234 pages, plus a preface

Quote: “My family is ordinary, my children are generic, and out of 31 possible flavors my life is vanilla.”

That’s what readers will love about this book and Zarnow’s previous book, Husband Is the Past Tense of Daddy. It’s also what they’ll hate about those books. Everybody knows a young mother who is a lot like Teryl Zarnow. Nice, kindhearted, well-meaning...but she never has anything to tell you that you didn’t already know, and also, since Zarnow lives in Orange County, California, you’ve seen all the products and the product-related episodes in a TV sitcom somewhere. It’s not that Zarnow gives readers any reason to doubt that her family did the things she described in these books; it’s that the TV writers consulted Zarnow’s magazine columns for nice, upscale, mildly funny family scenes.

It’s not that the fight Zarnow’s tots get into in the bathtub, in which Zarnow is “the one who gets doused with water,” was in any way a copy of the fight Jean Kerr’s tots got into in the bathtub, way back in Please Don’t Eat the Daisies. I’m pretty sure that the misadventures of the Zarnow family goldfish are in fact different from the misadventures of Cynthia Lindsay’s goldfish in Home Is Where You Hang Yourself or Erma Bombeck’s family’s goldfish in If Life Is a Bowl of Cherries What Am I Doing in the Pits. I’m also pretty sure that, although Zarnow’s water fights and goldfish are much more contemporary than the water fights and goldfish that made the previous generation chuckle, and even if you read each of those three older books when it was new, you will be more likely to chuckle over re-reading those older books than you will over reading this book for the first time.

Or: if you read comedy for the therapeutic benefits of laughing out loud, a possibility exists that you may not get your full daily dose of chortles out of this book.

Zarnow can even be irritating. “A girl’s fascination with ballet begins with the costume...[B]efore ballet lessons come tutus. I have never met a girl over the age of two who does not have her own.” Harrumph. I read the “Little Ballerina” picture books and did the stretches and twirls in ordinary play clothes. I was even the sort of skinny, flat-tummied little girl who wouldn’t have looked pudgy in a tutu. My family did not, however, belong to an extravagant social clique in Orange County, and therefore I never had a tutu. In fact, until well after I’d developed (at age eleven) the body shape that runs on both sides of my family and disqualifies each and all of us for adult ballet careers, I never met a girl who did have a tutu. Even when somebody organized ballet lessons, little girls did their workouts in shorts and T-shirts. Even for recitals, or concerts or games or whatever kids were into, no coach or teacher would have dared to demand that parents invest in special costumes before grade eight at the earliest. The social experiences of children are usually limited to one economic tier of one neighborhood, but it is disheartening when an adult, a mother of three, confesses the same narrowness...in a book, yet.

For readers older than herself, Zarnow’s observations can also be an encouraging validation of our existing beliefs. Apparently Zarnow wasn’t required to study even summaries of Piaget’s theories on why elementary school children, up to age ten or twelve, almost never actually have friends, at least not in the sense teenagers and adults use the word. In 1992 there was a market for speculation about the possibility that forcing children to spend more time among other children the same age, rather than with their parents or other older relatives, might actually stimulate earlier development of “social skills.” Zarnow apparently hoped to see something like that happening...and reports that it didn’t. “They will cut each other cold with absolutely no sense of loyalty and talk about their birthday par­ties in front of children they have not invited.” “I see children callously jilt each oher when a ‘better’ friend comes along: ‘You can go home now; I’m playing with Mary today.’” “Two children panting to see one anotther sometimes can get along in each other’s company for a total of twenty minutes.”

Whether she’s affirming that she really does have something in common with the reader or betraying her lack of common experience with the reader, Zarnow may be most helpful to readers who want to compare observations on the parenting process. A broader base for comparisons would of course be more helpful. Zarnow worries about her children’s conformity to the gender stereotypes that had been challenged and theoretically discarded by the previous generation: “Who’s modeling for this role, anyway?” When invited to pick out what she liked from a toy catalogue, “everything that my daughter circled was pink or purple”; Zarnow’s daughter didn’t “like to build” with regular red, white, and blue blocks but would consider building a dollhouse with “pink and purple pieces.” Zarnow blames herself , because a daughter who “sees me apply lipstick to go grocery shopping” seems to have absorbed more girly-girliness than Zarnow thinks she’s ever modelled.

I could have offered her some reassurance, although her daughter is probably offering it by now. In a time when these issues were taken even more seriously by people who’d forgotten ever having been children, I remember playing “carpenter” and measuring chair legs, taking apart disabled electric gadgets, even wanting to drive a bus as long as those were things the glamorous grown-up male cousins were doing, then rejecting anything that could possibly interest boys or men when the possibility arose that my little brother might want to play too, then, a few years later, sharing all sorts of games and pastimes with that same brother after he’d developed enough coordination not to mess up the game. For a while, in concern and frustration, the adults in my life banned obviously gender-tagged things from the nursery; in the absence of pink and blue things I announced that green was for girls and orange was for boys and my icky little brother had better keep his grubby little hands off my green bowl, and so on. Then, as school-aged children, we became best buddies and “liberated” ourselves from gender roles. Then, as teenagers, we discovered that a mild interest in opposite-sex things tends to fascinate the opposite sex... Zarnow considers other ethical and political issues as they express themselves in her children’s play. “If G.I. Joe shoots Cobra...somebody else must rush him to the hospital.” (Zarnow does not explain how she micromanages the niceties of telling a nice American child he has to step into the role of an Al-Qaeda supporter.) “If [homeless people are] cold, why don’t they move to California?” “When my children do notice [ethnic] differences, I try to talk about them.” But it’s not easy, she laments, making children’s play politically correct. She must have forgotten Beverly Cleary’s explanation, long ago, in Mitch and Amy, of how in order to make up an imaginative game “the first rule was to get rid of the parents.” Maybe her children hadn’t reached that stage yet. Mitch and Amy were nine.

The biggest surprise in this book may be the disclosure, on page 189, that Zarnow is Jewish. At least this surprised me. Maybe those who really cared would have seen the name “Zarnow” and asked “Is that Jewish?” before they even opened the book. I quickly turned back to the book cover, saw the name “Addison-Wesley,” and asked “Isn’t that a specifically Christian publisher?” Maybe not any more. A disproportionate amount of twentieth-century American art and literature is Jewish, and from Harper Collins, Simon & Schuster, or Bantam-Doubleday-Dell-And-Just-About-Everybody-Else-As-Well, I’d expect a book about a Jewish family. From Addison-Wesley, not until now.

It won’t be any surprise, but for some readers it will be a delight, to discover that this book contains about as many “heartwarming” scenes as it does funny ones. “We all seem to have the most love in the morning,” a child observes. “I just love babies,” says another child. Whatever experiences the children in this family are missing—and name-brand products seem to be substituting for a lot of the outdoor adventures and extended-family time I remember as the highlights of being those ages—they are loved, and they know it. Some things haven’t changed.