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Happy Mother's Day
 by:
Frederica Mathewes-Green
Got big plans for Mother's Day? Candy and flowers, hugs and kisses? Maybe
snapping some heartwarming photos of Grandma with the multiple
generations of progeny gathered all around?
Boy, are you out of it. Didn't you know that playing with grandchildren
is something women do just to keep themselves from thinking about how
they've wasted their lives?
That was the message celebrated in the New York Times last Sunday. On the
front of the "Styles" section was an interview with a retired
schoolteacher named Jane Juska. Juska has produced a book based on some
unusual research. A few years ago she placed an ad in the personals
column of the New York Review of Books stating that, before her upcoming
67th birthday, she wanted to "have a lot of sex with a man I like." She
invited readers to submit evidence of their likeability, and as the
responses came in, she sorted them into piles of "yes," "no," and
"maybe." Juska says that since then she's had sex with men aged from 84
to 32.
No, this wasn't in the National Enquirer, headlined "That's Why the
Grandma is a Tramp." This story got prominent, admiring placement in the
New York Times because of its philosophical underpinnings. (Though
perhaps, after the preceding paragraph, you don't want to think about
"underpinnings" for awhile.) Juska firmly believes that her adventuring
makes other women jealous. She says they ask themselves, "What have I
done with my life?" She says these women "Don't want to go back and look
at it. That's why they're so nuts about their grandchildren. It keeps the
focus off them."
Only inhabitants of the stratospheric reaches of trendy intellectualism
can believe that women play with their grandchildren in a desperate
attempt to kill the bitterness they feel over not having multiple sex
partners at age 70. Only very sophisticated people could fall for such a
self-evidently stupid idea. Only self-congratulatingly bohemian people
could have such contempt for normal, healthy family life. It's an index
of how much else is missing, how much has gone wrong, in their lives.
And that's the saddest part of the story. Juska has had a lot go wrong
over the years. She was divorced and had a rocky relationship with her
only child, who dropped out of school and ran away from home. She gained
seventy pounds and drank heavily. (These problems are blamed on her
"Puritanical small-town Ohio childhood." Oh, those vile Ohioans!) When
Juska retired her life seemed empty, even though she was singing in a
chorale and volunteering at Planned Parenthood. When she went home at
night she was alone.
Juska didn't expect this ad to lead to anything good. She says,
startlingly, "I expected to be murdered, or made sad at the very least."
A long history of self-destructive acts had found a new expression. She
is still alone most nights, because her playmates are all over the
country and not in her back yard, tinkering with the lawn mower. They are
emphatically not bound to her by chains of a lifetime of sleeping and
rising together, doing the dishes together, watching movies and making
love and arguing together. There is really no substitute for that
lifetime of daily experience; a few minutes in the sack with an
octogenarian stranger can hardly be said to compete.
But she does have a book contract and an admiring spread in the New York
Times, and a new celebrity as a crusader in the fight to turn the meaning
of women's lives into all sex, all the time, without the dignity or
wisdom or security of age. There may be rewards to this pointed rejection
of what women throughout history have found sweet and fulfilling. But I
bet they'll never set aside a day in May to celebrate it.
********
Frederica Mathewes-Green
www.frederica.com
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