I Don’t Want to Be Claire Dederer’s “Poser”
Being a mother is more than role-play. 
This week, my fiancé and I had a huge fight. It was a blowout, the kind of argument that escalates seemingly of its own accord, gathering steam as it rolls, like a snowball sliding down a hill. It’s not that we have never had a fight like this before—we have. I’m still a cautious lawyer at heart: I would never willingly join myself, legally and financially, to another human being without being intimately aware of his combat style.
My future husband is a general: capable of seeing the forest through the trees. He forfeits battles at will, one eye on the reserves. In this he is, perhaps, my perfect foil: I am a staunch defeatist—always ready to treat this battle as the decisive one. Always a little too hasty to take my ball and go home.
What was different about this fight—what made it memorable, worth analyzing rather than abandoning—was the variation in my fiancé’s behavior. This time, one of the first in my memory, he dug his heels in. When I shouted, he shouted back. When I disengaged, he disengaged right back. He met me shot for shot. Frankly, I wasn’t entirely prepared to handle it. Finally, at the apex, he came out with something unexpected: “I’m just trying to give you the kind of life our parents have!” he shouted at me, in a register louder than any he’s ever used before.
It was a truth bomb, and in its wake we both stood stunned. We looked at each other, slightly shell-shocked, beginning to rise to the surface of ourselves again. The fight was an excavation of something present but undetected, a gas leak lurking in the walls of our relationship. In hindsight, I’m glad we uncovered it. Everyone knows that gas leaks are silent, stealthy killers. You’d be dead without ever knowing what got you.
But, thanks to that fight—which was about how much time he’s been spending working, and, when he’s not working, networking, trying to hustle to the top of a new industry—we’re now aware of one of our relationship risk factors, one of the things that will eat away at us if we let it. It’s not an uncommon one I’m told: expectations are powerful things.
But I never asked him to give me anything other than himself. And he never offered me any particular kind of life; that’s a promise we both know, in our logical brains, to be beyond our control. The problem, as far as I can tell, is that we both only know a certain kind of life—the one our parents have. It’s not, exactly, that I want that life. Somewhat the opposite, actually: I’ve been actively growing away from their lifestyle for the better part of the last decade. Rather, it’s that their life is my baseline; it’s the mark I start from. As a starting line, it’s a sort of assumed a priori. I may not know how to live the life I want—that’s something I want to collaborate on with my future husband—but the life I am living, the one I know how to do, owes its debt to my parents’ choices, the shape their life takes.
And that shape is conventional, upper-middle-class privilege. My father worked, my mother stayed home, we always had enough, often more than that. It’s the same for his parents: his father clawed them up the socioeconomic ladder, while his mother subsumed herself in domestic life. She is, in many ways, the ideal housewife: the woman changes out her decorative hand towels seasonally.
Roles are little more than cobbled-together expectations—readymade blueprints for life. And the ones we inherit matter.
But my fiancé and I have not made conventional choices. He never went to college; I dropped out of the lucrative career path I spent my entire young life training for. We, like many others of our generation, are poised to be less successful than our parents were. What we have in the future, we may owe entirely to them. Except one thing: the way we arrange our relationship, the gender roles we follow. Not, at least, if I have anything to say about it.
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If expectations are powerful, roles are little more than cobbled-together expectations—readymade blueprints for life. And the ones we inherit matter. Clarie Dederer, the brilliant mother-writer whose article, in many ways, inspired this entire inquiry, writes of this powerfully in Poser: My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses, her awkwardly-named memoir of middle-age. Ostensibly about her decision to take up yoga in her forties, the memoir is actually about big existential questions, the same ones I’m struggling with today. Questions like: How do you know you’re living the life you want? In the right place? With the right people? And, moreover, how much of the shape an adult life takes can be traced to the wounds and influences of childhood?
For her part, Dederer’s childhood, which she excavates in the book, was a strange if loving one: her mother left her father when she was in grade school, for a young hippie very much her junior; Dederer’s parents, however, never divorced, sharing property and progeny, living amicably apart up to the time period recounted in the book, in which their children now have children of their own. Throughout the book, Dederer, like a good therapist, examines the extent to which her own familial choices were influenced by her childhood. She has, you see, been plagued by a strong, stubborn streak of perfectionism: she tries to be the perfect mother, the consummate domestic goddess, and finds, by the end of the book, that it’s exhausting her, depleting her, and, for good measure, destroying her marriage. For much of the beginning of the book, both Dederer and her husband are trying desperately to slot themselves into pre-made “Mom” and “Dad” roles, and it’s not working. As she writes,
“Our anxieties were driving us to become other people—he was Earner; I was Mother, like characters in some phenomenally boring Ionesco play. We both worried all the time and often didn’t remember to laugh. I could find relief in the baby’s smile, or with my friends, or, now, in yoga. I didn’t see that Bruce was headed someplace where there was no relief.”
Eventually, the book delves more deeply into Bruce’s depression, before ending, measuredly and organically, in a happier place. But there is much learning, growing, and skin-shedding that happens before Dederer reaches that end. She has, for one, to abandon the striving toward perfect performance, the compulsion she felt to fulfill the “perfect mother” role that her mother had failed at. She writes,
“My family life had been, to some degree, a performance that might please all around me. A performance to prove to everyone else, and to myself, that everything was fine. No, not fine. Perfect. Now my family life was my family life, private, almost secret, a pile of bears in a den, writhing and furry and intimate. I had no public. And now that there was no public, something mysterious was happening: The object of my worry and shame—that is to say, Bruce’s depression—had gone away.
By shedding their role-playing, both Dederer and her husband are set free—free to be the kinds of parents they are, free to have the kind of family they want. Dispensing with role-playing may be, I think after reading her book, necessary to becoming a fully realized adult. And if I am to become a mother, as “a fully realized adult” is the only way I want to do it. Perhaps, then, a large part of what I fear about motherhood is my own competitiveness, my own desire to embody other people’s ideas of perfection. What if I lose myself to the “good mother” role?
And now, in the wake of my fiancé’s admission, I’ve yet another fear to add to the scale: what if I lose my husband? What does it mean that these received expectations, these external ideas about what it means to be married, to be a wife, a husband, a partner, have already reared their head in the sanctuary of my relationship? Is it a sign that we’re porous, more contingent than I ever thought?
Or, to adopt the precarious optimism of the soon-to-be-married, maybe this actually means we’ll be on guard against such emotional insurgents, better trained to smoke them out.
Perhaps expectations are just insecurities in disguise. No two lives, no two marriages, no two children, after all, are ever the same. And there’s no way of knowing what anything will be until it is.