“REAL FAMILIES,” is the name of a personal-essay series at Salon “that celebrates the surprising and ever-shifting nature of domestic life in the 21st century.”  Salon means “surprising and ever-shifting” in the sense that tornados and hurricanes that lift whole houses off the ground and hurl them into the air are “surprising and ever-shifting.”

The latest entry is “Why I left my children,” by the Japanese-American, prize-winning author Rahna Reiko Rizzuto. Rizzuto has outdone Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert by leaving not just her husband but her children too and then writing about it, in the apparent hope of invigorating discussion at women’s book clubs everywhere. (Since many top women writers gloat over their damaged marriages and homes, investing this destruction with drama in order to make money and careers, the competition for any award for the worst wife or mother among them would be quite stiff.) When Rizzuto’s children were toddlers she left them for a fellowship in Asia. Then she divorced her husband and settled down the block from her family. This, she discovered, was a good way to raise her children:

The question I am always asked is, “How could you leave your children?” How could you be the mother who walks away? As if my children were embedded inside me, even years after birth, and had to be surgically removed? As if I abandoned them on a desert island, amid flaming airplane debris and got into the lifeboat alone?

Hyperbolic. Inflammatory. But that’s part of the point. Because my relationship with my children survives. In fact, it has improved.

Someday her children will read this: “I never wanted to be a mother,” and those words will be imprinted on their souls. Her children don’t articulate complaints, so they must not have any, as if they are going to turn on the people upon whom they depend. As for her husband, she has written both here and in her latest book about how he begged her to have his children and how he then agreed to be the mommy. What kind of man would … never mind.

Rizzuto, a former winner of the American Book Award and a nominee for the National Book Critics Circle Award, is the offspring of an interracial marriage. Judging from her books, which I would only read on pain of incarceration, she has spent a good part of her adulthood searching for a cultural identity. It is no surprise she does not see motherhood as a culture-shaping institution.

There will always be a minority of women who dislike being mothers. They are freaks of nature. They are not necessarily to be blamed for their lack of maternal feelings. But they are to be blamed for celebrating abnormality. Rizzuto, like her feminist sisters, complains that society has standards for mothers at all.

My problem was not with my children, but with how we think about motherhood. About how a male full-time caretaker is a “saint,” and how a female full-time caretaker is a “mother.” It is an equation we do not question; in fact we insist on it. And we punish the very idea that there are other ways to be a mother.

Actually, we don’t punish the idea. If we did, someone like Rizzuto would be run out of town.

                                                           — Comments —

Mabel Le Beau writes:

As I was reading the passage by the Japanese-American describing living arrangements with her sons, my heart told me that she is writing with sadness and resignation. I don’t hear any sense of gloating, just determination that she will at least do something ‘right’ by her boys.

In the essay, I feel a sense that she felt herself toxic to the boys’ well-being, happiness and mental balance. But, surely, up to the point of her leaving she felt they were safe and cared for. We make a big deal about children feeling rejected, and the resulting detrimental suffering to their mental health. Assurance of their safety and care while she was gone probably gave her courage to examine her life and come to realization of how to best help them, and help her see that she could be a positive influence in their lives.

Perhaps the time away from her former husband allowed temporary admission to a form of psychiatric re-evaluation, and returning to live just down the road is the best she can do in her duty. I remember babysitting for a woman who went on an a short ocean trip watching whales away by herself for a week or so while she pondered how best to go about living with her husband.

I feel sure that the writer’s choice was what thought she had to do to save or keep her soul, and learn to ‘create’ a love for the children. Up to that point, perhaps, she felt disconnected from them and now is feeling more at peace and content that she can show the boys their birth mother is no more ambivalent about a maternal bond. Physiologically, science might describe these human bonds with deficits of oxytocin or other hormones, but sometimes one must use brainpower to work around a lack of emotion or other more natural human responses.

Laura writes:

As I said, there are some women who, perhaps through no fault of their own, do not possess normal maternal feelings. They are freaks of nature who should not be held up as examples to other women. The solution to their abnormality, absent any threat of extreme child neglect, is the cultivation of those feelings or the pretense of them. The solution is not for them to abandon their children and divorce their father.

However, it is not true that Rizzuto lacked those feelings simply because of psychological abnormality. She states that she did not like the idea of taking care of children because they would prevent her from pursuing her own dreams. She writes:

I was afraid of being swallowed up, of being exhausted, of opening my eyes one day, 20 (or 30!) years after they were born, and realizing I had lost myself and my life was over.

She does gloat over the success of living apart from her family. She writes:

I had to leave my children to find them. In my part-time motherhood, I get concentrated blocks of time when I can be that 1950s mother we idealize who was waiting in an apron with fresh cookies when we got off the school bus and wasn’t too busy for anything we needed until we went to bed. I go to every parent-teacher conference; I am there for performances and baseball games. My former husband is there too. Though it was not easy for him, he has made it possible for me to define my own motherhood, and for our sons to have a life of additions, rather than subtraction, of a relative peace, rather than constant accusation.

Motherhood can be so redefined it no longer entails even living with one’s children or being married to their father.

Lawrence Auster writes:

Laura writes:

Salon means “surprising and ever-shifting” in the sense that tornados and hurricanes that lift whole houses off the ground and hurl them into the air are “surprising and ever-shifting.”

That’s nihilism: the rejection of all stable meanings and values and their replacement by constant change and meaninglessness as the new meaning. 

People think that nihilism means the rejection of all meaning. That’s not correct, because no human being can reject all meaning. All human beings desire and require meaning. What nihilism means is the embrace of non-meaning – or, better, anti-meaning – as meaning.

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