Motherhood and works righteousness

The title says it all. There's really not a whole lot to add. If you hang out with moms for any amount of time you'll rapidly figure out that a lot of us are desperately trying to control our child's health, safety, mental/physical development, and future prospects by doing everything "right." It's the organic food and the early interventions and the best toys and the kindermusic and the rest of it. That's all fine as far as it goes, but then I read of some mom posting, as though it were something to be proud of, her response to another mom's question about a sick child. Honestly made me see red for a minute because it was essentially a laundry list of things you should do to keep your child from getting sick. There was one suggestion about helping get over being sick - the rest were all preventative.

Now, being proactive about our children is just part of what we do as moms. It's our job, and we should take it seriously. However, the message I got from the mom mentioned is "If you aren't doing all these things it's probably your fault that your kid is sick." She's a sweet mom and probably didn't mean it that way, but so much of this advice boils down to "if you do things right (aka my way) then you won't have whatever problem that's worrying you."

Guess what folks - my husband had a super crunchy mom and still dealt with asthma, food allergies, pneumonia, etc all before he was even an adult. They ate good food, ran around outside, and he still has health challenges. Works righteousness won't save you eternally, and it won't save you temporally. You cannot guarantee that your child or life will go smoothly, and we darn well don't need to be treating other moms like it's there fault when their kid gets an earache or strep throat or whatever is going around at the time. Maybe she needs a little encouragement on better health choices. That's fine - just don't act like if she'd just done XYZ her child wouldn't be sick now. Unless she's giving her kid decayed and rotten food you really don't know that.

So enough with the works righteousness. Take your vitamin C, pray, and trust God. Be faithful in the small things because you honestly can't control the big stuff anyway. And, please, cut each other a little slack. Seriously.

Mother trauma

Minor vent ahead:

I think that if there's anything in my life more exhausting than being a mom it's thinking about and researching mothering and postpartum care in our culture. Once you look under the bows and parties you'll find a whole world of hurt, angry, and confused women. There's the senseless, sin cursed tragedies of stillbirths, nursing troubles, medical disorders, and postpartum mental illness. That's horrible and painful enough, but then you find out about the willful trauma perpetuated by care providers for no reason at all. There are survivors of abuse, who already find the prospect of intimate care frightening, who find themselves triggered by callous and power hungry birth attendants. I've read countless stories of women who were cut against their will and without their consent for no medically necessary reason whatsoever. Women have been bullied and lied to and pushed around to suit someone else's convenience. Even worse, some moms have been explicitly punished for not immediately surrendering to their doctor's dictates and then have it put on their medical records that they themselves were abusive or requested certain actions. I've heard of so many repeat caesarian moms who, after being pushed into a CBAC, were told later that they declined a trial of labor.

There is enough pain and trouble with childbearing and mothering without people adding to it. I don't care if you're a doctor, nurse, midwife, or doula. I've heard stories about them all, and they are almost all equally pointless and stupid - like a doctor refusing a mother anesthetic while repairing a tear because she refused an epidural during labor. That's the sort of senseless misconduct that weighs on me when I'm reading and hearing about birth and mothering today.

I want to help people and encourage moms, but it just drains me to see how tragedy gets compounded by medical assault and malpractice. Again - I'm not talking about the grey areas. I'm not talking about trigger happy lawyers and fine lines. I'm talking about the people who act like a woman in labor doesn't even have to right to common decency.

It's hard to be a woman and to gear up and fight for life and children and family in a world that doesn't value these things. It's exhausting. Sometimes it's almost as exhausting as my clusterfeeding clingy baby who is at this moment hollering at his father because I moved more than three feet away from him. But hopefully tomorrow will be better, and maybe eventually we can stop fighting the stupid, petty battles about mothering and birth and put more of that energy into actually being good mothers.

Looking beyond babyhood

You know how when you have a honda suddenly half the cars you see on the road are hondas? It's the same thing with motherhood - suddenly you start noticing when folks sing about their moms on the radio and clicking on the random mommy links your friends share on facebook. One thing a lot of these links have had in common lately is that they talk about some of motherhood's "ends." I've been reading about weaning and those last few months of babywearing and packing up baby clothes and all those sort of things. Not that I am, so it pleases God, anywhere close to done with nursing and baby clothes over here, but I know that at some point I will be done. That thought is a little sad. Yet, this morning, the thought struck me that perhaps in acknowledging all of the first lasts a mother faces we swing a little too far? Consider this article on weaning your last baby. I've no doubt that what she's facing is real and sad, but are we perhaps leaning a little too hard on motherhood as biology? For those of us in more "crunchy" circles this makes sense. Pregnancy is a time where we're encouraged to trust and nurture and really inhabit our bodies. Labor and delivery is talked about in physiological terms that encourage moms to avoid medications and trust their instincts. The whole act of becoming a mother is one long biological phenomena that continues all the way through breastfeeding. But then what?

This Tim McGraw song has been on the radio recently, and it really caught my attention.

Yeah, it's an idealized picture of life in the country, but what caught me the most was the sense of a man who's mother still held a space for him of peace and welcome and contentment. This is a man who left the farm to make his way up in the world only to realize later (as he must since this is a country song) that what he's really missing is the good life his momma has created with his daddy. So on one hand we've got the end of nursing and a break in that intimate relationship between mother and baby, but on the other hand we've got a grown man looking at his wife and telling her that the good life, the life he wants to live, can be found through his momma's front door. For all the talk I've heard about a nursing mother's breasts - what they symbolize for her and the world around her and the very real benefit they are to her and her child - breasts are, ultimately, not the enduring symbol of motherhood. The platonic ideal of motherhood, or so it seems, is that of a woman perpetually and cheerfully in the kitchen baking bread and layering lasagna and fixing lemonade and rolling out pie crusts and frying chicken. It's an ideal of comfort and warmth and plenty. It's vocational rather than biological. It's the sort of space I hope to hold for my child(ren) someday.

Motherhood is weird

So Allen has crud, so it's mostly been Jacob and I riding the day out with a little help from my MIL who brought us some probiotics and a couple chickens so I could make stock for Allen. It hasn't been a particularly bad day or a stressful day or a good day. It's just been sort of hanging out here, but while I was puttering around this evening it struck me that motherhood is just a little crazy. Let's tally up my interactions with Jacob today. They look a lot like this:

Why does he want to cluster nurse all morning? I need to eat. And pee. I'm thirsty too.

Awwww, he's so cute when he wakes up happy and smiling. I think we'll just lay around and snuggle. I'll eat later.

WHY ARE YOU CRYING WHEN I'M SOOOOOO HUNGRY!

Whatever, kid. You can fuss a little. Mommy needs to go to the bathroom.

I'm sorry I let you fuss. Let's play with your stacking cups. 

Oh, hey! Facebook. 

Would you be happy playing in the back while I fold laundry? 

No, don't look around when you're hungry. You're hungry. Ok, I put down the phone and closed my laptop. Now eat please.

Cute little sleepy nursing face. 

Sum total of work done today.......one load of laundry folded and put away. Hmmmmmm, why don't you play over here while I work? No? Need a nap?

(a hour later)

Ok, tidied stuff up kind of maybe. I should send that e-mail and pretend like I'm a together sort of woman who stays in touch with her friends. Ooops, baby needs me.

I tried to put you to bed before you crashed. I really, really did, but your daddy needed me. I'm sorry I had to put you down while I brushed my teeth.





Don't ever grow up and stop snuggling with me while you sleep. I mean, I don't actually mean that, but that's not going to happen for another fifty zillion years right?

All throughout the day I cycle back and forth from frustration, through calm interactions, to absolute "smother his face in kisses" adoration and back again. Sometimes I skip one of those steps. Anyway when you think about the constantly changing hormones, the various domestic changes that occur, the personal sins/demons that motherhood rouses, and the madly cycling emotions - motherhood is one trippy experience! I realize that pretty much everyone who writes about motherhood says this, but I figured I'd say it as well I guess :) I love my little guy.

the postpartum culture crisis as a grandmother crisis

I'm still reading Mothering the New Mother, and I'll admit there are times when the book makes me a little uneasy because it really does put a huge emphasis on supporting mothers in ways that go so far above and beyond the cultural norm. Why does this bother me? Because we've all seen narcissistic, selfish mothers who treat their children more like lifestyle accessories. On some level it feels as though all this nurturing and support and understanding must surely turn into flat out pandering. It can also be hard to see someone else get something that we didn't have - witness my moment of out and out anger when I saw that another postpartum friend's mom was doing her laundry for her. No one was doing our laundry. Why is she so special?

So here's the dilemma. On one hand we have mothers who are so fixated on their experience that they aren't willing to do what's best for their child. They ignore medical advice, spend money on useless designer crap, and in general turn their experience into a true Bridezilla sequel. On the other hand we have mothers who are turned lose into a largely atomized culture and expected to thrive with very little support or encouragement. Both approaches betray a cultural and/or personal ignorance of or indifference to the needs of motherhood.

What we need are the dual expectations that mothers will in fact pour themselves into their children and seek their good combined with the expectation that older women in the community will in turn pour themselves into this younger mother. What I'm seeing from other cultures, from this book, and from the Bible itself is that motherhood is like some vast stream that catches us up and bears us onwards. When the Bible says that older women should teach the younger women to love their kids and husbands and take care of their homes I'll admit I've often thought of it in the sense of older women laying down the law about how these younger women need to step it up and stop complaining and being lazy. Upon reflection though, I think a gentler connotation is warranted. The ESV says "and so train the young women." That's a lot of what this book is talking about - training mothers to be good at being moms. Instead of grandmothers and aunts and cousins skipping a generation to pour all their love and attention into these new babies, they need to step back and take a look at the mom and make sure that she's equipped to be a good mother.

Unfortunately Titus 2 women seem about as rare as snowflakes in Florida, and we find many younger women existing in a state of benign neglect. I say benign neglect because I rather doubt these older women don't care that their friends and daughters are struggling with motherhood, but it's also neglect in that these older women are failing to do what they ought to do. I'll confess that the more I think about it and see evidence of it the less patience I have with even benign neglect. In some ways it's gentle nature almost makes it more virulent - it's harder to complain about someone who brings over a casserole and coos at your baby even if that person leaves you feeling lonely and frustrated at their lack of understanding and support. In my own life I've seen this play out in very similar fashions with two women who could not be more dissimilar in how they otherwise love and care for people. One person is a giver, and the other is a narcissist - they neither of them understand how to mother the new mother.

Grandmothers and great aunts and old cousin and sisters and the like have a crucial role to play in postpartum care, and they fill that role best when they look first to the mom and then to the child. An infant doesn't really "need" a grandmother, but he surely needs a mother who is encouraged and supported and feels capable of loving and nurturing him. In that sense, a grandmother who coos at her granddaughter while ignoring her own daughter's needs is being just as selfish as a mother who "needs" a certain type of birth. I think it's entirely possible that our current postpartum culture is partially the fault of grandmotherly selfishness, but because this selfishness manifests itself in lots of cooing and baby snuggles we either can't or don't see it for what it is. It needs to stop though. These babies do need the love and wisdom of older generations, but the way they most need that love and wisdom initially is poured out through the care their own mothers receive.

The mother and the child

I've got words stumbling around inside of me that have been sifted loose by my reading lately on postpartum practices in America. They don't feel very eloquent, but then again they might be. There seems to be a fair bit of pain and confusion around becoming mothers - matrescence as one of my books puts it. I can't speak for many of my friends because this isn't something that comes up casually, but, as I start on the earliest stages of trying and preparing to understand and help other postpartum women, the stories I've come across suggest that perhaps my story isn't so very different from other women.

My journey into motherhood was a fragile, brittle thing. My mother is a broken woman as was her mother. My paternal grandmother was reserved and had fought her own battles. My mother-in-law is a dear woman but can't quite seem to meet me on my own impulsive yet over-thought level. Her mother was rather similar. Possibly the most motherly woman I've ever met was my husband's paternal grandmother - Mamaw. A little woman living on a farm with her garden and her cows who loved people. She might not appreciate me saying this, but she had just enough squish for proper grandmotherly hugs. Her enthusiasm for her children was boundless. Although I only knew her briefly, I loved her dearly. She was, in some ways, the most mothering woman I knew for some years.

So when I say my journey into motherhood was brittle or fragile, I mean that it was like spanning a gorge with a thick cable and asking me to climb into a basket and hoist myself to the other side. I didn't have generations of women around me to make the way across plain and safe and carry me over on their experience, compassion, and wisdom. Looking back, I believe I felt alone. A man cannot take you there. It takes a man to be a mother, but I'm not sure he can make you one. Men have different burdens, and it's like asking a freight train to grow wings and fly to Cairo. Eventually you just can't get any closer no matter how hard you try.

All through my pregnancy I tried to face my fears and worries about becoming a mother. I read the books and talked to my counselor and took a childbirth class and tried to soak up the faith that I too could make this journey. If you'd seen me wresting through transition it might have all looked like a front. I don't know because I didn't make it that far. After I started to bleed they rolled me back into a very bright room with a very narrow table full of people who suddenly looked very different in their surgical gear. I remember thinking, insofar as I could think while pumped full of drugs, that there was supposed to be a cry. There is supposed to be crying at births. I waited and waited for that first cry. In my heart I think I'm still waiting for it - that moment when your baby cries and you're flat on your back on a narrow metal table, but it doesn't matter because life has snapped back into focus because your son has arrived. Instead I had a very quiet birth and a near sighted squint at a very baby looking baby (drugs remember) in a plastic box before everyone got wheeled away to their respective destinations.

I'm not sure what happened afterwards. If I tell you a thing didn't happen, and you happen to be one of the few people reading this blog who can say for sure that it did then don't feel the need to call me out. Why? Because it wasn't enough. If you think that words said once or twice to a woman who has just been through that sort of birth are supposed to sustain her through the process of matrescence then you're wrong. You are fully and completely wrong. I've had two people come back to me later and say they should have been more supportive - my husband and my childbirth educator. This is not to say that other people didn't do other things for me. This isn't about what they said but about what they left unsaid.

When I really met Jacob it was over twelve hours later. Allen was there as well as the NICU nurse. Other people had gotten to hold him and watch him sleep before I'd done much more than touch his hand. Instead of me, his mother, introducing him to the world I felt like I was the stranger being introduced. Not having the benefit of that birth rush I've heard about and being under the influence of some pretty powerful painkillers the whole experience felt awkward and somewhat flat. In my head I was telling myself over and again,

This is my baby. My baby. The baby that isn't inside me anymore. The baby that surprised us nine months ago. This is my baby. This is Jacob. I don't know how to hold him, but this is my baby. This is Jacob. I was afraid he wouldn't be cute. I like him. He's a sweet little boy. My little boy.

Just about every single one of those thoughts had a tiny little question mark hovering over it. It's like I was having to remind my numbed and drugged body of something that I thought it would know instinctively - that it should have known instinctively. What I desperately needed was someone to affirm my motherhood. I needed a cloud of witnesses to say "These two belong together. They are mother and child and therefore holy in the same way that all God's most common and precious miracles are holy." Instead I had a parade of nurses telling me how to care for him, grandparents who were impatient to hold him (which they can't do in NICU), and a stream of uncles and aunt and friends who cooed and smiles and spoke warmly of modern medical technology. It was an atmosphere of love and thankfulness and yet it did so little to help me cross that great gorge of motherhood. My cord across the chasm felt fragile indeed.

I felt, oddly, like a conduit. Now that I had born a child my husband had a son. Our parents had a grandson. Our church had a new member. I could see rather clearly my son's relation to all the other people around him, but I had a hard time seeing his relationship to myself. I saw my role as trying to manage and foster all these other relationships when I should have been cocooned safely away with my son learning how our relationship worked. What I needed desperately was someone who looked at Jacob and saw a child and his mother, and my faltering, needy heart never heard that message as loudly as I wished. Instead Jacob would insist on nursing when other people wanted to hold him or fuss at loud noises instead of being cheerfully passed around to one and all, and if he was "good" and I expressed concern at being gone while someone watched him I was dismissed as almost extraneous. I had people whom I thought were my friends who didn't even bother to learn our story before making flippantly unhelpful remarks about parenting.

So what did I want? I wanted to be surrounded by people - women of my family and church - who would sit with me while I tried to make my cut and drugged body catch up with reality and encourage me again and again that Jacob and I belonged together and that I would be a good mother. I wanted these women to take their experience and their kindness and build a tall fence about my baby and me so that we could be shielded from ordinary cares and instead learn to love each other. No - so that I could learn how best to love him. Jacob needs no training. He used to bob and shift his head around until his could see my face before he fell asleep, and he'd swing an arm up over me to touch my chest or my neck. He still does that. I have always been the uncertain one. There's still a corner of my heart that wants that birthing experience of having someone see your child for the first time and say "Him - he belongs with her, and that's exactly where he's going to go."

Now, nearly eight months later, I feel as though I've crossed the chasm safely. This isn't about whether or not women require certain things in order to become mothers. This is about the loneliness and uncertainly that I encountered in my own journey to motherhood. It's about a postpartum culture that start and stops (if you're lucky) with some homemade meals and a few late night facebook chats with the mom up the street and just how very little that does to succor a mother who is finding her own journey across the gorge more perilous than she hoped. Someday I hope to find that mother and say, "He belong with you. You're going to do great. I'll be in the kitchen cleaning up if you need me."

..........................................

I wrote the above in those highly philosophical hours between midnight and 2am, and now in the daylight I wish to add a couple more observations. First, this is the story of a woman who has very few real connections to wise and loving mothering and who entered motherhood in a rather traumatic fashion. Take away one of those factors - a loving and present mother or a peaceful birth and bonding experience - and you'll likely end up with a woman who is rather more satisfied with her postpartum experience. Secondly, upon reading this story, you may at some point feel like asking, "Well, why didn't you just ask for help or support or encouragement." The simple truth is that I and, according to my recent reading on matrescense in Western Culture, many other women simply do not have the voice to ask for these things and for some women it's only years later that they realized what was lacking in their own postpartum experience. That said, I agree that if I'd been able to ask for them that there were women in my life who would have tried to support and help me in the way that I needed. However, the more common experience - my experience - is that when the feelings don't work the way we wish, when we get tired and discouraged, when we doubt ourselves and our connection to our child our instinct is to turn inwards and seek the problem within ourselves.  We are encouraged to be ok with being exhausted and emotional. There are plenty of "there there's" and "that will pass" and "I remember those days" to go around. What was missing were more statements like "Look how happy he is with you" and "Don't you love that new baby smell" and "I'm so proud of how you're taking care of him." Mothering is not all by instinct, and we need a safe and supportive place to begin to feel like mothers. We know we're tired - we've been up all night. We know we're tough - we've been through physical and emotional turmoil different and/or harder than anything previous to this. What we need is constant reassurance that we're ok - because we feel so very inadequate to care for this tiny soul who looks at us with big eyes that take and take and take from us because we are Mother and yet somehow reflect all the wonders on the universe.


For more reading on this subject I recommend Mothering the New Mother by Sally Placksin.

Created to Be His Help Meet: Part 2 (Love them chillen's)

I think I can. I think I can. I think I can.

I know that despite my post rate increasing, I haven't exactly been getting through this book very fast. But I will finish. I promise. On days like today grinding out another book review post actually seems like a great way to temporarily forget how much painting I still need to do =D

So, I thought it was awesome that Mrs. Pearl spent the first couple pages emphasizing that to be a good mother you have to be a good wife. Having grown up with my parent's somewhat dysfunctional marriage, I think this is a great way to start. Looking back I easily can see where codependency in their marriage affected our lives as children. If the kitchen is the heart of the home, I really think the marriage bed is its soul. There are the two hands of Christianity - service and communion. Speaking of service, I was further pleased to see Mrs. Pearl reaffirm the worth and necessity of practically loving and serving your family every day. As she points out, there are plenty of mothers who leave all the child rearing to others, and therefore don't have good reason to be surprised when there kids turn out dumb and uncaring. It takes a mother taking the time to teach, train, and answer a hundred thousand questions to truly raise a child. This is hard work and valuable, and I found Mrs. Pearl's encouragement highly practical. (At the point I should probably throw in the obvious caveat that I don't have children, and these remarks are all made from the perspective of what I think I'd like to hear when I am raising children. There, exhaustive caveat complete.)

Balancing out this good advice we come to (surprise!) the nonsensical edicts and fear mongering I've unfortunately come to expect from Created to be His Help Meet. It starts with Mrs. Pearl responding to a letter in which a women complains of insufficient meditation time and female companionship, by flat out saying that women don't need time together outside of church meetings once or twice a week. In her words "God never intended for you the have intimacy with another woman, whether in worship or otherwise" (181). Mrs. Pearl even warns that she's seen such relationships become "abnormal and sick" (182). Now I could be totally misreading this, but it sounds like Mrs. Pearl is saying the women should all work alone in their own homes and that doing otherwise could (eventually) lead to lesbianism, which puts a very disturbing spin on Ruth and Naomi's relationship. Right? And what about Mary and Elizabeth? Those are just the examples of the top of my head, but I'm sure there are others. It might be wise for wives to limit their emotional dependence on other women simply because problems arise when you go outside your marriage for what should be nourished inside it, but that's not what she says. She says that God doesn't want you to do this. With zero evidence. Maybe some women need to be told to stop gossiping with their girlfriends instead of tending to their families, but in today's individualized society I think many more women should be encouraged in finding ways to work together and share all the homely wisdom that comes with three kids, 17 years of marriage, or a life spent in single service to God.

This was almost a footnote this the chapter, but I found it singularly odd that she closed the chapter with a disturbing picture of the possibility for sexual molestation should you take your eyes off your child for one minute. She gives a few statistics without citing a single source and even throws blame on innocent young men by casting them as potential child molesters. Yes, this sort of thing does happen, but the day I'm afraid to let my child run around after church for fear of being molested is the day I change churches. In fact, I would do what Mrs. Pearl says not to do - trust God to protect my children. Don't believe me?

You cannot pray and expect God for supernatural intervention and protection. God has already provided for her through you. You can and must pray and ask God to make you a more attentive and sober parent, that you might better protect your child (186).

The second part of her prayer is great - we all should be praying to God that we might better fulfill our roles and have strength for the tasks ahead. However, I cannot, do no, and will not believe that I can control everything. If my child were to get hurt I'm sure I'd be torn with grief and feeling of failing. I'd probably even tell my child I'm sorry I didn't/couldn't protect them that time. But, only God is in control. He is their salvation and protector as He is my own. The presence of human mediators doesn't replace the divine reality.


Next time - Discretion. I have to say that Mrs. Pearl generally gets it in one. It's a pity she didn't elaborate more.

Nosy neighbors and involved communities

So here's a bone I want to pick from one of the Thinking Housewife's posts. The basic gist is that a woman wrote in talking about her experience with a neighbor ringing the doorbell and inquiring why she'd been hearing a child crying/screaming for the past hour. For context I'll add that this particular mom had decided, after making sure this wasn't a tired/hungry issue, to let her son work out his toddler tantrum alone in his room hoping that he'd cool down with a little space. During this process a neighbor rang her doorbell, expressed concern, and offered to help. This is part of the resulting conversation -starting the with mom quizzing her neighbor in turn.

“Do you tell parents it’s okay to let infants cry to sleep in their cribs? Because that’s NOT okay!” I spit that out fast.

“No, I don’t. How old is she?” (The fact that she automatically assumed it was a girl further annoyed me.)

“He is a boy, and he’s 18 months.”

“Well, I am a psychologist and I would like to come help you.”

“NO!” I was so annoyed.

“I am a mother,” I declared.

She smiled at me, as if she was thinking, “Oh, you’re so sweet; you think that matters!” But at the time, I thought maybe I had made some headway with my confident assertion.

“This is my second child. I did the same with my first, and he is a very obedient, well-mannered little boy.”

“But you may not want them to be obedient and well-mannered — (my face said, huh??) – you might want them to have free spirits.”

I laughed. I said, “You know, that’s the trouble with parents today is that they’re listening to that ridiculous advice. Pride is the root of all sin! I want my boys to be humble!”

“Can I come in to help?”

“NOOOO!” I was shocked that she was asking again. What nerve!

“Well, fine. But if I hear it again, I’ll call the police.”

“Go ahead!” I yelled, as she stomped down my driveway.

First, this neighbor was clearly off base with regards to threatening to call the police and how parents should discipline their kids. The former is a serious threat, and I really don't think people should be able to make anonymous "tips" about people like that. It's way too easy for disgruntled neighbors or people who just differ from you to wreck havoc. However, I was slightly baffled by the whole "atta girl" response to this post.

Here are my problems:

1. There was no call to be accusatory ("Do you tell people...?")

2. Assertions about peoples motives are highly problematic.

3. She didn't have to justify her parenting methods.

4. There were zero reasons for this mom to be offended in the first place.

Let me start with my last point. In the sort of communities in which people say they'd like to live I can easily imagine adults checking in when something seems to be a problem. You hear of cases where kids were terribly abused and people wonder where all the other adults were. Probably minding their own business. This is my default as well. But imagine a community where people did knock on each other's doors? I'd say the default for this should be "Hi, Mrs. Davies, I heard little Davies hollering for the past hour, so I thought I'd just step over and make sure no one was hurt." At which point Mrs. Davies calmly explains that her son is working out a little temper, was just told he couldn't visit his grandparents this weekend, in time-out for coloring on his sister's doll, etc. Everything looks good, and the neighbor walks away. But imagine the mom comes to the door drunk, or there's a new babysitter who hit the oldest, or the dad fell down the stairs and is hurt. In all those cases everyone would be better off for having a neighbor (and a neighborhood) where people knock on doors. The assumption should be that everything is ok, but when things do go wrong you've got eyes to see. While I agree that this neighbor sounds pretty out of touch (and potentially dangerous) I disagree that this sort of behavior is innately offensive.

The other points are mostly secondary. If I were the neighbor in question and the mom started acting all huffy and defensive I'd probably get a little nosier myself. If I ask you a parenting question (even if it's just "can I help you") and you return with baseless accusations, that doesn't exactly reflect the model of calm, competent motherhood that sets bystanders at ease. I'm guessing this mom felt judged ("Is she classing me with those people") and instantly made a defensive jab. Understandable and completely non-helpful. If someone asks you about your child all you know about that person (barring past history and perhaps extremely keen insight) is that they're asking about your kid. Now obviously I don't have kids, but I have had people question (and even shun) me over important decisions I've made. Bearing people's judgement isn't easy (ask me, I still do it all the time), but eventually you just have to smile and let things roll off your back.

How do I think this mom should have handled this? Like I said before, with as gracious a smile as she could muster and a "Thanks for checking on us, but Jason's just working off his toddler angst." If you feel inclined to go further you might mention that you thought letting him have a private tantrum in his room the best way to deal with it and ask whether your neighbor has any tips for dealing with bewildering toddler moods. Take the good advice, and just smile if you get a bunch of pc parenting light. It's really not that big a deal. If we're going to live in and cultivate the kind of communities where people have each other's backs then you'll have to deal with people actually asking if things are ok. When my pastor asks how my marriage is going I don't assume he saw Allen out to dinner with a tarted up skirt. I do assume he cares about us and wants to make sure small problems don't become larger ones. That's what a community does.