The Art of Bad Parenting

In which Jillian Lauren recognizes that being an artist sometimes makes her a bad parent.

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LOS ANGELES-

Being an artist makes me a bad parent more often than not.

Yeah, yeah, I know. There’s all that crap we tell ourselves to rationalize, to justify, to assuage our guilt. A writer friend of mine told me the other day that my child benefits from my being an individual who is happy and creatively fulfilled far more than he would benefit from me being around all the time and hyper-focused on his growth, his attachment, his security. I’m not convinced that’s true.

And even if it were true, I didn’t say I was a happy and creatively fulfilled individual. I said I was an artist. More specifically, I’m a writer and a performer and that pretty much insures that I’m neither happy nor creatively satisfied. Rather, I’m surly. I’m selfish. And even when I’m not working, I’m working. I’m percolating. I’m running over that one unsuccessful sentence again and again in my mind until it’s like an invisible splinter in my big toe all day. I wind up snapping and telling my kid to go find his own damn airplane. I wind up saying things like, “Just a minute, okay? Do you want to watch another Peppa Pig? Mommy just needs to write down this one thing.”

Yesterday, my three-year old was drawing on one of the eighteen billion legal pads I keep stashed around the house and I asked him what he was writing.

He said, “I’m taking notes for my show.”

My first reaction was to melt from the cuteness of it. My second was guilt, guilt, guilt.

And my son has some special needs, so I have to face not only my own guilt but that of an occupational therapist who clucks her tongue at me and gives me handouts emphasizing the importance of an early bedtime, of a predictable routine. I actually looked at the early bedtime one and said, “Fat chance,” to her face.

I sometimes keep my kid up late so I can spend more time with him or so he can Skype with his dad, who is often playing music on tour in other time zones. Because Dad, too, is an artist — also a surly, selfish motherfucker half the time. Our son can’t catch a break.

We working moms tell ourselves that happier moms make for happier kids. But if I’m going to be honest, the stay-at-home moms I know are generally happier than me. They’re usually nursing a vague restlessness and contemplating graduate school or planning to open their own little home business making terrariums, but on the whole, they’re happier.

And yet, happiness has never been the driving force behind how I spend my days. I do what I do because I can’t do anything else, because I’m driven to do it. Not because it particularly makes me happy. Reading books in the bathtub makes me happy. Going to the beach on a windy afternoon in late fall makes me happy, but I don’t expect to make a career out of it. My work gives me not happiness but rather an understanding of who I am in the world, or at least an arena in which to contemplate the question.

And I believe the stay-at-home moms I know feel the same way about their stay-at-home mom-ness. It’s not so much that it makes them happy, as that the language of it describes them in a way that makes sense.

And that is something that I’m unwilling to live without, even though I’m forced to sacrifice a measure of serenity that I believe would benefit my child.

But the thing about my relationship with my son is that I’m not fake with him. I let him know when I’m frustrated or when I’m ecstatic or when I’m having a hard time paying attention. I tell him when I had a lousy writing day and how that makes me feel sad or angry. I let him know me — his mom. Bad parent. Selfish artist. Who loves him like mad.

Do I think that honesty is better than being patient and empathetic and present at every moment? No, I don’t. But it’s the best I can do while I work on the other stuff.

And as I get to know him, I’m learning that my son, too, is fiery and willful and creative and moody. And there have been mornings around here when a hail of Hot Wheels are flying through the air and the cranky rock star dad is stomping around complaining about the coffee and I’m still in bed with my fingers in my ears and a strange quiet has settled over me and I’ve thought, We’re perfect. We’re perfect for each other.