Uncle John’s Presents Mom’s Bathtub Reader (8 page)

Ben’s mother took some of her child-raising ideas from Dr. Luther Emmett Holt and his book,
The Care and Feeding of Children
, a popular baby-care tome of the day. Other ideas were her own (how she came about them is anyone’s guess). But all of them were promoted with an eccentricity that made Ben feel peculiar when he longed to feel like a regular kid.

Spock’s mother believed that children under 12 should have a special diet, constant exposure to fresh air, and a very early bedtime. Mildred rigidly enforced her ideas. No
matter how Ben protested, his diet was
always
mainly vegetables, fruits, and eggs—and absolutely no bananas. (Odd, but true. Mildred wanted bananas nowhere near her children!) For a time, instead of going to a local school, Ben was educated in a tent school organized by his mother so that he would be outside in the fresh air while he was learning. Bedtime was
exactly
6:45 p.m., even if other kids were still playing.

Mildred’s rules were so rigid that she was unwittingly cruel. The young Spocks slept out on the sleeping porch (in the fresh air, of course). Always. They were warmly dressed, with warm blankets, but they were also outside in the frigid winters of New Haven, Connecticut. Nights were so cold that after little Ben used a chamber pot, the urine froze. But rules were rules and there was no hope of getting back into the warm house after 6:45 until morning.

Ben always knew his mother loved her children. In fact, the arrival of a baby in the Spock household was a celebration, and Mildred’s joy in her infants would later inspire Spock’s own career as a pediatrician. But Mildred was so stern and moralistic that it was almost impossible to win her approval. And when she thought herself in the right, she never hesitated to punish her children—though usually with deprivation or withering scorn rather than with spankings.

If physical punishment was rare, hugs were even rarer. Ben found his mother intimidating and he wrote late in his life that, thanks to Mildred, “All my life, up to this day, I’ve felt guilty until proven innocent.”

As Ben grew into his teens, his relationship with his mother only got worse. Mildred continued to control Ben’s life, but now she also showed a strong puritanical streak. To get him away from girls, she sent him to a boarding school for boys. There the teenager experienced all the usual emotions of a young man trying to fit in—except homesickness (can you blame him?).

Successful in his education, Ben went on to Yale University, but lived at home. His mother continued to dominate and frustrate him until 1924, when he competed in Paris on the U.S. Olympic rowing team. The United States won a gold medal, but Ben’s real victory was the joy of being so far from Mildred and emerging from under her thumb.

After graduating from Yale, Spock went on to attend medical school at Columbia University. He married and settled down in New York City—a sophisticated location far from mom. He opened a pediatric practice and fathered children of his own. But Mildred’s legacy remained, so much so that Ben felt it hurt his ability to be a loving father to his own boys. He decided that “there must be pleasanter ways to raise children.”

Spock began formulating his own ideas on child raising and wrote them into a book. From the beginning of his work until the end, he had differences with Mom. Instead of putting an emphasis on raising the perfect child as
Mildred had, he believed in supporting and loving every child as an individual. “Every baby needs to be smiled at,” Spock advised, “talked to, played with, fondled—gently and lovingly.”

The pediatrician turned his back on Mildred’s harsh control of her children to make them better people. “Positive traits in children,” said Spock, “emerge naturally when they are given love and nurturing.” And where Mildred was stern and rigid, Spock was flexible. “You may hear people say that you have to get your baby strictly regulated in his feeding, sleeping, bowel movements, and other habits—but don’t believe this. He doesn’t have to be sternly trained.” (Translation: if the sleeping porch is too cold, you can bring your child indoors, and if he likes bananas—no problem!)

The good doctor didn’t always disagree with Mildred. He found it “absolutely fair to expect children to go to bed at a designated hour.” Late in his life, he credited vegetarianism with helping to restore his health. Also like his mother, he recommended less meat for children and even mentioned the benefits of fresh air! “Cool or cold air improves appetite, puts color in the cheeks, and gives more pep to humans of all ages.” But his recommendation was for playing in fresh cold air, not sleeping in it. Spock warned against putting babies and children to sleep in too cold a spot because “that could lower their body temperature to dangerous levels.”

Spock denied that he wrote his book to rebel against his mother. And though Dr. Spock’s book was widely acclaimed, he wasn’t comfortable until he found out what
Mildred thought of it. “[A] young man’s book on child-bearing might be thought of as a possible criticism of his mother,” he later admitted. But when Spock asked her opinion, Mildred, 70 years old and widowed, looked at her son and gave him the answer he least expected. “Why Bennie, I think it’s quite sensible,” she said.

It’s the maternal instinct—at 24 frames a second! Herewith a sampling of films featuring some of the best moms the cinema has to offer.

Aliens
—Wait a minute, you say? Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley may be a xenomorph-killin’ action heroine in this classic 1986 sci-fi film and she even saves a little girl, but she’s not a
mother.
Ah, just go to your local video store and rent the director’s-cut version on DVD and you’ll discover that Ripley is indeed a mother, who learns to her grief that she was 57 years late to her daughter’s 11th birthday party because she was floating in space for all those years. This maternal grief and guilt provides an extra dimension of depth to her subsequent bonding with preteen alien-attack survivor Newt (Carrie Henn) and illuminates the lengths she’ll go to in order to protect her, including fighting hand to hand (well, claw to mechanical claw) with the 20-foot-high queen alien in the film’s climactic scenes. It’s a “good mom/bad mom” kind of thing. Shame that
Alien 3
came along and ruined everything. But forget about that and just enjoy Ripley’s fierce maternal instinct, backed up by guns. Lots and lots of guns.

Bambi
—The world’s most selfless mother. First she raises the child of the ruler of the forest as a single mother, with no help at all from the dad. She teaches her child the ways
of the forest, explains about evil (“Man was in the forest”), and then, when that evil threatens her child, sacrifices herself so her child can live. Only then does Dad show up (yeah, nice absentee parenting there,
pops
). Bambi’s mom is so selfless that she doesn’t even
get her own name.
Go on, see if you can think of it. The death of Bambi’s mother famously traumatized generations of tiny filmgoers into an aversion to killing deer so pronounced that it actually has a term in wildlife management circles: “the Bambi effect.”

Dolores Claiborne
—In a slightly different take on the definition of “good mom,” Kathy Bates plays a hardscrabble Yankee suspected of murdering the woman for whom she works. As the film goes on, we find out that this isn’t the first time she’s been suspected of killing someone—and that the previous suspected murder has to do with Dolores’s now-estranged daughter, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh. The movie is based on the Stephen King novel of the same name, but the film both elaborates and centers on the contentious relationship between mother and daughter and just how far a mother will go to protect the innocent child in her care. Not cheerful, but certainly gripping.

Stella Dallas
—The world’s most selfless mother, human division. Ironically the film shares some plot points with
Bambi.
There’s a mom raising the child of a powerful man as a single mother, teaching the kid the ways of the world, and then sacrificing herself for the good of her offspring. In this case, however, mom doesn’t take a bullet, she just sends her kid to go live with the rich and powerful dad. The story is not unfairly described as a politically incorrect melodrama by critics, who are legion, but as film historian scholar Leslie Halliwell noted: “Audiences came to sneer
and stayed to weep.” If you’re interested, this film comes in three flavors: the hard-to-find 1925 silent version; the classic 1937
Stella Dallas
, which features Barbara Stanwyck as the selfless mom in question, and the more recent 1990 version
Stella
, which features Bette Midler. Whichever one you choose, keep the tissue box nearby.

Almost Famous
—Frances McDormand plays a mother who lets her 15-year-old son, a budding journalist, tour with a rock band in the hedonistic days of the early 1970s. Normally this would probably qualify someone as a
bad
mom. But McDormand’s character is neither stupid nor clueless, and shows how a good mom is not only the mother to a child, but the midwife to the man that the boy will become. She understands and trusts her son enough to let him have the adventure—one which does ultimately open his eyes to the world. Which is not to say mom passively waves good-bye to her kid as he goes on the road. One of the film’s best scenes has one of the rockers picking up the phone to charm McDormand and getting slapped down by her no-nonsense awareness of what’s really going on out there on tour. Anyone who can humble a rock star deserves your respect.