"Confessions of a Slacker Mom" by Muffy Mead-Ferro’s
If each generation had the capacity to laugh at itself, the world would be a better place. The Donna Reed generation took itself so seriously when I was growing up, that Donna, in her white-frilled apron, couldn’t be laughed at. She was doing it right. When my generation of the ‘60s & ‘70s came along, we laughed out loud, pointed fingers, and said, “I’ll never be like that!”
Alas, we did become our parents. And we couldn’t laugh at ourselves. Until now. In “Confessions of a Slacker Mom,” (Pince-Nez Press, January 2004), Muffy Mead-Ferro, a first-time Salt Lake author, blasts our sacred cows. With sarcastic wit, she laces into the parenting generation of the ’90s and ‘00s. Take the book’s opening paragraph, for example:
“For us moms or moms-to-be in these information awash and overachieving times, it feels as though, somehow, we’ve become everyone else’s property. Wards of the state. Imbeciles. We can’t put a toe out of bed in the morning without feeling the pressure to buy a bunch of expensive equipment and do a whole load of nutty and, frankly, inconvenient things in the interest of being a super-mom and producing a super-kid. We’re inundated with instructions on how best to achieve these goals. And we’re not supposed to question either one — the instructions or the goals. It makes me want to put my toe right back under the covers and keep it there.”
The hilarity of “nutty and inconvenient things” include writing a letter of recommendation to an exclusive school for a 2-year-old, using a plug-in container to keep baby wipes warm, and piping Mozart into the womb so your baby will become a math wizard. “When it occurred to me that Einstein’s mom didn’t do that either,” Mead-Ferro writes about the in-vitro concert, “I went right ahead and crossed that off my list of things to feel guilty about.”
“Guilt works,” she said looking directly at me over her latté at Park City’s Alpine Internet Café. I had asked her why she believed today’s parents are embroiled in a snarl of “get and spend.” “Marketers will stop at nothing. They tell a mom her child might not be up to speed if she doesn’t buy this product, or her baby won’t be comfortable without this diaper, or her kid won’t be as smart if she doesn’t buy this educational toy.” Marketing messages tell us what we’re supposed to be striving for and we’ve been taken in, says Mead-Ferro, who has spent the last 20 years creating marketing campaigns for corporate clients. She knows.
She’s also observed that a lot of women in the corporate world attack motherhood the same way they attack their jobs — with competitive zeal. “I could start at 8 a.m. and not be done until 8 p.m. with the enriching activities for my children,“ she points out.
So what’s her prescription for change? “Confessions of a Slacker Mom” is not just about a philosophy, it’s about a family — Mead-Ferro’s own family, which owned a cattle ranch in Wyoming where she grew up. “Previous generations have raised lots of happy, healthy babies — even smart ones — without any of the things I had on my baby shopping list,” she writes. They made do.
Now there’s a philosophy I can embrace. Living on a 40-acre ranch just outside of Park City, I make do all the time. Before we had electricity, we made do with kerosene lamps. I had an ice chest for food storage. Now I have a bar-sized refrigerator in our tiny house. Sure, things will improve when the addition gets done, but meanwhile, we’re making do with what we have, what we can afford, and the luxury of time we aren’t sacrificing to the prevailing American culture of “getting and spending.”
That’s the message Mead-Ferro is trying to get across. Along with one other: Making do builds character. On her family’s ranch in Wyoming, she learned the value of work when she wanted to buy a hula hoop at the age of 7. “I knew my mom wasn’t planning to run into town and buy one for me,” she wrote, contrasting her childhood with today’s kids, whose rooms are stuffed with personal computers, televisions, and battery-operated toys. “My mom volunteered a list of jobs I could do if I wanted to earn the money. Taking out all the trash: 05 cents. Cleaning the bathroom: 10 cents. And so on. My mother was not influenced by such radical ideas as minimum wage.”
On Mead-Ferro’s family ranch growing up, there was also no childproofing. “You can’t make an environment that includes irrigation ditches, large animals and heavy equipment perfectly safe. So what you do instead is teach your children how to avoid the dangers. And you realize there are going to be lots of bumps and scrapes along the way,” she said.
Rather than turning down the home hot water heater, she gives her children information about how to avoid getting scalded at the sink. Her advice for climbing tall fences? “Go ahead. If you fall off, it will hurt.” If her children try something and there’s a bad outcome, they won’t make the same mistake again. Over-protectiveness breeds children who expect the world to be a perfect place — and it’s not.
I asked Mead-Ferro how she thought the bumps and scrapes of her childhood had prepared her for corporate life. “I had no expectation of things ever going my way,” she said. “I don’t think I suffered from the disappointment, and certainly not the immobilization, that I see some people suffering from.” The ability to bounce back — in corporate terms called “resilience” — is an essential skill of today’s workers. Layoffs and office politics dish out painful hard knocks.
“I do wonder if a lot of adults were at some point led to believe that someone was supposed to be watching out for them,” she writes. “That if they’ve suffered an injury, or even an illness, it must have been because of some fundamental breakdown in the ‘system,’ that someone should be held responsible for. In court, preferably.”
Mead-Ferro’s message is that raising kids who expect life to be a sumptuous buffet can’t become the creators and doers of the next generation because they‘ve never known frustration. Success — building children who will “get ahead’ — means teaching children how to think for themselves and solve their own problems by not doing it for them.
So what’s next for this bold author? “I’ve been thinking a lot about my role as a wife,” she said. Uh oh. Look for “Confessions of a Slacker Wife” due out in bookstores next spring.
Lola Beatlebrox is the mother of two, who are well balanced, engaging human beings despite her slacking off. She lives on a 40-acre ranch with two dogs, three cats, a llama, and metal sculptor, Zafod Beatlebrox.
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