Are You My Mother?

Imagine my surprise to pick up To Hell with All That and discover that Flanagan has recast this portion of her own personal baby-mama drama. The new version, written with just as much panache, exposes the self-loathing of what she was now terming her "conversion experience"—i.e. the point in the saga where she realized that she's got the upper hand in a very unequal relationship and tried, in noblesse oblige fashion, to work out her liberal guilt.

In the new version, Flanagan found herself completely undone by caring for her twins by the time Paloma arrived each morning. We're with her so far, right? Except that her response, upon recovering enough of her faculties to see that Paloma and her boys truly enjoyed each other, was to hang around making sure that the nanny didn't usurp her. As if that weren't enough, she wants Paloma's companionship, but she also wants her absolution for the fact that Flanagan occupies the more enviable of their two positions.

The passage of the book that has most flattened the mothers of my acquaintance:

In our own way, we loved each other. Still, I was the boss.

"Paloma, Patrick is throwing up!" I would tell her, and she would literally run to his room, clean the sheets, change his pajamas, spread a clean towel on his pillow, feed him ice chips, sing to him. I would stand in the doorway, concerned, making funny faces at Patrick to cheer him up—the way my father did when I was sick and my mother was taking care of me.

I wanted Paloma to be my friend and equal, but I also wanted her to do what I told her. Most of the time she did.

The new version does a much better job of getting to the heart of the matter, and in the process gives working mothers much less of a shellacking. But it still warily circles the most obvious thing highlighted by stacking Flanagan's writings end-to-end: Being a housewife is more easily romanticized when one doesn't do any of the actual scut work. In an ode to Martha Stewart and other doyennes of the pleasant and peaceful home, Flanagan breezily confides that neither she nor her husband has ever changed a bed sheet, and that Mom tried to teach her to iron, but that the lesson never took.

As for her nostalgia for that mother love, the book goes a few steps toward explaining the endurance of the mystique. She writes that her own mother "abandoned" Flanagan when she was 12, by going back to work. This resolved mom's low-level depression. Mom was suddenly airier, and more pleasant to be around, Flanagan concedes, but to this day she has a pathological fear of being alone in a house. (One more thing for poor Paloma to tend to, I would suggest.)

Mom may have gone missing, but dad, like every man in this book, is a ghost. Her husband spends most of the time working overtime in corporate America to support this venture. His lone appearance comes in a chapter I can only describe as the book's final slap-down. Here, Flanagan describes battling breast cancer and concludes that the domestic tranquility she'd created for her husband—or at least directed others to create—are deposits in some sort of account that secured his fidelity. (I don't know whether Newt Gingrich's abandoned ex worked—perhaps she deserved her sickbed comeuppance.)

Flanagan, for her part, realizes you've got to earn that loyalty in a marriage. During a recent appearance on The Colbert Report, Flanagan trotted out another of her themes: that the lady of the house, as she puts it, will be expected to put out with some regularity. Hey, so she's a romantic!

Flanagan has been pilloried in the press—mostly by women—and the great majority of working mothers probably have no idea that she disapproves of the way they manage their families—by choice, necessity, or some combination of the two. Which brings us to why we shouldn't just say to hell with To Hell with All That and be done with it.