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I was reading a discussion on Scans_Daily today that circled around one of my pet peeves: the importance of a "normal" life. I don't know why this bugs me--I can remember getting into a big fight about it once regarding a kids' book years ago.
Let me define normal in this context. Sometimes fandom etc. uses "normal" to describe people not in fandom, often associating the word with things that are boring and mundane. That's not what I mean here. I don't think there's anything wrong with living a "normal" life that you enjoy. I don't think that Jim and Pam on The Office have betrayed themselves or us by admitting that they are satisfied working at a small paper company while they enjoy each other and their baby probably soon to be babies.
This is not about putting down the "normal" life--it's more about the opposite, the sometimes unthinking judgment that "normal" is healthy and therefore "abnormal" is unhealthy.
I’m talking about situations where, for instance, certain details associated with suburban American childhoods are held to be immensely important for development in ways they probably aren’t. I remember someone once telling me that when Jodie Foster was asked her about not having a childhood, because she was a child actress her entire life, she replied basically: wtf? I did have a childhood. Just because I didn't have the childhood you did doesn't make it not a childhood. I so love her for that because it sounds like she had a really awesome childhood in some ways. It’s also like how on sitcoms whenever characters have babies it suddenly becomes important to their healthy development that they live in the suburbs.
There's plenty of stories of child actors going off the deep end--it can be a terrible life. But it also, it seems to me, can be particularly good life. One where a kid learns how to be a professional and work with adults from an early age, makes contacts and money to go to college. Or has plenty of fun meeting different people, going on location, learning new skills and acting. The idea that the job would *take away* from childhood always seemed very strange to me. There’s plenty of pitfalls and bad things a child could learn (especially if they don’t make it as an adult actor), but professional acting in general doesn’t seem automatically harmful.
The conversation on S_D, which was pretty fascinating to me, centered on the idea of "play." A character was brought to a moon bounce to jump around and learn how to “have fun.” What was (rightfully imo) challenged was the idea that this character didn't know how to have fun because he hadn't experienced this kind of recognizable experience of fun. Things the character was showed being interested in, like complex math, engineering and building cars, and weaponry, didn’t count as fun because they were too practical and helped with his job. Or were, objectively difficult things to do.
There seemed to be this idea that learning and play were two different things, because play was by definition not practical. But the opposite is actually true. All play is about learning and gaining skills. When baby mountain goats leap around with each other or wolves play fight they're learning coordination and skills they're going to need. Humans are pretty unique in that unlike other animals we play for our entire lives. We never stop learning that way. We rehearse social skills, physical skills, and intellectual skills all the time. Puzzle solving and tinkering might look like work to people who don't like them, especially if it's at a very high level and has practical results (like figuring out who's stealing from Wayne Enterprises or creating a Batmobile that can fly) but that's just an extra plus. It's the doing that's fun.
To overly analyze the idea of these two characters on a moon bounce, for instance: Moon bounces are fun because of the sensation of bouncing, and they teach physical sensations and coordination etc. For older people moon bounces are fun in part because the sensation is fun and in part because of the nostalgia. A person who did not moon bounce as a child and regularly experiences weightlessness and bouncing in a far more extreme way (swinging from buildings on a cable) probably wouldn't find moon bounces that fun. As I said in SD, it’s would be like telling Dick Grayson he didn't know how to have fun because he found swing sets boring when he grew up on a trapeze. There’s plenty of games I found absorbing and fun as a toddler I’d find boring today.
Fun and difficult don’t have to be enemies, and work and play can spill into each other. Charles Darwin was mad about collecting beetles as a kid. The Brontes made imaginary worlds. Professional sports players often enjoy playing sports for fun. Being able to relate to people is, imo, important, and shared cultural experiences can help that, but I think that's different from subtly suggesting that having interests that seem difficult or not fun to a hypothetical average person is a problem. Or that fun/not fun and work/play are divided into categories clearly designated by laughing, yelling or the words like "game" or "fun" on one side and focus, absorption, thought and a complex result on the other.
To use Bones as an example, for instance, it’s one thing to school Brennan on times when she thinks only what she thinks and only what she knows is intelligence—that’s true and as an intelligent person she should know that. It’s quite another to tell her that she shouldn’t find anthropology and working with skeletons more fun than sitting on a beach—that’s not true.
This is maybe an idea that’s particularly important to fans of characters like House, the Leverage team, Batman etc. The Batfamily celebrates hyper-competency in the areas in which they specialize. So I think there’s a natural feeling of being threatened when designated “ordinary” characters get added to that mix. Not because the ordinary character is necessarily bad, but when they seem held up as something the super competent characters need to be more like in terms of their ordinariness. Like, would you really be interested in an ep of Star Trek where a non-Starfleet member taught the crew to have fun by toilet papering somebody’s house?
This lj is kind of proof of that of the whole premise, really. I pretty much write informal English papers for fun.
Let me define normal in this context. Sometimes fandom etc. uses "normal" to describe people not in fandom, often associating the word with things that are boring and mundane. That's not what I mean here. I don't think there's anything wrong with living a "normal" life that you enjoy. I don't think that Jim and Pam on The Office have betrayed themselves or us by admitting that they are satisfied working at a small paper company while they enjoy each other and their baby probably soon to be babies.
This is not about putting down the "normal" life--it's more about the opposite, the sometimes unthinking judgment that "normal" is healthy and therefore "abnormal" is unhealthy.
I’m talking about situations where, for instance, certain details associated with suburban American childhoods are held to be immensely important for development in ways they probably aren’t. I remember someone once telling me that when Jodie Foster was asked her about not having a childhood, because she was a child actress her entire life, she replied basically: wtf? I did have a childhood. Just because I didn't have the childhood you did doesn't make it not a childhood. I so love her for that because it sounds like she had a really awesome childhood in some ways. It’s also like how on sitcoms whenever characters have babies it suddenly becomes important to their healthy development that they live in the suburbs.
There's plenty of stories of child actors going off the deep end--it can be a terrible life. But it also, it seems to me, can be particularly good life. One where a kid learns how to be a professional and work with adults from an early age, makes contacts and money to go to college. Or has plenty of fun meeting different people, going on location, learning new skills and acting. The idea that the job would *take away* from childhood always seemed very strange to me. There’s plenty of pitfalls and bad things a child could learn (especially if they don’t make it as an adult actor), but professional acting in general doesn’t seem automatically harmful.
The conversation on S_D, which was pretty fascinating to me, centered on the idea of "play." A character was brought to a moon bounce to jump around and learn how to “have fun.” What was (rightfully imo) challenged was the idea that this character didn't know how to have fun because he hadn't experienced this kind of recognizable experience of fun. Things the character was showed being interested in, like complex math, engineering and building cars, and weaponry, didn’t count as fun because they were too practical and helped with his job. Or were, objectively difficult things to do.
There seemed to be this idea that learning and play were two different things, because play was by definition not practical. But the opposite is actually true. All play is about learning and gaining skills. When baby mountain goats leap around with each other or wolves play fight they're learning coordination and skills they're going to need. Humans are pretty unique in that unlike other animals we play for our entire lives. We never stop learning that way. We rehearse social skills, physical skills, and intellectual skills all the time. Puzzle solving and tinkering might look like work to people who don't like them, especially if it's at a very high level and has practical results (like figuring out who's stealing from Wayne Enterprises or creating a Batmobile that can fly) but that's just an extra plus. It's the doing that's fun.
To overly analyze the idea of these two characters on a moon bounce, for instance: Moon bounces are fun because of the sensation of bouncing, and they teach physical sensations and coordination etc. For older people moon bounces are fun in part because the sensation is fun and in part because of the nostalgia. A person who did not moon bounce as a child and regularly experiences weightlessness and bouncing in a far more extreme way (swinging from buildings on a cable) probably wouldn't find moon bounces that fun. As I said in SD, it’s would be like telling Dick Grayson he didn't know how to have fun because he found swing sets boring when he grew up on a trapeze. There’s plenty of games I found absorbing and fun as a toddler I’d find boring today.
Fun and difficult don’t have to be enemies, and work and play can spill into each other. Charles Darwin was mad about collecting beetles as a kid. The Brontes made imaginary worlds. Professional sports players often enjoy playing sports for fun. Being able to relate to people is, imo, important, and shared cultural experiences can help that, but I think that's different from subtly suggesting that having interests that seem difficult or not fun to a hypothetical average person is a problem. Or that fun/not fun and work/play are divided into categories clearly designated by laughing, yelling or the words like "game" or "fun" on one side and focus, absorption, thought and a complex result on the other.
To use Bones as an example, for instance, it’s one thing to school Brennan on times when she thinks only what she thinks and only what she knows is intelligence—that’s true and as an intelligent person she should know that. It’s quite another to tell her that she shouldn’t find anthropology and working with skeletons more fun than sitting on a beach—that’s not true.
This is maybe an idea that’s particularly important to fans of characters like House, the Leverage team, Batman etc. The Batfamily celebrates hyper-competency in the areas in which they specialize. So I think there’s a natural feeling of being threatened when designated “ordinary” characters get added to that mix. Not because the ordinary character is necessarily bad, but when they seem held up as something the super competent characters need to be more like in terms of their ordinariness. Like, would you really be interested in an ep of Star Trek where a non-Starfleet member taught the crew to have fun by toilet papering somebody’s house?
This lj is kind of proof of that of the whole premise, really. I pretty much write informal English papers for fun.
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Very true! I sometimes find it hard to explain to people that I have lots of fun translating or studying or researching for academic papers.
On the other hand, I think that when people say that "child actors have no childhood" they are mostly worried about the great responsibilities that are placed upon young children. Sometimes it can be very hard. But it depends on the child, of course.
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Or like the other day Jon Stewart interviewed Ron Howard about how he was so upbeat and idealistic even when he was raised in Hollywood and he had plenty of nice things to say about the experiences he had and getting confidence from his career. Course, he worked with Andy Griffith who's apparently awesome.
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I have often compared myself to my parents (of the 1970s early 1980s era) who regularly hosted formal dinner parties, had standing tennis and golf matches, and who traveled rather often . . . am I boring because I do none of these things? Am I somehow less than or socially inept because of my lack of interest in these things? Well, travel is interesting to me, but ykwim. I don't often travel. More vividly, for me, being and identifying as a goth sends oodles of stereotypes through peoples' minds (not that I'm an overt goth, because I'm not at all) . . . No, I'm actually not suicidal, morose, homicidal, or highly cynical. I have always just loved the aesthetic and the music. Am I somehow missing out on normalcy by not preferring Izods and khakis? I don't feel that way. Some of my best times and favorite memories involve the music, the underground vibe, the visual aesthetics, and the really really intelligent people I have known and met through the goth "sub"culture. Does this mean I feel I must only have gothy friends? No, not at all. It's not about extremes of normalcy -- as you say, what is normalcy? The things I enjoy the most are closely intertwined with my daily activities -- blogging; reading criminology material; reading mental health material; pet care; reading about pop culture; IMing with my friends. Am I somehow missing out on something because I prefer IM to the phone? I don't think I'm particularly abnormal because I prefer our hamster to sports, or because reading forums about aquariums and tropical fish actually interests me, LOL! I think the proverbial question of What is normal? definitely applies.
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I think your last sentence is the kicker here. Hosting dinner parties, playing tennis and golf, and travel can actually be the sign that someone IS boring, rather than the reverse. If that is what the social round expects, and you do it because of that, it doesn't make you an interesting person: it makes you a person who conforms to social expectations. It may be that you _are_ an interesting person, that you enjoy these things and get a lot out of them, but simple participation says nothing about whether the person is interesting or dull ;-)
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LOL no. No, I would not. And your last sentence in this post is awesome. I think that's it's particularly interesting point, the fact that fans of super competent characters are going to be less um... interested, perhaps, in these "average" people basically (sometimes, if I'm reading the situation correctly) giving the competent character an Awesome Learning Experience and Joy by showing them something mundane.
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From: (Anonymous)
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I think it's pretty much normal for people not to be able to get into each other's heads and understand that what I like isn't what you like. I always made a mental note to myself not to think my kids were suffering or being perverse if they didn't like what I liked, but even consciously telling myself that, I realized over and over that I just can't get into their minds to see what they like and don't like and, sometimes, it bothered me that the things I liked weren't the things they liked. I'd like to share my favorite things with someone close like my child. It's simple as that. I just stop myself from pushing too hard or browbeating because I went through it and the one thing I never wanted to do was to become my mother. Heh. Maybe, looking back, I had the most advantageous childhood as far as seeing what not to do to other people.
But, yeah, it looks like fear of someone not being the same as you or holding the same values you do. Maybe you'll be invalidated if your tenuous grasp on "normalcy" falls through. Maybe you'll find that you aren't "normal" yourself if someone else has a different idea of it. It's joining "Us" and trying to convert "Them" so there is no threat from "Them." It's a group thing, I think, and every group has its standards that people must meet to become and stay a part of that. Maybe it's fear of losing that support network and being left alone and at the mercy of "Them" that drives people. In an earlier world, this would be a real threat. Maybe that's why it's hard-wired in - for self-protection.
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I think you're right that many people can be very threatened if their view of normalcy is threatened. Especially if they have that bound up with something like friends being validating, because it sounds like your mother saw it that way. Maybe she didn't think of it that way, but it sounds like it since she was turning around and being judgmental about your failing by not having enough of them.
It's also like the comment below about the person having to patiently explain that no, they weren't suffering because they had no relationship with their father. They knew the guy and he didn't offer anything to them, so why should they waste time on a relationship that wasn't giving them anything when that time could be spent on things (and people) they did like?
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You can probably tell I didn't have the best relationship with my mother. When she died last summer, I didn't actually grieve. There are things that ought to be a certain way, my mother wanted them that way desperately, and I'm enough of a daughter to want to defend my mother, but that's about all the confusion there is. My friend, who had a similar only worse mother, and I, discussed it. What we wanted from our mothers in the end was all of those loose ends tied up, maybe a little validation of our selfhoods that we never got even though we banged our heads against brick walls all our lives to get them to notice us instead of their church friends or gossip buddies. They used us to belittle us to make themselves look better and they did it so well that no one seemed to notice. The last time my mother did that, she was in the nursing home and I was going to plug in her cell phone for her. It has a rubber stop over the connection; I bite my fingernails. She smirked at her two visiting church ladies and said, not looking at me but to me, "Let me do it. It pays to have fingernails." Fortunately, I got the stopper undone and said, "Never mind, I got it." It was crudely done. That surprised me. I think that was the only time she let the facade slip enough for anyone but me to see what she was up to.
Long story to say that I totally agree with the poster below because I never felt the lack of having my mother nearby once I was married and raising my own kids in a different state. We got along a lot better when we didn't have to spend time with each other.
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Oh God, yes. Also, OMG how I hate the idea that the more complex and difficult something is (or appears to be), the less "genuine" it is. AAAARGH! (I very nearly started a huge argument with my boss over this the other day, but then I decided it wasn't worth it.)
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Ugh. Yeah, I have waaaay too much experience with people doing this. I didn't grow up in that situation at all, and neither did most of the people I know, and most of the people I've met who did tend to assume that we've all been pining for that kind of life ever since we were children.
Part of it is that I grew up in the city, but I've found people are more clueless about non-two-parent households. I was effectively raised by just my mom even before she properly became a single mother. Lots of my friends were raised by single mothers. People who grew up in two-parent households tend to assume that we all have some kind of desperate longing to have our fathers in our lives, even those who have never met their fathers at all!
There are a few things to blame here, I think. The first is TV. Not so much the Ward Cleaver stuff, but the way characters who've grown up without a parent are always portrayed as being desperate for a relationship with that parent. If they don't act that way, it's because they're merely repressing the desperate need for said parent, and they will break down eventually. It's way harder than it should be to convince people that something they've seen play out on TV 1000 times isn't actually true. And of course, any TV show that does is now is just following an established trope.
The next problem is that people often have a limited ability to imagine the situation. They'll think they're imagining what it's like to grow up without a father at all, when they're actually imagining what it would be like if they suddenly couldn't see their own father for years. Or in my case, when I say I had next to no interaction with my father before a certain point, they'll imagine a time when their father was too busy to do something with them, as opposed to years of complete non-interaction while living in the same house.
It's really only when I try to take the word 'father' out of the equation that some people start getting it. As in, "Think of a random crazy bum you've seen shouting profanity on the street. Now, imagine people suddenly insisting you're secretly desperate for a relationship with him, whatever you might think your own feelings are..."
The last problem is psychology, and the BS idea of needing/seeking out "father figures". Believe it or not, the "ideal childhood" crap is very, very present in modern psychology, especially in family counseling. I was forced to undergo such counseling at thirteen because I was refusing mandatory visitation with my father.
The psychologist just wouldn't get at first that I didn't have any pressing need for a father figure. He'd ask questions like "What do you imagine when you think about having a better father?" And seemed confused when I was like "Huh? I've never done that."
I was old enough to demand an explanation for exactly why they were forcing me to waste three hours every week with my father, and what I got was basically the exact sort of nonsense you're talking about in the post. It was like, they saw two-parent (father and mother, of course) households as necessary for healthy development, and any deviation from this leads to DRUGS and ALCOHOL and UTTER DISASTER! So they tried to cram everyone back into something based on the father-mother model, even when it made no sense.
To be fair to the psychologist I got, he did realize how stupid the reasoning was once I made him say it out loud explicitly (and told him "You know that *I* have control over whether or not I do stuff like that, right?"). He recommended against more forced interaction. Other children aren't necessarily so lucky, though. The blind "children need a father" nonsense can lead to things like children having forced visitation with a father who's in prison for abusing them (<-this has actually happened).
And I think my comment is about as long as the post. Clearly I have Strong Feelings about this, but I will stop now.
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But that show was unusual. Usually there's this starting point that a two parent home is best and it's based on really faulty premises, especially when you're applying it to a real situation. Being biologically related to a person and even knowing that he's your father doesn't necessarily mean they're giving you something in life you couldn't live without. There is often this whole idea that kids, especially in movies, are operating under some longing for a father figure by instinct. And even in cases where they do benefit from a father figure that doesn't mean they were having a problem because they didn't have a father. They may have just been a kid in a situation where a certain kind of personality helped them.
I do love that your therapist eventually saw reason because I can't imagine how irritating it must be to have someone telling you you must waste 3 hours of your week with someone you just don't care to see. You're not covering up some hidden neurosis by saying that, you just know the relationship and get nothing from it. I mean, sure everyone would benefit from a father with whom they had a positive, loving relationship--but people benefit from any positive, loving relationship. Nobody assumes a kid absolutely must be close to their grandfather or have siblings in order to be "normal" yet plenty of people who do have those things get something out of it. Everyone's different! You are close to the people you wind up being dealt in life who provide that for you.
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Some RL people may feel the need to do that, others might not. Some RL people might buy into the idea that meeting the parent or coming to grips with a distant sort of parent will bring a break-through like a therapy session seems to do in TV shows: everyone gets weepy, the parent apologizes or beats the breast, the kid tearfully forgives, they hug... Hm. Sounds a lot like A Boy Named Sue.
Sometimes, you just want answers. No reconciliation, no snot-filled scenes, no nothing but having your say and getting it out. Finish things, tie up the loose ends.
IMO, of course. Your mileage may vary.
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That also reminds me of an article I remember reading about a couple who went through a stillborn birth. The hospital really encouraged the mother to hold the baby and maybe have a picture taken with it. I think they had the best of intentions based on their experience. They said that based on what they'd seen of others a lot of people who didn't do that regretted it later. But still it seemed for this woman to just give her a horrifying moment and a bad memory. She hadn't wanted to see the baby (she knew she was giving birth to a stillborn child beforehand) and when she took it and looked into the baby's face she was just disturbed by it.
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Thinking about the NC funeral, everyone driving along the route to the cemetery stopped their cars and got out, put hands over hearts or doffed hats even though this was not a military funeral. I remember when we used to do that in CA, back when we were told to whisper when a funeral procession went by. Odd how some things hang on in a place when they vanish in other places.
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But I know I've done that to other people. I think I may have done that about the house elf thing. Somebody was really mad that I was like, 'Yeah, so they're slaves and Harry's a slave owner and that's okay." No matter how many times they explained it to me, it just didn't hold up any other way to me!
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One of those days :P