HOME / family: Snapshots of life at home.

Playing Catch-UpMy son is better than me at baseball—the discomfort of parental envy.

By Emily BazelonPosted Thursday, July 9, 2009, at 4:54 PM ET

(Continued from page 1)

RSS

Baseball, Scrabble—what's next? That's the anxiety at the root of this parental envy, I think: Our sense of mortality, fading glory, heights unscaled in a sport or skill or realm of knowledge. By doing something well, our children force us to see that we are doing that thing poorly. And they make us let go of the illusion that we'll ever do it masterfully.

Mythology and fairy tales offer examples of parents who turn pathological when faced with their children's surpassing achievements. For fathers and sons, the best or rather worst example I can think of is Cronus, who overcomes his own father, Uranus, and then actually eats his son, Zeus, after he is told that Zeus' destiny is to overpower him. In this myth, the mother is her son's defender: She fools Cronus into swallowing a stone instead of her baby and then hides Zeus so he can grow up away from his father's wrath. And then, of course, Zeus fulfills his destiny.

So Cronus was right to worry. Just like the wicked stepmothers in Cinderella and Snow White were right to worry about the threats posed by the stepdaughters they tried to squash. I think the step relationship here is fairy-tale cover for resentments that could just as well be about plain old mothers and daughters. In Snow White, the Wicked Queen is too vain to bring herself to cede the stage to the loveliness of youth. It's all very transparent: She tries to have her stepdaughter killed so that she, the older woman, can remain the fairest in all the land. I don't have daughters, but I imagine that a lot of women feel a twinge of this when their daughters turn into swanlike teenagers.

A couple of modern examples: The father (played by Robert Duvall) in The Great Santini who loses it when his son surpasses him in basketball, and starts whaling on his kid, in a riveting scene. The mother (Anne Bancroft) in The Graduate who seduces the confused Dustin Hoffman before he shows up to take her daughter on a date. I'm having a harder time coming up with examples of mothers who envy their sons in distressing or interesting ways or fathers who envy their daughters. (Ideas? Send me an e-mail.) Maybe that is because the most typical trope is about fathers trying to cling to their superior physical prowess and mothers trying to cling to their sexual powers.

But if the patterns of envy are less visible across gender lines, from mother to son and father to daughter, that doesn't mean they aren't there, beneath the surface. Novelist Zadie Smith, in an essay written after her father Harvey's death, writes about her father watching from below as she climbed the ladder of British class and education, through the lens of her father's affection for the sitcoms Fawlty Towers and Hancock's Half Hour.* She says of the latter show's bumbling male foil, "Hancock's heartbreaking inability to pass as a middle-class beatnik or otherwise pull himself out of the hole he was born in was a source of great mirth to Harvey, despite the fact that this was precisely his own situation." She continues:

And Hancock and his descendants served as a constant source of conversation between my father and me, a vital link between us when, class-wise, and in every other wise, each year placed us farther apart. As in many British families, it was university wot dunnit. When I returned home from my first term at Cambridge, we couldn't discuss the things I'd learned, about Anna Karenina, or G. E. Moore, or Gawain and his staggeringly boring Green Knight, because Harvey had never learned them. … When meditating on the sitcom, you extrapolate from the details, which in Britain are almost always signifiers of social class: Hancock's battered homburg, Fawlty's cravat, Partridge's driving gloves, Brent's fake Italian suits. It's a relief to be able to laugh at these things. In British comedy, the painful class dividers of real life are neutralized and exposed. In my family, at least, it was a way of talking about things we didn't want to talk about.

That is profound, whereas my grudging feelings when my kids outstrip me are merely mundane. Maybe I'll be spared the more wrenching kind of discomfort. But, of course, at the same time, I should hope for it. Harvey Smith may have felt bittersweet about his daughter's learning and success as it took her away from him. But the rest of us get to read her books.

This article also appears in Double X.

Correction, July 10, 2009: The original sentence left out the show Hancock's Half Hour, the reference for the quote in the next sentence. (Return to the corrected sentence.)

Page: 1 | 2SINGLE PAGE

E-MAIL

RECOMMEND... Get Slate RSS Feeds

Emily Bazelon is a Slate senior editor and an editor of DoubleX.

Illustration by Robert Neubecker.

COMMENTS

Don't feel too bad about those barehanded catches, Emily.

Baseball players field with gloves because it's a lot easier to do and a lot less likely to result in injury than barehanding. Major league players make barehanded catches only when absolutely necessary in order to save a close play, and pulling one off frequently lands them on an ESPN highlight reel. So the fact that you could barehand your son's throws without too much trouble suggests that he's got a ways to go before he really outstrips you in baseball.

Can't help you with the Scrabble, though.

-- MplsKid
(To reply, click here)

I read recently that most of the villainesses in the original folktales/fairytales were actually the biological mothers of the heroines - the Grimms changed them to stepmothers in their books in order to uphold the sanctity of motherhood, apparently.

Scary thought, that you might be jealous enough of your own daughter to make her eat poison.

-- Tinyredcar
(To reply, click here)

What did you think of this article?

Join The Fray: Our Reader Discussion Forum

POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES