Motherhood Opens a New Vista in Writing

My dismay at how I felt our culture was hurting the innocence of children had a positive flip side: It handed me an untapped and virtually limitless new arena for my writing.

“Mom bats the ball. See it go!” My five-year-old son, Avi, read from Clifford at Bat as his four-year-old brother, Noah, sat next to us listening attentively. Noah had been a book hound since he was still crawling, dragging a book across the floor till he reached me at ankle level, tilting his face up and lifting the book toward me like an offering.

As a mother I was naturally thrilled with Avi’s budding literacy. As a mother who was a writer, I also savored a delicious anticipation that this son, and all my children, would always find as much pleasure in the world of reading as I had. My available time to read for pleasure was tightly constrained–I had three sons under six years of age and worked part-time writing freelance. Still, I loved every moment I spent with my two oldest boys at home, reading from our children’s library. We loved The Runaway Bunny, Paddington, and Mercer Mayer’s charming “critter” books, such as Just Me and My Mom. As siblings accumulated for Avi, the pages of other “critter” books, including The New Baby and, perhaps not coincidentally, I Was So Mad, really took a beating.

In just a few weeks, Avi’s reading level had catapulted from a hesitant, struggling effort to sound out the words to a budding confidence and fluency. So it was only a matter of time before he would become captivated by reading simple yet saucy messages. One day as I was driving us in the neighborhood, a billboard caught his attention. “Get your butt in here!” he read from the enormous outdoor advertisement. The ad for a popular clothing retailer splashed the image of a sexy woman, clad in a tight-fitting pair of jeans, the zipper halfway unzipped, revealing several inches of her sleek, bare abdomen. Maybe she hadn’t been able to decide what shirt to wear by the time the photographer showed up.

Avi laughed as he read it. No doubt this sentence struck him as funny because he knew that the word “butt,” while not a “bad” word, was not one we used at home when referring to our back sides. Some would call us prudes, but in the Gruen home we unapologetically taught our children to use language in a refined way. We didn’t even allow the children to call one another “stupid” or to say “shut up.” Why not set the bar high at the beginning?

My guilty pleasure–ungrammatical, heady rock music

(Confession is said to be good for the soul, so I admit that when alone in the car, I’d still blast my favorite rock and roll music nearly at rock concert decibels. I wouldn’t want my kids to hear most of this, at least, not for many years, but for me it was an essential, slightly guilty pleasure. As with chocolate, I could not imagine life without steady, heady doses of the music I loved. My guilt wasn’t even so much about the sordid themes in some of the songs as it was in the lyrics studded with grammar fails. Bad grammar must have been locked and loaded into rock because it’s so much easier to rhyme “ain’t” than “isn’t” and “done” with “doesn’t.”)

Back to my story: The billboard upset me. Mild as it was for this time and place, its vulgarity and sexual exploitation struck another blow against my children’s innocence. Our media culture kept growing bolder, cruder, and coarser, though the trend began many decades earlier. Avi was too young to understand what the ad was really selling–for now. But as he and his siblings grew up, they would face an endless barrage of words and images that offended our values. Soon enough they’d hear and read other words and images from the media, and probably from other kids whose parents allowed a broader range of content than we did–or who might have seen or heard the material by accident. Billboards, music, movies, TV shows, video games, magazines, and books—even children’s books—seemed to push the envelope further and further away from traditional values that I believed were healthy and nurturing. I hated to see producers of media content chipping away at my son’s innocence when he was only five.

Flipping through the mail the next day I received a postcard, addressed to “resident,” with the exact same billboard ad in miniature. Though small and easily tossed away, the postcard made me furiously indignant. I found the phone number of the retailer’s corporate office and called to protest. Surprisingly, I was connected with someone who sounded as if he had some weight to throw around over there.

Selling the essay felt like a victory. The editor’s purchase affirmed that many other parents were likely to share my concerns that our coarsening culture was desensitizing our children—and us.

“The sexual message on the billboard was inappropriate enough,” I said, “but you had no right to send this to my home, my personal space. You’ve definitely lost me as a customer.” He listened politely, more than I would have expected, and said he would reconsider this campaign with colleagues. The billboard didn’t last long, to my relief, though I don’t know what ultimately made it disappear.

My dismay at what I felt the declining culture was doing to hurt children’s innocence did have a positive flip side: It handed me an untapped and virtually limitless new arena for my writing. With my righteous indignation on behalf of the Children of America still sizzling, I wrote a column about the billboard issue and sold it to a regional parenting magazine. Looking at the world through the eyes of my young, impressionable children, I was determined to fight to protect their innocence to a reasonable degree—life would strip it away soon enough, I wrote. Selling the essay felt like a victory, not for the pittance that these magazines paid but because the editor’s purchase affirmed that many other parents were likely to share my concerns that our coarsening culture was desensitizing our children—and us.

Life’s frustrations and upsets are always gifts to writers in their own way. A favorite joke of mine goes something like this: A woman shows up to her weekly writers’ group and announces, “I have news. I’m getting divorced, my dog died, and I need a knee replacement.” A man in group glares at her grumbles resentfully, “Some writers have all the luck.”

Unexpectedly, my fight against the billboard gave rise to an odd hobby. For years after this incident, whenever a particularly offensive advertisement blighted our local landscape, I’d call the agency that leased the space and explained politely but firmly that the ads offended our community standards. Some of these images were staggeringly gross, and it was hard for me to believe that anyone could have green-lighted them. Word spread around about my success, and people began reporting sightings of new contenders for the Latest Offensive Billboard in Town: “Did you see what just went up on Olympic and La Cienega? It’s sickening. You won’t believe it. Can you help get it down?”

We cared deeply about children’s physical health—we pushed bike helmets, exercise, limiting sugar, and taught about “stranger danger.” But who outside conservative and/or religious circles was even thinking about our children’s spiritual health, and the damage that raunchy, violent, and otherwise explicit material could have on them?

I could not change the trajectory of our society, but I could agitate for a kinder, gentler one for the sake of our children through writing. I wrote about The Parents Television Council (PTC), an organization pushing back against networks that were broadcasting completely inappropriate content even during TV’s evening “family hour.” The PTC urged viewers to call and write advertisers that supported these programs and boycott them if needed.

Here’s what I couldn’t understand: As a society we cared deeply about children’s physical health—we pushed bike helmets, exercise, limiting sugar, and taught about “stranger danger.” But outside of folks in conservative and/or religious circles or activist groups such as at the PTC, who was even thinking about our children’s psychological and spiritual health and the damage that raunchy, violent, and otherwise explicit material could have on them? A show aimed at small children, AHHH! Real Monsters, featured a charmless trio that included one who looked like a demon elf, another who held his own eyeballs, and a third who looked like a Tim Burton creation with crazy eyes. They all went to monster school to learn how to scare humans. If your first-grader had nightmares, you might have had Nickelodeon to thank.

As a young mother, my ambition to write had not waned, but it now competed for attention with my career as a mom. Motherhood came first for me, but I had my moments of professional envy, too. I began to notice that some photos of editors of women’s magazines were looking younger and younger. I’d stare at the editor’s photo, feel my lips harden in a line, and think, that could have been me in that photo, writing the editor’s column, deciding what went in each issue. Fortunately, the thought was only a flash. I was blessed, very blessed, to be living a wonderful life, growing in my connection to my faith, nurturing my children, in a happy marriage, and feeling like a valued part of my Jewish community. And I also got to write! In addition to paid freelance work, mostly still in healthcare, I also did some volunteer writing for our synagogue newsletter and crafted a series of advertisements for our small day school—my first time writing ad copy. It was increasingly clear that the impact I wanted to have in life would not happen through my writing alone. It was an awesome realization that being a mother could have impact beyond anything I could ever write.