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CPS 40(3):481-484 (2004)

Parent-Child Eros: Reclaiming the Middle Ground: A Review of The Eros of Parenthood: Explorations in Light and Dark by Noelle Oxenhandler. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2001. 321 pp.

Author: Therese Ragen PhD

Abstract

THESE are the kind of very real moments in which Noelle Oxenhandler engages the reader in her beautifully written book:

I feel this hint of censure when my daughter climbs into my bed in the morning to wake me, wrapping her muscley little arms around me. [p. 4]
The other day my youngest son came home with a project he'd made at school for Mother's Day. The children had been asked to respond to the question “What is a mommy?” and on a big sheet of paper, he had written, “I love to take hot tubs with my mommy and play games with her.” In our family, one of our favorite things is being all together in the hot tub. But seeing this in his big letters on bright paper, imagining it through the eyes of school officials, I noticed that I felt anxious. I felt that social screen that comes up between you and your own child. And I had that “what-if” feeling. What if somehow I'd done something wrong? I hadn't done anything wrong. I knew that, I know that—and yet there's something in the air that's so powerful, so oppressive, it makes you doubt yourself, it alienates you from what you know to be true. Increasingly, I've begun to feel discomfort in all sorts of places where I never did before, and it doesn't even really feel like my own discomfort. I don't know whose discomfort it is.[p. 235]
What is it like for fathers and young daughters today, when the atmosphere has become so saturated with fear of sexual abuse, with suspicion of the predatory male? [p. 242] If touching a child becomes, increasingly, something a man can do only in the privacy of his own home, does this make touching his own child even more charged? [p. 243]

Oxenhandler, a longtime contributor to the New Yorker and author of A Grief Out of Season, announces in her introduction that a “quest lies at the heart of The Eros of Parenthood” and that is to “seek to regain a certain spontaneous delight in our children as we pat them dry or twirl them in the air or gaze at them in their sleep” (p. 10). She sensitively ad

CPS 40(3):481-484 (2004)

Parent-Child Eros: Reclaiming the Middle Ground: A Review of The Eros of Parenthood: Explorations in Light and Dark by Noelle Oxenhandler. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2001. 321 pp.

Author: Therese Ragen PhD

Abstract

THESE are the kind of very real moments in which Noelle Oxenhandler engages the reader in her beautifully written book:

I feel this hint of censure when my daughter climbs into my bed in the morning to wake me, wrapping her muscley little arms around me. [p. 4]
The other day my youngest son came home with a project he'd made at school for Mother's Day. The children had been asked to respond to the question “What is a mommy?” and on a big sheet of paper, he had written, “I love to take hot tubs with my mommy and play games with her.” In our family, one of our favorite things is being all together in the hot tub. But seeing this in his big letters on bright paper, imagining it through the eyes of school officials, I noticed that I felt anxious. I felt that social screen that comes up between you and your own child. And I had that “what-if” feeling. What if somehow I'd done something wrong? I hadn't done anything wrong. I knew that, I know that—and yet there's something in the air that's so powerful, so oppressive, it makes you doubt yourself, it alienates you from what you know to be true. Increasingly, I've begun to feel discomfort in all sorts of places where I never did before, and it doesn't even really feel like my own discomfort. I don't know whose discomfort it is.[p. 235]
What is it like for fathers and young daughters today, when the atmosphere has become so saturated with fear of sexual abuse, with suspicion of the predatory male? [p. 242] If touching a child becomes, increasingly, something a man can do only in the privacy of his own home, does this make touching his own child even more charged? [p. 243]