Remembering Jean Kerr


http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2003/0303.austin.html

I searched on "Jean Kerr " today, just on a whim. I don't know why. Probably to distract myself from my new internet hobby of searching for a free African grey parrot (an impossible task). I found the above article by Elizabeth Austin.

Like Elizabeth Austin, I loved Jean Kerr when I was in high school. I don't know which of her books were or were not in print at that time, because I got all my books at the library. I didn't know anything about Jean Kerr's contributions to the national concept of combining motherhood and career. I liked her because she was funny, she wrote beautifully, and she had the kind of household that I thought I'd like to live in. (And the movie "Please Don't Eat the Daisies" is not the book, so don't assume you know Jean Kerr if you just saw the movie.)

I was an only child and terribly shy. I had no friends for, literally, years on end in junior high and high school. Jean Kerr and Marie Killilea lived next door to each other, both had large families with lots of pets, and both wrote books about them (anyone remember "Karen" and "With Love From Karen," books that made having cerebral palsy socially acceptable back when it wasn't?).

As an adult with my own kids, I still like Jean Kerr. Jean Kerr accepted that kids act like kids, and that adults are naturally driven crazy by this. One of her kids once unrolled a roll of toilet paper from an upstairs window, and when she yelled at him, it turned out that he just wanted to know how long a roll of toilet paper WAS. That's what kids are like, but today's soccer mom mentality seems to me to insist that either (1) kids are really just like us and can behave rationally if we just Parent correctly, or (2) we are just like them, and we should be sure to participate in Directed Play with our toddlers and attend all the soccer games for our school-agers. (My husband says his parents never attended a kids' sports event, ever--and they had six kids in the 1950's and 60's.)

Instructions on How To Blog always say you have to find a niche--you write strictly about parenting, or Quaker parrots, or how to hack free music for your ipod. This article about Jean Kerr mentions her unconcern about combining stories about her kids, her home, and her career in her books. Essays on producing a play appear next to essays on finding the right lunch money. ("I'll be glad when they raise the price of milk to ten cents--they're entitled to their profit just like everyone else, and dimes--you can find dimes.")

Everyone's life is a niche in and of itself, I think. We don't have to compartmentalize our kids. If I want to post in one blog about our dog Lurch, and our kids, and what life was like when my husband and I were young and whether we remember at-home milk delivery, well, it's all part of my life. And if I were producing plays, I ought to be able to throw that in too, I think.

I probably don't have the above Jean Kerr quote exactly right, so don't hold me to it. I didn't look it up. I read her books so often as a teenager that I remember swathes of them. I was familiar with all the quotes in the above article. My favorite Jean Kerr essay was the beautiful one where she said they may have made mistakes in raising their kids, but they did one thing right--they taught them not to be afraid of poetry. I felt like I could see her kids myself, standing there with their hair tousled and sneakers dirty, reciting Browning.

Anyway. Elizabeth Austin points out that to Jean Kerr, parenting was a pass/fail event. Or maybe in the 50's in general, parenting was a pass/fail event.

I think that's the most valuable thing I can take away from this article. I am a pass/fail parent. They're all alive and doing reasonably okay. I forget birthday party invitations and I don't like to cook and I can barely bring myself to provide decent Halloween costumes (geez, money for something they're only going to wear for a few hours?). But they have lots of pets, and we take them to the library, and I get everyone to school on time almost every day. I'm passing. There was a time in our society when that was enough.

There was one Jean Kerr quote that I have remembered frequently since we brought home Francie, now age four, from Haiti. One of the Kerr kids was, shall we say, unusually challenging--like Francie. He attended Catholic school, and one of the nuns once said something along the lines of, "He may be bishop someday if I let him grow up."