Mars Needs Moms

I was listening to an old interview with Berkeley Breathed on The Diane Rehm show yesterday, when I was driving Wilder to his doctor's appointment.  I have a soft spot for Breathed, because I was a huge Bloom County fan back in the day.  Now he's written a children's book, Mars Needs Moms.

I hadn't previously heard of or seen the book, but I am pretty sure I take issue with it.

Breathed, in the course of the interview, said that he wrote the book after becoming a parent and realizing that he would "take a bullet" for his children.  The book features a little boy whose mother, whom he has previously seen only as a disciplinarian and diet-monitor, is kidnapped by Martians who want Mommies.  The child rides off to his mother's rescue, and after learning lessons in all the great services Mommies provide, the boy is saved from asphyxiation by his mother, who gives her space helmet to him.

Apparently this is quite controversial, because there's an illustration of the mother in her death throes after she gives her child the helmet.  There's a reprieve at the end, of course.  (Really this is an incredibly arrogant blog post, criticizing a book I've never seen.)

I don't know that I think the illustration of Mom in agony is, per se, awful, but this strikes me as the most self-indulgent theme for a picture book imaginable.  Much creepier than that I Love You Forever book.

What parent wants to convey to his children the message that their parents would die for them?  In a picture book?

"Sweetie, Mommy would die for you.  Here's the visual!  Now give me a kiss.  Sweet dreams!"

Isn't it one of the defining aspects of an ideal childhood (the kind no one ever gets), that you can take your parents' love for granted?

I hope I am never so creeped-out and needy that I feel the desire to club my children over the head with the outer limits of my love.  Wouldn't it be more healthy to show them I love them by, I don't know, providing healthy limits and nutritious foods, and not expecting my children to recall my sacrificial love when they're pushing against me, whining all the way?

Ick, Berkeley Breathed.  Ick ick ick.

Comments

[luolin]

Take it for granted, indeed. Reading a book about it seems a bit like protesting too much (to jump on the bandwagon of discussing a book I haven't read).

You prompted me to finally post my worries about the "always there for you" aspect of all this.

[Lisa V]

It sounds a little more advanced than Runaway Bunny.

Bert loves I'll Love You Forever (I even wrote about this yesterday). I think it's creepy and stalkerish. But then I am a cynical bitch.

And frankly, I have seen up close and in person that every one has limits on their love. Even parents. I would die for my children. However, there are things they could do that would make a relationship with them difficult, if not impossible. I no longer do the "love has no bounds" ideas with them.

[Jackie]

This reminds me of my least favorite book ever, "The Giving Tree," which is supposed to be all touching but instead is creepy and icky.

[Foster]

Hmm. As a child, I absolutely adored the books The Giving Tree, Runaway Bunny, and Ill Love You Forever. I even put some of my favourite pics from Bunny in frames to hang in our babys room. I always interpreted Tree as not a reflection of a parents love, but as Gods. Yes, even as a child. Well, whatever. I guess I just dont see The Big Deal.

[electriclady]

You know what makes "Love You Forever" so creepy to me? I mean, besides the weird attachment issues? The fact that the mother climbs in the window in the middle of the night and CRAWLS ACROSS THE FLOOR to her sleeping grown-up son's bed. We actually have two copies, one in English and one in French, but I don't know if I can ever bring myself to read it to BG.

I also have ick issues with "The Giving Tree." But then again, I am cold and dead inside.

[DaniGirl]

Oh, I too was a huge Bloom County fan back in the day... but this book does seem a tad, um, odd. I have issues with Love You Forever, too, but have never enunciated them quite so well as Mad Hatter did here: http://madhattermommy.blogspot.com/2006/11/picture-books-i-abhor-part-2.html

[Jody]

Yes, and Mad Hatter
perfectly captures my unarticulated complaint with Mars Needs Mommies:

"Love You Forever makes for terrible children's literature because it was written from a very adult place and speaks primarily to other adults."

Here's the tiny URL to her whole piece:
http://tinyurl.com/yo4g2m

No child needs to be aware of the outer limits of a mother or father's sacrificial love. In fact, good parents will shield their children from that knowledge to some extent, because to do otherwise is to impose an unhealthy and corrosive sense of duty on your child. Children SHOULD think of their parents as broccoli bullies.

Breathed wrote this book to satisfy his own needs, but it doesn't seem to meet any child's needs ever. And in fact, it seems to act against the needs of the child -- to know that you are loved, but for that love not to be a burden that prevents you from becoming an adult who leaves the parents who would have sacrificed everything to get you there.

[merseydotes]

I much prefer "I love you all the way to the moon...and back."

Mars Needs Moms does sound creepy. Although it is hard to beat out Love You Forever in the creepy contest.

[Kristin]

Jody, your last paragraph reminds me of something I wrote in a journal before my Boy was born. I was thinking about Anne Lamott, and how she wrote that having her son was wonderful and terrifying: before, she could handle anything that happened, more or less, and still be OK. But now, she said, she really had something to lose. As she put it, "Now I am f*cked unto the Lord. I could lose Sam." I found myself thinking something similar: this is the greatest joy of my life, and the greatest terror. I am, now and forever, utterly hosed. And yet, I wrote to myself, I can't really say that to my son: I wrote that I wish there were a way to convey the depth and the strength...but that I am not poet enough to get that point across with out also laying a terrible burden on him. He needs to know that I love him, that my love for him is the greatest joy in my life, that his love for me makes the sun come out on a rainy day. He does not need to know that this love is also the greatest fear in my heart: that's my problem, not his.

[Julie]

Thank you for saying this!! I haven't read or heard of Breathed's book, but that I Love You Forever one bugs me, and everyone else around me is moved to tears by it.

Although there are days when I wish my kids would say, "Thank you mother, it means so much to us that you have been hungry for two hours because you have been too busy cutting our sandwiches into shapes that we will eat," in the long run I would rather, as you say, preserve the illusion that my sacrifices are always given willingly.

[bj]

Oh, and I've always hated it when people who say they'd take a bullet for someone unless they've actually done so. No one knows what they would do in that circumstance, one hopefully that we'll never encounter.

It's a shorthand trick ("take a bullet") for expressing the much harder sentiment that the love we feel is so powerful.

It's just as silly as the stupidity of Ayalet Waldman writing, in the NYT, no less, that she would save her husband over her children. It's just not a scenario worth planning out, because what you think now has nothing to do with what you do when you are actually, horribly, offered the choice (you or your child, your husband or your child, one child or the other?). Writing that you know what you *think* you would do does a disservice to those who have actually had to face the choice.

There's a mother out there who did the equivalent of giving her helmet to her child, I'm sure. It speaks to the universality of a mother's love, but Breathed sitting on his privileged perch should only talk about it metaphorically. And, why is about a mother, anyway? Last I checked Breathed was a man, right? OK, enough venting on a book I haven't read. But, we're not venting about the book, but about the idea.

bj

[leo]

For the record, I do think that it is slightly unfair to critique something one hasn't read. Not to defend something that *I* haven't read, but I think that Breathed *is* being metaphorical for better or worse. According to an interview in Salon (June 2007), he was writing in part about his relationship with his own mother (who breathed the "poisonous air" of a relationship she probably should have left but stayed in [again certainly no defense of this] for the children). Mothers are something boys can write about as well (or poorly) as girls. I am not a proponent of self-sacrifice, but I am also not a proponent of forming opinions simply based on reading about a book.... And who knows what children might take from this? His own child seems to have decided that slippers needed to be drawn more explicitly.

[Jody]

Leo, I completely agree, there is something arrogant and unfair about targeting a book I haven't read. But I do feel justified in saying that what I know about the book gives me the creeps. This just does not sound like a picture book for parents to read to children. That doesn't mean it wouldn't be a valuable book for parents to give to other parents, of course.

I found a fascinating feminist analysis of Mars Needs Moms, looking at how the book defined motherhood according to an "Ozzie and Harriet" fantasy, by Michael Dorf:

http://michaeldorf.org/2007/05/mars-needs-ozzie-and-harriet.html

Breathed found Dorf's criticism and sent him a copy of the book, after which Dorf revised his first impression:

http://michaeldorf.org/2007/06/mars-needs-moms-redux.html