So just today I got involved in an online discussion about a snippet — seriously, just a snippet — of an essay, presumably written by a writer-mom, in which the mom breezily admits that she wishes the singing-and-clapping of a typical mother-child music-and-movement class was done without her participation. She’d rather, she wrote, be sitting in the corner sipping coffee with fellow moms while her child did the clap-and-sing routine with someone else.

Oh, no. It was that “someone else” thing that got some commenters into a twist. Maybe, maybe you can admit (if you make it clear that you’re mostly joking, hahaha) that you don’t much care for singing, clapping, or shaking maracas. Maybe, maybe you can say that Gymboree gives you the heebies. But you cannot say that you’d rather someone else took care of that aspect of parenting (and I’m just leaving to one side the whole notion that singing and clapping and maracas of any kind should be considered an aspect of parenting at all).

Because if you admit you’re happy for someone else to do something with or for your child that you should be doing (and hopefully enjoying, but at the very least grinning through the pain), you are a terrible mother. Which few people actually say, but many people — sometimes innocently, sometimes with complete self-consciousness (if not self-righteousness) — firmly believe.

Why?

Why is doing the stuff you truly don’t enjoy, the stuff you’re actually crappy at, more virtuous than not doing it? And why is admitting that not only do you not like these certain somethings, but going on to say that you’d be much happier if you could let your child do that thing with someone else, so much worse?

It ends up not being a terribly large leap from someone sniffing at your parenting skills if you admit you hate Mommy & Me, and turning the eye of judgment on you for working, not because you have to (that’s okay), but because you also want to (inviting “why did you have children?” insinuations).

I freely (and frequently) point out that I am not a crafty person. I pretty much suck at that stuff, to be honest (and I prefer to be honest). I can’t tell you how happy I was to get all those scrapbook pages and poster-paint handprints and frames with glued-on shells while my boys were in daycare. Because I sure as hell wasn’t going to do it. Nor was I going to apologize for not wanting to do it. Any more than I apologize for the daycare I relied on when starting my freelance career (wouldn’t it have been more virtuous, more good-mommy of me, to juggle madly with my baby and toddler at home with me?).

Nor should my neighbor, a woman who drops her toddler off at a daycare center for a good chunk of every day, apologize or justify her reasoning, even though — as another neighbor (in shock!) pointed out — she doesn’t work outside her home. Well, I said to this other neighbor when she tried to enlist me in her “how could she?!” outrage, not every mother can stay home with her kids all day long. OK, it came out harsher than I intended, but I  meant it.

There’s no virtue, none, for any mother, in pretending she can be and do the things she perceives she must, lest she be judged. It’s very, very easy to judge, and it quickly becomes a vicious circle, an evil feedback loop, hence my too-strident reply to my neighbor. It’s easy for all of us to perch a chip on our already overburdened shoulders and go forth, justifying on the one hand, and judging on the other.

I’m tired of it. As a friend pointed out today, there are way worse things some parents do to their kids than the so-called horror of admitting they’d prefer a cappuccino in the corner (complete with ironic commentary on the bubbly enthusiasm of the mommy & me goings-on) over actually diving in and doing the Chicken Dance with their little ones. And way worse things (abuse and neglect come to mind) than admitting that you’d rather hand over the silly-shaking duties to someone else, like that nice lady in the library.

Not only is my lack of participation in such activities not a measure of my love for my sons (or my suitability for being their parent), I believe my honesty about not enjoying this or that aspect of parenting is a better barometer of my love for them. Because it’s real. I’m showing them me. This is the mom you get, the mom who doesn’t do Play-Doh, the mom who brings the New Yorker to soccer practice, the mom who hides the good snacks until her kids go to bed.

And anyway, aren’t we all just doing the best we can?

Have you read this article in the New York Times yet? It’s by writer and psychologist Alison Gopnik, and it’s gotten a bunch of media play in the last few days, because it’s about something supposedly revolutionary: Babies, Gopnik asserts, are quite a bit smarter than we think.

I’m pretty sure I knew that already. I mean, I knew it already because it’s not exactly new news (though the research Gopnik cites, some of it her own, from the University of California, Berkeley, where she’s a psychology professor, is new). I know that science has discovered amazing things about a baby’s inborn capabilities, and how those capabilities blow out of the water our previous beliefs about newborns–that they are basically inert lumps, taking in food from one end and pooping it out at the other, little more than  adorable amoeba. But I also knew it because I’ve seen my own babies at work, so to speak.

The first time I held James, my younger boy (well, maybe the second time; the first time, I was still numb from unwanted C-section surgery to remember much), I saw something familiar in his eyes. There was a knowing glint in those newborn eyes, I swear. “This one’s trouble,” I said to my husband later. James was sharp as a tack from the get-go, and he hasn’t let up since. Here he is, at two months (a different mom would claim he’s counting to one with that raised pinkie!):

My smart baby James. Just what is he planning in that elastic brain of his?

All of which makes me feel better about the fact that I haven’t tried all that hard in the intervening years to “boost” my babies’ learning.

The biggest example is, of course, Mommy & Me or Gymboree and other, similar classes meant to give babies a chubby leg up on a lifetime of learning. I didn’t do it. The only foray I made into that whole arena were a few free Mommy & Me-style classes at my local library, which I’ve mentioned before on this blog. I never really liked them much. The woman who ran the classes was a little too into the whole thing, for one; but more important, when it came to the craft portion of the session, she seemed to expect us moms to do the gluing and the folding and whatever, and I frankly am not into that kind of mom-directed art project stuff.

Mostly, I didn’t follow up on other classes because they didn’t fit into our schedule. At the time, we were new to our town, and I was working three days a week at my old editing job in the city (Daniel, then one, was home with a nanny). The baby and I had two weekdays together, and no car (the library happened to be in walking distance, or I wouldn’t have done that, either). We stuck close to home by necessity, but also by temperament — mine. I’ve never been a joiner. Also, though I can’t underestimate baby classes’ value for breaking up the tedium of life at home with a baby, I’ve always been skeptical of anyone who asserts that babies need them. At best, I find all those classes a crashing bore; at worst they felt like a replay of junior high, but with babies in tow. I never quite fit in; I wasn’t a full-time working mom or a stay-at-home mom, but a curious hybrid of both. (See what I mean about junior high? How would I find the right kind of friends? Easier to just avoid the whole thing.)

Gopnik makes the point in her piece (and the research bears this out) that babies and young children (say, under 4 or 5) can’t focus on just one thing, and that in fact, that’s not how they learn best. Their brains are elastic (I love that image!), filled with neuronal connections that allow them to explore and take in what their senses offer them with no preconceived ideas of how things should look, taste, react, feel or sound like. It’s all new, it’s all stimulating, and it’s all good. Even preschoolers aren’t really “learning” as much from the journal-keeping and flash-card-working that many of them do in school (or at home!). They’re learning by hanging around with their peers in the classroom, or with their siblings and parents back at home; by watching, by listening, and above all by playing.

Another Mean Mommy relief moment! My instinct (to not be a mommy-joiner; to not feel I have to get on the boost-baby’s-brain bandwagon; to do my own thing at home even if all I’m stimuating my child with is the sight of me folding towels or doing a Pilates DVD) was on target.

Gopnik mentions a famous experiment in which children and adults were asked to watch a video of two people tossing a ball back and forth, and count how many tosses they saw. Some time into the video, someone in a big gorilla suit walks slowly across the set. Guess who notices the gorilla and who remains focused on the counting task?

So I guess you can say by not doing more classes (and by using those insane Baby Einstein DVDs not as learning tools but as a mommy-needs-a-shower-break) I’m giving my kids a chance to see the many gorillas walking across the scene that they may otherwise have missed.

Do you think classes make your baby smarter?