I've begun reading Bruno Bettleheim's _The Children of the Dream_, his account of communal child-rearing practices on Israeli kibbutzim in the 1960's. This book was another gift from my father, and I'm excited about it for a number of reasons: (1) it may be applicable to the "gender inverted" world of my stories, in which children are reared collectively and mothers detach from them at about two years of age (2) it may shed light on my son's development, since I live in an experimental community -- though one that is far less communal than a kibbutz, and (3) it discusses Jewish attitudes toward family and motherhood, which are important to me because I am living with my girlfriend, a Jewish mother.

I haven't read very far in _Children_, but already it's got me rethinking some of my assumptions about motherhood.

I'd been disturbed by the reaction one of my writing teachers had to a story of mine (set in a pre-technological Islander culture distinct from the "gender inverted" one) in which a young mother appears to rejoice at escaping from home and leaving her 18-month old son to be raised by his grandmothers. My teacher, a woman of color, was shocked by the characters's apparent lack of maternal feeling. She asked me if I thought that "those people don't really have feelings?"

The comment stung. She had suggested that I bore a racist attitude toward my own character -- as if I would've written a different ending if the mother were a white American. I've since rewritten the story to clarify that the separation is involuntary and the mother's feelings about it are decidedly mixed, but the experience left me concerned, and lately I've noticed that mothers abandoning their children is a theme that crops up often in my stories.

(In case you're wondering: no, I wasn't abandoned by my mother. Perhaps the theme emerges from a guilty feelings I have toward my own son, though I wouldn't say I've abandoned him, either.)

I became concerned that I was some sort of unfeeling brute, out of touch with a universal invariant of human culture -- as if every culture expects mothers to rear their children and no mother with normal feelings could calmly accept separation from her child. Perhaps, as a man, I "just didn't get" the importance of motherhood to women.

The little I've read of Bettelheim's book has me convinced me otherwise. He describes a culture in which parents routinely hand off their children to unrelated women, to be raised in a communal setting. The kibbutz mothers' feelings seem normal in other respects, so I'm less worried that the mothers in my stories are inhuman. Like the kibbutz mothers, they merely are products of their culture, one which makes different assumptions about childrearing and maternal roles than my own.

I wish I could explain this to the teacher in question, but unfortunately we are out of touch.