Cleaning More Than Bathrooms

It was an overreaction, maybe, having less to do with the state of my bathroom than with this sudden, irrational notion that a toilet brush and a bottle of bleach could help keep my daughters “clean.”

Still, I gathered my girls and passed out supplies, and the “how to clean a bathroom” lesson began.

“Why do we have to do this?” the 13-year-old whined, handling the toilet brush as if I’d asked her to touch a hot poker.

“Because!” I snapped back. “I won’t have you growing up to be Monica Lewinsky!”

*

Ever since I watched her televised performance last week, I’ve been haunted by the question: How do I raise my three daughters and not have them turn out like Monica?

Apparently intelligent, but with nothing on her mind beyond her weight, her “sensuality,” her pain. Charming enough, but in an empty, frivolous way. Often articulate, but monumentally self-absorbed, with nothing much of substance to say.

“She is a very typical product,” feminist author Camille Paglia proclaims, “of a certain kind of affluent, upper-middle class family.”

Spoiled, egocentric . . . a poor little rich girl unable to see beyond her own wants and needs. How do we cultivate such seeds?

Yes, we dote on our children, we try to cushion their journeys through life, to shield them from hurt and pain. But when does encouragement end and overindulgence begin?

Am I grooming my daughter for self-absorption when I iron her jeans, cut up her pancakes, rush to school with homework she thoughtlessly left behind?

Can I find in the accumulation of small gestures my own contribution to raising a girl like Monica . . . one who can’t see past her own selfish dreams?

*

“I don’t think I’m a spoiled brat. . . . However I do have a certain level of expectation about what I deserve, both from the way I was brought up and the environment in which I was brought up.”

Those are Monica’s words, from her recent biography, a book as empty and soulless as its subject appears to be.

She recounts a childhood of “family clashes . . . of tears and tantrums” when her father refused to buy her a Snoopy phone or a Minnie Mouse dress at Disneyland.

Invariably, time and again, her mother intervened.

When Monica was not invited to the birthday party of fourth-grade classmate Tori Spelling, her mother “rang the Spellings’ social secretary . . . and an invitation was duly sent out.” When her father turned thumbs-down on a lavish bat mitzvah party, her mother launched a tirade and prevailed.

But Monica’s mother was curiously silent when her 17-year-old daughter was being romanced by a 25-year-old drama teacher at Beverly Hills High.

Now Marcia Lewis looks back with misgivings. “I think I could be criticized for not going to the school and reporting him. But you don’t want your daughter’s name bandied about. . . . It would have caused our family embarrassment.”

Mom wonders now if she had confronted her daughter’s married paramour, “whether this would have sent [Monica] a better message” about truth and consequences, morality and self-worth, about owning up and taking responsibility.

It apparently seemed easier to opt for a life of shifting moral standards, where image is reality, the end justifies the means and saving face reigns supreme.

And I wonder what would have happened to Monica’s self-pity had Mom offered, instead of summer at fat camp, a stint on the line at a soup kitchen, serving others less fortunate than she.

*

It is a detail, but a telling one.

Monica is off at college in Oregon, sharing a house with two classmates, living on her own for the first time.

“When it was her turn to do the housework,” the book says, “she phoned her mother in a panic for instructions on how to clean the bathroom.”

She was 19 and had never cleaned a bathroom or a kitchen or even her own bedroom. Her family, she says, always had maids to do the tidying up.

A girl who never had been allowed to clean up her own mess. . . . Is it any wonder that she can walk away from this national catastrophe feeling bad only that her affair with the president didn’t meet her personal needs?

Beneath all her tears and hand-wringing, you can still see the imprint of a child raised oblivious to others’ needs.

She says that she may, when all this is over, volunteer to work with disadvantaged children, teaching them to read.

Because “maybe,” she says, “if I do good, good will come to me. . . .”

Sandy Banks’ column is published on Sundays and Tuesdays. Her e-mail address is sandy.banks@latimes.com.