She touched the silver pendant she was wearing, his wedding anniversary gift. He’d given it to her that morning, while the kids were playing with their scores of Sylvanian Families, which were like crack cocaine to little girls (the only family they were still missing, Alexis reminded her constantly, was the penguins).
Mariam had not bought Rowan anything – not even a card – because a week ago, they’d made a pact not to do gifts. Celebrating their wedding anniversary was another ritual of couplehood that having kids had blown to smithereens, along with morning sex, and the leisurely bi-monthly back waxes she’d once given Rowan, grooming him like a gorilla. These days, she was lucky if she got to attend to her own body hair.
He had broken the pact. In his card – which had on the front a bobble-headed cartoon Miley Cyrus sticking out her tongue, and inside, ‘YOU WRECK MY BALLS’ – Rowan had written:
Moo,
I chose this gift for two reasons. The first is I think you’re out of this world!
And to say sorry for sometimes being a doofus. Men are from Mars . . . you know the rest. You’ve made me the happiest man in the universe for the last fifteen years by being my wife. I can’t wait for the next fifty.
Roo
The pendant held a tiny piece of pockmarked metallic rock: an asteroid from Mars. Jomo had sourced it for him, so at least they could trust that Rowan hadn’t paid through the nose for a fake.
Mariam stopped to load Alexis’s scooter onto the already overburdened stroller. They had finally made it – hallelujah! – to the green lawns of the Quad, where Radcliffe students had lived when Harvard was reserved for men.
Her daughters reanimated at the sight of dozens of other kids screaming with excitement in the jumping castle. There was a petting zoo, a busy balloon stand, and tables covered with what looked like jello sculptures. That’s definitely going to end badly, Mariam thought, but then stopped herself – just last week, her mother had said on the phone that Mariam should launch a website called kill-an-idea.com because she was so good at anticipating everything that could go wrong.
The smell of sausage smoke was in the air and, with well-trained parental vision, Mariam noted the urns of coffee set up under the trees, alongside which most of the other moms and dads were already huddled.
Having settled the girls at an arts and crafts table to make fairy wands, and poured herself a cup of coffee, she felt the morning might improve. But then she found herself mired in a husband-bashing conversation with another mom, before they’d even exchanged first names. This was a topic Mariam normally avoided like the plague, but the heat and the long walk out there had made her too lethargic to escape.
‘He tells me that if I get to go to book club, it’s only fair that he gets a boys’ night in return,’ the other mom was saying. ‘But that’s not how it should work. He goes to an office every day. He has colleagues. He gets to have conversations with grown humans whenever he wants. While I’m at home nagging a toddler to put on underpants.’
Mariam nodded sympathetically, but she was thinking the husband had a point. This woman had forgotten how stressful office jobs were, and how tedious water-cooler conversation could be; her husband needed time with his friends as much as she did.
The woman was now looking expectantly at Mariam, waiting for her to complain about her husband.
Mariam tried to pick something minor and told a story of how Rowan had recently pinched a nerve in his back while reaching forward from the couch for his afternoon mug of decaf coffee. ‘I could not summon the energy to care,’ she said. ‘It was the end of a week where I’d been with our daughters all day, every day, and now he was going to be in bed all weekend, unable to move. That sounded fantastic to me. It’s my ultimate fantasy, in fact. So I ignored him. I didn’t even take him food or water. The poor guy, when I brought him a cup of instant noodles at about ten that night he accepted it as if I’d brought him steak with truffle sauce.’
The woman laughed gleefully. Mothers in misery do so love company.
There were, however, a couple things Mariam had strategically omitted from her tale. One was that she had come to her senses that night after remembering the vow she’d made to Rowan when they married: in sickness and in health. And secondly because she’d imagined how she would feel if he’d treated her with the same lack of sympathy – something he would never do in a thousand years. She’d begun to feel like she was the bad husband in the Ibsen play A Doll’s House, who at some moment of domestic crisis, she couldn’t remember what exactly, lets down his wife – whom he supposedly adores – in her real moment of need (which is the point at which she puts on her hat and leaves him).
So Mariam had not only brought Rowan a cup of noodles. She’d run him a hot bath, heated a wheat bag in the microwave, and massaged his back. Then, for good measure, she’d given him a hand job.
She also did not share with this woman that she was not joking about the fantasy of injuring herself. Not too badly, but enough to spend a week lying in bed in a very nice hospital, eating soup, not even having to get up to pee, being washed from top to toe by a kind nurse with a warm sponge. She’d read a short story in some magazine about this yearning to briefly turn the tables. A mother hurts herself on a wilderness trip with her young sons and they have to look after her for a week, keeping her alive. It was a moving parable of how all parents hope that their kids will one day care for them in their old age as devotedly as they’d been cared for when they were little.
The other mom was now preoccupied trying to negotiate a truce between her children, who were warring over a luminous pink crayon.
Mariam looked around at the other families at the children’s festival. The men wearing babies in various brands of strap-on knapsacks and slings outnumbered the women wearing babies by about two to one. A couple of dads were inside the jumping castle, being thrown this way and that, trying to get to their crying kids. Nearby, a dad was changing his baby’s diaper on a mat on the grass, and another was using a plastic knife to chop up sausages into non-chokeable chunks. Many men stood in the shade rocking strollers, soothing their babies to sleep.
And yet they were supposed to be the enemy! Sure, these were men of a certain background, Mariam knew. Or at least Harvard had given them a leg up in the world, meaning they could be here on a weekday, tending to their children. Yet just one generation ago, would any of the men attending their fifteenth Harvard reunion have worn a baby at a barbecue?
Mariam understood full well what #MeToo was about, and why it was essential, but she also worried that all the negative talk about toxic men eclipsed the very real and observable positive shift in fathering standards. What was it that Eloise had quoted from Margaret Mead in her book? Something about how the goal of any great civilization should be to figure out how to involve fathers in childrearing. And look at these men! Who could say they weren’t the most involved fathers in world history? The sad fact was that progressives – and she counted herself among their ranks – never celebrated their victories. They just moved right on to the next problem.
Her mother had helped her to see this. Whenever she visited them in Bushwick, she could not stop marveling at Rowan and his fellow dad friends as if they were a new breed, a newly evolved species – papa sapiens. She often said to Mariam that she wished she’d been a mother now instead of a generation ago.
Mariam remembered her father breezing in and out of the home, not ever doing anything as menial as housework, or childcare, or even cooking a meal. She had adored him, of course, faithfully bringing the newspaper to him out on the porch every evening, where he sat smoking a pipe while her mother fed, bathed and put to bed three children.
Another mom who was standing next to the crafts table introduced herself as the partner of a guy in their class, and commented that she couldn’t help overhearing what they’d been saying about feeling maxed out. She could relate, she said – when her youngest was born, she had murdered several potted plants she’d been given as gifts, starving th
em of water until they shriveled up and died. ‘What a bad idea, to give the mother of a newborn another thing to keep alive!’ she said, laughing.
She told them she ran a Steiner playgroup in the Bay Area.
‘What I realized after killing the plants was that I was very low on life force,’ this woman continued. ‘When we parent, we pour our own life force into our children. It needs to be replenished, so that you can keep finding the energy to care for others. The way to do that is through creative activities. Something you can lose yourself in. Reading. Knitting. Drawing. Playing an instrument, or listening to music.’
This was not a novel thought; it was bandied about at all the parenting seminars Mariam had attended when she was pregnant with Alexis – how crucial self-care was – but something about the way this woman said it made the advice seem worth following.
Lately Mariam had been trying, before bed, while Rowan finished off work at the computer, to listen through earphones to an album of Syriac Christian hymns she’d secretly downloaded. She found that the eerie chants, among the oldest musical traditions in the world, scrubbed her mind squeaky clean.
‘My version of self-care,’ the first woman was saying, having settled the fight between her kids, ‘is binge-watching Outlander. It’s about a woman who time travels – the main guy is so sexy. That Scottish accent, oh my God. My husband has started calling the show Wetlander.’ Her face went bright red.
Mariam laughed loudly, to put her at ease, and also because it was a great story. More than any of the woman’s previous complaints about her husband, most likely exaggerated, this was a revealing insight into the happier truth of their relationship, the truth known only to them.
She loved it when women let their guard down like that. She was tired of the usual fencing and denial and half-truths that she had become accustomed to over the years of interactions at mothers’ groups and breastfeeding circles and play dates and park encounters. Before she’d had kids of her own, Mariam had assumed that having children would make her feel closer to other mothers. But as it turned out, mothers of young children were often weirdly defensive, herself included. You never got the truth out of them in real time. If you got it at all, it was only years later.
She had a close friend, for example, who had maintained that her son slept through the night every single night from the age of six weeks on. But one night over drinks, when her son was 5 years old, she’d made a comment to Mariam about how he’d been such a poor sleeper as a baby that she had eventually hired a night nurse, because she and her husband hadn’t been able to bear the thought of sleep-training him themselves. It wasn’t a confession – she had completely forgotten, Mariam realized, the false account she had invented at the time. An account that had, for most of Alexis’s largely sleepless first year, made Mariam anxious that she was doing something wrong as a mother.
Or it was when women had their second kid that the truth about the first would emerge. They’d say, ‘Oh, our second is so chilled out, so easygoing – nothing like his sister was at that age. She was such hard work.’ But all they’d ever told Mariam about their firstborn was how chilled out and easygoing she was, how she never cried, how she just lay about gurgling and giggling, an angel child.
It wasn’t just an issue in her friendships with other moms. From painful experience, she had begun to think twice before sharing with girlfriends – other than Jules and Eloise – anything too intimate about her life with Rowan and the girls. She had learned that whatever she shared could always backfire and blow up in her face. Friends would seem to be sympathetic in the moment, but later they might use that information against her.
Once she had told an old friend from chef school that occasionally, when she and Rowan were having sex, she imagined he was somebody else: a stranger she’d seen in a restaurant or on the subway. She’d shared the story to make this friend feel less bad about what she’d just divulged to Mariam: that she could no longer stand being touched by her husband. A while later, after getting divorced, this same friend had asked her advice on dating. Mariam had replied, ‘Kindness and chemistry, that’s all you need to look for.’ And the friend had said, ‘Chemistry? But you said you always think about somebody else when you’re having sex with Rowan.’
It was like being stabbed in the gut, because it was so far from the truth. The chemistry between Mariam and Rowan had always been there, effortless, electric. But Mariam had known she couldn’t say this to her friend to put the record straight, since it would only sound defensive and reinforce her friend’s misunderstanding of their marriage.
Alexis and Eva had finished making fairy wands and now wanted to go to the jumping castle, via the jello stand. Mariam said goodbye to the two women and felt sort of empty as she followed the girls across the lawn. This was the story of her life, her conversations with other parents falling into the cracks somewhere between the banal and the sublime, always cut short just as they were getting interesting.
She tried to look as unfriendly as possible while joining the knot of parents watching their kids in the jumping castle, unwilling to engage all over again, but she immediately recognized one of the fathers. Sebastian . . . She couldn’t remember his last name. He’d also been in Kirkland House. She had a sudden flashback to him in full drag at the Christmas concert one year, fish-net stockings and all.
He was the picture of good health – dark hair, thick eyebrows, very white teeth. ‘Mariam!’ he cried, giving her a hug. He glanced over at Alexis. ‘She is like Rowan’s mini-me. Do people say that to you all the time?’
Sebastian, she soon discovered, was married to a guy called Adam, whom he’d met hiking in Yellowstone, and they also had two kids, a son and a daughter, who were jumping in the castle.
Out of politeness, she asked him his children’s names, and he used the opportunity to tell her not only their names but their favorite foods, the ages at which they had first sat up, rolled, crawled, walked and talked, the extracurriculars at which they now excelled (rock climbing, judo, code club, oboe), and the admiring comments from teachers, repeated verbatim, from their most recent school reports.
She had unwittingly walked straight into another high-stakes trap of a conversation: the dilemma of what to say when telling a stranger – or even a friend – about your children. Mariam felt glad they had stopped by the jello stand on the way to the castle. The only thing that was going to get her through this was processed sugar.
In the brief paragraphs of Eloise’s book that she’d managed to skim on the train the day before, there’d been something interesting about why parents in her cohort all tried to stuff their kids full of opportunities and experiences, talents and skills. Because for the first time in history, parents did not know what they were meant to be preparing their kids for. In the past, parents interpreted their job to be raising their kids according to custom and tradition, so they could one day themselves uphold a solid, stable community that did not change much between generations. But today’s parents were trying to prepare their kids for a future that seemed to change shape by the second. All this anxiety had resulted in the rise of the filiarchy, Eloise had written: a world in which children ruled over adults.
Maybe she would cancel all the girls’ extramural activities for the summer, Mariam thought. ‘We’re late, we’re late, come on, we’re late’ was a refrain she caught herself saying a dozen times a day, like the White Rabbit. Imagine: no swimming, violin, ballet, or Mandarin lessons. It would be bliss to give in to child-time rather than imposing adult-time on them constantly. They could stay in their pajamas until noon, muck around in the mud in the back garden, doodle on the sidewalks.
Sebastian had mistaken her silence for interest and was now telling her adorable things his kids had said when they were younger. His daughter, at her first swimming class, had become frustrated because she’d thought she was there to learn to breathe underwater. His son, at age four, had asked him, ‘Is this all there is, this place with the blue sky?’
Mariam was forming a few questions of her own. Why did grown-ups think it was okay to boast about their children? Hadn’t they learned as kids that it’s never okay to boast about anything?
It was another bizarre feature of parenting: it seemed to make people forget their manners. (Even Rowan, apparently, who had not considered that it was rude to boast in a public document about Mariam’s births.) Recently, at a fire station open house in downtown Manhattan, she’d watched as parents shoved one another out of the way to give their kids a better chance of sitting inside the fire truck.
A frightening ruthlessness was revealed in everybody who had a kid. You could see that as a positive – people really would die for their children – but often Mariam was inclined to think that the way it would really play out in a war of resources was that parents would kill other people’s kids if it meant their own would survive. She got an inkling of this every time there was a stampede over a child-related resource: spots at day care, highchairs at a café, enrollments in a mommy-and-me yoga class. Things got primal fast.
Listening to Sebastian gloat about his kids, Mariam tried to take a more generous view. He believed that it was his duty as a parent to talk up his kids to anybody and everybody. The problem for Mariam was that the general consensus seemed to be that Sebastian had it right: the more you boasted about your child, the more you loved them. By refusing to put her best foot forward, so to speak, when talking about her kids, she knew that some people came away with the impression that she was an indifferent mother. Which drove her batshit crazy!
That very moment, she could have gotten away with a few legitimate boasts. Alexis was looking after Eva in the jumping castle, helping her get back up whenever she fell over, and waving and blowing kisses to Mariam. To anybody observing them, Mariam would seem like a flawless mother, her daughters little saints.
Life After Truth Page 13