It’s always the mother.
So maybe I was a little out of my league, putting my kids in a tony private school in the sixteenth arrondissement, but there was a lived-in, ramshackle, vine-covered, Madeline feel to the place that appealed to me. Kids bursting out of classrooms, spilling chaotic energy on the playground, and I thought, Yes, my children will be comfortable here. I did not choose the American school, with its sprawling, suburban grounds and football field; I did not even consider St. Mary’s, with its nuns and state-of-the-art science lab. I picked the international school, while sitting at my kitchen table in Los Angeles, from a selection of brochures, having never met V Strickling, or anyone like her, before. The V is for Victoria, like the queen.
Let’s back up a few months to when Gee was standing in our bedroom in Los Angeles, a towel wrapped around his waist, having just returned from eight months in Italy. I came home from work and found him freshly showered, suitcase open on the bed, unpacking. I was torn between wanting to rip the towel off him and giving him a proper welcome home and expressing just how hard it had been without him. I wish I could tell you I went with the towel idea, but instead I said, “Gee, this isn’t working. You need to get a job in LA.”
“Jesus, Em, I just walked in the door.”
It was the sort of fight we could do on autopilot. We just started hurling complaints at each other, like paintball, like you can shoot that bloodred, shocking-pink, deep-purple shit at each other and it’ll wash right off.
He said I was being a bitch.
I said he was never around.
He said I was the one who wanted more money.
I said we’d have more money if we didn’t spend every dime I made on after-school care and babysitters. If I had a coparent to help with the kids. Toward the end, the fight petering out, Gee complained that I’d taken over the whole closet, and I said it made me feel sad to see his side bare, like how my mother must have felt when she looked at my dad’s side of their closet: empty, no suits hanging.
“I’m not dead, Em. I’m traveling on business.” And then he said, real quiet, “Em, this is my job.”
“Can’t you do something else?”
“I’ll try.”
I thought he meant he’d try to get another job, one that was based in LA, but what he did was get another family relocation overseas.
“This way, you don’t have to work while I’m on the road,” he said. “It’s a management position, Em. Put your eggs in my basket,” he pleaded. “Just for a while, so I can move my career forward.” So that’s what I did. Because I wanted my husband to be successful. I wanted both of us to be successful. But I admit, despite all my complaining about how important my career was, a year in Paris did sound like fun. And then after a year we could come home and I could get a new job. A better job. A year is like a sabbatical—it’s no big deal; it could even be a career boost, add to my cachet. The zoo threw me a bon voyage party; they had a cake with a caricature of me standing in front of the Tour Eiffel, wearing a beret and carrying a baguette under my arm. When I saw that cake, joy rippled silently through my whole body. A year in Paris!
A month later, Gee was already gone and I was overseeing the movers. Literally, the movers were in the house. The kids and I were packed and ready to go—boxes labeled with magic marker: “Keep,” “Ship,” “Give Away”; the house sitter arranged; our cars in storage—when the relocation manager called Gee in Paris.
The two of them conferenced me in on the call.
“Good news,” Mina announced. “Your stay in Paris has been extended.”
Just like that, a year in Paris turned into four years abroad. Four years is not a little time off to refresh—it’s career suicide. After she hung up, leaving just Gee and me on the phone, he didn’t ask, “Are you okay with this, Em?” He said, “You need to sell the cars, call the insurance company, cancel the house sitter, and hire a real estate manager. Ship everything you think we’ll need: books, toys, furniture, kitchen items.”
Mina arranged a last-minute rental car to be dropped off at the house, as a courtesy, so that I could facilitate the change in plans. “Your life is like a permanent vacation,” she joked.
I smiled politely, controlling the urge to snap at her, because Mina was my official interface with Gee’s company and I didn’t want to be labeled a “problem wife.” I always tried to keep it friendly, but we were not friends. And moving to Paris was not a vacation. When I go on vacation, I like there to be sand and a beach, straw hats and flip-flops. I like to plan that vacation myself, pore over websites, looking for the most dropped-out, dope, off-the-grid place I can find. Yelapa—it’s a tiny little cove in Mexico that I shouldn’t mention because it’s a best-kept secret. You can’t even get there by car. You have to take a boat from PV. There’s no dock; they just throw your bags on the beach and you wade in after them. A week, maybe ten days later, totally destressed, mañana, baby, you grab that ferry back to civilization and return to work. A vacation has an end date; that’s what makes it a vacation—that round-trip ticket back home.
That night I was taking the kids out to dinner, backing out of the driveway, when I hit the side of the garage and heard a metallic crunch. Oops. This car is bigger than mine, I thought, putting it in drive, gently stepping on the gas while the passenger side scraped against the garage again. For a minute I forgot how to drive; my brain couldn’t send a message to my hands. Turn the wheel, Em! We were rocking back and forth, like when I was driving in Detroit in the winter, stuck on ice, trying to get some traction, only it was August in LA and the kids were in the back seat, wearing T-shirts and shorts.
“Mommy,” Rio yelled, “you’re smashing the car.”
“I know.”
“Are you gonna get in trouble?” Ruby asked.
“No, sweetie, Mommy never gets in trouble. She gets stuck sometimes, but mommies don’t get in trouble. Besides, Daddy’s company has insurance.”
So there I was, summoned to the headmistress’s office, feeling awkwardly like my teenage self, like I’d gotten caught smoking in the john or talking back in class. V was smiling. She had this perpetual smile, a red slash, like it was painted on; she was wearing a tweed pencil skirt, pumps, and a creamy, silky blouse with one too many buttons undone—a little too revealing for primary school, if you ask me, but this was Paris and it was I who was underdressed. Sloppywood. Jeans, sneakers, and a moto jacket. Outplayed from the get-go.
She smiled, so I smiled.
She crossed her legs, and I crossed mine.
She mentioned Columbine, and I lost the battle. Right there. Had to apologize for my son’s taking a protractor to the park, hiding it in his sweatshirt pocket so he and Andy could dig a tunnel from Paris to China. Of course, she didn’t actually mention Columbine or Sandy Hook or Parkland or any school shooting. She didn’t have to—it’s there, in the ether, when you talk schoolyard aggression in an international environment, and I was willing to fall on that sword. I get it. How the world views us. How, in my second-grade, American boy’s hands, a protractor could be seen as a weapon. But she wasn’t willing to leave it at that.
“Sometimes,” she said, “when children have a hard time adjusting, it reflects a deeper problem. How are things at home?” she wanted to know, and then, not waiting for an answer, she followed up with a second query. “How are you doing, Emma?”
“I’m fine,” I lied, shifting in my seat. No wonder the kids were intimidated by her. I searched her office for something to diffuse the tension—framed family photos or student art projects. Then I spotted a pair of boots and a whip in the corner.
“Do you ride?” I asked her. Of course she did—she was British. I could easily visualize her astride a quarter horse, making it do figure eights, holding the reins tight, slapping it with the crop.
“I’ve been headmistress here for some years now,” she responded, ignoring my question, her smile unchanged, her hands poised in her lap, recrossing her legs for emphasis.
Is
“headmistress” one word or two? I wondered, still imagining her in those boots with the whip. Maybe it’s hyphenated.
“And,” V continued, “the children who struggle most are often the ones whose mothers gave up satisfying jobs to follow their husband’s careers overseas.”
Boom. She zeroed in on me.
“Did you work, Emma? Yes, of course you did.” She answered her own question, using the past tense. “Rio tells me you worked at the zoo.”
“Marketing director,” I confirmed, feeling the need to defend myself with a professional title. “Worked at the zoo” was too vague; the kids used to tell their teachers that Mommy took care of the sick animals. Even after Bring Your Daughter to Work Day, when Ruby sat on the floor in my office, coloring, while I typed on the computer, she still told people I took care of baby animals. Because this one time the zoo had a litter of wolf pups whose mother had abandoned them, and I got to play with them, tails wagging, nipping at my fingertips.
“Failure to nurture,” the keeper said, so the baby wolves were moved to the nursery with a litter of newborn German shepherd service puppies, and the nursing mama fed them all, wolves and puppies alike.
“How long can they stay together?” I asked.
“We do have to keep an eye on them,” the keeper answered, petting a baby wolf. “One day, it’s like a switch flips. Instinct kicks in, and these wolves will kill all of these dogs. Nature versus nurture.”
Why was I even thinking about this? One day the wolves were sleeping with the puppies, and the next day they ate them. Too close to home, I guess. Why was V talking to my son about my job, anyway? She was sneaky. Then she said something about my possibly mourning my career and how it would be understandable if that were the case.
“It sounds like you had a big job,” V said, trying to flatter me into saying more than I should.
I started to perspire, under my arms, between my breasts, in the small of my back, but I didn’t say anything, afraid that if I opened my mouth, the whole fucking dam would break. Next thing you know, she’d be getting me to admit how I’d lost my shit last week on the way home from school, had a total meltdown, crying, begging the kids to please just behave, sixteen metro stops from Rue Ranelagh to République, the three of us standing the whole way, squashed and jostled while I tried to hang on to both their hands.
“Why don’t we have a car?” one said. “When can we go home?” the other wanted to know, and she didn’t mean home to our apartment in the Marais. I practically had to pull them up the stairs four floors to our flat, no elevator, my backpack loaded with groceries.
“Why don’t you do the grocery shopping when we’re in school?” one asked. The other complained his backpack was too heavy, dragging it behind him, letting it clunk on every step, saying he was tired, plopping down on the landing between the third and fourth floors. “It’s too heavy, Mommy.”
“Andy has an elevator,” he whined. Ruby pointed out that if I did the shopping before I picked them up, I would be able to carry Rio’s backpack.
They blamed me for all of it: the metro, the stairs, Paris. I was the bad mommy for making them move. Yet I was just barely holding it together myself.
“Buck up,” I told my grade-schoolers. “This is where we live, this is where Daddy works, this is our life now,” and all the while I was crying and pulling them up the stairs, pushing them through the front door. As soon as we got into the apartment, that’s when I really lost it, collapsing on the floor, kicking the door shut, punching Rio’s backpack, wailing on it like I was at Gold’s Gym. Ruby kept her distance, staring at me like I was a scary monster; Rio crouched on the floor, covering his head, just in case I missed the backpack.
A week later, Rio accidentally gave the little Japanese girl in his class a black eye, nearly causing an international incident. And V requested this meeting with me.
“You’ll need to fill that hole, Em,” she said.
She was referring to the hole that quitting my job at the zoo left in my psyche, in my identity, in my day, the nine hours between nine and six when I had nothing to do. Which wasn’t entirely true, I had plenty to do. Domestic chores took longer in Paris. Multiple trips back and forth to the market, carrying groceries on my back because I was too stubborn to break down and buy one of those caddies with wheels, like Gee suggested. The ones that came in plaid or polka dots—so cute, they were supposed to make you think it was fun to go to the market. “It won’t solve the problem,” I said. “The cart will be too heavy for me to carry up the steps.” When Gee insisted it would be more efficient, if I just … I stopped him with the palm of my hand, saying, “It won’t solve the fucking problem.”
“Why don’t you join the PTA?” V asked. “They could use a woman with your abilities. And it would be good for the children to see you participate in school activities. It might be good for you, too, don’t you think?”
That’s how I got recruited for the PTA. Newcomer welcome coffees and bake sales. I was about to go all Niagara Falls—I could feel tears welling up—but I didn’t let on, or we’d be flooded out of V’s office, down the hall, spilling out into Rue Ranelagh. And I was already late for coffee with the tagalongs at Café Mozart. I thanked V politely for her time, for her concern about me and the children. Then, because I don’t know when to stop and I always have to close the deal, I agreed to the whole PTA thing.
“I’m so glad we had this talk, Emma,” V said.
She was right. I did miss my job. But if I’m being completely honest, work was stressful and sometimes a break seemed like a good idea. It wasn’t that I didn’t like my job. It was a good job. First and foremost, the zoo was in Griffith Park, which was practically across the street from the kids’ school in Silverlake. So it was convenient. Commuter convenience is a big plus in LA. And then there was the job itself, overseeing the radio-advertising budget, so even though I never got back into the music industry after Korea, I did (almost) get back into radio. Radio adjacent. And I was good at that job; I knew exactly how to develop promotions that would be on-air-friendly, like Hog Wild. That was my boss’s idea.
“Give the pigs some love,” she said.
Pigs are not the sexiest animals in the zoo. Kids don’t tug on their mommy’s shirt, saying, “Pleeeze, can we go see the pigs?” They’re farm animals, the lowest rung of zoo critters. I needed to somehow make wild boars sound fun, so I got a bunch of radio stations to each sponsor a pig, and they got their listeners to come to the zoo in droves to vote for their favorite pig. It was hilarious, DJs competing with each other, like having the most popular pig at the zoo would get them some serious bragging rights. I’m goooood at that stuff. I loved my job. Working with animals never gets old.
I’ll tell you what does get old, though. The culture wars. Married versus single; stay-at-home or working mother; daycare or nanny; kids or dogs; lean in or tag along. One thing I learned at the zoo is that animal people are not necessarily kid-friendly. Every time I left work because Rio was sick or Ruby was in a school play, there was a closed-door chat with Bosslady about how my being a breeder couldn’t get in the way of her departmental rules.
“Emma,” she said, “it’s not that I mind, but it’s not fair to the others.” And then she’d say, “We all make choices in life.”
I’m tempted to say she was a bitch—a big, unattractive woman with a shrill voice on a power trip, and that her not getting married and not having kids was probably natural selection and not a choice—but that’s the kind of thing you should say only to your girlfriends when you’re pissing and moaning about your job. Bosslady had a personnel file on me that was bulging with memos.
When Rio, barely six years old, was recovering from surgery, I told Bosslady I had to leave work early to go to the hospital. Rio was a trouper. We dragged him to Korea before he could even walk or talk, and from there to Singapore, Bali, and Phuket. Maybe because he wasn’t socialized with other English-speaking kids, his speech was delayed. His first word was actually a full
-on sentence, a complete thought: “Go home now.” I was pretty sure he wouldn’t want to wake up in the hospital alone.
“Emma,” Bosslady said, “it’s not life-threatening. He’ll probably sleep all day. Why don’t you wait until after work to visit him?”
And I said, “Never mind.”
An hour later, I sent her an email that said I felt ill and had to go home immediately. Another memo in the file. There wasn’t enough personal time, vacation days, comp hours in the world to make that situation work. I was drowning in my mother’s dreams. Everything she had, plus everything she wanted. And the math didn’t add up, either. Childcare cost a fortune: early drop-off, after-school programs, and a babysitter to pick them up after the after-school programs. Then came Tuesdays. Half days in the middle of the week! It was almost like it was intentional, like being a working mother was not supposed to be manageable. Add to it that Gee was always somewhere else, on a gig in the Bahamas, or living in London for months at a time. No more long-term overseas posts, I told him after Korea. So, instead, he just took short-term gigs and left me home alone with the kids and a full-time job for months at a time. Which is really why I said yes to Paris. And agreed to put my eggs in Gee’s basket.
BALANCE VS. BLEND
“Mais oui … There is an alpha in every couple, n’est-ce pas?”
“Yes,” I agreed, “but I always thought it would be me.” This got a laugh out of Pascal, a French colleague of Gee’s. He leaned back, exhaled a cloud of smoke, and settled in for an engaging conversation. We were talking about the shifting balance of power in expat marriages, the loss of career, community, and financial independence for tagalong wives.
“We had a corporate training recently—” Gee chimed in, lighting a cigarette, holding it in his front teeth while he lit the match, so he could keep on talking, “and the new term for ‘work-life balance’ is ‘work-life integration.’ It’s all about harmony. Forget about the balancing act, two partners trying to do it all—that concept never worked anyway. The new idea is to coordinate or blend all the parts into a functioning unit.”
Em's Awful Good Fortune Page 12