by Liz Astrof
His illness forced my hand: Was I going to bail on the opportunity for quality time with my children? Would a “Fun Mommy” do something like that?
Also, I really wanted to see if Nordstrom had those shoes.
“I’ll take them to the mall myself!” I blurted against my better judgment.
At first, I was filled with dread—how was I going to handle my own children alone in public at night? This was something that a natural mother could handle with ease. But not me. I’m not a natural mother! I’m not even natural chestnut brown with hints of auburn!
“Get a grip. You can do this,” I told myself into the rearview mirror. “You’ve done much harder things on a daily basis. You run a TV show! You’re in charge of fifteen writers and coming up with stories and scripts and jokes in the wee hours of the night. Plus, you can do a handstand!”
“I can do a handstand, too!” Phoebe chimed in from the backseat, startling me. I’d forgotten they were back there. Oy.
We got to the mall, and the fact that we had to park all the way on P12 seemed like the universe’s way of telling me to turn back. But I couldn’t. There were too many cars behind me.
We weren’t out of the car for two seconds before Jesse started worrying that we’d lose the car because I’m forgetful. It was insulting, albeit assertive of him—I didn’t tell my mother she was insane when I was seven, but that might be because she was gone by that point.
“We’re fine,” I assured him. “We’re not going to lose the car.” Though I was starting to trust his instincts and regard him like one of those prescient seer-children in a creepy Japanese horror film adaptation.
“But what if you do?” he asked, his pitch rising with terror. “You always lose everything.”
“I won’t lose the car.”
“We’re going to die here!” He was spiraling now. Which made me spiral.
I grabbed him by the shoulders and shouted into his face, “You’re safe!” Which, unsurprisingly, didn’t allay his fears.
We finally got to the entrance. Venetian-themed, the mall was all marble and glitz. Shops, restaurants, the fountain—it all awaited us. We just needed to get past the all-but-impenetrable wall of people.
The place was packed. Throngs of teenagers and couples holding hands tightly, making it impossible to navigate past them. Families with double-wide strollers rushed toward us, around us, behind us. Phoebe, already bored, commenced hanging on my arm, her four-year-old weight sending shooting pains up and down my spine and weakening my knees. Jesse, who suffered from crowd aversion, dove under the back of my shirt, pressing his boney head into my back to soothe himself, making moving forward impossible, had it been possible to begin with.
It was a retail hajj, rush hour without the whimsy. The pain was dizzying, I was already dripping with sweat, and we were all of three feet into our trip.
Jesse was right. We were going to die in the mall.
I knew that if we were to have our idyllic night, complete with me running into Nordstrom, quickly, to look for those shoes I wanted, I needed to break out the big guns. Not literally.
I told them that if they were good listeners, they could get whatever they wanted from Dylan’s Candy Bar.
“And a toy,” Phoebe said.
“No toy,” I told her.
“Yes,” she insisted.
Jesse emerged from under my shirt, his anxiety eclipsed by his curiosity at seeing how the sudden clash of wills would shake out.
“No toy,” I repeated, determined to be strong.
“I want a toy!” the fruit of my loins screamed back at me. It wasn’t even seven-thirty yet, and she was turning.
I made a mental note to instruct their nanny, Angela, whom we’d hired to be extra strict so I wouldn’t have to be, to teach my daughter not to be a spoiled asshole, and said they could both have a toy because Jesse needed to know he counted, too.
In a clear-headed moment of self-preservation, I decided to bag the sit-down dinner at Wood Ranch Grill. The only thing worse than a thirty-minute wait with two kids is a thirty-minute wait with two kids fighting over the giant light-up beeper thing they make you carry around to let you know your table is ready. I decided not to be a hero and just take the kids to the food court. We could bring our dinners over to the fake grass lawn and look at the fountain at the same time, killing two birds with junk-food sedatives. Then we’d go to Dylan’s Candy, I’d run into Nordstrom quick and see if they had those shoes. Then home by nine, to a martini, a true-crime documentary, and bed. And maybe another martini.
We went to Wetzel’s Pretzels, and I ordered them everything their mercenary hearts desired. Hot dogs, pretzels, butter nugget things, cinnamon balls. They wanted it, they got it. Because I was “Fun Mommy” and, while I might not always be home to come up with brain-building activities or disinfect boo-boos (also Angela’s job), I can buy my children’s love on an idyllic Saturday night.
Which I was now about to do.
Except I couldn’t find my wallet.
I rooted through my purse, frantically digging through the stray Xanax, gym clothes, gum, loose papers, and other shit, and still couldn’t find it. I gave the girl behind the counter the “just a sec” finger, put my bag on the ground, and squatted over it.
“Just getting my wallet!” I singsonged so as not to cause Jesse alarm.
Jesse dove his head back under my shirt, making it hard for me to extend my arms for full bag digging. I dumped out the contents on the concrete and then zoomed in on where my wallet was: on my dresser at home, in my closet, where I had left it.
Fuck. I couldn’t wait until the future when I could . . . just beam it to myself. I did find in my bag a squished, wrapper-less muffin and a $20 bill. I ate the muffin, which had a couple of Tic Tacs in it, and nearly $18 of the $20 bought us two pretzel dogs (they should be ashamed). The remaining $1.90 would have to last us until we got home. If I could find the car of course, which, judging from the stricken look on my son’s face, he strongly doubted.
We sat on the fake grass away from the crush of people and, while the kids ate, I prayed they didn’t get thirsty because water was nine dollars a bottle. I texted Todd about my wallet. He confirmed that it was on my dresser. Thanks. He claimed he was throwing up too much to come to our rescue and added a gagging emoji for effect. I was about to rip him a new one when I spotted a beacon of hope in the form of a mom from our school and her two kids. They would help us. We were a community, after all—at least that’s what I heard they tell the parents at every school meeting I miss. This mom would give me cash, and we’d commiserate about what a dumb idea coming to the mall was. We’d maybe even each watch the other’s kids while we took turns running into Nordstrom quick.
I went to call her, but her name had escaped me. Barbara? Carol? Judy? I had nothing. I asked the kids her kids’ names. They didn’t know, and I watched our only hope turn the corner at the Pottery Barn—our Carpathia, leaving me to drown with my two babies and no life vest.
I lectured Jesse and Phoebe about how extremely rude it was to not know the names of the people you see every day and mentally added learning people’s names to Angela’s Monday to-do list before announcing that we should go home and check on Daddy.
“What about the fountain?” Phoebe asked. “I want to see the fountain.”
I told her the fountain was at a different mall, hoping she wouldn’t see the giant spurts of colored water shooting into the sky above the crowd. At what age do they start really seeing things? I wondered.
“What about the trolley?” she asked.
“It’s broken,” I told her, and when the trolley ding-dinged past us, I told her that the people on board were taking it to the Trolley Hospital.
“What hospital?” Jesse asked. He could smell my fear. I think kids can do that, especially Jesse.
“It’s . . . in the back.” I pointed off at nowhere and halted the interrogation by saying that if there were any more questions we wouldn’t go to Dylan’s
Candy. In the ensuing silence, I wondered what the hell two bucks could possibly buy at Dylan’s and prayed the store would be on fire when we got there.
Just then, throwing out the hotdog wrappers, I spotted a five-dollar bill sticking out from under a plate of half-eaten pizza in the garbage can. My eyes went wide with disbelief and excitement. Who throws away five dollars?! Who throws away pizza?! I dove into the trash for the money, thinking if this is a napkin that looks like a five-dollar bill, I will lose my shit. Not that I had far to go: I was already neck deep in a trash can. The garbage was wet and hot and smelly, but I powered through for my children.
With my forefinger and thumb, I retrieved the soaking wet bill and, holding it up victoriously, I whooped, singing “Mommy found five dollars in the trash!” accompanied by a sort of Jewish version of an Irish step dance. “Let’s go get six dollars and ninety cents worth of candy!”
We made our way to Dylan’s Candy, where I was able to talk the kids into the cheapest and possibly most carcinogenic candy, resulting in a respectable-sized bag of crap. I waited until we were in the mall bathroom, however, with a stall door separating us, to break it to them that there would be no toy buying that night. Blissed out on candy, they didn’t raise a protest, which emboldened me to press my luck and walk them through Nordstrom quick.
The store was a respite from the crowds. Jesse and Phoebe were happy to sit and eat their cancer candy while I did a sad lap around the shoe department, where I soon spotted my quarry. The platform Oxfords were in stock and absolutely gorgeous. I touched them. I held them. I wanted them so badly. But all I had was seven cents in my bag. It was a fitting end to our excursion.
When you’re a working mother, you have precious little time to make it up to your kids, and even though I had the best intentions, I had failed. I had ruined the night: no Grill, no fountain, no trolley, and now I also couldn’t have the shoes I wanted. I started to cry. More about the being-a-bad-mother part than the shoes part, but also about the shoes.
I pouted all the way back to the kids and told them we were going home. Without any new shoes for Mommy.
Before we headed outside and back into the crowd, I reflexively pulled the back of my shirt out, making room for Jesse’s head.
“That’s okay,” he said, and pulled his own shirt over his head.
I was confused. “Wait—you don’t want to put your head in my shirt?” I asked him.
“Nope,” he said from inside. “I’m calling this ‘turtling.’ ”
“He’s a turtle!” Phoebe laughed.
He was self-soothing his crowd anxiety. For the first time, he had put his head in his own shirt. Proud as I was of him, it made me melancholy. They were growing up so fast. One minute they were babies who looked to you for comfort, and the next they were—well, turtling.
It was too much for me at that point. I needed to be needed. If not for money, of which I had none, then for the calming pressure I could provide my son’s head.
“Turtle me, Jesse,” I demanded.
He did. I told Phoebe to pull on my arm. She obliged—even though we were edging closer to nine o’clock, and I could see her eyes starting to narrow.
I was just beginning to feel better. I mean, no one had ever died from not getting platform Oxfords . . . when one of the salesgirls ran over to hand me a Post-it note with a name and a number on it. “I hope you don’t mind—” she started to say.
“I already have a therapist,” I told her. “Thanks.”
“No—that’s my number,” the girl said. “I babysit. Your kids are amazingly well behaved—I’d love to watch them.”
I gestured to Jesse, obediently pressing his head against my spine, and Phoebe people watching—noted a budding staring problem, which she’s inherited from me.
“These kids?” I asked her, incredulous.
“Oh, yeah,” she answered. “You should see the monsters we get in here.”
“Really?! Bad, huh! Like how bad?” I said, hungry for anything terrible she could tell me about other people’s kids.
I’d never thought of my kids as examples of “good behavior,’’ but, come to think of it, they actually were good. Out of the three of us, I’d been the only one who’d had a truly extended tantrum the entire time we’d been at the mall, plus I touched garbage and ate a muffin off of the ground. I made a mental note to thank Angela for teaching them how to behave.
But then I thought that maybe the reason they were so good was that this had been just a normal outing with me, their overwhelmed, scattered, disorganized mother. Whether I’d lost our hotel room key at the bottom of the pool, locked my last set of keys inside my car, made us miss a flight because I left our plane tickets at the airport McDonald’s, when they were late for school because I accidentally hit that pedestrian . . . thanks to me, they’d grown accustomed to utter chaos—and that, I am convinced, will serve them well in life.
Until I had children of my own, I didn’t realize how important it was to have a mother. Not just someone to babysit in a pinch and tell you you’re gorgeous even when you’re nine months pregnant and pushing 250 pounds, but a constant presence in the lives you bring into the world. That responsibility has long weighed heavily on me, mostly because I’m no more equipped now than I was the day my son was born and I told Todd not to take the tags off.
I had no role model worth emulating in the people who raised me. No road map. No skills. No mother. And it shows. At the very least, I feel it.
Yet as time goes on, I’m starting to think there are a lot of moms like me out there.
Moms who sit in their car a block from home at night, waiting for their kids to go to sleep because the bedtime routine is just too frightening.
Moms who let their kids eat butter for lunch because their own parents sent them to fat camp and gave them body dysmorphia.
Moms who buy car seats based on how well they coordinate with the car upholstery and who don’t know any of the evils of soy milk.
Moms who will climb a fence at their kid’s preschool—an actual metal fence—to escape the small talk of the Stay-at-Home Mothers gathered at the entrance gate.
Moms who are more confident running a multinational conglomerate or network TV show than they are getting their kids to brush their teeth.
And it seems that even as I struggle to not become my mother, even as I deal with the complete lack of parenting skills and surplus of PTSD that were the only constants of my childhood, I have become someone my kids like. Someone who they, for some reason, can’t get enough of. A source of chaos to be sure, but a consistent one whose love they can always count on. Someone who, when they’re old enough to buy my Mother’s Day card, won’t have to ask the saleslady at CVS where the “Estranged, from All of Us” section is, like I do.
I hope.
• • •
WALKING TO THE wrong car on the wrong level of the parking garage, Jesse emerged from inside my shirt, his lips dyed blue from the toxic candy he ate, and said he had the funnest night ever.
“Me too,” Phoebe cheered, and asked me to do the “Mommy found five dollars in the trash dance” again.
I danced. And they laughed. And I got Phoebe home by 9:14, seconds before she turned mean.
It wasn’t an idyllic Saturday night. But it was perfect for us.
Epilogue: One Flying Leap
* * *
It’s impossible for me to get any work done at a trampoline park (I think it’s safe to say I’m not alone in this). Something about the loud music pumping over the din of a hundred kids screaming, bouncing, diving into foam cubes, doing flips, and coming within inches of paralyzing themselves makes for a less than ideal mobile office. Yet the trampoline park was my office, one recent Sunday afternoon.
I was on deadline for a script outline that was giving me grief. I was having trouble plotting the story, truly blocked; it’s something that happens to writers, pretty much every day—we are stricken with the panic that this script will be the one that out
s us as a fraud, the one that proves we just can’t do it. I mentally put my house on the market and sell my overpriced sneakers to an online shopping site. If only I could come up with that second act complication, crack the problem by tonight, I could mentally take my house and my sneakers back off the market.
But weekends are when I make up for lost time with my kids and, on this day, I had Phoebe and her friend Kimberly to entertain—it had been either that or take Jesse to a Dodger game. As it turned out, I almost certainly would have gotten more work done there.
Before Kimberly arrived, I told my daughter that I needed to work that afternoon and they’d have to entertain themselves. Phoebe promised me they would.
Mere moments into their playdate, however, Phoebe appeared before me, with Kimberly at her side and holding a box containing a bracelet-making kit she’d gotten for her birthday. These craft-type “presents” are, in my eyes, a hate crime against parents. The box says “5 and up” but really it’s “40 and up” because it’s the parents who are inevitably tasked with the 25-step directions which are (naturally) in both microscopic print and nine languages. By the time I got to English, I already had a migraine and was ready to start screaming in tongues.
Phoebe’s kit contained a hundred little baggies of string, glue, rubber bands, and a contraption used to make the damn things, which was (naturally) broken. There was only enough green string for one of the girls, so of course Phoebe declared that green was her favorite color and threw a fit when Kimberly said green was her favorite color. I dragged Phoebe into the kitchen and told her that I didn’t like her spoiled behavior and also that if she agreed to give her friend the string, I would buy her a professionally made green string bracelet later.
Five minutes later, an acrid smell from the kitchen proved that Phoebe was pulling a DIY science experiment that required a plastic container with holes and a warm surface, and that she’d lied about letting me work and was never going to leave me alone unless I got her and her friend out of the house.