And then there is Type III: The Children Are Everything, Harried Busy-Bee Mother. Under no circumstances may I drop an F-bomb in this one’s presence. She’s on every PTA, preschool, and church board of directors, and not to be helpful. She’s in it to win. You think this preschool runs itself? she seems to ask. Lady, they’re just crafts, I think. “Organize the pipe cleaners, bitches!” she screams, but only with her grim eyes. She will spend a solid hour discussing whether the teacher’s gift card should come from Target or Nordstrom or Starbucks. At minute two, I will want to stand up and scream, “NOBODY FUCKING CARES,” but I cannot, because she’s always smiling. The smiling makes me wonder if she locks puppies in closets or sniffs Krazy Glue in the evenings. Then I feel bad again for thinking these things because she’s so goddamn “nice.”
Alright, there are more than three. There’s the Super Political Wounded Mother, who’s been gaslighted since birth and complains constantly but can’t change on account of internalized misogyny. She barely makes it through the day because life is harder for her than the rest of us. Her degree in gender studies compels her to suggest at every meeting that we “unpack our privilege,” but later she will instruct people of color on Facebook how they can fight oppression more pleasantly. Her children are very deep. The entire planet wants to pass her a note reading: “Hey lady, stop talking. Or at least move to Portland.”
Incidentally, I am grateful I was not yet on social media when I was drinking.
There’s also the Aloof Badass Mother, who doesn’t give a damn about any of this nonsense because she’s drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon and getting tattooed and pretty much never showing up to anything because it’s all too mainstream. She and her partner are about to sell their house to backpack around Thailand. She has a Tumblr and a vintage typewriter. She is polyamorous and attends Burning Man in feathers, atop a unicorn bicycle.
And, of course, there’s the Earth Crystal Sage Mama, who manages to incorporate the words “womb,” “goddess,” or “menstrual blood” into damn near every conversation and once told me that cutting the umbilical cord is a form of “violence.” She has a shamanic weaving teacher, smells like Dead shows and garlic, and truly believes there is an ancestral warrior leading her life on a daily basis. Her kid is named Lotus Reef and never wears shoes but can absolutely kill it in Hula-Hooping.
Whether or not these categories existed in reality, what I saw was that I fit nowhere. I lived in a house with linoleum floors and spent my afternoons with an ex-cocaine addict so I could remain among the living. I had trouble keeping the floor of my car visible at all, let alone composting kitchen scraps. I couldn’t read the group emails from the parent associations because nobody understood the “reply all” function and I got bored by email number nine in the string of nine thousand.
But when I made jokes about the email thread, the other mothers looked at me like I was a dead bird on the porch, and then a week later I’d realize I missed an event because in email number 347, the event was clearly outlined, but I didn’t read it because it was past email number nine.
I didn’t fit in with the “read the books and learn and do it right” mothers because I read things, implemented them in a fury of excitement and staunch devotion, then forgot about them entirely three days later. I’d look at an abandoned chore chart as it leaned sadly against the wall and think, If only. Then I’d yell at my kids to do some chores because “I can’t live this way anymore!”
Maybe we should start another chore chart, I’d think.
Of course I didn’t fit with the Etsy hipsters either, because I wore Target maternity jeans six months after I had the baby. I knew I was wearing the “mom jeans” we’re all taught to avoid like Red #2 dye and simple carbs, but I never got around to buying other pants.
But even when I tried to fit in with other mothers, my mouth would ruin it behind my back. One little ill-timed expletive and the whole thing would go to hell. We’d do fine at the sandbox until I dropped a “fuck,” thinking it added to the moment, then feeling the wrath of a woman who believed nobody should swear on hallowed kid ground.
Oh, they couldn’t hear me, I’d think, and mumble “Fuck” again, only this time in my head, because I am in trouble now and I made it weird. Do I attempt to salvage this relationship? Nah. Move on. It was based on lies anyway.
Motherly small talk was complicated because we were not actually talking about the thing we were talking about. We were both supposed to know this and stick to the rules, but I’ve been bad at that since the sixth grade, when my teacher duct-taped my mouth shut because I wouldn’t stop talking.
It didn’t even occur to me to censor the audible version of my thoughts at all until I had a certain epiphany at age sixteen, when I realized girls were getting the boys because they act differently around them and you, Janelle, you’re still admitting you prefer the Allman Brothers over Nirvana and it’s 1996.
I tended to say the thing that was true as opposed to the more palatable alternative, and this really concerned people, particularly when it involved raising America.
(Mothers don’t admit that. Especially at the park.)
“What exactly do we have here?” they seemed to ask. “Do we eat it? Kick it? Counsel it?”
Probably.
I knew the game. I knew we were supposed to talk-not-talk about whose partner was the best and wealthiest, whose preschooler was the smartest, and whose baby was the most advanced, but I couldn’t play. I tried a few hundred times, but eventually I focused on getting it over with by saying something like “Yeah, my son is three and barely talks,” or, “My daughter refers to her vagina as a ‘wiener shooter.’”
You win.
Your kid is smarter. The end. And yes, you have more money and, yes, more education, and your baby, I know! Your baby crawled at three months and talked at six months and slept through the night at twelve minutes—what a miracle! Must be superior genetics.
Now can we just hang out? I’m bored.
Can we talk about the way these kids give and suck life by the minute, day by day, and how sometimes you’re sure you’ve ruined your life through the reproductive process, but five minutes later you’re in tears as you pack the newborn clothes into the giveaway box? The way the years mock you with their passing, lull you into the safety and surety and vague comfort of knowing your children will always be small, until you realize it will soon be over? Done. Your time is done. Sorry. You should have paid closer attention. Should have held on tighter. Try not to fuck it up with the others.
But you already are. You’re always already fucking it up. Can we talk about that?
Let’s not talk about how we all became better versions of ourselves the day we became parents, and, please, would you stop pretending you did? Because your holier-than-thou shit makes me worry you watch dinosaur porn after the kids go to bed. Your steadfast focus on seasonal cupcakes and organic kombucha concerns me. Look, I’ve got some too. I know all about gut flora. But please. Is that all there is?
You didn’t become some G-rated version of yourself and you know it.
But let’s not talk about that either. Let’s make a couple of jokes, chill out, and make fun of “man colds” or “wife colds”—do those exist?—and how hard it is to get kids to do chores when they’re bickering and awful and you think, “I’d rather do it myself than listen to this!” No, but seriously, husband, you’re fine. Why are you on the couch whining? Call your mom. Maybe she cares. I’ve had a cold for nine weeks, asshole.
Let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about sleeping babies and newborn breath and how I once wanted to kill myself after I had my baby because it seemed the only or best solution to the pain.
Maybe we won’t talk about that at the park. Let’s talk about something else.
Let’s talk about coffee. You can talk about wine. I don’t drink wine because I drank all the wine and alcohol has a tendency to turn me into a homeless person, but we can talk about it anyway because I understand. We don’t need
to pretend.
Let’s talk about how we haven’t seen the floor of our cars in months, and how it smells oddly, always, of apples (but where are the actual apples?), and how the sound of nonstop kid chattering makes my head spin, but I still lie down at night wishing I had listened because they won’t be chattering forever.
Let’s talk about my son, the quiet one, who squeaks and yells and screams and runs, all the time. I get so frustrated with him for the stomping and incessant movement and it’s so hard to listen to him talk sometimes. He can’t think of the word because he’s dyslexic. I know he is. His father and grandfather are dyslexic. What kind of shit human gets impatient with a boy with dyslexia? What kind?
Let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about the fact that I am that mother. I am already that mother. I was the worst one, too. I let my children go one morning, and my boy, he was only sixteen months old. Don’t you think he wondered where his mother went? Yeah, I hate me too, lady. I hate me too for the things I did, and when these memories come, I throw my head back and forth like a motherfucking lunatic trying to shake them out of my brain. I think perhaps I’d rather die than live with that shame.
Maybe we won’t talk about all that. That’s a little heavy.
Let’s talk about how sometimes, by the end of the day, I understand—just a little—how parents snap and hit their kids. I haven’t hit my kids. I would not. But sometimes when combined with lack of sleep, and my husband working six days a week, and the times I drove intoxicated with my child in the car and poisoned breastfeeding, nearly overdosed in a trailer, and my sagging belly and gray roots, self-hatred, and joy that I’m free (from alcoholism, today), I wonder if I may break, just fucking break, so I come here to the park, and I sit next to you because you’re a mother like me, right? And we can talk about it. We can talk and talk and talk.
“Is she sleeping through the night yet?” you ask.
No.
“Oh, where is she?”
In my bed, with me.
“Oh, you co-sleep?”
I guess.
“My baby slept through the night at two months because I did sleep training. Why haven’t you sleep trained?”
Oh yeah. Okay. Talk to me about that, I guess. If that’s all there is.
• • •
In August 2010, when I was seventeen months sober, our third baby was born, in a water birth at home, as the morning sun splintered across the faces of Mac, my mother, children, and midwives. They were circling me as our ten-pound, dimpled baby Georgia with a cleft chin and bald head opened her eyes against my chest, and I watched her body flood pink with our blood, from the center to her fingertips. Just like Rocketship.
At night, I would hold her in the crook of my arm and see only love, and I’d wonder how it could get like this. It was just me nursing her in the gray dim of a little nursery I decorated with Ava and my mother when I was pregnant, in the house Mac and I bought together, where all our children live, and we are a family.
How wholesome life had become, not in that church way, not in the way that made me feel unworthy, but in the meatiest, grittiest way.
Not beauty in the clouds. Beauty on the ground. Beauty in my hands.
Six months to one year to one year and a half sober. I should be in a gutter somewhere, but I’m here. With the thought, while I rocked, I’d turn my head up to the ceiling and close my eyes as the warmth of the day rushed over me.
I am none of those other mothers, I’d think. I am all of them.
I realized we are all a bunch of fakers. We’ve got too much past to remember, too much on the line to forget. We become some mother. We show up. We work and drive and love. It all feels like a tiny miracle. It all feels so boring we could puke. For some of us, that becomes enough, and we don’t have to dance anymore.
Maybe I don’t care quite so much about being better than you. Sometimes I want to be better than you. But in the end, I have nothing left to prove: to you or myself. I have no polish to fix what I am. I am a woman who lost her children, and I am the woman now standing here in this hallway bright-eyed and motherly while you size me up. You don’t even know what it means for me to have this stupid fucking G.A.T.E. interlude with you.
Sure, I hate you, but I love that I get to hate you. I love that I get to be just another mother pissed off because a woman in Teva sandals condescended to her.
Because look at these wiper blades. All you do is turn this dial and swoosh—problem solved! Do you not see how funny that is?
Don’t you think that’s cool?
No? Alright. Guess it’s just me.
And that’s fine, because I’m just happy to be here.
13
Failure That Isn’t Funny:
Sober Edition
Is that your boy up there?” I recognized the tone in the woman’s voice as that of the inordinately concerned. Though she was smiling, I could sense I had offended her, and would soon discover how.
“Yes,” I answered, joining the game of fake civility.
“Oh, okay! Well—I just have to say! It makes me nervous! Seeing him up there!” she said, pulling her shoulders up and making a face like, “I just can’t help myself! I love all the children!” She seemed to punctuate every pause with unwarranted jubilation.
I spun through the mental Rolodex of the situation’s features to determine which one of us was more irrational: He is standing on top of kid-level monkey bars, over a sand pit. If he fell, he would fall into sand, notably soft, and if he fell and managed through some miracle to hurt himself, it would be a broken or sprained ankle or wrist at the very worst. There wasn’t even a damn rock around.
Sometimes kids need to climb, I thought. Sometimes I need to let them climb so I can sit on a bench and play on my cell phone, pretending I don’t have children. Of course I didn’t say that. She was quite obviously not the type of person who enjoys that level of honesty. Instead, I tried: “Well, I figure if he can get up there, he can get down!”
I smiled and shrugged my shoulders as if to say: “Kids will be kids!” I was attempting to connect with her, to be two mothers at the park, although at that point I would have settled with two humans sharing a planet. I thought my soaring charm might bring out the best in her.
Instead she looked at me as if I had just pulled out a meth pipe and hit it.
“Do you have insurance?” she bellowed.
“What?” I asked, thinking, For sure she’s going to kill me tonight while I sleep.
“Health insurance. Do you have health insurance for when he falls and hurts himself? KIDS GET HURT, YOU KNOW.” She said the last part as if she were leading a rally in the protection of all the children of the world who could possibly get hurt.
I lifted my eyebrows and mumbled, “Yep. I do,” turned around and sat down, where I proceeded to think of all the piercingly witty things I should have said. “Actually no, I prefer to duct-tape my kids’ injuries at home in the garage using a light dose of heroin to kill the pain.” Ultimately I decided I should have just gone with, “Do you ever wonder why nobody likes you?” And then I should have stared at her. For a long time, until she grew so uncomfortable she cracked.
I glared at her from behind my sunglasses while my rage turned into an ill-defined shame. I watched Rocket play while the stranger’s words repeated in my mind—“kids get hurt, you know”—and seeing Rocket stand up in the air sent my mind spinning back to a summer trip I took with my stepmother and friends to Lake Tahoe when Ava was eighteen months old.
On the way home, we had stopped at a restaurant with a full bar along the Truckee River. It was one of those funky Northern California motel/restaurant/bar places right on the river—an all-in-one establishment where you could eat, get drunk, sleep, and buy a small carved black bear that says “I left my heart in Tahoe.” The patio and open-air bar were next to the restaurant, and above it was the motel, with stairs leading from the bar patio to the rooms. We had lunch in the clean high-altitude sun during one of those days that
feels endless and so beautiful you could die right there without a single regret.
We had cocktails on the patio and it was all quite pleasant until somebody started pointing and yelling, “Oh my God,” and then the whole restaurant was gasping and pointing, and I looked up to where they were pointing and saw my baby girl standing on the roof of the motel—a flat roof that extended from the motel, over the restaurant, to the roaring, maniacal river. From where she stood, wearing a little red gingham apron dress with a white blouse underneath, her favorite scuffed red leather Mary Janes and white lace socks—from where she stood gazing cheerfully at the people below, she was a few feet from death. If she took five or six steps to her right, there was no railing or edge or prayer that would stop her from tumbling down into the white water slipping and flipping over giant granite rocks.
I remember the blur of running up the stairs, three at a time, and stopping at the top, at the gaps between the wooden rails she had crawled through. She was in the middle of the roof, outside my reach—five feet from me and five feet from the edge. What I knew was that she could not run.
If I yelled or crawled onto the roof, she might bolt, startled, or thinking we were playing a game of “catch me,” as we had done so many times before. I wanted to scream, to beg for help, but I couldn’t frighten her—and yet, if I spoke softly, she might ignore me.
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