Bad Mother

by Ayelet Waldman

  At heart, and despite my occasional behavior and my frequent protestations to the contrary, I was a nice Jewish girl, and I wanted to please my mother. Moreover, I believed in her causes as fervently as she did. I accompanied her to pro-choice demonstrations, I helped her leaflet the neighborhood on behalf of liberal Democratic candidates for office, I responded with appropriate horror when kids showed up at school wearing “Students for Reagan” T-shirts. Most important, I did well enough in school to get into a good college, and although I betrayed her by refusing to attend her beloved Swarthmore, Wesleyan University was still an adequate sticker for the rear window of her car. A few years later, her red Aspen station wagon became unto a chariot of the gods when she was able to decorate its window not just with Wesleyan and Swarthmore stickers but with that most powerful of Jewish-mother incantations: Harvard Law School.

  In college, I discovered my own brand of feminism, one that for a time involved great quantities of body hair and an intense program of sexual experimentation. My cousin Marcie had the misfortune of getting married during this period of my life, an event I celebrated in a strapless pink taffeta gown accessorized with two tufts of wiry black armpit hair.

  My mother was so proud of me during those years and the ones that followed. I will never forget the expression of pure joy on her face when, in my very first year out of law school, my salary was higher than my father’s.

  My mother taught me that ambition was my right and my duty, and that I needed to be careful to structure my life in order to accommodate it. One of the keys to creating the life she wanted for me was to find a mate who would be a willing foot soldier in my battle for equality. I needed a husband who would value my professional identity as much as his own, who would assume half the household and child-care duties. Who would, if anything, subsume his ambitions to mine. I needed, in short, a man different from my father.

  My father doesn’t think of himself as sexist, and neither, really, do I. Born in 1925, he is no more nor less than a man of his time. It never occurred to him that his wife’s career should have or could have been taken as seriously as his own. If asked, he would probably say that it was merely a function of earning capacity. He made more money than my mother, thus his job was more important. As strapped as they always were, it would have been foolishness to behave otherwise. If he was offered a better position two hundred miles away, then they had to move, whether or not she was working at the one job she ever really loved.

  Like most men his age, my father is inept at managing the most basic details of their domestic life. He doesn’t clean—I’m pretty sure he lumps toilet brushes and mops into the same “feminine products” category as tampons and vaginal deodorant—and he cannot cook. The only time I remember him preparing supper was during a week my mother spent in the hospital after surgery, and he served us salami and eggs every single night. Sometimes when he was feeling particularly cheerful, he would pack our school lunches for us, but as neither my younger brother nor I could gag down his peanut butter and butter sandwiches, we learned soon enough how to fend for ourselves. Left to his own devices, my father would subsist on a diet of Fudge Stripe cookies and orange juice mixed with Coca-Cola, in a room stuffed with teetering piles of ancient newspapers and dusty old books. The telephone would be buried in the cracks of the sprung sofa, next to the long-lost remote, but he would have noticed the absence of neither, because he would no longer be wearing his hearing aids.

  “Do not marry a man like your father,” my mother instructed. And, having been a witness to her frustration and their discord, and though I love my father dearly, I was eager to comply.

  Men unlike my father abounded at Wesleyan University. They sat next to me in women’s studies classes, playing with their long, stringy ponytails and wiggling the toes that peeped from beneath the straps of their Birkenstocks. They linked hands with me at silent vigils in front of fraternity houses that had committed the thought crime of showing porn movies during pledge week. They toted around the collected poems of Marge Piercy and well-thumbed copies of Gyn/ecology by Mary Daly. They wore T-shirts that proclaimed their opposition to apartheid and their membership in PETA, and they spoke with authority about Hélène Cixous and the feminist post-structuralist critique of phallogocentrism. These were precisely the kinds of men my mother had instructed me to marry (although whether they actually planned to practice the domestic equality they proponed was anyone’s guess).

  Unfortunately, over and over I failed to muster up any attraction for those earnest men in their huaraches and drawstring pants. I tried to sleep with them, to survive their passive, tentative, and overly deferential lovemaking. But they were so boring.

  So I took a page out of the book of bossy women everywhere. I found myself a weak-willed man to push around, a man like the husband in my favorite Jewish joke. A boy comes home from school one day and says to his mother, “Mama, Mama, I got a part in the play!” “I’m so proud of you, darling,” she says. “What part did you get?” The son puffs up his chest and says, proudly, “I’m the Jewish husband!” “The Jewish husband?” the mother says, aghast. “You just march back to school and demand that they give you a speaking role!”

  Cast in the role of silent husband was my first serious boy friend, a kindhearted and weak-willed Israeli I’ll call Elan.* Elan deferred to me in all things. When we first started dating, I promised to move to Israel, but when I grew disenchanted with this idea, he obligingly followed me to Cambridge. While I was in law school, he got a job in a moving company, the default occupation of those Israeli immigrants who are not interested in the electronics business. We both knew that he’d never earn much of an income, so our plan—my plan—was that I would support us as an attorney, and he would take care of the children. It was the kind of plan my mother would approve of. (Or so you would have thought. It turned out, however, that a kibbutznik with no apparent aspirations beyond his high-school diploma was not what she wanted for me. Jewish motherhood, it turns out, trumps feminism.)

  The plan was laid, the plan should have succeeded, but in the end the very thing that made it possible, Elan’s tractability and lack of personal ambition, doomed it. It turned out that while the role of bossy wife came naturally to me, it didn’t make me happy. He didn’t make me happy, and I made him miserable, too. In law school, for the first time, I found myself surrounded by different kinds of men. If they wore huaraches, it was because they had spent the year of their Fulbright fellowship in Oaxaca organizing farmworkers. They’d trimmed their ponytails when they’d gone to work as legislative aides to Barney Frank and Tom Harkin. I met men like Barack Obama, one of my classmates, whose brilliant future seemed assured even then. Harvard Law School was replete with men who harbored the not-so-secret ambition to be president, each of whom had the confidence of a Heisman Trophy winner considering his future in the NFL.

  That ambition, that confidence, turned out to be much more alluring than a placid willingness to defer to your wife. I broke up with Elan and turned my attentions to those ambitious men, and to my own career. And then, one day, after being dumped by a religious Catholic who doubted, quite wisely, that I would allow our children to be raised in the Church, my roommate’s best friend suggested that I go on a blind date with a buddy of his from high school. I had just finished retelling, with great drama and a few tears, the tale of my rejection at the hands of the observant Catholic. Jon smiled sympathetically and said, “I know a Jewish guy who’ll date you.”

  When Jon called Michael to tell him about me, Michael was suspicious of the whole enterprise.

  “A blind date?” he said. “I don’t think so.”

  Jon said only, “Your loss,” and changed the subject. Michael says now that it was the very casualness of Jon’s reply that sparked his curiosity. Jon says what sparked Michael’s curiosity was that Jon told him I had a nice rack.

  (How well I remember that rack! Those perky breasts that hovered just below my chin. Those pert nipples. That swelling cleavage. Aft
er four children and a full seventy-two months of breast-feeding, the last six of which were spent with my nipples clamped in the death vise of a breast pump, it is only by dint of foundation garments designed by teams of MIT professors who otherwise spend their days drawing up plans for the world’s longest suspension bridges that my breasts achieve a shape even approximating round. When I undue the clasps, buckles, straps, and hoists of these miraculous feats of engineering, my boobs tumble to the ground like boulders falling off a cliff. I could polish my shoes with my nipples.)

  I consulted with my girlfriends about attire. Casual but sexy was the consensus. One friend lent me her perfect jeans, the ones that cinched tight at the waist and showed off her ass (this was 1992, long before we began wearing our jeans slung low on our hips). Another had the perfect black leather belt. I bought a new crisp white cotton blouse, polished my lucky black boots, and then was confronted with the most important sartorial dilemma of all. The rack about which Jon had raved had to be shown off to full advantage. That called for a new bra. White, lacy, and with enough push-up power to confirm his assessment.

  The night of the date I tamed my unruly hair into submission, applied the right amount of makeup, and squirted myself with just a hint of scent. And I waited. And waited some more. And waited for a while after that. Forty-five minutes after our appointed time, when I was about to give up, tear my useless new underwear to shreds, and gobble up the contents of my freezer, my buzzer rang.

  I was living at the time on Fourteenth Street and Avenue A, an area of New York City that has since moved to hip, through fashionable, and on to staid. Back then, however, it was the kind of place where you crunched crack vials beneath your shoes every morning on the way to the subway, and were not infrequently awakened in the middle of the night by the sound of gunfire.

  I tried to buzz Michael into the building, but the buzzer was, as usual, broken. Too impatient to wait for the elevator, I rushed down the stairs. There he was, standing in the entryway behind the glass door, his hair even wilder than in the photograph on the jacket of his books, his eyes even more blue, his smile goofy and broad. Bells didn’t ring, angels didn’t sing, but I did, indeed, fall in love at first sight. I know this because a single thought entered my head. “Now I can finally stop dating.”

  I am cynical and pessimistic, and I don’t believe in love at first sight. I believe you have to know someone to love him, have to see his good and bad sides, his flaws and foibles. I believe that love grows, and that attraction or infatuation cannot be the basis of a real life together.

  And yet.

  There is a word in Yiddish—bashert—that translates more or less as soul mate. Intended. The one that God, or fate, meant for you. The legend associated with this word says that before you are born, an angel appears to the soul of your infant self and takes you on a tour of your life. You visit your future, or a version of your future. One of the things the angel shows you is the person whose soul is a match for yours. The person with whom you are meant to share your life. Then the angel strikes you beneath your nose, leaving that subtle channel in the skin between the nose and the mouth, your philtrum. The blow causes you to forget what you have seen. But there remains a vestige of memory, an unconscious sense of what you saw and learned. Enough of a memory to evoke a jolt of recognition when you stumble across your bashert. When, for example, you see him standing behind a pane of bulletproof glass, a bouquet of purple irises in his hand.

  We went out to dinner, to a romantic restaurant with banquette seating and dim lighting. For the first and last time in our relationship, we drank an entire bottle of wine.*

  After dinner and that unlikely bottle, we walked over to the Bowery. Somewhere between Spring and Prince streets Michael leaned over and kissed me. We kissed in that face-mashing, lip-groping way of teenagers. And we kept kissing. At Max Fish, an agonizingly trendy bar. At a tiny table in the Ukrainian café Veselka. On my corner. In my postage stamp of a lobby. In front of the elevator. We kissed and kissed and kissed. And then he left.

  That’s how I knew it was forever. It was the first time since I was approximately fifteen years old that I did not sleep with a man on our first date. That, and the fact that within the first hour of my meeting him, he told me that, because he was a writer and worked at night, he intended to spend his days taking care of his children, so that his wife could pursue her career.

  Here he was, the man I’d been looking for all along, the man my mother had sent me out in the world to track down and bring home. Funny and smart, Jewish and successful. And harboring ambitions of being a househusband. He would take care of my children while I worked. He would be an equal parent and an equal partner. He would make it easy for me to be the kind of woman my mother and I had planned for me to be. Is it any wonder that I proposed to him three weeks after our first date?

  Not only did he, dear reader, marry me, but he followed me first to San Francisco, where I had a clerkship with a judge, and then to Southern California, where I found my dream job, as a public defender, representing indigent defendants in federal court. His career was portable, mine was not, and, more important, my ambitions were every bit as important as his. To this day neither my mother nor I can believe our good luck.

  I loved my job. I got off on every part of it—I was a natural defender, I reveled in my battles with opposing counsel, I enjoyed the intellectual challenge of arguing before the court, a jury trial was my idea of bliss. And, especially, I loved my drug-dealing, bank-robbing, gangbanging clients. The job was difficult, frustrating, and more fun than I’d ever had in my life.

  I achieved the future my mother had struggled so mightily to ensure for me. A job I loved, and a man I loved. A man who did all the cooking and most of the housework. A man who was eager to start a family and planned to be the primary caretaker. My goals accomplished, my future assured, all I needed to do was sit back and reap the rewards.

  The sense that I was doing exactly what I was supposed to be doing subsided not a whit when I became pregnant, although from the beginning the baby complicated things. I remember one day running lightly up the steps to the courthouse in my little blue suit and matching suede pumps and stopping suddenly. I gulped a few times and then leaned over the railing and threw up the entire contents of my stomach into the bushes before the bemused eyes of the jurors who were enjoying a quick cigarette before the trial day began. I debated asking the judge to instruct the jury that my queasiness resulted not from any lack of faith in my client but rather from my pregnancy. Instead, I contented myself with chewing ostentatiously on a stack of saltines throughout the trial. The judge, a mother herself, helped me by calling a recess whenever she caught me looking green around the gills.

  Still, even though I was spending half my day kneeling in front of the toilet bowl and the other half adjusting my maternity pantyhose, it didn’t occur to me that a baby would interrupt the scheme my mother and I had outlined for my life. On the contrary, I shamelessly made use of my pregnancy to curry favor with judges and juries alike. I encouraged my clients to pull out my chair or take my arm as I heaved my bulk around the courtroom. The jury reacted to this solicitude just as I wanted them to. They took one look at how sweetly the tattooed, methamphetamine-addled drug dealer took care of his adorable, little pregnant lawyer, and decided that he could not possibly be as bad as the prosecutor was making him out to be.

  I worked until the very end of my pregnancy, until my feet were too bloated to fit into my pumps and my belly was so big that by the time I moved my car seat back far enough to accommodate my girth, I could no longer reach the brake pedal. When I finally went out on maternity leave, I didn’t even bother cleaning up my office. I knew it would be only a matter of a few months before I returned.

  During this period, on the rare occasions that I appeared in non-lactating public, I was invariably reminded of how important it was that I get back to work. Once, at a party, a successful female movie producer to whom I was introduced as “Michael Chabon�
�s wife,” as if that were the sum total of my identity, sized me up with a glance, taking in my swollen, leaking breasts, my quivering postpartum belly, the faded black maternity dress that was still the only thing in my closet that fit. With a pitying smile, she patted me on the arm and said, “I so envy you. I wish I’d been able to just give it all up and stay home with my daughter. Lucky you!”

  Yes, lucky me, I thought. While you’re busy making a series of monster box-office hits, including the most lucrative romantic comedy of all time, I’m spending my days analyzing the frequency and consistency of infant bowel movements. While you’re totting up box-office receipts, I’m totting up ounces of pumped breast milk. And while you’re evaluating the relative merits of different literary properties up for adaptation, I am—without irony—evaluating the relative merits of Huggies and Pampers. Lucky, lucky me.

  I went back to work.

  But not, as it turned out, for long.

  I made myself a little sign for my office door. “Pumping, please knock.” Three times a day I would put up the sign, and within three minutes the door would burst open and reveal one of the guys from the mail room bearing a stack of letters or an urgent fax. “Oh my God,” he’d say. “Am I interrupting something?” It turns out that young men are unable to resist the temptation of bared breasts, no matter how pendulous and mapped with bright blue veins. The first few times I sprang back, grabbing for my blouse and spraying precious breast milk in all directions. But after a while I would simply roll my eyes and shove my nipples farther into the horns, as if the clear plastic provided any kind of concealment. Why it never occurred to me to just not put up the sign, I have no idea. Perhaps because I refused to give up my belief in people’s better natures, or perhaps because I was too addled by hormones to realize that the guys were matching their mail deliveries to my pumping schedule.