Bad Mother

by Ayelet Waldman

  She and her siblings do this all the time. Their father and I talk constantly—our marriage is really one long conversation, interrupted only when absolutely necessary. The children by and large ignore us, entirely wrapped up in their own complicated universes and in one another. They pay only sporadic attention to our discussions about our work, the books we are reading, the movie we saw the night before, their uncle’s new job, the latest episode of Entourage. When we kiss or hug, their eyes skate over us; at best they snort in derision or utter a disdainful “Gross.”

  But let one of us mention an instant of conflict, let one of us recount a bit of bad news, and they snap to attention.

  “What did you say?” Zeke shouts from the back of the minivan.

  “Nothing! I didn’t say anything,” I say. My tone, in telling Michael of our friend’s diagnosis of breast cancer, had not changed from the tone in which I described another friend’s good review in the New York Times, but somehow the boy was no longer interested in playing with his Z cards.

  “Yes you did. Who has cancer? Is she going to die?”

  Or, “Who’s getting divorced? Why are they getting divorced?”

  Or, “Are you fighting? What did you say to Daddy?”

  They can be so immersed in Wallace & Gromit that they wouldn’t hear a bullhorn calling them to wash their hands for dinner, but if their father and I begin an argument or share a whispered piece of malignant gossip, they are like dogs responding to the sound of the can opener. They appear in the kitchen, their prying eyes narrowed. “What’s going on?” they want to know.

  * * *

  Our bedroom door has a lock, and most nights we remember to use it. We’ve cleared out the nightstand, bought a box with a key for the things we don’t want them to see (or show their friends). I’ve never been a fan of John Cleland, and The Joy of Sex is passé. There are plenty of salacious books on our shelves, but I figure once the kids can make it through the rest of a novel by Nicholson Baker or Bret Easton Ellis, they’re entitled to enjoy the sexy parts.

  I can handle all that.

  The other is far more complicated. Better parents than we might manage rage in whispers, but to me the very nature of an argument lies in the fact that it is uncontrollable. An argument that can be muffled or silenced can just as easily be avoided. Anyway, given the keen ears of my daughter and the apparent paucity of insulation in the walls of our house, controlling the volume probably wouldn’t make much of a difference. If I were a better mother, or a different kind of person, I might determine never to argue with Michael again. But the chances of that vow actually being realized are about as good as the chances of Dick Cheney or Sarah Palin being elected mayor of Berkeley. As a perhaps paltry substitute, Michael and I make sure that if the children hear us fight, they also hear us make up. They witness not just the bitter words but the contrite ones. In their turn they’ll probably fight with their spouses, but they’ll also be adept at the heartfelt apology.

  None of us have any choice but to live with the way in which our children are making sense of the adult world, no matter how uncomfortable it makes us. What goes around, after all, always ends up coming around. Karma, baby. It surely would have made my own parents uncomfortable had they known about my childhood snooping through their drawers and closets, my listening in. But back in those days we didn’t talk about such things. I kept my own counsel, drew my own conclusions. I never would have dared to cheerfully confess my eavesdropping over fried chicken and biscuit. Perhaps that is something to be grateful for. Because my own children feel no self-consciousness about their nosiness, at least I am warned.

  My kids have put me on notice. They have advised me of their intention, like mine before them, like that of all children, to latch onto tales and examples of conflict, despair, misery, and sadness in order to learn what it is like to be a grown-up. This is what it has always meant to be a child. Such dark stuff is the very currency of children’s literature and fairy tales. The stories my children love are full of doom and disaster. It’s just like when they ignore our calm and pleasant conversation, but tune us in when we bicker. When we read, for example, the Norse myths, they stifle a yawn at the sun dawning over the green and lovely new earth, but sit up, eyes bright and fascinated, at the parts about Nidhogg, the dragon of destruction, or the hag with many heads. What is more delightfully grim and terrifying, after all, than the Grimms’ version of “Cinderella,” the one my children like best, complete with hackedoff toes and birds pecking out the stepsisters’ eyes? I could try to present a Walt Disney version of my marriage, all happily-ever-afters, but they would neither be interested in it nor believe it.

  So now that I know that they are listening at our door and rifling through our drawers, hoping we won’t clean up our act, what will we do? Nothing different, I suppose. We’ll just continue the show.

  13. To Each His Own Mother

  When my oldest daughter was in preschool, there was a mom none of us had ever met. The mystery mom’s nanny brought the little girl to school every morning and picked her up every afternoon. The nanny came to Friday circle time and showed up for performances and events. We talked about this bogeymama all the time. What kind of a mother was too busy for the simple task of drop-off? Why bother to have children, we whispered to one another, if you had no intention of participating in their lives? Child neglect, that’s what it was. A Bad Mother.

  Flash forward ten years. Abraham is in preschool. His babysitter drops him off. Michael and I pick him up every day, but unlike the majority of children, Abraham is a Teddy Bear, which in sweetly cloying preschool parlance means that he stays in aftercare until 3:30 instead of getting picked up at 1:00. He is also in before-care, which means he gets dropped off at 8:30. Because most of the children come to school at 9:00 and leave at 1:00, there are some children and many mothers whom I don’t recognize when the day of his preschool graduation ceremony arrives, even though our kids have been going to school together for three years.

  It’s the final Friday circle time, and I am glancing surreptitiously at my watch as we sing round seventeen of “There’s a Dinosaur Knocking at My Door,” when a mom leans over to me and whispers, “Wow! You’re here. We never see you.”

  She has no idea how close she came to getting her clock cleaned. If I could only remember the name of that other bogeymama of so many years ago, I’d write her a note of apology.

  This was hardly the first time I was confronted with the tyranny of preschool expectations. Not long before the circle-time incident, the preschool class’s room parent decided to delete the husbands from the class e-mail list, figuring that only the moms needed to be informed about classroom outings and schedule changes. We share those jobs in my family, and I sent back an e-mail to the group asking that in the interest of egalitarian parenting, the men be reinstated. “After all,” I wrote, “if I have to deal with things like volunteering to serve pizza, then so should my husband.”

  In reply the group received an e-mail from a mom informing us that she (unlike, presumably, me) loved her children, and considered working Pizza Day a privilege, not a chore. I didn’t know the mom whose ire I had sparked; I was never there at drop-off to meet her.

  I forwarded this exchange to a friend, along with the expletive-tinged response that I would have sent to that sanctimonious mommy had I not been such a circumspect person. Except I didn’t hit the “forward” button. I hit “reply to all.”

  Thus I guaranteed my continued status as the class bogeymama. Clearly, the one who should have been banned from preschool e-mailing was not Michael but me.

  Way back when Sophie was in preschool, it was so easy for me to pass judgment. I was a stay-at-home mother then. I relished drop-off because it got me out of the house every morning. The other preschool moms constituted the bulk of my social life, most of which had to happen with our children in tow. I had plenty of time for playdates, plenty of time to volunteer to distribute Wednesday bagel lunch, plenty of time to drive on field trips.
I had nothing but time—long days filled with breast-feeding and grocery shopping, Mommy and Me and Music Together, playdates and preschool politics. I was certainly busy, but as my children were the source of my activity, it went without saying that I was there, ready, willing, and available for all the multitude of activities their lives required of me.

  By the time my fourth was born, I was a writer working on deadline, trying to cram a full day’s work into the hours before my kids got home from school. I took on more assignments than were remotely reasonable, but in all honesty it wasn’t only my work that obliged me to buy out my preschool volunteer hours instead of spending time cutting up fruit for morning snack or taking home and laundering the costumes from the dress-up corner. The problem was that my fourth child’s first year of preschool was my eighth. I’d faithfully attended eight information nights, fourteen preschool parent-teacher conferences, twenty parent-principal coffee hours, and approximately 280 Shabbat sing-alongs. Abraham was just getting started, but I was ready to graduate.

  Abraham and Sophie had two entirely different mothers. Sophie’s was young and eager, and found the whole preschool experience to be novel and exciting. Abraham’s mother was old, her knees hurt when she sat cross-legged on the floor, and her cupboards were already bursting with popsicle-stick-and-glitter-glue picture frames. She did only a halfway decent job of feigning excitement at yet one more.

  We have a Baby Blues comic strip taped to our fridge that offers an embarrassingly accurate reflection of our family life.* The first panel is captioned “First Baby’s Pictures,” and it shows a pile of scrapbooks and photo albums, painstakingly labeled and organized. The second panel is captioned “Second Baby’s Pictures,” and it shows a shoe box stuffed willy-nilly with photographs. The third panel is captioned “And So On,” and it shows the parents looking at a picture on their cell phone and saying, “We really should download these one of these days.”

  I produced six complete, beautifully organized photo albums of Sophie’s first year, the kind with the individual photo corners and the tissue-paper dividers. Stored on my computer are hundreds of files of digital images of her every smile, step, and bowel movement. Hanging on our walls are not one but two series of framed black and whites taken by professional photographers whose services cost more than my first car. I have a plastic storage bin full of videotapes with hour upon hour of Sophie playing with her toes or spinning the beads on her ExerSaucer or sleeping. We videotaped her sleeping, because, my God, no baby has ever looked so beautiful when she slept.

  There are exactly twelve decent photographs of Abe’s first year (and a bunch of digital images I will someday get around to downloading). The twelve photographs were taken only because we started this thing when Sophie was a baby of taking a picture every month with a sign that said, “1 month,” “2 months,” and so on and then at the end of the year framing all twelve of them together and hanging the poster-sized picture on the wall. We did it joyfully with Sophie, absentmindedly with Zeke, grudgingly with Rosie, and finally with Abe, only because not doing it would have given him too much to talk about in therapy.

  We have about ninety seconds, total, of video taken of Abraham in the four years before Sophie’s bat mitzvah, when the friend who was videotaping the event managed to catch him dancing with his sister. It was about time, because I was starting to freak out that if (God forbid) he was snatched by some crazy maniac, we wouldn’t have a video clip to play on the news or on those huge AMBER Alert screens set up on the sides of highways.

  It’s not just that we are more distracted now, or stretched thinner, than we were back when Sophie was a baby, although of course that’s true, too. It’s that in some tangible way, we are different parents. Sophie’s mother was twenty-nine years old; she was excited by every aspect of having a new baby. She was also tremendously insecure, terrified that she would make a mistake, and so intent on doing everything differently from her own mother that she experienced motherhood as a semi-constant state of second-guessing and reevaluation.

  Sophie’s mother hadn’t yet learned that babies of six weeks have, basically, the same personality they’ll have when they are sixty years old, and there is not a whole lot you can do to change that. You can do as much baby whispering and charted behavior reinforcement as you want, but the truth is that it’s not going to have a whole lot of effect, either for good or for ill. You can probably train your baby to sleep through the night, but if your kid is by nature an insomniac, then the two of you are just screwed. You can probably make your kid work hard to earn enough stars on his chart to buy a Lego Imperial Star Destroyer, but if he’s got a lazy streak, you’re not going to have much luck stickering it out of him. And by the same token, as bad as your temper is, as prone as you are to nagging, if your daughter is by nature unflappable and confident, then there is, thank God (and thank Sophie), a limit to how much damage you can do to her.

  Sophie’s mother hadn’t learned those lessons. On the other hand, Abe’s mother was in some ways so laid-back that she once forgot him in an ice cream parlor. It was only a couple of weeks after I gave birth, and on our way out of the ice cream store I did that maternal inventory thing—kid 1, check, kid 2, check, where’s kid 3? Over there, check. Dog, check. Sunglasses, check. Purse, check. Okay, let’s go. I was halfway down the block before the soda jerk caught up with me. “Hey, lady,” he called, trundling the stroller in front of him as he ran. “I think you forgot something.”

  Abe’s mother got an early dose of perspective. When your baby nearly starves to death, when getting every mouthful of food into his body is a struggle, when you wonder if you will have no choice but to put him through a draconian surgery to wrench forward his sweet little jaw, when he gains a total of three-quarters of a pound in his entire fourth year, whether or not you show up for circle time becomes a lot less important.

  Even the two middle kids had (and have) different mothers. Zeke’s mother was, at least at first, pretty thoroughly depressed, and preferred to keep him reliant on her in a way his older sister never was. Each of the three other kids had Lovies—little stuffed animal heads with blankets instead of bodies. Sophie’s Mr. Bun still lives on her bed, tattered and battered into nothing more than a bare, earless rabbit head with no blanket and only one eye. Rosie and Abe’s mother was smarter and invested in half a dozen replicas of each of their “transitional objects,” although it is true that there is only one truly beloved Pink Bun or Mr. Pup. For his transitional object, Zeke had his mother, or rather her boobs, which he relied on for comfort until he was two years and nine months old, when he began to make regular comments like “This titty empty. Other side, please.” Sophie’s mother was insecure and yelled all the time, but when he was little, Zeke’s rarely got angry and, when the situation demanded it, usually had to fake even sternness.

  Rosie, born after Rocketship, got a mother incapable of anything but the most shocking indulgence, who gave her everything she wanted, spoiling her rotten, and protected her from any and all sensations of displeasure and disappointment, no matter how educational they might have been. It is possible that the reason Rosie didn’t walk until she was eighteen months old was that her tiny feet could not bear the weight of her rolls upon rolls of delicious chub (you have never seen such a fat baby), but it is also possible that it was because her mother, so grateful to have her, couldn’t bear to put her down.

  Abie’s mother was at once much more strict and distracted, by her worry for his health, by having to pump breast milk, by her deadlines, by the sheer technical effort involved in getting four children from point A to point B.

  It is hard to say which of the four got a better deal. Abie never had the pleasure of holding his mommy’s hand during the field trip to the children’s museum, and he was only ever allowed to have playdates with the two boys whose sisters had been in school with Rosie and whose mothers his own had thus made friends with when she still had the energy and spare time to do so. But his mother wasn’t afraid so much of t
he time, or at least not of such silly things. He is also indulged and appreciated, even savored, because he’s the baby. For all that he suffers from being a fourth child—his mother’s preschool passivity, the paucity of photographs of him as compared with his oldest sister—he gains something from being part of a large family. It’s easy to see what the benefits are while watching the four of them gleefully construct a fort out of living room pillows and cardboard boxes.

  The little boy formerly known as “the baby” started kindergarten this fall. We have both, Abraham and I, graduated from preschool. No more Shabbat sing-alongs. No more preschool picnics or teacher appreciation breakfasts. It has only been a couple of months since we cleaned out his cubby for the last time, but already I’m waxing nostalgic. Remember Water Day? Remember that weekend when the class mouse decided, without notice, to go live on a farm in the country? Remember Friday afternoons in the park with the other kids in the class when I tried to pretend I knew everyone’s names, but confused Parker with that other kid—was it Adam?—with a regularity that I know was perceived as intentional. What was that boy’s name? Was it Adam? Or was it Jonah? Wait, I think Jonah was a kid in Sophie’s class.

  Come September, I’ll have a whole new group of parents not to get to know. Sophie’s mother might have considered being a room parent, and while Abe’s would rather have her eyes plucked from her head, she is making a New School Year’s resolution. She is going to try not to be the mom that no one ever sees.

  Unfortunately, all the kids except Sophie started a new school, which means three classes’ worth of children and their parents, three classes’ worth of picnics and potlucks, three classes’ worth of field trips and garden tours. I know that even if I approach this with all the goodwill in the world, there will come a time when I hurt Parker’s mother’s feelings or fail to recognize Adam’s father when we bump into each other at Peet’s Coffee. Whatever my intentions, I am probably doomed to become once again that mother to whom people say, “You’re here! What a surprise. We never see you.”