Bad Mother

by Ayelet Waldman

  So this is it. Four wonderful children. More children than I ever thought I’d have, certainly. A big family. The perfect size for us. And yet, remember the eggshell toenails and buttery soft skin of a baby’s foot? Just one more tiny mouthful of a foot …

  17. The Audacity of Hope

  For the last few years a video has been working its way around the Internet. You know how these things go, for months no one notices them, and then suddenly thirty people send you the link on the same day. I’d watched the video before, a few times, I think, and thought it was cute and a little bit silly. It made me smile. Then my brother Paul—a hard-bitten political media analyst living in D.C.—forwarded me the link with a note that said, “For some reason, this almost gives me hope for humanity.” Paul isn’t a sentimental guy, except when it comes to his oldest child, a gentle and charming boy who goes through life with a “Kick me” sign taped to his back. Paul is a supreme cynic; he lost his hope for humanity when he was three years old. So when Paul sent me a sappy note with a link, I had no choice but to follow it.

  For four minutes and twenty-eight seconds, some guy named Matt (Matthew Harding, a thirty-something white man from Connecticut living out a protracted and very sweet adolescence) dances the same goofy dance in dozens of different countries. At first he’s dancing alone, in an alley in Mumbai, on a hillside in Paro, Bhutan, atop a causeway in Northern Ireland. But soon people start to join in, a group of small children in Antsiranana, Madagascar, a bunch of hipsters in Stockholm, kids in school uniforms in the Solomon Islands, a blank-faced soldier in the demilitarized zone in Korea, a troupe of dancers in candy-colored saris in Gurgaon, India, Papua New Guineans in feathers and paint, a beluga whale in Vava’u, Tonga. The music, by the composer Garry Schyman, has one of those incredible melodies that clicks into your limbic system like a key into a lock, releasing a wash of serotonin or dopamine or something that makes you happy to be alive. It was in Madrid, when a crowd of joyful people rushed out from both sides of the screen, gyrating wildly, a giddy swirl of alegría, that I started to cry. I kept it up through Chakachino and Cape of Good Hope, Timbuktu and Tokyo, San Francisco and São Paulo, and didn’t stop until Matt did, in Seattle.

  I was crying at the sight of this chubby American dude, a self-described deadbeat with no plan other than to travel the world until his cash ran out, kicking up his heels and swinging his arms atop mountains and temples, in alleyways and on beaches, because Matt’s world, where strangers gleefully join you in your dance, is the world that I have always told my children we live in.

  For all that I profess such a wholehearted belief in honesty, I have been committing that worst of maternal crimes on a near daily basis. I have been lying to my children. I’ve been feeding them this tale about how if they came across a Bedouin in the Negev desert, he would welcome them into his tent and serve them a cup of mint tea, and that if they found themselves in Burkina Faso, a seven-year-old kid might kick around a soccer ball with them, and when lost on the Métro, they are likely to be given directions to the Musée d’Orsay by a haughty but polite Parisian matron with a bichon frise tucked under her arm.

  It’s not that I would not warn them, say, that while on the Via Veneto in Rome it’s wise to clamp a hand over their wallets if rushed by a group of Gypsy kids, or that I would allow them to apply to a student exchange program in Harare, Zimbabwe. I’m not sheltering them from the truth, exactly. The older ones know what an IED is, and that hundreds of thousands of people, both soldiers and civilians, have been killed and maimed in Iraq. They know what happened in Abu Ghraib. All four kids are conversant in the looming global-warming crisis (when she finds a light on, Rosie is apt to snap it off and shout, “Are you people trying to kill the polar bears?”) and they hate John McCain with a passion they normally reserve for … well … Dick Cheney. They know it would probably not be safe for our family to travel to certain countries because my passport lists my birthplace as Jerusalem, and they worried about their friends who were lucky enough to go to China for the Olympics because the air pollution in Beijing is, Zeke tells me, some of the worst in the world.

  They are not naive children. But in a way they are innocent. As honest as I’ve been about all the world’s calamities, I’ve also tried, despite knowing full well that I was deceiving them, to instill in my kids a faith that at heart all people are just like them, and that justice, if it is not prevailing now, is bound to one day.

  That woman who told me when Zeke was a baby that I was imposing my negative view of the universe on my children had it only half-right. On the one hand, I’ve successfully managed to raise at least one punk rock kid, Zeke, who periodically becomes convinced that the human race has, on balance, brought little but destruction to the world, and that it would be best if our species, like the saber-toothed tiger or the great auk, simply became extinct. But at the same time I’ve also so successfully sugarcoated the world that Zeke is able to have his faith in human decency completely restored just by listening to Rush (“And the men who hold high places, must be the ones to start, to mold a new reality, closer to the heart”). Which is worse? Lying about hope or telling the truth about hopelessness?

  The myth Michael and I have been telling our kids—that each individual in the world shares a core of human decency—has a corollary in the way we discuss the history of America. Our kids get a slightly more honest view of American history than we did back in the 1970s, but the lessons being taught today are not that different in tone from those bygone rose-colored paeans to melting pot and opportunity. While our children learn in school that Columbus cannot be said to have discovered America, they are also told that he did make a very important journey. As the song they teach Berkeley schoolchildren every Indigenous Peoples Day goes, “It was a courageous thing to do, but someone was already here, yes, someone was already here.” Because their teachers wouldn’t, Michael and I taught them (with the assistance of the brilliant Sarah Vowell and Ira Glass’s This American Life) about the Trail of Tears, and the brutality of Andrew Jackson, but we also told them about heroes like Tecumseh and Sitting Bull. We wanted to make sure that while they understand this country’s history of brutality, they also saw grace and courage. We taught them that once, in the far past, women were not allowed to vote, but now, thanks to suffragists like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Hillary Clinton can run for president and California can be represented in the Senate by not one but two women.

  You see where I’m going here? We teach them about our nation’s history of racism—I once played the older kids Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit,” and we talked about how lynchings were common not so long ago in the South—but then we tell them that thanks to people like Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks, whom Sophie portrayed in her nursery school’s civil rights pageant, the struggle for civil rights was won. (I think Ms. Parks might have enjoyed the sight of a little white moppet furiously refusing to sit at the back of a cardboard-box bus.) My kids are proud to live in the Bay Area, where there is a mayor like Gavin Newsom, brave enough to stand up for justice and allow gay people to marry. We spend a lot of time talking about injustice in our family, but the way we tell it, those days are mostly over. The Voting Rights Act passed into law, and equal protection means that every individual, regardless of race, ethnicity, nationality, or sexual orientation, is entitled to be treated the same. We tell them that the end of racism and prejudice of all kinds is inevitable. I spout to my children an optimistic version of America and the world, in which bad things happen but good people of all kinds struggle for and ultimately receive justice. But I have always feared, in my heart of hearts, that I have been selling them a bill of goods.

  Michael is a natural patriot. If it were up to him, we’d have an American flag flying from a pole in front of our house, not because he is naive about what the flag has come to mean both here and abroad, but because he refuses to allow jingoistic bigots who substitute a flag pin for a commitment to the Constitution to own that symbol of freedo
m. I’m the one who won’t have it. Freedom? I scoff. To a kid on the streets of Iraq or Iran, of Kigali or Rafah, the American flag sure as hell doesn’t symbolize freedom.

  But it should, Michael says. And if we keep up the struggle, if we don’t cede the nation to people and parties whose conception of liberty begins and ends with the right to keep a loaded semiautomatic pistol tucked into the waistband of their jeans, if we keep teaching our children that America is a fundamentally decent place, the flag will one day be a symbol that we can take pride in.

  What comes easy to him had to be learned by me. When he tells those stories to our children, a large enough part of him believes what he’s saying. But I was raised by Canadian parents whose defining attitude toward the United States was a distrust of its power and rhetoric. My father, who after thirty years in New Jersey finally became a citizen solely so he could vote against George Bush, always wanted to move back to Israel. He and my mother, who was born in Brooklyn but grew up in Montreal, taught me that while the United States was a fine enough place to live, its citizens were in many ways as foreign to us as Masai warriors or Ladakhi sheepherders. My parents instilled in their children not just a suspicion of the U.S. government but a sense of superiority toward its citizens, at least those that didn’t live in New York or teach at a select few institutions of higher learning. Americans were stupid, bovine, easily fooled by conniving politicians and telemarketers. They watched hours of television every day. (As did we, but that didn’t keep us from looking down our noses. We watched Masterpiece Theatre and M*A*S*H, they watched soap operas and game shows.)

  The stories we tell our kids come easier to Michael in part because, unlike me, he spent his childhood in a place that inspired patriotism. He grew up in Columbia, Maryland, in the 1970s, when that planned community came close to achieving its utopian ideal of racial integration. In Columbia black and white families lived side by side. White and black children rode their bikes together along the meandering paths, swam together in the neighborhood pools, got into arguments, made up. They were friends.

  Even if I were not already predisposed to feel both alien and superior to the country in which I spent the vast majority of my life, my hometown wasn’t anything to be proud of, particularly when it came to race. I grew up in Ridgewood, New Jersey, a town where real estate agents routinely steered minority families to certain neighborhoods. The African American kids were isolated, segregated, and we white kids made little or no attempt to cross over that divide.

  As a little girl, I knew there was a problem, but it never occurred to me that I could do anything about it. It was just another reason to hate my hometown. Now, as an adult, I am not only conscious of and ashamed of my failure to act, but I’m also damaged by it. When Michael meets someone of another race, he does not pretend to be color-blind, or to deny the omnipresence of race, but neither does he bring with him any expectations or biases. But because I did not spend my life in the company of a diversity of people, I’m not as comfortable as he is. I am so conscious of the historical context of oppression in which my conversations take place that sometimes I end up making a fool of myself, trotting out my liberal credentials to prove that I’m one of the good guys.

  But part of the story we’re teaching our own children is that things like that don’t happen anymore. America is different. And it’s not entirely a lie. Their America is different. Berkeley isn’t Ridgewood, or Indiana, or even Columbia. They go to schools that not only celebrate diversity but actually embody it. One of Zeke’s best friends is a kid whose parents between the two of them encompass four ethnic identities: Jewish, Greek, African American, and white. His other buddy came to Oakland as a refugee from Mississippi after Katrina. Together the three of them look like a Benetton ad.

  In my children’s world the girl adopted from China by two Jewish lesbians is no more unusual than the kid whose parents hail from the Iowa cornfields. Less, probably. In the year 2000, the first in which the census permitted people to check a box to describe themselves as mixed-race, nearly 5 percent of Californians chose that option. One in nineteen children in the United States is of mixed race, and in California that number is closer to one in ten.

  Things do look better for my children, and perhaps because of that I have very recently started to wonder if the tales we’ve been teaching them about the victory of the civil rights movement and the power of diversity might not be the truth, after all.

  Not long ago, I was reading the New York Times, and was stopped short by a full-page ad for an exclusive real estate agency—a photograph of a family in their lavish, high-ceilinged kitchen, complete with Sub-Zero fridge, expensive wood paneling, and a European cappuccino maker. What was striking about the ad was not that the man and woman were far too young, thin, and fresh faced to really be the parents of the four gorgeous children, but that the “father” was white and the “mother” was black. The family being used to sell a vision of American achievement and luxury was biracial.

  I was in Columbia, South Carolina, during the Democratic primary, volunteering for Barack Obama. The night of the election I was standing in a crowd of hundreds waiting for our candidate to take the stage. While they waited, people amused themselves by watching the news on the JumboTron, batting beach balls over their heads, and taking up various chants.

  Bill Clinton’s face appeared five feet tall on the television screen, a replay of his now-notorious reference to Jesse Jackson having also won the South Carolina primary, with its implication that this year’s black candidate’s victory would be as fleeting and ultimately irrelevant. In response, a group of black college students took up the chant “Race doesn’t matter, race doesn’t matter.” Within moments the cry spread throughout the room.

  There we were, a crowd divided roughly in half between white people and people of color, most of whom were black, in a city where the Confederate flag still flies and where there still stands a statue of Governor Benjamin Tillman, famous for boasting of his murder of blacks who dared to vote: “We shot them. We are not ashamed of it.” And we were all shouting, “Race doesn’t matter.”

  Now, of course, race matters. America is still a country where nearly a quarter of African Americans live in poverty and more African American men are in prison than in college. Sixteen years ago, when I was living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and dating a black fellow law student, race sure as hell mattered. Even in the birthplace of the abolitionist movement people stared at us. Cabs refused to pick us up. People avoided sitting next to us in movie theaters or on the bus.

  But now there’s that ad in the paper. There are those students in the crowd. There is Barack Obama himself, who doesn’t so much espouse the rhetoric of equality and the end of racism as embody it. And there’s Matt, boogying down in Amman and in Tel Aviv. And there is the evidence of my four white children, who count among their friends children of any number of races and permutations of racial identity. My kids no longer see the world in black and white. The other day Abe was describing two people. One, he said, was bald, with pink skin. The other wore a red shirt and had black hair and brown skin. Skin was something that could be described by color, like hair, but that’s all it was. No race, no politics. Just color.

  I’m not naive. I know that soon enough Abe will learn how racial differences and distinctions continue to preoccupy American society. But he’s growing up in a world where an advertiser’s ideal family is multihued, and where young people can lead a chant that embodies not only the feeling of a moment but the hope for our country’s future.

  He and his siblings are growing up in the America of our stories, and I can’t quite believe it. Maybe all along, like a Good Mother, I’ve been telling the truth about that good country, America. And maybe it’s time for us to get that Stars and Stripes, after all.

  18. The Life I Want for Them

  At every parents’ night I’ve ever attended—and with four children I’ve been to more than my share—I have waited for the inevitable question. After we hav
e studied the self-portraits and birthday charts that decorate the walls, after we’ve signed up (or not) to chaperone the field trips, after the teacher has presented the year’s curriculum and the parent-teacher conference schedule, one of the parents always raises his or her hand, a little too high and a little too eagerly.

  “What accommodation,” he or she says, “do you make for the exceptionally gifted child?”

  All the other parents look to find out who the lucky speaker is; who is the parent of this future Bobby Fischer, this Stephen Hawking of the second grade?

  For the vast majority of us, the question serves only to make us feel bad. We’ve all wished at one time or another to be the parents of the gifted kid. Our kitchen drawers are brimming over with abandoned flash cards, Baby Einstein DVDs gather dust in our television cabinets, and our children’s toy chests are littered at their lowest levels with the polygon rubble of black-and-white-striped Stim Mobiles, mini baseball gloves, and broken violin bows. I should know. Michael and I still swear to this day that Sophie said the word “duck” when she was only six months old.

  It was Sophie who began for us what became a long lesson in the folly of expectations. When she was in preschool, I began buying her First Readers, convinced that it was only a matter of months before she’d be whipping through The Chronicles of Narnia. When she was still painstakingly sounding out words at age seven, I called my mother, completely distraught. “She’s only reading at a first-grade level!” I wailed.

  There was silence on the other end of the line.

  Finally my mother said, “Honey, she’s in first grade.”