Bad Mother

by Ayelet Waldman

More hysteria. “But Michael was reading by age four! And I was such an early reader!”

  “What are you talking about?” my mother said. “You took forever to learn to read. You were the last in your class.”

  What?

  Still, even knowing of my own average kindergarten abilities didn’t prevent me from being disappointed that my daughter didn’t excel. Why is it no longer enough for us that our children do well? They must, instead, be prodigies. Top of the class doesn’t cut it. They have to be taken from the class and enrolled in a special program for future Nobel laureates.

  When Sophie was five years old, she began playing the violin. Or, rather, I made her begin playing the violin. It was because of Max. Max was a boy Michael’s brother used to babysit for, a boy who, at Sophie’s age, played angelic Bach cantatas on a quarter-sized cello. I was sure, or rather I surely hoped, that Sophie had a natural ear, and she looked so cute with her quarter-sized violin.

  By the time of her uncle’s wedding, Sophie had been studying nearly a year, the last month of which was spent preparing a Russian dance from her Suzuki violin book.

  Sophie mounted the stage in her lavender taffeta-and-tulle gown, a circlet of roses in her hair (her first duty of the day had been as flower girl). The crowd hushed as she lifted her violin into position and raised her bow. Every guest in the audience sat a little straighter, wondering just how stunning the prodigy would be when she launched into her flawless Mozart minuet, or perhaps one of Paganini’s more simple Capriccios. I knew better, of course, and yet when her bow hit the strings, I sat with my heart in my mouth, full of pride and expectation. You see, my capacity for expectation was forever distorted by Hollywood and that rotten little Max, and part of me was sure that her rendition of this little Russian dance would be the most beautiful, transporting performance of that supremely minor bit of violin music that any of us would ever have heard. This even though I had been listening to her for months; I knew that Sophie playing the violin sounded exactly like a violin rolling itself halfheartedly down the stairs. I knew that her clearest note was in the same exact pitch as my teakettle. After all, I was the one who kept rushing into the kitchen during her lessons to turn off the unlit burner. And yet when the performance began, and the cats in the neighborhood yowled back, recognizing her squall, I was as shocked as anyone in that audience.

  The pictures came out great, though! Sophie looks adorable, her curls bouncing beneath their crown of flowers. For all you can tell, she might be playing the allemande from Bach’s Partita no. 2 for solo violin.

  Why is it that when our children fail to meet our unrealistically high expectations—when they behave, instead, like normal, average kids—we end up disappointed? We send them to after-school cram programs that have terrorized generations of Japanese schoolchildren into higher test scores and mental collapse, we hire pitching coaches and gymnastics tutors, we enroll them in chess camp.

  We contemporary parents are convinced, just like the fictional population of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, that all of our children are above average. But here’s the thing: intelligence, like most accomplishment, is a bell curve. There’s a large group in the middle, and only a very few outliers on either end. Thus, most of our children rest comfortably in the fat part of that curve. The only thing worse than having low expectations of your children is setting the bar so high that they cannot hope to succeed. And the only thing worse than that is allowing yourself to be crushed when they fail. I know; I’ve been there. I have seen what happens when the children of whom you have such unrealistically high expectations not only don’t excel, but lag behind.

  After his horrible year in fourth grade, when we sent Zeke to be evaluated, I think I expected the neuropsychologist to say something like “This child is so brilliant and sophisticated that sometimes his frustration with the low level of work in the classroom makes him act out.” I can hear you laughing. At least those of you whose children have gone through the rigamarole of testing and diagnosis. I’ll bet there are others who are thinking, “That sounds about right. Poor Dylan/Parker/Jayden/Storey is just not getting the stimulation he needs.”

  I went into the meeting confident that my child’s genius would be confirmed. This was the boy, after all, who could recite the planets in order from the sun when he was fifteen months old. Of course he could also recite the names of TV’s Arthur and all his classmates, and there didn’t actually seem to be much of a difference in how he’d learned both. He’s got a great long-term memory. The last thing I was expecting was a diagnosis of ADHD and of the other series of challenges my older son faces. The doctor spent over two hours with us that morning, going over every page of his thick pile of test results. I started crying almost immediately, something fairly typical, I suppose, if the boxes of tissues placed strategically around the office were anything to gauge by.

  When I recall it now, it was almost as though, in the days and weeks that followed, I went through a version of Kübler-Ross’s stages of grief. First came denial. There was nothing wrong with my son, I insisted. To a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and to a neuropsychologist every behavior looks like a learning disability. The tests were wrong, administered poorly, graded incorrectly. My boy wasn’t hyperactive; he didn’t run frantically from place to place, jumping off furniture and breaking dishes. He didn’t have attention problems; he could sit for two hours perfecting a Flair-pen drawing of Mothra battling Godzilla. Zeke was fine, the problem was school. His teachers didn’t understand him; they couldn’t see past his (admittedly crappy) attitude to the sensitive brilliance that lay beneath. Moreover, the whole academic enterprise was structured for girls, not for boys. Show me any ten-year-old boy who could sit still for an hour multiplying decimals. It can’t be true, I said. ADHD is one of those fad diagnoses, a way to pathologize the behavior of normal boys. The medical and educational establishment wants to drug our children into dull compliance.

  Although I’ve moved beyond the stage of denial, I still think there was some truth to my initial flood of defensiveness. Schools are organized to cater to more sedentary, well-behaved children, to the kinds of kids who can concentrate for hours at a time, even without periodic recess breaks spent crashing madly around a playground. It was also true that Zeke is not hyperactive in the way that laymen think of the disorder; you rarely see him bouncing off the walls.

  But even as I was ranting and remonstrating, I knew that I was being unreasonable. While he might not tear a room apart (he’s a neat boy), Zeke does have “impulse control” issues. That phrase rang true the moment the neuropsychologist first uttered it. I thought of the impulses Zeke had failed to control: the impulse to use his new pocketknife to shred the seat of his desk chair and the upholstery in the back of the minivan (how does one balance the cost of having to replace leather car upholstery against the pleasure of being able to say to one’s husband, “I told you a knife was no gift for a child”?); the impulse to tackle a mean kid who was teasing him; the impulse to knock down his younger siblings’ elaborate “setup” (a family term that means a panorama made of small toys, like Playmobils or Legos, or the beloved Hamtaros, tiny plastic hamsters based on the Japanese anime TV series).

  The diagnosis of processing-speed delay made sense, too. This was why Zeke was always slow at figuring out the value of his Yahtzee roll. I felt so ashamed of all the times I had berated him, saying something like, “Come on, Zeke, you know what three times three is.” And of course he did. It just took him an extra fraction of a second to come up with the answer. It was a miracle that he could do it at all, with me hollering in his ear.

  The next phase I went through was a kind of collapse, in which I actually stopped seeing my son, the boy whom I know better, in many ways, than I know myself. I forgot everything I knew about who he was and what he was capable of, and began to panic that he would become lost in the world. The possibilities for his future, which I had once seen as boundless, suddenly seemed constricted and limited. He would not, as I had promised
him since he was a baby, be able to do anything and be anything, with only the limitations of his imagination to constrain him. There were skills that would forever be beyond him, jobs he would never be fit to assume. It was in the throes of this bitter phase that I said to Michael, “If he’s got processing-speed problems, he’ll never be able to be an airline pilot!”

  Doing his best not to smile, Michael said, “I don’t think he’s ever wanted to be an airline pilot.”

  “I know that! But if he ever wants to, he won’t be able to.”

  “He won’t be able to play in the NBA, either,” Michael said. “That’s never bothered you.”

  Indeed I had never lost a moment’s sleep over the fact that my son would never be a professional basketball player, or a professional athlete of any kind. Michael’s right—I’ve never cared one whit about my children’s athletic limitations. On the contrary, I brag as much about the time Zeke kicked a ball into the opposing team’s soccer goal as other parents brag about their children’s amateur tennis rankings.

  But to have my child be limited by something in his brain: that thought tortured me. Now, a year later, picking apart my reaction, I can see that this period of panic and fear had two distinct elements. I was afraid for my son, for how hard he would have to struggle to do well in school, for the ways in which he might not be able to do all he wanted, or achieve all his dreams. But there was also a much more shameful element. One that even now I can hardly bear to admit. I was afraid for him, but I was also disappointed. I was crushed at least in part because of my own ego. Part of me wanted to be, had always wanted to be, the one with the hand in the air. “What accommodation,” I was afraid I would now never be able to say, “will you make for my gifted child?”

  I had these expectations, you see, born of my own and Michael’s academic successes, that our children would be not just smart but smarter. I had met all these exceptionally smart children even before I had my own, like the son of college friends who at age four could warble long bits of opera—in Italian. The ten-year-old son of people we know works weekends as a sous chef at one of the Bay Area’s finest restaurants. Other people’s children made their debuts with the Berlin Philharmonic; they sat in Washington Square Park, the heels of their Stride Rites pounding a tattoo on the bench, as they trounced old Russian grand masters at blitz chess. They did quadratic equations in their heads while they were still in diapers. That was what my children were supposed to be like. Even before I had them, I knew they would be brilliant. They would be plucked from their schoolrooms and taken to the gifted class. They would play Mozart at age three. They would shine brighter and do better than any other child. There was no room in my elaborate scaffolding of expectations for something like ADHD.

  As much as I loathe to admit it, I was fearful of the reactions of the mothers of those perfect, gifted children. I was embarrassed. And certainly there have been mothers (and fathers) who have justified that concern. I cannot tell you how many people have responded to news of Zeke’s diagnosis with disapproving versions of my own initial reaction, informing me of the dangers of over-medicating. They’ve said, “Boys will be boys.” They’ve raised their eyebrows; they’ve been smug or pitying. But just as often, people have responded to my (or Zeke’s) admission with the whispered confession that their son needs medication, too, or their daughter is learning disabled, or can I please, please, give them a referral to Zeke’s therapist.

  The thing is, you can never really know what goes on behind the closed doors of other houses, and what seems like brilliance and feels like superiority almost always has its own quota of trouble. Things are rarely ever what they seem. That math genius? He was still taking a nightly bottle when he was seven. The opera singer is dyslexic. And while the infant chess master is indeed brilliant, he’s also a narcissistic little pill.

  On Zeke’s first day of summer day camp this year he came home in a gloom. Everyone knew each other, he told us. They all went to school together. They had secret handshakes, in-jokes, private nicknames. They knew whom to sit with, and just what to say. And there he was, on the outs. He would never make a friend.

  As parents, we had the presence of mind and the experience to tell him that the way things feel from the outside is rarely the truth of the matter. The people at the fantastic party you think you didn’t get invited to don’t even know there’s a party going on. They don’t feel any more a part of the brilliance than you do. We have a tendency to value idealization over our own experience of messy reality. We fail to recognize that reality is actually wonderful, but for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with the ideal.

  The reality of Zeke perhaps did not live up to some fantastically ludicrous ideal of a child I had in my head, the perfect counterpart to the ideal of the Good Mother I dreamed and despaired of being, but what I finally realized, when I passed out of that ugly and painful stage of grief, was that nothing about my son had changed. The neuropsychologist’s diagnosis had not infected Zeke with a disease. It was nothing more than a description of a small part of who he was, who he’d always been. And he was still exactly the same person. He was still the same little boy who’d named all the planets, still the same politically savvy kid who cracked jokes about Donna Brazile, still the same boy who picked up his little sister at ballet class and walked her home, gripping her chubby little paw in one of his hands and her tiny pink slippers in the other. Zeke is exactly what he’s always been, creative and very intelligent, with a heightened awareness of injustice and a mordant wit. He is the little toddler who held my cheeks in his hands, gazed into my eyes, and said with utmost seriousness and certitude, “Mommy, I love you.” What I love about my boy is unlabelable. Who he is can never be quantified by pages of test scores, no matter the size of the sheaf.

  The whole notion of the constriction of potential that I had cried over so hard, I see, is just absurd. True, you wouldn’t want to fly in a plane piloted by Zeke, nor will he ever solve the Goldbach conjecture. But as Michael said, he’s never had aviation aspirations, and he’s doing fine in math. The point of a life, any life, is to figure out what you are good at, and what makes you happy, and, if you are very fortunate, spend your life doing those things.

  What the diagnosis gave us was a way to help our son. He now has, in the jargon of his various tutors and therapists, a full toolbox of techniques with which to do well in school. He is learning math through a teaching program designed for brains like his, and doing well.* He has an ed therapist to help him figure out how to approach his homework. And on school days—only on school days—he takes Ritalin, which allows him to ignore the distractions around him and concentrate on his teacher and his work and on controlling his impulses.

  The worst thing about being so devoted to your expectations is that it blinds you to the wonders of the children you have. When Rosie was little, she was a slow talker. At the age at which her siblings were discoursing in long, complicated sentences, she was just beginning to put words together in non-syntactical combinations. She spoke in the most adorable baby talk, but much of the time when I should have been enjoying her babble and celebrating her new words, I was distracted by the nagging worry that she was behind the curve. She would sit on the floor, her fat legs stretched out in front of her, as I built and rebuilt a tower of blocks, laughing each time I toppled it over. I was so busy saying, “Rosie, can you say ‘boom’? Say ‘boom’ for Mommy,” that I barely registered her full-body smile, the way every inch of her, from her cornflower blue eyes to the pink tips of her toes, wriggled as she grinned at the tower’s collapse.

  The most toxic thing parents can do is allow their delight and pride in their children to be spoiled by disappointment, by frustration when the children fail to live up to expectations formed before they were even born, expectations that have nothing to do with them and everything to do with the parents’ own egos.

  One of my favorite yoga teachers, the one I go to because she works me the hardest and makes me the skinniest, spends a lot
of the time we are inhaling through alternate nostrils talking about right mindfulness, the Buddhist notion of bringing awareness to the present moment, of consciously shifting our attention away from the past and the future and focusing it on the present, on the moment, on the instant at hand. To be mindful means you do not judge or evaluate, you simply experience. Notice. Concentrate on the moment, be aware of it as it happens without stopping to try to figure out what it means.

  It feels ridiculous even to write about this, about Buddhism and yoga. I do not meditate, although I know I should and I have periodically tried. The voices in my head are as multitudinous and persistent as the lice that infest my children’s hair at the beginning of every school year. Moreover, I actually kind of hate people who talk about things like mindfulness, or at least the ones I run into around here, in Berkeley. Why is it that the most self-actualized people seem so often to be the most self-absorbed?

  I’m no Buddhist, but still I wish I were a more mindful mother. A mindful mother would not get so knotted up about breast-feeding that she would forget that her job was simply to love her baby and keep him healthy, without torturing herself and him with that infernal pump. A mindful mother would not be so worried about her children being bipolar that she would be too afraid to laugh when her daughter reported hearing a voice in her head. It was not the fact of the voice that was funny (although neither, really, was it a cause for alarm). It was whose voice it was, and what it was saying. At the height of the 2008 Democratic primary, six-year-old Rosie awoke in the middle of the night wailing, “I can’t get the voice out of my head!”

  “What voice?” I said, panicking. “What is the voice telling you to do?” Immediately, I saw the rest of our lives. My beautiful fairy daughter, the sparkle in her eyes dimmed by Thorazine, struggling against the straps of her straitjacket, while I stood helplessly by, unable to save her.

  Rosie clutched her skull with both hands and whipped her head back and forth. “It’s Hillary Clinton!” she wailed. “Health care, health care, health care, she just won’t shut up!”