Adam must have felt like he’d lost both his job and his wife, along with any semblance of a calm and happy home life. I felt abandoned and lonely and permanently infuriated. Then, as if full-time newborn care wasn’t enough, I decided—for no reason that was even remotely rooted in reality—that I needed to write another book that very minute, and that if I didn’t get back to work, if I couldn’t secure the next chunk of my advance, if we didn’t have some money coming in, then we’d go broke and lose the house and be out on the street.
It was sheer, delusional panic, and if I could go back in time I would sit myself down and tell myself sternly, Relax, you’ve got enough money saved up that you don’t have to worry for years. But I couldn’t see that through the fog of my self-loathing and terror, and so I added “write five pages a day” to my to-do list.
Initially I’d imagined that writing would come as easily as it always had; that I’d start working in the cheerful little nursery, with its yellow walls and tiny pink crystal chandelier, and the window covered with a sheer curtain panel embroidered with pastel butterflies—it had, after all, once been my office. I would sit in the glider with my laptop on my lap and Lucy asleep in her Moses basket at my feet, or tucked into the crook of my arm. She’d nap and I’d write, and then we’d go for a walk to the grocery store and have a home-cooked meal on the table by the time Daddy got home.
This, of course, did not happen. Lucy’s naps ranged from fifteen minutes all the way up to a sumptuous half hour. Most days, by the time I’d located my laptop, realized the battery had died, dug the charger out from underneath a pile of magazines and newspapers, and plugged it in, she was awake again . . . and Lucy was not the kind of baby who would happily stare at her fingers or suck on her thumb from the comfort of her state-of-the-art bouncy seat while Mommy wrote novels. She was, instead, the kind of baby who, at six months, determined that she was done forever with her pacifier, and signaled this new development on I-676 by flinging it from her car seat at my head.
One afternoon in August, when Lucy was three months old, I’d taken her out to run errands. It had been an awful night, where she’d been up and down, never giving us more than a ninety-minute respite, and I was exhausted and on edge, but determined to stick to our schedule of eating and activities. We’d gone to the grocery store and the hardware store, and came home with half a dozen plastic shopping bags, plus the diaper bag and my purse, shoved into the stroller’s inadequate undercarriage or dangling from its handlebars. It was ninety degrees and humid. I was soaking with sweat. Lucy woke up and started to cry as I tried to heave the stroller up the front step and maneuver it through the front door . . . and once I got there, I saw my husband on the couch, in his boxer shorts, fast asleep. He didn’t get up to help me with the stroller into the house—or at least he didn’t do it fast enough. I was so angry that I could feel my fingers curling into hooks in preparation for ripping his face off . . . and I was certain that if a jury of my peers was assembled, the twelve mothers of newborns would not only acquit me but would build a statue in my honor.
That was the moment that broke me. Something had to change. If things didn’t get better, I’d end up hurting someone or losing my mind. I needed some help. So, even though I’d planned on staying at home for a year, I was forced to acknowledge, with sorrow and regret and a metric ton of guilt, that so far, stay-at-home motherhood was killing me. I couldn’t just roll with it; couldn’t accept that chaos and sleeplessness were my new normal. I’d get frustrated at the way Lucy seemed secretly intent on screwing up anything I’d have the temerity to try to organize. A friend and I would plan to meet for lunch and Lucy would stay up all night, finally falling asleep at eight in the morning and staying passed out in her crib until two in the afternoon. Or I’d feed her, then load the diaper bag, then strap her into the stroller, then walk six blocks and smell something awful and realize she’d had one of those clothes-wrecking blowout poops—the kind where the shit sprays all the way up the baby’s backside and leaks out of the diaper to soak the stroller underneath—and have to turn around and go back home. We’d go on a plane trip, and she’d screech for three hours straight, earning me endless stink-eye from fellow travelers, until five minutes before the plane landed, at which point she’d conk out. Everything was a struggle. Everything left me feeling frayed and miserable and incompetent.
By September, I’d found a sitter, a calm and serene and lovely young woman named Jamie, and I started to work first ten, then fifteen, then twenty hours a week. It helped. Getting dressed, combing my hair, putting on grown-up clothes and going to write in a coffee shop down the street, leaving my baby with someone who was warm and loving and patient (and who could be all of those things because she got to give the baby back to me and go home at the end of the day) did wonders for my mental health. Almost immediately, I started feeling better. Then, of course, came the guilt about feeling better. A good mother would not have left her baby this early, I would think, remembering those content-looking moms in the Times. A good mother would not have hired a sitter. A good mother would have found a way to make it work.
Every day gave me the opportunity for new screw-ups, new occasions to feel like crap. When Lucy was six months old, I booked a speaking engagement at a synagogue outside of Baltimore and I brought the baby along. I felt comfortable doing this, because I’d taken her out to dinner a few months before and she’d slept through the entire thing like a potted plant in a pink onesie, and I knew that if she didn’t sleep, Adam, who was coming with me, would quickly whisk her away.
You can probably write the ending to this sad chapter. Somehow we drove all the way to Baltimore and were in the synagogue before realizing that the diaper bag was lacking the crucial component of “diapers.” Adam went to find a place to buy them, leaving me with a fussy baby and an increasingly disgruntled event coordinator. I was on a panel with a beloved bestselling local mystery writer and a woman who’d self-published a memoir about surviving the Holocaust. Adam and Lucy were seated right up front. The mystery writer brought down the house. The Holocaust survivor moved the crowd to tears. I quickly decided that I could not follow a story about Auschwitz with my planned raunchy passage about blow jobs, and was rifling through my manuscript to find something that felt more appropriate when Lucy started to cry. There I was, on the stage, sweating and stumbling through my speech, trying to shoot psychic messages out of my eyeballs and into my husband’s brain: take the baby out of here! Alas, he didn’t hear.
I apologized my face off. It didn’t help.
The next day, the event organizers sent me a chilly e-mail saying they hoped I’d “learned my lesson” about where it was and was not appropriate to bring a baby. Then they cc’d me on an email to my booking agent, asking for their money back.
I was mortified. For years, I’d prided myself on doing well at work, on never missing a deadline or letting a boss down, on always doing my best. I was never going to be the prettiest girl or the thinnest or the most popular. By then, it was also clear that I wouldn’t be getting any Best New Mom prizes. But I could damn well be the hardest worker, the best prepared . . . and now I’d screwed up so badly that the people who thought I’d be a fun, engaging speaker wanted a refund.
I was damned if I did, damned if I didn’t, damned if I tried to split the difference, damned no matter what. In the winter of 2004, the Atlantic published a piece by Caitlin Flanagan, a scathing indictment of nanny culture and the selfish, self-centered upper-middle-class white women who pay other women to care for their babies. It felt like it had been written specifically for me, a poison-tipped arrow aimed right at my heart, as punishment for my wicked working ways.
Flanagan’s essay, “How Serfdom Saved the Women’s Movement,” pointed out (correctly) that our modern world has become absurdly child-centric. “In the past month,” she wrote, “I have chaperoned my children to eight birthday parties, yet not attended a single cocktail party (do they even exist anymore?).” She observed (again, correctly)
that “almost any decision a woman makes about child care is liable to get her blasted by one faction or the other.” Then, with barely a paragraph to pivot, Flanagan unloaded on the privileged, educated white ladies who hired—and underpaid—their black and brown nannies.
Never mind that my sitter—I could not bring myself to call her a nanny—was white, with a college degree, or that I was paying her more per hour than I’d made at my first two newspaper jobs. Never mind that none of my working-mom friends were exploiting their help. Never mind that I doubted that the black and brown women Flanagan was caping for had subscriptions to—or time to read—the Atlantic. The target of her story was guilty white moms, and her words kicked me right in the guts. A mother who chooses to leave home to work was a mother who had forfeited her children’s love.
“The professional-class working mother—grateful inheritor of Betty Friedan’s realizations about domestic imprisonment and the happiness and autonomy offered by work—is oppressed by guilt about her decision to keep working, by a society that often questions her commitment to and even her love for her children, by the labor-intensive type of parenting currently in vogue, by children’s stalwart habit of falling deeply and unwaveringly in love with the person who provides their physical care, and by her uneasy knowledge that at-home mothers are giving their children much more time and personal attention than she is giving hers.”
There it was, in black and white, in the pages of a magazine I respected. Children love the woman who takes care of them. “At-home mothers are giving their children much more time and personal attention.” And women “who have chosen to separate themselves from their children for long hours of the day . . . feel a clawing, ceaseless anxiety about this.” I felt guilty, for sure, but I wasn’t sure I felt the “clawing, ceaseless anxiety” that Flanagan had identified. I wasn’t anxious about leaving Lucy with Jamie, because Jamie was lovely and competent and kind, and wasn’t undone by Lucy’s crying the way that I was, and because giving myself permission to leave made me a better mother when I came home.
Leaving, clearly, was best for me . . . but it was not, per Flanagan, the best for my baby. After I read the Atlantic, it was as if every previous instance of self-doubt and self-loathing—hating my body, doubting that I was qualified to be at Princeton, worrying that I’d never find a man to love me—were only warm-up rounds that had existed to prepare me for this, the Mother of All Shame. Failing yourself is one thing. After all, who are you really hurting if you fake your way into a school you never deserved to attend, if you never get thin, if you never find love, if you die alone with your nine cats and the paramedics have to saw a hole through the wall to remove your gigantic, bloated corpse? Just yourself. Possibly the paramedics who’d have to haul you to the morgue. Maybe the person who should have been admitted to Princeton in your stead. But if you screw up a baby? The implications were endless and awful.
Maybe if I’d been leaving my daughter with a nanny so I could slave away at a law firm or a big bank, trading the misery of motherhood for work that I hated in order to earn a desperately needed paycheck, it would have been different. But I loved my job—so much so that it hardly ever felt like work. I loved the balance that working gave me. I loved how writing let me lead a kind of double life, attending to the realities of the quotidian world while simultaneously living in the world that existed only in my head. So I wrote when Lucy was a baby, in spite of the guilt. When Lucy started preschool, I adjusted my hours, and the sitter’s, with the school year, fitting my work life around her schedule. I learned to grab time whenever I could, keeping my laptop with me so I could write if she fell asleep in the car, or while she skipped and somersaulted in Little Gym, where I became an expert at figuring out how to look up at the precise instant she’d scamper past the glass windows between the parents and the gym, then quickly go back to my screen, then look up again during her next cartwheel or flip. Work was giving me happiness and autonomy, even if it did make me an object of suspicion in a culture that preached attachment parenting and baby-wearing and co-sleeping; one that encouraged nursing on demand for as long as a kid was willing and told moms that by putting their babies in front-facing strollers instead of wearing them strapped to our backs or our chests, we were implicitly rejecting them, literally pushing them away.
By then, I also knew what to do with pain and guilt and shame and sorrow—spin them into fiction! With Good in Bed, I’d wanted to write honestly about weight, and screwed-up, funny families, and finding happiness in spite of it all. With In Her Shoes, I’d wanted to write honestly about weight and sisters; about being stuck with the label your family gave you as a girl and growing out of it, or into it, and finding happiness in spite of it all. My third book was going to dip into the realm of magical realism. It was going to be about an orphaned girl, horribly scarred, who found out that she’s the descendent of Diana the huntress. I was a hundred pages in when I had Lucy, and, in short order, a new story to tell. I wanted to write honestly about motherhood. I wanted to tell the truth that the glossy magazines hadn’t hinted at, the story that the advice and how-to and call-to-arms opinion pieces never mentioned. I wanted to talk about how undone I was by my baby, how unprepared, how giving birth made me a different person, how it was like a bomb erupting in the middle of my marriage, leaving carnage and resentment and distrust and guilt in its wake.
I thought about one of my favorite poems, Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art”—a villanelle, one of the first I’d learned in Professor McClatchy’s class—the lines that go,
It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
I would write it, like disaster . . . and that story, and the ones my fellow yoga moms and playgroup moms shared, became Little Earthquakes.
• • •
I’d always wanted at least two children, but I’d been so thoroughly shamed and undone by my initiation into motherhood that it took me years to believe that I hadn’t caused Lucy irreparable harm, that I was ready to try again. Eventually, I did, and once again, I got pregnant pretty much immediately. Phoebe Pearl was born on the last day of November in 2007.
Things were different the second time. When my obstetrician, who remembered how desperately I’d wanted natural childbirth and how heartbroken I’d been about my C-section, asked if I was interested in trying for a VBAC (vaginal birth after C-section), I gave him a smile and told him that I thought I’d spent enough time in labor to last for my entire life. We pulled out our phones, loaded our calendars, and agreed on a date, and when it came I arrived at the hospital well rested and well hydrated, pedicured and waxed, and, most important, with an armada of help lined up and waiting for me at home. When Phoebe’s lungs failed to clear because she hadn’t been squeezed on a trip down the birth canal, and she ended up spending eighteen hours in the NICU, I refused to feel bad about not attempting a vaginal delivery. When she was diagnosed with hip dysplasia that required her to wear a wee little harness that pulled her legs up and out into a froggy sort of split, around the clock for the first three months of her life, I did not pore over the early weeks and months of my pregnancy and try to figure out whether something I’d done or eaten or neglected to do or eat had caused it. Nor did I feel guilty for refusing a “push prize” and asking instead for a doula who’d spend every night from ten p.m. to six in the morning at our house. When Phoebe woke up, Tia would bring her to me. I’d nurse her, burp her, cuddle her, then hand her off and go back to sleep.
Phoebe was a different kind of baby than her big sister, easygoing and cheerful, a good eater and a good sleeper who fell easily into the promised routine of eating, activity, then sleeping for a while, then waking up to do it again. Some of that was just her nature, the personality she was born with . . . but some of it, I have to believe, was because she had different parents than her sister: a father who was working and had his confidence and self-esteem back, and a mother who was much more forgivi
ng and much more relaxed, a mother who wasn’t a neurotic, self-loathing, guilt-ridden wreck.
Breast-feeding went much more smoothly, in part because I knew that Lucy, who’d been mostly formula-fed, was perfectly healthy and was, so far, exhibiting none of the dire effects that nursing advocates (or, as I’d come to think of them, the Nipple Nazis) promised were awaiting every child whose mother hadn’t loved him or her enough to nurse exclusively; in part because I was better rested and better hydrated before my delivery, so it didn’t take a week for my milk to arrive, and in part because I had lowered the bar. I knew that it wouldn’t be easy or natural, and that I would need help. I had a lactation consultant work with me in the hospital and at home. I nursed Phoebe, as best I could and as frequently as I could, and when I gave her bottles of pumped breast milk or even formula, I didn’t let myself feel like a failure.
As my girls have gotten older, I’ve been able to realize my strengths as a mother, and I’ve tried to forgive myself for my weaknesses. I’ve learned that I’m just not great with newborns . . . but give me a toddler or a preschooler, a kid who can talk, and I can spend all day chatting with them, reading them books, swimming with them, making cookies with them, whatever they require. I’ve learned that I don’t have the patience for board games . . . but I can, when presented with an armada of stuffed animals, give them all names and personalities and individual voices, and make up adventures for them. Craft projects and beading make me want to shoot myself . . . but I love popping my girls into a kayak or a canoe and spending a day on the water.
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