Small Animals

by Kim Brooks

  As I sat there at the table that night, it seemed that every hope and good intention I’d had since becoming a mother had crumbled under the slightest pressure. The baby book I wasn’t keeping would be a long log of failure, an exhaustive inventory of good intentions gone wrong.

  “I’m a terrible mother,” I said to my empty wineglass. I wanted to hear how it sounded. “I left my son in the car.” Our rat terrier, Liza, trotted down the stairs and looked up at me with clear eyes, as though she understood. The phone rang. It was the lawyer.

  “Sorry about the wait. I got caught up in something.”

  “What did you find out?” I asked.

  “This is the funniest thing,” he said. “I talked to the officer who called you. It turns out that we went to the same high school in Brooklyn.”

  “That’s so funny,” I said.

  “So I explained the situation. He seems like a reasonable guy. You know they have to be cautious in situations like these where kids are involved. There are so many terrible parents out there. But I don’t think you’re the person they’re after. You’re not the kind of mom they’ll throw the book at.”

  “You think it’s fine? They’ll drop it?”

  “I think that’s a definite possibility. I do.”

  He gave me the name of a Virginia lawyer, someone who would be able to better help me if it went any further. He told me to call the guy in the morning.

  I thanked him at least ten times.

  “Glad to do it. Glad to help,” he said.

  He was about to hang up when I said, “Just one more question. After I call the lawyer tomorrow, what happens next?”

  I could hear he was distracted, covering the phone while he said something to his wife. I pictured his perfect family, his perfect children, his perfect, happy home. “Next,” he told me, “you’ll wait.”

  * * *

  “Well, I don’t understand it,” my father said over the phone the next morning. “I just don’t understand what in the hell all the fuss is about.”

  This was him at his angriest, a state I’d seen him in only a few times in my life, usually when he’d gotten off the phone with a case manager at a health insurance company or had submitted himself to his masochistic ritual of watching Fox News. He’d called me from work, hoping for an update, more information, some explanation or assurance that it was all a misunderstanding, the same thing I’d been hoping to get from the lawyer the evening before.

  “What is he saying the problem is? What are they accusing you of?”

  I had taken Felix to school, put Violet down for her morning nap, and was now sitting on the living room floor, trying to keep my voice steady as I told him the little I knew. “They’re saying that I left him in the car. That someone saw me leave him while I ran into the store.”

  “And that’s against the law? That’s a crime?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. It varies by state. I’m waiting to hear back from the lawyer. I don’t think there’s a specific law in Virginia. But they could argue it’s child neglect. Abuse. I don’t know.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me. Neglect. I’ve never heard of anything so asinine. Do you know how many times your mother and I left you and Sari in the car for a minute? I’d be serving consecutive life sentences if that were a crime.”

  “I know. I’m trying not to panic,” I said, secretly relieved that he was panicking for me, that he was as taken aback by the whole thing as I was. If he said what was happening was asinine, then it was asinine. I trusted and believed him. Still, my voice was shaking as we spoke. “I guess what they’re saying is that someone could have hurt Felix, broken into the car, kidnapped him.”

  A week earlier, it would have seemed preposterous. Of all the dangers I feared might befall my children, this wasn’t one of them.

  I hadn’t yet memorized the facts that illuminate the paranoia behind our obsession with the occasionally horrific but largely fictional, inanely named phenomenon of stranger danger: the FBI data that show that the number of missing person reports involving minors has been at record low levels in recent years, that the number of these reports has fallen by more than 40 percent since 1997, and that out of all missing person cases (adults and children) in 2014, roughly 96 percent were runaways, that only 0.1 percent of missing person cases were what we’d think of as a “stereotypical kidnapping.” I didn’t know any of this then, but I must have sensed it, because abduction was simply not on the list of nightmare scenarios I worried about, and the list was long. But I was rational in my hierarchy of fear. Speeding cars, distracted drivers, unfenced swimming pools, asthma irritants, third-floor windows left open too wide: These were the demons that haunted my imagination. Not creepy-looking strangers. I lived in a city and rode public transportation and spent a decent portion of my time hanging out with people who wrote for a living. I felt right at home among creepy-looking strangers. Only now, when I pictured this person in the parking lot, this faceless concerned citizen peering through the window of my car, recording my son as he played, watching him, talking to him, excited (maybe) to have found this defenseless, neglected child, I wondered if I’d been naive.

  My father sighed into the phone. “Kidnapped?” he repeated flatly. “Last I checked, kidnapping is a crime. Someone could break into my house and shoot me in the head, but the police aren’t showing up to arrest me if I forget to lock my door.”

  “I don’t think they see it the same way when kids are involved.”

  “The same way,” he said. “You mean rationally?”

  I waited a moment, then asked what I didn’t want to ask, the thing I’d been avoiding. “How’s Mom?” I knew the answer by the amount of time it took him to respond.

  “She’s been better. She’s upset by all this, obviously.”

  “Upset?”

  “It’s hard for her. It’s been hard.”

  There’s an episode of Fresh Air, one of Terry Gross’s approximately seven million interviews with Philip Roth. They talk about his mother’s reaction to Portnoy’s Complaint, an extended and hilarious rant about the Jewish mother. Gross asked Roth if his own mother had seen herself in the characterization, and if so, whether the likeness had upset her. He responded that another journalist had asked his mother the same question years before and that she replied with Cartesian eloquence, “Every mother is a Jewish mother.”

  “Your mother worries,” my father said. “She can’t help it. She feels like it’s somehow her fault.”

  “I understand that,” I said. “But you know, not every bad thing that happens to me is about her.”

  “I understand that.”

  Softening, I asked if I should call her.

  “Maybe hold off a few days. Wait until we have a sense of what’s happening so you can put her mind at ease. It will make my life easier. You know how your mother gets. She makes your problems her own.”

  “Yes,” I told him. “I know.”

  * * *

  In the years since, whenever I tell people the facts of my case, that I left my four-year-old son in the car for five minutes, that someone recorded me doing so and called the police, that this single decision I made and its ramifications played out in my family’s life over the course of two years—when I recount these facts to some new friend or family member, to a reporter or colleague or radio-show host, they all want to know the same thing. “How did you feel?” they ask me. “How did you feel when you realized what was happening?”

  It’s a simple enough question, yet it took me almost two years to answer it honestly. “I was scared,” I used to tell them. Or “I was shocked.” I would tell them I was angry or embarrassed or bewildered. And there was truth to all this. But the deeper truth was much worse. The deeper truth was that I felt as though I’d been caught doing something very bad, even if I didn’t understand what the bad thing was, exactly, or what the rationale was for its badness. I felt, I think, what just about every woman feels whenever someone attacks or criticizes her mothering. I fe
lt angry. I felt embarrassed. But beneath all that, I felt ashamed.

  2

  PARENTHOOD AS A COMPETITIVE SPORT

  Before the incident in Virginia, when it came to absorbing and integrating ideas about parenting, about what it means to be a good parent, I had simply followed the herd, at least when others were watching. In a way, I was really two different mothers: There was the parent I was in private, and the parent I was in public; there was the parent I was to my children (loving, unstructured, disorganized, and probably overly permissive—my husband once told the children, “Mommy is not a ‘yes’ machine”), and there was the face of motherhood I projected onto the world, the face of a mother who always knew the best and most enlightened way to nurture and protect her children. This mother was thoughtful and competent and loving in a precise way that neither overinflated egos nor made them doubt their mother’s affection. I subscribed to a rational, knowledge-based philosophy of parenthood, a philosophy in which information was elevated above all else. Children drowned in swimming pools not because their parents didn’t love them. They drowned because their parents simply hadn’t known that an unfenced swimming pool is as dangerous to a toddler as a loaded gun. Children grew fat watching television and drinking juice boxes not because their parents didn’t want them to be healthy, but because their parents didn’t know that the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends limiting screen time, or that sugary juices are nearly as toxic as soda. And children died in hot cars not because parents were stupid or reckless, but in most cases because they didn’t know how easy it is to become distracted on the way to work, to be thrown off by a change in routine and not notice an infant in a rear-facing car seat.

  Bad things happened to children not from lack of love but from lack of knowing—knowing what the risks were, knowing the best way, knowing the right method, knowing the latest research—and so I strove to be the mother who was informed and enlightened. I was a writer, after all, a reader, a person more comfortable in my head than anyplace else. I might not be good at holding a job or cleaning my house or organizing my kitchen or making birthday cakes. I might not be the most patient or creative or energetic mother. But I could be the one who always had the answer, who always had the most accurate and up-to-date information. And I believed that if I did this, if I played this part, my kids would be okay. Knowing, as anyone with an anxiety disorder can tell you, is one step away from controlling.

  But it’s hard to continue to believe that you have all the answers when you find out that someone has called the police to report you for criminal negligence of your son.

  In the days and weeks following our return from Virginia, I felt myself slipping through the cracks of the façade I’d constructed. What’s more, the incident put in sharp relief the charged and often stressful jockeying for status and approval that lurked beneath so many of my interactions with other parents, a habit I’d never acknowledged but one that became clear to me when I considered doing what I typically did when working through something difficult: talking to people about it.

  I’ve always been terrible at keeping secrets. Pete once asked me if I’d ever not told anyone anything. But suddenly, for the first time in my life, something had happened that I realized I would have to keep hidden from as many people as possible, and especially from other parents. I felt this with absolute certainty; to tell people what I’d done, what was happening, no matter how absurd it seemed to me, was out of the question. I felt certain, and yet at the same time, I wondered why this was the case. If I didn’t believe that I’d intentionally put my child in danger—if I believed, as I’d said to the lawyer that first night, that at worst, this was a momentary lapse in judgment—then why should the idea of telling other parents about the lapse fill me with shame and dread? We were all friends. Neighbors. Peers. We were all doing the best we could to raise our kids and keep them safe. Why should I have to keep the ordeal to myself? Why shouldn’t others lend a sympathetic ear, or even a bit of advice? It wasn’t like we were competing at raising our kids.

  * * *

  “Have you given much thought to what kind of pregnancy you’d like to have?” a nurse practitioner asked me during my first prenatal checkup. I was wearing a paper gown, sitting on the plastic examination table of the University of Illinois–Chicago family health center, halfway through my first appointment, when she posed the question. I remember it clearly all these years later for two reasons. First, it was the moment at which I began to understand not just intellectually but emotionally that this was actually happening—that there was a small, fast-dividing cluster of cells embedded in my uterus, hurtling toward humanhood, and that I, Kim Brooks, was going to be the mother of this person. The second reason I remember it is that it was also the instant in which it occurred to me that pregnancy and, later, parenthood, was not just a thing that happened, not just a thing one experienced, but something a person did, an arena in which I in particular would have the opportunity to impose my own preferences and ideas and desires, of which I had many.

  This was the winter of 2007, shortly after Pete and I moved to Chicago. We’d gone there without jobs, with few friends in the city, with no clear idea of what, exactly, we wanted out of our lives other than to spend time together, to write, to read, to drink beer, to make enough money to live, and to maybe, potentially, possibly one day start a family. That day arrived sooner than we’d thought it would, about a week after we’d moved into our new apartment. It was not quite an accident. I’d stopped taking the pill a couple of months earlier and was relying entirely on a form of birth control I’d stumbled upon while buying shampoo at Rite Aid. It was called spermicidal film, and it consisted of a flimsy disk of clear, congealed spermicide, kind of like a Listerine melt-away strip. The idea was to fold it in half and insert it into the vagina, where it would dissolve and serve its spermicidal purpose. I was intrigued. Also, and maybe more important, I believed that because I’d always wanted to become a mother, because it was one of the few things in life I was absolutely certain I wanted, I assumed that getting pregnant would require years of temperature-taking, timed intercourse, and prohibitively expensive fertility treatments.

  Infertility was a hot topic in the early aughts. You could hardly open a magazine without being swept up by a story of unfulfilled maternal yearning. I read every one of the stories I came across. I knew a few women who had struggled to get pregnant or to carry a pregnancy to term, women who’d been heartbroken by the frustration and disappointment they’d endured. Somehow all of this convinced me that conception would be horribly difficult for me as well.

  But a month after relying on what I now believe actually was a Listerine melt-away strip for birth control, I woke up nauseated, hungry, and intent on guzzling a gallon of grapefruit juice. The next day, a pregnancy test confirmed my suspicion. I called the 800 number of my (about to expire) graduate student insurance and was told by the voice on the line to make an appointment at the campus health center. It was at this center that a few weeks later, as I was sitting on a sheath of tissue paper and examining the chipped purple polish on my toenails, that the nurse posed her perplexing question to me, the question of what kind of pregnancy I wanted to have, which was really a coded way, I later realized, of asking what kind of mother I planned to be. I remember that she had warm, heavily mascaraed eyes, earrings that looked like the gears of a clock. She was friendly, professional, unsentimental in her posture and tone. She spoke as though having a baby were no different from ordering a steak.

  “What kind of pregnancy,” I repeated, watching as she unpeeled her latex gloves, scrubbed her hands with foam sanitizer. “An easy one?” I said.

  She began opening drawers, gathering brochures, thumbing through informational leaflets. When she was satisfied with the materials she’d gathered, she looked up at me and smiled. “Here’s my advice,” she said. “Take some time and think about what kind of experience you want to have. How much medical supervision during the pregnancy? Are you considering natura
l childbirth? Are you leaning toward a midwife, an obstetrician, a family doctor? Would you like to deliver in a hospital, an attached birthing center? Are you interested in alternative pain management? Hypnosis?”

  She handed me a pile of printouts. “You have time to decide, but in the meantime, this should give you some things to keep in mind. You should be getting plenty of exercise, plenty of rest. But also you should start taking folic acid if you haven’t already. It can help prevent spina bifida. You should also be taking a prenatal vitamin to ward off anemia. Let’s see now—things to avoid: alcohol, which causes fetal alcohol syndrome and many other problems. No Advil. It can cause bleeding. No smoking, which is associated with low birth weight. No sushi or tuna, because of the mercury. No unpasteurized cheese or cold cuts, which could contain listeria. No caffeine, associated with miscarriage. And do everything you can to minimize stress—cortisol’s no good for the baby.” She told me all this in a single breath, in a flat, even tone, the same way the flight attendants explain how to put on your oxygen mask if the plane falls out of the sky.

  I left the medical center feeling as if I’d just been booked on a trip around the world. I drove home with the pamphlets on the seat beside me, picking them up and skimming them at red lights. I’ve been given facts, I thought. I’ve been issued instructions. There was so much to learn, so much to do, so much to decide, so much to buy. I got home and hurried up the stairs of our third-floor walk-up to pee. Then I sat down at the dining table with these pamphlets, spreading them out before me. I read and reread, making mental notes on all the things I should avoid doing if I loved my unborn baby, all the risks to be minimized or eliminated. I wondered as I read, and continued to wonder for the next nine months, how it was possible that any healthy baby had ever succeeded in being born. Reproduction suddenly seemed as dangerous as nuclear fission, the human embryo a rare and delicate flower tenuously imported into a woman’s toxic womb. The literature was unambiguous: Be informed, be vigilant, or you and your child will suffer.