I recently finished reading Ayelet Waldman's Bad Mother: a Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace. (It was a library book! On my Kindle! Technology these days.) Now, besides being known as author Michael Chabon's wife, she's written mysteries, fiction, and contributed essays to collections. One of those essays has caused her a bit of infamy, but I'll get to that.
The premise of Bad Mother is that women are often made to feel like bad mothers no matter what they do, with the harshest critics being other women. We all mock celebrities and we even make reality television over it. Any woman that falls below the stature of June Cleaver isn't the best mother she can be, and that's often not good enough.
Waldman writes her personal essays with a dose of admitted over-sharing, drawing from her experiences giving up a career as a attorney, being a stay-at-home mother, and raising four children. She recalls a woman, in line behind her at a bakery, telling her "You know, breast is best," while watching her bottle-feed her months-old son. Instead of saying, mind your own damn business, she bursts into tears and explains to this presumptuous stranger that he was born with a palate deformity, and can't breast feed, and that the milk in the bottle is hers, laboriously pumped. Yes, this is the sort of detail she shares. But if that stranger hadn't felt the need to hold up a score-card on her decision, she never would have felt compelled to reveal the nitty-gritty.
Bad Mother is frequently laugh-out-loud humorous, told in Waldman's cynical voice. My only qualm with it is that she clearly writes from a higher-middle-class stance, speaking of things my childhood never contained. (What the hell is Baby Gymboree?) But she knows this, even making fun of her Berkeley address.
The most interesting hook to me, though, was that she wrote the memoir in response to the uproar caused by an essay of hers published in The New York Times. Not about motherhood, the essay addresses her confusion at the normalcy of sexless marriage. In it, she wrote something that had some readers scrambling to call CPS: "I love my husband more than my children." This statement has a context. It may still rub you the wrong way, but give it a shot. Waldman loves her children. Never once does she express regret at having them. The most heartbreaking chapter in her book deals with her decision to abort four months into her third pregnancy, after having learned the baby had a chromosomal defect. She constantly questions how her decisions may negatively affect her children. But she's also deeply in love with her husband and strives to maintain her connection to him. Frankly, I can't see how that connection would be deleterious to their children. Isn't that why we pair up to begin with, to have a companion? Once your children have grown, gone off to live their own lives, isn't it important to have that? Who does this expectation that your children must be your all-consuming passion serve? As Waldman points out in her NPR interview, the assumption is that she would throw her children in front of a bus to save her husband. Which doesn't make a damn bit of sense.
Now, I'm not a mother, though I've always intended on becoming one (eventually... someday). None of my reflections come from a place of experience, not even in a pseudo-mothering way. I never had any younger siblings to watch over. I hardly babysat as a teen. Nearly all my nieces and nephews live in other states. One former co-worker continually expresses her surprise that, at twenty-five years old, I still have yet to change a diaper. My attitude is, why should I? What reason do I have to go out of my way to deal with another human's waste product?
Not to say I wouldn't, if given a reason. I just haven't gotten there yet.
Bad Mother tapped into all sort of anxieties I have about my desire to have a kid. Am I doing it for the right reasons? Are there right reasons? What sort of environment do I want to raise this (imaginary) child in? What if I'm too lazy, too stressed, to give the kid the attention they need? What do I do if I find motherhood (dare I say it?)... tedious? Does that make me the most horrible of horrible people?
Waldman's conclusion is one I can appreciate: she affirms to be more mindful in her parenting, to not let her pessimism draw her away. My own goal of mindfulness is another blog entry, but I appreciate her perspective. Especially when I can look at a child, crying in the cart at Wal-Mart at nine p.m. because he's tired, and not think, "What the hell is wrong with his parents?" Instead, I think, "When that's me, let me have the confidence to tell the woman in line behind me to mind her own damn business."
And then I mind it.
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