Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace (11 page)

Now when something breaks in the house, I respond with the panic of my forebears. Every popped lightbulb is a catastrophe, every leaky faucet spells, if not the end of the world, then surely the beginning of months of crack-assed plumbers hunched over my sinks and toilets, flushing my hard-earned dollars down their mysterious drains. It always takes me a minute to remember that Michael is not like my father. He’s got a set of needle-nose pliers, even two, but he’s also got slip-joint pliers and groove-joint pliers and pliers I don’t even know the names of. When the faucet leaks, he not only knows what a washer is, he can replace it. Moreover, he enjoys the job. He hangs pictures, he unclogs toilets, he knows what to do when the computer flashes that scary little bomb icon.

Each time, after my initial moment of hysteria, I feel a wave of contentment, of security. I feel protected. I am a damsel in clogged-drain distress, and he is my knight with shining plunger.
It is uncomfortable for me to admit that when it comes to this part of our lives, I want to feel sheltered and cared for. There is something seductive about letting go of this area of concern. Instead of causing anxiety, a dripping faucet now reminds me that there is someone in my life who can take care of such things.

When Michael goes away, I allow things in the house to fall into a state of ridiculous disarray. I avert my eyes from the blinking oil light in the car; I prop a door closed with a chair until he comes home to fix the latch. I lie in the dark and listen to the toilets running, waiting for him to do whatever it is he does to make them quiet again. As lightbulbs burn out, the kids and I just squint in the ever-increasing gloom.

When I was single and lived alone, I was perfectly capable of getting the ladder out and changing bulbs on my own. So what is it about marriage that has made me so dependent, and why, even witnessing the warning of Ariel’s example, do I continue to allow myself to behave like some helpless 1950s sitcom wife?

Now that I am working again, this is the
only
area of our lives where traditional roles hold us in such sway. Otherwise, as I’ve told you before, our partnership is remarkably equal. Michael does as much or more of the actual floor time of parenting. He cleans more than I do. He does all the cooking. Given this, and given that I am someone who takes equality between the sexes so seriously, shouldn’t the fact that I seem to enjoy a certain kind of helplessness bother me? Feminism, for all that the word has fallen out of fashion, is ubiquitous enough that it feels vaguely shameful for a woman to want to feel protected. A
good
feminist mother would be able to do it all—assemble the crib, prepare her own organic baby food, snake the drain, breast-feed the baby, and regrout the bathtub.

What I feel worst about is that I am perpetuating this dichotomy into the next generation. Michael is training our sons to follow in his competent footsteps, but not, alas, our daughters. It’s not that he doesn’t want to teach the girls. Every time he busts out his electric screwdriver, he tries to recruit an assistant, but the only volunteers for the job in our house are male. The girls would rather stick to building elaborate fairy houses for their tiny Japanese rubber hamsters or running up leg warmers on their sewing machine, and I never try very hard to convince them to drop everything and hold the clamp for Daddy while the wood glue dries. A Good Mother, one who took seriously her obligation to prepare her daughters for an egalitarian world, would be cracking the home-repair whip, wouldn’t she?

Michael feels no counterpoint to my feminist crisis. I am solely responsible for our finances, a job that, while many women do it, might be considered the traditional purview of a man. Yet he doesn’t find it emasculating that he hasn’t paid a bill in as long as I haven’t changed a lightbulb. On the contrary, he’s relieved.

Perhaps my lack of concern with my home-repair incompetence is nothing more than a vestige of that patriarchy I spent so much time reading about and demonstrating against in college. Maybe I’m not as much of a feminist as I think I am. After all, I stopped working and stayed home with kids for years, and neither Michael nor I even considered for a moment the possibility that he would stop writing. Maybe I enjoy feeling inept with a hammer and a screwdriver because part of me thinks that’s how girls are supposed to behave. Maybe that’s why I haven’t been more aggressive about making my daughters learn the intricacies of the toilet’s balky flushing mechanism.

But I don’t think so.

I think this has more to do with the nature of marriage. In every union roles are assumed, some traditional, some not. Michael used to pay his own bills; I used to call my own repairman. But as marriages progress, you surrender areas of your own competence, often without even knowing it. You do this in part because it’s more efficient for each individual to have his or her own area of expertise, but also as a kind of optimistic gesture. By surrendering certain skills, you are affirming your belief that the other person will remain there to care for you in that way.

This kind of capitulation is not without its pitfalls, of course. Every woman who has given over the financial reins only to find herself divorced and penniless knows its dangers. Still, one of the wonderful things about an intimate partnership is the division of life, the parsing out and sharing of responsibility.

One of the tragedies of a lost love is the collapse of this system, and the confrontation of the ways we’ve allowed ourselves to become dependent. When I think of Ariel alone in her house, learning for herself the things that she once relied on David for, my heart breaks. Ariel is a strong and able woman. Of course she can put together a cabinet or unplug a toilet. So could I, if I set my mind to it, and checked out a few books on home repair from the library. My heart breaks because this enforced proficiency is symbolic of David’s absence, of all the ways in which she and her daughter must do without the man on whom they would still rely if only fortunes were different, if only that driver had taken the corner more slowly.

I suppose you could argue that this is precisely why we shouldn’t give in to this seductive loss of expertise. You could even argue that we could view the end of a relationship as an opportunity to become stronger, to relearn or learn new skills. I don’t know. I do
know that I am not going to be picking up a hand tool anytime soon. I will continue to pay the bills; Michael will unclog the toilets. That is the way our marriage works; that is the bargain we struck without a word. My only wish is that I could take a page out of his book and refrain from feeling guilty about it.

W
hen Zeke was in preschool, he came home every day and headed straight for the couch. He pulled me down next to him and cleaved his plump body to my own less adorably rotund one. He pressed his soft lips to my neck, nuzzling under my chin, breathing deep, as if he wanted to inhale every molecule of the fragrance he had missed in the four hours of our separation. He placed his palms on my cheeks and kissed me on the lips, languidly yet gravely, like a very small, round-cheeked lover.

I can’t say that while he was gone, I missed him as much as he missed me; I did not prove my devotion by spending our time apart dripping tears onto the sand table and rocking in misery on the cushions of the book nook. I was too busy reveling in my time alone, getting my work done, going for solitary walks, reintroducing myself to my husband. But when Zeke returned, I leaped onto the couch with as much eagerness as he. Holding his fleshy, silky body was the most satisfying tactile experience I have ever had in my life. The flawlessness of an infant’s skin is a trite metaphor, but his baby skin was even more buttery than most. And I’m not a child-aggrandizing mother blinded by love. I have four children, and this boy’s skin was different. It felt like the freshest heavy cream tastes: smooth and round, fat and thick on the tongue. His body, too, was different. It’s a wonder how what can inspire such disgust on an adult can be so delectable on an infant. Zeke is
eleven years old now, as thin and wiry as a half-starved whippet, but when I close my eyes, I can still feel the give of his plump baby flesh under my fingers.

Once, when he was about four years old, while we were driving over the hill leading to our house, we passed the bright purple house that had always been his older sister’s favorite.

“That’s where we’ll live when I grow up,” Zeke said.

“Who? You and the person you marry?” Note that I didn’t say “wife.” Those of us who raise our families in Berkeley would never make assumptions about our children’s sexual orientation.

“No. You and me.”

“Aren’t you going to get married and have children?” I asked, hearing to my horror a hint of the whine of my foremothers. You can take the babushka off the Jewish mother and dress her up in a pair of Seven for All Mankind jeans and Marc Jacobs Mary Janes, but she’s still going to expect a passel of grandkids.

“My wife will sleep on the first floor with Daddy. You and I will live on the top floor. Together.”

It’s possible that a psychologically sound mother, a mother whose role model isn’t the floating maternal head in Woody Allen’s “Oedipus Wrecks,” would not have been quite so pleased. Certainly a better mother would not have congratulated her son on such a fine plan and offered to cover half the mortgage.

Even now, although Zeke’s pride does not allow him to linger in my arms for much longer than a minute or so, he still calls for me to lie with him at night; until he was seven, he still gave me “movie kisses”—kisses that last for a little longer than usual and involve a lot of twisting of the head and moaning. He still cuddles up to me, pressing his needle chin and knobby knees into me before spinning off to pick up his skateboard or go to the computer. And although he no longer plans to exile his wife to the far
reaches of the lower floors of the purple house, neither is he particularly anxious to consider a life with a woman other than his mother.

I do not envy this phantom daughter-in-law of mine. I pity the young woman who will attempt to insinuate herself between my mama’s boy and me. I sympathize with the monumental nature of her task. It will take a crowbar, two bulldozers, and half a dozen Molotov cocktails to pry my Oedipus and me loose from each other. She’d be better off turning her attention to decorating that downstairs in-law unit.

I sympathize with how much work she faces, but not with
her
. In fact, the very thought of this person, imaginary though she is, sends me into paroxysms of a kind of envy that is uncomfortable to admit. I make jokes about how I hope Zeke is gay so that he will bring home a lovely young man, rather than a nubile young girl who will cast a disparaging and dismissive eye on my crow’s-feet and thick waist. This young man would be my friend. My ally even. In the more likely but far less appealing scenario, Zeke and his wife will screen their calls and roll their eyes as I leave increasingly frantic voice-mail messages. She will perfect an impression of me, complete with nasal whine and pinched lips, while he winces at the droll accuracy and drags her off to the bedroom while my forlorn voice begs to the empty air, “Please, darling, give your mother a call, just so that I know you’re all right.”

You’d think this obsessive love my son and I share would give me sympathy for my own mother-in-law. My mother-in-law and I are, in many ways, perfectly matched. Like me, she is an attorney. Like her, I am an eclectic and voracious reader. Both my mother-in-law and I are far too attracted to stories of personal and medical misfortune, and we enjoy recounting them with exquisite detail. We share the rather unattractive qualities of being both nosy and
snoopy. These are not identical traits—the first indicates that we’re interested in other people’s doings and the second that we are not above making inquiries, subtle or not. A nosy person listens closely to a friend’s confidences about her husband’s sexual dysfunction, and maybe asks a prying question or two. A snoopy person combs through a friend’s medicine cabinet looking for Viagra.

We should have gotten along famously, from the very first moment. And in a sense, we did. We could kill an hour with relative ease. Michael’s eyes would glaze over early in the conversation, but I was always willing to egg her on.

“Was it more like an orange or a grapefruit? Did they get it all?”

“Can’t he get his wages garnished for that?”

“How did she even know to get herself tested for chlamydia?”

We share these traits, and I should have had empathy for her. After all, she had experienced what I knew I would eventually: being the first love of your son and then watching helplessly as that devotion shifted.

But I found myself without compassion. On the contrary, I couldn’t help but feel that my job was to step between her and her son. I cannot trace my attitude to any flaw in my mother-in-law. She is not domineering or overbearing, nor does she treat my husband as a prince around whom she flutters in constant and obsequious attendance. She is a calm and pleasant woman, unassuming and benign. Our first meeting augured well. We spent an entire weekend together in a small hotel suite. Michael brought me to Washington, D.C., where she was working on assignment for a month, so that I could meet her. Michael and I slept on a pullout sofa, separated from her by tissue-paper-thin walls. We had not been together very long, Michael and I, only a couple of months, and we were in the throes of that first hysteria of sexual infatuation
where your body is attuned to your lover’s every breath, and passing a night without proving that to each other is impossible to imagine.

My mother-in-law gamely ignored us. At meals, she kept her eyes on her menu while we snuggled on the other side of the table. She accompanied us on our visits to friends, walks through the city, nostalgic forays to the neighborhood where she had raised her son, the man I knew even then that I would marry, and never once behaved as I would have, if it had been Zeke canoodling with his girlfriend in the backseat of the car while I tried to point out how big the trees had grown in the yard of our old house. Not only did my mother-in-law tolerate what can only have been highly irritating behavior, but she actually seemed to enjoy our company.