Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace (12 page)

Despite her fondness for gossip, Michael’s mother is a reserved, quiet woman, the polar opposite of me in this regard. If, as Michael is fond of saying, my autobiography would be titled
Me and My Big Mouth
, hers would be called
Quiet, I’m Reading
. She is as restrained physically as she is verbally.

The next time we saw each other, at her house, she put her hand on my shoulder while placing a bowl of broccoli on the table. That instant of contact had Michael waxing rhapsodic for hours.

“She’s never just spontaneously embraced one of my girlfriends like that,” he said, his voice hushed with awe.

“Embraced?” I replied, genuinely confused. “When did she embrace me?”

“At the table. She hugged you at the table.”

“You mean that time she sort of bumped into me?”

She’s a little looser nowadays, and we hug and kiss easily when we meet after an absence, but she is by no means physically effusive. What felt to me like cool friendliness at the time was warmth
to her; what felt to me like an accidental brush of her arm was to her a sign of something special.

None of which explains why, not long after that meal, when Michael and I moved to within half an hour’s drive of my mother-in-law, I began to feel an intense sense of competition. I was jealous of her. The idea to move to the same part of the country was mine—I had a new job that took us there—but something about the proximity made me anxious. It brought forth a jealousy that might otherwise have simmered barely noticed, under the surface. I fear that I generated this on my own, entirely within my own head. My mother-in-law had, after all, been through this before; I am my husband’s second wife, and the last in a long line of girlfriends. She must have been resigned to her fate as perennially second in his heart.

From early on, I felt deeply territorial about Michael and approached our relationship with a kind of ravenous intensity. When we first met, Michael and I told each other about our previous relationships. We traded details, laughed over them, shared our inside jokes with each other. I think I felt that only if I could insert myself into his history, consume it, if you will, could I assert the primacy of our relationship over all those prior ones. If I knew as much as he did about those women, especially his ex-wife, I could be secure.

Michael also told me about his childhood, as much as he remembered. I think much of my jealousy of my mother-in-law sprang from my belief that there were long years of his life that belonged exclusively to her, that lived only in her own memory. Those were years, I imagined, when she was the sun around which his little-boy self revolved. I could never own those years the way I tried to own the other epochs and loves in his history.

In thinking about my husband’s relationship with his mother, I wonder if the very thing that should have given me the most peace of mind was what caused me the most consternation. There was none of the Sturm und Drang I was used to from my own family. His family seemed genuinely to enjoy each other’s company, but not to be overly involved with one another. There was no bickering, no unrealistic demands, no slammed phones, no waves of passion and rage. They were
easy
with one another—mild even. They were the very opposite of Woody Allen and his mother’s floating head. I was confused by it. It was so unlike anything I understood a mother-child bond to be. I, who called my mother three times a day, just didn’t
get
that Michael and his mother could love each other without being overly entangled.

At the same time, I failed to be comforted by the fact that he made a deliberate choice to be with a woman whose temperament, unlike his mother’s placidity, runs to extremes of passion and mood. You’d think these very differences would have made me more confident in my primary place in my husband’s heart. You’d be wrong.

This tug-of-war between a mother and a daughter-in-law over a man is an age-old phenomenon, the stuff of sitcom jokes and Greek tragedy. Two women, decades apart, vying over the favors of a man who most often doesn’t even know a battle is being fought. It’s easy to imagine why women who define themselves through the status of the men in their lives and the attention those men pay to them would end up in competition. But my mother-in-law and I are not women like that. We are both women who pride ourselves on our independence, our careers. Even in the absence of an overbearing and territorial counterpart, I slipped into the combative role so easily, as if it were an inevitable part of being a woman marrying a man. It was as though the need to be the one, the
only
, in his life overcame even the most common of sense.

My campaign was subtle, and at the time I didn’t even realize what I was doing. I insinuated myself between them delicately but decisively. I began complaining about my mother-in-law, and my primary target was her reserve. “How can you stand such diffidence?” I kept asking Michael. “Doesn’t it drive you crazy?” Through cues as understated as holding his hand when we were together, I tried to make my primacy known. Michael and I were planning and paying for our own wedding, and we limited the guest list to our families and our own friends, effectively making my mother-in-law—and, by necessity of fairness, my own parents—mere invited guests at their own children’s wedding.

When Michael and I spent time with my mother-in-law, I found myself using the first-person plural, an exclusionary tense if ever there was one. “We loved that movie,” I would say. Or, “That’s our very favorite restaurant, we’ll take you next time we go.” All this by way of showing her that he and I were a unit, a couple.
The
couple.

I even resented the weekly lunch date Michael and his mother shared. I had the grace to be ashamed of this resentment and tried to hide it, but I must have failed dismally, because over the course of our first few months together those lunches gradually ceased. Then I thought she barely noticed that they no longer lunched together, or didn’t care, but in retrospect I think she just kept her feelings to herself.

My mother-in-law’s style is much more subtle than my own. Because of her natural reserve, she would never have mentioned our rivalry, and it’s even possible that she didn’t feel it. Or at least wouldn’t acknowledge the feeling. But it was there, lurking under the surface of even our most positive of interactions.

Michael, like most husbands in so many of this most stereotypical of domestic dramas, did his best to keep everyone happy, but
I think the primary emotion he experienced was confusion. After all, it was clear to him. I was his beloved. She was his mother. Two relationships entirely different one from the other.

I think he probably wished I’d just give it a rest.

And so this undercurrent of tension remained, with me grudging the time we spent with my mother-in-law, suggesting, for example, that Michael and I have a private Thanksgiving dinner in a beautiful lodge in the mountains, instead of with his family.

Then we had children, and something began to change. It was a gradual shift, one that took a while even to notice. But when I became the mother of Michael’s children, I began, almost imperceptibly at first, to relax. Suddenly there could be no question that
we
, my children and I, were the primary family unit in Michael’s life. It was as if once it became obvious that the competition was over, I could take my mother-in-law into my heart with all the grace of a good winner. Somehow, effortlessly, all the antagonism of our relationship simply evaporated. Once I was absolutely sure of my ascension and her usurpation, I could give in and become her friend.

A couple of years ago I invited my mother-in-law on our yearly family vacation. The invitation was a selfish one. With four children, the hotel would not allow us to cram into a single bungalow, and if we didn’t bring a third adult, Michael and I would be forced to spend our vacation in separate rooms. I invited her as a glorified nanny. Within hours it became clear that she was much more than a third pair of hands.

Travel with four small children had always been gratifying in its way, but so, too, it had been a special kind of misery, with anxiety, squabbling, and lots of vomit. This time, while one child threw up in my lap, another ran down the airplane aisle to the bathroom, and two more catapulted out of their seats in a shrieking
wrestling match, my mother-in-law kept her cool. She always keeps her cool. That’s who she is. She can sometimes be stern, but she never loses control. What was miraculous was that when she was there, neither did I.

I went from resenting my mother-in-law to accepting her and finally to appreciating her. What appeared when I was first married to be her diffidence, I now value as serenity. The capacity for extravagant emotion that Michael finds so attractive in me can be exhausting, especially to a child. My moods are mercurial, and this can be terrifying. I know, because I was a daughter of a mother with a changeable temperament. My mother-in-law’s mood is always consistent. She is the opposite of capricious. She is the most reliably steady person I have ever known.

Once, I chafed at any hour Michael spent with his mother, somehow viewing it as time stolen from me. Now I don’t mind. They take our oldest daughter to musicals, an entertainment I find tedious in the extreme, or Michael takes all four of the kids to his mother’s house for dinner when I am out of town. But my mother-in-law and I are far more likely to go out alone than the two of them are. We go shopping; we go to the movies. I enjoy spending time with her. She’s a good companion, part friend, part mother. When Michael is out of town, she comes over for dinner, and just having her in the house eases me. She eases all of us.

That February, in Hawaii, my mother-in-law and I sat side by side under a tree on matching lounge chairs. Michael was in the water with the older children, and the little ones were playing in the sand next to us. My mother-in-law and I had each just finished the novels we were reading and had swapped, something I can rarely do with my husband, because he is a slow and methodical reader and because he is most often immersed in something like a thirteen-hundred-page annotated volume of Sherlock Holmes
short stories or Gnome Press’s
Porcelain Magician
by Frank Owen. My mother-in-law can be relied upon to have the new Philip Roth or Lorrie Moore. I remember looking out at Michael diving smoothly under the waves, and at the sun-kissed faces of my two youngest towheads as they dumped sand on their grandmother’s feet. In the moment of quiet before the baby walloped his older sister on the head with his shovel and she kicked him over in the sand, I thought to myself, “This is nice.” Then pandemonium broke out, and there were tears to dry and egos to soothe.

After we had finally managed to calm things down, my mother-in-law held Rosie on her lap, and I held baby Abie. He snuggled against me, his velvet cheek rubbing my chest. He smelled deliciously of coconut sunscreen and the strawberries he’d eaten for breakfast, and I breathed deep of his marvelous fragrance. He was just under a year old and had only two words reliably in his vocabulary, but one of them was “Mama.” When he said my name, I kissed him, rubbing my lips against his soft, rubbery mouth and tickling his sun-warmed belly. I looked over at my mother-in-law. She returned my gaze with a complicated one of her own. I could tell that the sight of her baby grandson lolling on his mother’s lap under a palm tree in the dappled Hawaiian shade pleased her. I wonder, though, if something else wasn’t giving her just the tiniest bit of satisfaction. The prospect that one day I was going to do battle with this boy’s wife, just as I had done battle with her. And I was going to lose.

I
t was the night we wove an Iroquois cradleboard out of natural fibrous materials that drove me over the edge. It was 9:00 p.m., an hour
after
bedtime, when Sophie—eleven years old at the time—suddenly remembered that in addition to a written report, her Native American history assignment required a visual presentation.

“It’s okay, I can do it,” she said. “I just need some hemp.”

Frankly, so did I.

I hate homework. I hate it more now than I did when I was the one lugging textbooks and binders back and forth to and from school. The hours my children spend seated at the kitchen table, their books spread out before them, the crumbs of their after school snack littering the table, are without a doubt the worst of my day. If their teachers, delightful and intelligent people every one, were to walk through my kitchen door between 3:30 and 4:30 p.m. on a weekday, I could not guarantee their safety.

When Zeke was eight, he routinely had an hour of homework a night. Zeke is an interesting, creative kid, one who’s described as having a lot of “personality.” He’s the kind of kid who, left to his own devices, thinks it’s funny to write “a Rottweiler” as the answer to every question on the homework page, even the math problems. Especially the math problems.

Accordingly, either Michael or I have to sit next to him and
insist that he read the directions in his homework packet, instead of riffing on the crazy soundtrack that runs in his head.

School for Zeke has always been work, and by the end of a seven-hour workday he’s exhausted. But like a worker on a double shift, he has to keep going. When, halfway through kindergarten, we had to break it to him that this wasn’t a one-year gig, that in fact he was looking at, conservatively, sixteen and a half more years of school, the expression on his face was one of deep, existential despair. That evening he calculated that the next time he could count on being really, truly happy was in sixty years, when he retires. His sister, however, is one of those cheerful Pollyanna types who finish their summer reading list before Memorial Day, and at eleven was already counting on getting at least one graduate degree. But even she hates homework.

When I sent out a feeler to mothers of other elementary school students asking for their experiences with homework, my in-box was immediately flooded with replies, some furious, some rueful. “We had to set up an interview with someone in the community, transport the children, supervise the interview, take notes, take photos, print the photos, assist the students in making note cards for a speech, and help the kids make a poster about the community member,” said Martha, the mother of twins in the Bay Area. Sounds like a nice project, doesn’t it? It might have been—for a ten-year-old. But Martha’s boys were in
second
grade.