Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace (15 page)

I want for her what I didn’t have. I wish with all my heart now that I had had that first
Forever
… sexual experience, with a boy
who loved me and whom I loved, after debating the pros and cons and planning carefully for the event itself. I wish I’d had candles and roses. I wish I’d had a condom. My first time lasted about eleven minutes, and I rushed from the room as soon as it was over. I don’t even know how much blood I left on his sheets. With the perfect vision of hindsight I can see that it would have served me better to have fumbled through my first experiences with sex alongside someone just as unworldly. Perhaps then I could have kept the pace slower, not been tempted to try things before I was really ready for them. Perhaps then I would not have ended up living up to my reputation. One of the reasons we tell stories is to find meaning in events that seem devoid of it, to make sense of the senseless. Perhaps if my first time had meant something, I wouldn’t feel like I had to talk about it at all.

It is possible, I suppose, that today’s “hooking up” culture about which the mainstream media are so fond of agonizing has ended at least the social-stigma part of the teenage sexual equation. If I suppress my impulse to make light of my sexual experiences and use them as material for jokes, and instead tell my daughters how much I wish I’d waited, perhaps they’ll just react with a kind of confused pity. People used to ostracize you for
having
sex?

But I doubt it. Things have changed so little. In my daughter’s progressive middle school, a wonderful school in which a seventh grade boy can happily announce that he’s bisexual to no outrage or, frankly, surprise, they still use the same hateful language. Girls who do “too much” are sluts. The boys? There’s no real word for them, or at least not one the boys are afraid of. “Dawg” and “playa” are plaudits, not epithets.

I have no social research to support this claim, but I see something hollow in all the boasting about teenage hookups. If in fact this boasting even occurs. How many times have we seen a wave
of adult hysteria in reaction to a supposed teenage fad that turns out to be nonsense? There were those high-school girls in Massa chusetts who in the end
hadn’t
made a pact to get pregnant and raise their children together. And then there were those “rainbow parties,” which involved fellatio and different shades of lipstick and turned out not to be sweeping the country after all. I don’t imagine today’s teenage sluts feel much better about themselves than I did, back when I penned a missive at once frantic and miserable, begging my mother to come to Israel to help me because I was sure, after that first Israeli soldier, that I was pregnant.

I have no idea how to help my daughters traverse these rocky shoals. I have to trust in my guiding principle of motherhood: when in doubt, tell the truth. As seductive as it is to lie (“No, darling, I’ve never smoked pot,” “I never spoke to my mother the way you speak to me,” “I was a virgin when I married your dad”), it never works out the way you hope it will. Children are remarkably adept at sussing out the truth. Moreover, once you lose their trust, it’s hard to regain it. And the price of losing that trust when it comes to sex in the age of AIDS, hepatitis C, and periodic miniepidemics of syphilis is too high.

So I’m going to be honest with my girls while at the same time resisting the impulse either to make light of or to overdramatize my sexual experience. Because while I fear that making promiscuity sound beguiling and chic will lead them astray, I also know that the best way to ensure that your children dispense with your advice is to exaggerate the damage of the activity you want them to avoid.

It’s like the D.A.R.E. program that was found by the surgeon general to correlate with drug
use
, rather than avoidance. If you tell children that all drugs will kill you (or all sex will get you pregnant
and cause you to break out in pustulant, fatal sores), as soon as they are old enough to realize that their pothead cousin not only is not dead but has just graduated magna cum laude from Yale, they will dismiss
all
your warnings, just as the townsfolk dismissed the warnings of the boy who cried wolf. They won’t listen to you about pot or pregnancy, and they’ll also ignore what you have to say about heroin and methamphetamine, and having sex without a condom with a twenty-five-year-old you just met at a friend’s sweet sixteen.

Moreover, I want my girls to feel
good
about sex. I don’t want them to think there’s something wrong with making love. The last thing I could handle would be to have Sophie show up one day wearing a gold promise-keepers ring and proclaiming her intention of “saving herself” for her husband. Don’t forget that I was raised on a steady diet of Erica Jong and Marilyn French, and that I’m married to a man who turns me on as much now as he did sixteen years ago. In spite of my history, I love sex, and I want them to love it, too. The truth is that as unpleasant as it was to be called a slut in high school, and as hollow as most of those early encounters were, they didn’t
damage
me. I long for different memories, but I am not a worse person for it all. I was hurt, but I am not harmed.

In talking about sex with my girls (and my boys, too), I want to invest it with the appropriate meaning. I want them to understand how important sex is, but also how
un
important it is. It’s a part of life, a delightful part of being a grown-up. But having it or not having it shouldn’t define you. And in the end, if they make a mistake, if they have regrets, they can always look for meaning in the way their mother has—by telling stories, by talking it through.

This is another one of those tightrope walks that make up so much of parenting. One misstep in either direction and you’re
bouncing in the net (or lying on the ground in a crumpled heap of broken bones, depending on how bad you’ve blown it). So far, thank God, while Sophie looks like a sexy witch, she thinks like a cereal box. Her approach to boys has yet to shift beyond the most tentative of curiosity. Unlike some of her friends, she’s never “gone out” with any of the boys in her class, and she is only just willing to concede that there might be something appealing about that dude who played the lead in
Atonement
.

But I’m ready for her, and for her little sister. And for the boys, too. A while ago I ordered some condoms for Michael and me from Condomania, and when the box arrived, it included a gift: a pack of fifty candy-colored condoms. A Ziploc full of stick-less lollipops. I was about to throw them away (tightfisted as I am and as expensive as those fancy ultrathin Japanese condoms are, there’s no way I’m letting anything Day-Glo near my lady parts) when I stopped. After a few moments of reflection—an internal debate that seemed at once to encompass every attitude, preconception, goal, and belief I have about parenting—I took the bag and put it on the very top shelf of the cupboard in the kids’ bathroom, almost but not quite out of sight.

A few months later I heard a scream from the bathroom, as if someone had slipped on the tile and broken his neck. I ran in to find Zeke holding the bag of condoms, with his older sister standing next to him, her hands clamped over her mouth.

“Are these what I think they are?” Zeke demanded.

“That depends. Do you think they’re condoms?”

“
What
are they doing in
our
bathroom?”

“They’re here in case you need them, someday,” I replied. “I don’t want this stuff to be a big mystery to you. At some point
in the very distant future
you’ll be having sex. And you’ll need protection. Look,” I lifted up the Ziploc. “I even opened the bag so no
one will even notice if you take one.” (I guess I should probably find out how long condoms last. Do they have expiration dates like cartons of milk?)

“
God
, Mom,” Sophie said, turning her back and stalking out of the room and out of the cereal box world in which she will be living for such a very brief time to come, “that is so
gross
.”

I
was four months pregnant with my third child, and we were heading to Hawaii on vacation. I stuffed our suitcases with swim diapers, sunscreen, and water wings, and bought a maternity bathing suit that managed to make me look at once pregnant and obese, a remarkable piece of structural engineering. I canceled the newspapers, put a vacation notice on my e-mail, and took the dog to the dog-sitter’s house. I bought the kids enough new little toys to guarantee that I would have sufficient time on the plane to read an entire
People
magazine, if not the issue of
Harper’s
I bought to camouflage my baser literary instincts. There was only one thing left to do.

The week before the trip I had an amniocentesis, the first time I’d undergone that procedure. My first two babies were born before I achieved the magical age at which the risks of amnio are outweighed by the chances of finding a genetic abnormality. I was only twenty-nine when I gave birth to Sophie, and despite the purple stamp in my obstetrical record that read “Elderly Primigravida”—the medical term for anyone who has a baby after the age at which it can be popped out during a bathroom break at the senior prom—I was far too young to worry about the quality of my eggs. Two years later, when I was pregnant with Zeke, I was still well within the safe zone. Even this time it was something of a toss-up—I celebrated my thirty-fifth birthday in my first trimester. I could easily have forgone
gone the test, but I have always been a pessimist and catastrophizer. I try to claim as an excuse for doomsaying that anticipating the worst makes a positive outcome all the sweeter, but this isn’t true. When things don’t happen as I fear, I feel only a moment of relief before going on to wonder if there isn’t another, more dreadful possibility lurking unseen in the shadows, ready to strike the moment I let my guard down.

Thus, when my obstetrician suggested the amnio, I immediately agreed. I remember the experience vividly, not because of the massive needle plunging deep into my belly—all the more painful because I clenched every single muscle in my body in order to keep from jumping at the sensation and causing the doctor to pierce the baby rather than the amniotic sac—but because of the image on the ultrasound screen. The first thing we saw were the baby’s feet, two little pads with ten distinct pearl toes. Those tender, vulnerable baby feet brought us to tears. The doctor printed out a picture that would hang on our fridge for the next two weeks, and that now resides in a file, the most tragic of a pile of miserable documents.

“There,” the doctor said a few moments later. “You see that? It’s a boy!” Just what I—a fanatic devotee of the Oedipus complex—had been hoping for.

“Hey, little Rocketship!” I cooed. We had for the previous few weeks been calling the baby Rocketship, a place-holder name Zeke had come up with while we waited to find out the baby’s gender.

When we came home from the OB’s office, we showed the children little Rocketship’s feet and told them that they would, in just a few months, have a new baby brother.

The afternoon before we left for Hawaii, I decided to call the
OB, to see if the results might be in early. “Just so that I have nothing on my mind while I’m floating in the ocean,” I told her.

For a moment there was silence on the other end of the line. Then she said, “Are you sitting down?”

In my memory I am hovering by the ceiling watching the scene unfold beneath me. I see myself collapse onto the floor. I hear myself scream, my voice hoarse, my wails so loud it seems the windows might shatter. I watch my husband kneel down beside me and pry the telephone from my rigid clasp. I watch him cry.

And I think, “A person really does fall onto the ground screaming when she experiences a hideous, shocking pain. Remember that.” This, alas, is part of what it means to be a writer, someone whose job it is to observe closely enough to convincingly turn what she sees and feels into words. A writer stands at a distance and watches her heart break.

We didn’t go to Hawaii. Instead, we spent the next three days trying to decide what to do.

Rocketship suffered from a genetic defect known as a trisomy, a triple chromosome where there should have been only two. Down syndrome, on the twenty-first chromosome, is the most common of trisomies. Rocketship’s was more rare, and at the time there was little research on the subject. We began almost immediately to scour the Web for information about the diagnosis, and by the time we showed up for our appointment at the genetic counselor’s office, we knew more about it than she did. The one major study of the chromosomal defect evaluated the status of affected babies at birth, but not beyond. That study showed a good chance that Rocketship would be born without obvious defects, and a small chance that he would suffer growth retardation, hypotonia (extreme tension of the muscles), structural central nervous system abnormalities and seizures, facial malformations, failure to
thrive, and developmental delay. There was no way, however, to know into which group he fell.

It was a roll of the dice, our genetic counselor told us. What you decide to do depends on how lucky you feel.

And there was the rub—one of the many agonies of this most tragic event of our hitherto over-fortunate lives. I, of course, never feel lucky. I had the test in the first place because I took the possibility of catastrophe seriously, even though my chances of having a baby with a genetic abnormality were, at thirty-five years old, only about 1 in 365. How could I risk another roll of the dice when I had already won the most miserable of lotteries, with chances far slimmer than Rocketship’s? Months later, a friend would say that after you go through this kind of experience, your chances of having a healthy baby never again feel any better than fifty-fifty. You see the two pink lines of the pregnancy test, and you think, “Maybe I’ll have a baby in nine months. But then again, maybe I won’t. Maybe he’ll be healthy. Or maybe he won’t.”