Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace (17 page)

On Yom Kippur, the day when Jews gather and confess our sins to ourselves and each other and request absolution from our God, I wrote a letter to Rocketship and read it aloud in our synagogue. Because I don’t believe in the kind of God that sits in judgment on our confessions, I did not atone before God. Rather, I atoned before my community, my family, and myself. I atoned before my husband, and my baby. I begged Rocketship’s forgiveness for being
so inadequate a mother that I could not accept an imperfect child. I told him that I wished I was more like his father. I wished I had been able to play the odds.

When the day of fasting was over, I did not feel an immediate sense of release. I did not forgive myself right away—nor have I yet, nor will I ever—but I did feel the beginning of an easing, a slight shifting in the way I was experiencing the guilt.

Before Rocketship, I had published the first few of my Mommy-Track mysteries, lighthearted little novels featuring a heroine who cracks jokes about being a mom while she solves the many murders that crop up in her peculiarly fatal corner of suburban Los Angeles. But in the immediate aftermath of the abortion, I found it impossible to return to those books. I had no funny in me about motherhood. I felt like the worst Bad Mother in the world, a mother who had killed her baby. What could possibly be funny about that?

Yet I also found myself desperate to write. I had the sense that I wasn’t ever going to understand and learn to live with what had happened unless I wrote about it. I wasn’t going to return to even a facsimile of the person I’d been before without the comfort of solitude and words.

I could not, at first, write directly about Rocketship. The pain was too fresh, and I lacked the necessary perspective and emotional distance. Instead, I wrote a novel,
Daughter’s Keeper
, which I intended to be a manifesto, a screed against the destruction of society wrought by the War on Drugs. Instead, and inevitably, I suppose, I wrote a novel about a mother who loses her daughter. I wrote a novel about the debts a mother owes her children, even when the children are themselves adults. I wrote about the fear that your child will be taken away, or that you will drive her away, and the shame of making a decision that prioritizes your needs above hers. I gave the mother and daughter in the novel an ending
that, although bittersweet, redeemed the mother’s love. Feeling like the worst mother in the world, I gave the mother in my novel a chance to be good.

It was as though I were writing in concentric rings around the heart of what happened—
Daughter’s Keeper
the farthest out. Some time passed, and I felt like I could jump one circle in, but only one. I wrote a short story about a mother who breast-feeds the ghost of her dead baby. The story is creepy and frightening and, like all ghost stories, turns a real pain into a supernatural one, thus making it easier to stomach. One ring closer to the truth of Rocketship was my novel
Love and Other Impossible Pursuits
, where I confronted full force the terrible grief and guilt of a mother whose baby has died.

And now, with this eleventh of eighteen chapters, I am in the innermost ring, the core of the circle. This is the first time I have written with such detail about what happened to Rocketship, about what I did and how I felt. And because I can write about Rocketship, I can accept that all wounds, even the most painful, finally heal.

Aborting my baby is the most serious of the many maternal crimes I tally in my head when I am at my lowest, when the Bad Mother label seems to fit best. But although I still sometimes find myself in that place of judgment, I also know that my children need me too much for me to waste my time on the malignant indulgence of guilt.

The morning of the first Mother’s Day after the abortion Michael led me to the window of our bedroom and pointed out into the yard. In a patch of earth next to our front gate, he had planted a slender plum sapling.

“Happy Mother’s Day,” he said. “I love you.”

Rocketship would have been eight years old this year. In those
eight years the sapling has grown into a tree, its trunk four hand spans round, its masses of leaves golden red in the spring sun. “Rocketship’s tree” we call it. This spring, for the first time, the tree bore fruit, little purple plums that we were at first afraid to eat. Sophie was the only one brave enough to pop a plum into her mouth. Her smile was wide. “Delicious!” she said. “Perfect!” She handed me a plum.

I bit into it. The ripe flesh was sweet, sweeter than any plum I’d ever eaten. But the inside of the skin was sour. Not inedible, but a little zing of tartness against my tongue, a reminder of both joy and pain.

O
ne evening not long ago, while enjoying a family dinner at the kids’ favorite restaurant, a diner owned by members of the band Green Day that specializes in meat loaf and milk shakes served by be-pierced young people suffering from a desperate surfeit of cool, Michael and I discovered that we have been under surveillance. The night before we had gotten into a fight—neither a rare nor a common occurrence. Michael and I see eye to eye on almost every question of importance that arises in our household, we enjoy no one’s company as much as each other’s, we spend the vast majority of each day together, but every so often things take a turn for the bombastic. Over the course of a marriage of a certain length—we’ve been married for fifteen years—all arguments tend to coalesce and devolve into a meta-argument, an argument about the nature of the argument, revolving around slippery questions such as who started the argument, who was the one doing the yelling, whether an apology is required, by whom any such apology should be offered first, whether the resulting tone of contrition is genuine or adequate, and so on. The fundamental absurdity of the process, and the fact that both of us care far more for each other than for it, means that while our fights are loud and all-consuming, they never last for more than a few minutes, and are usually resolved when I storm out of the house, drive around the block a few times, and return, bored or contrite. Never once in
fifteen years of passion and debate have we gone to bed angry, and by the next day neither of us can recall much of what happened.

We live in an old house with, we thought, solid, thick walls. And thus we were stunned to find out that Sophie had heard our fight. Sitting amid the hipsters and alt-rock junkies with their barbed wire, Japanese demon mask, and nautical star tattoos, the blood draining from our faces, we listened as she calmly recounted the argument in all its specific detail. To us this particular argument, whatever its source or flash point, had within minutes merged into the undistinguished gray mass of all its predecessors. But Sophie, it turns out, has a far better memory for our discord than we do.

“That was a very nice apology, Mommy,” she said to me, with a hint of condescension in her tone. “Although you might have made it earlier on, the first time Daddy asked you for it.”

My tongue scraped against the dry roof of my mouth. I took a drink of water. Then I said, “Did you hear a lot of what Daddy and I were talking about?”

Talking
. Yeah, that’s one way to put it.

“Yes,” my daughter said brightly, “I heard everything. I can always hear
everything
you guys do and say.” Across the table Michael covered his mouth in wordless horror. “But I only
listen
when you’re fighting,” she continued. “Otherwise I don’t really pay any attention.”

I turned to her younger brother, busy with his fried chicken and biscuit.

“Can
you
hear everything, too?”

“No.”

“Thank God.”

“I only hear it when you’re doing mm-mm-mm,” he said, giving his eyebrows a lascivious waggle.

I don’t know why I am surprised by any of this. My children are moderately more precocious than I was—it took me until junior high school to start invading my parents’ privacy on a regular basis—but by the time I was thirteen, searching through my parents’ drawers and listening to their conversations were two of my primary preoccupations. Why did I ever imagine that my own secrets would be any more sacrosanct or less interesting than theirs?

My parents both worked, and from the time I was in sixth grade and my younger brother in second, we came home to an empty house. There were strict rules about what we were supposed and forbidden to do. We were to do our homework and walk the dog. We were not to fight or eat candy. Most important, we were never,
never
to watch television. Not once did we consider following these edicts, but in the late 1970s television was not the wonderland it now is. In the late afternoon our favorite reruns came on—old episodes of
Happy Days
or
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
. Occasionally, if we had achieved a deep enough state of desperation that we were willing to risk being educated, we’d even watch
The Electric Company
. But, while I indulged a brief infatuation with the goings-on of Luke and Laura (was it rape or true love?), the early afternoon offered little more than a wasteland of game shows and local news. Usually, in the hours before a decent show would air, I amused myself with exploring my mother’s underwear drawer, the shelf on the top of my father’s closet, his bottom desk drawer, her top corner bookshelf. My preoccupation, of course, was sex, and I was looking for anything that smacked of even the
remotest licentiousness. It was the 1970s, and my parents satisfied me with the occasional
Playboy
magazine, a dog-eared paperback copy of
Fanny Hill
, and the ever-popular
Joy of Sex
, that hairyarmpits staple of the fantasies of suburban teenagers across America. Once, during a disturbingly transgressive phase of all our lives, a copy of
The Joy of Lesbian Sex
even showed up on the bookcase, next to a volume of Victorian porn,
The Pearl
.

As I grew older, my interests expanded beyond the purely sexual. I rifled their filing cabinet, looking for letters and documents, preferably ones that would cast aspersions on my siblings or on my parents themselves. Panicked missives from deans of students, psychologists’ reports, medical evaluations, accusatory letters from my father’s ex-wife. I would tremble with a kind of delighted horror when I found them. There was no similar thrill to be found from the notification that my sister made the dean’s list or a form letter indicating that my father’s cholesterol was in the normal range. I took pleasure only in bad news. It was misery and only misery that satisfied me.

Neither were my parents’ drawers the only ones that fell victim to my snooping. I was a popular babysitter, my services in high demand throughout the neighborhood. I enjoyed being with children and they liked me, I could be trusted to clean up the kitchen (when did that become an unimaginable request to make of a teenage sitter?), and, most important, I had never once turned down a job because I had a date. (Note to parents: Fun-loving social rejects make the most reliable babysitters.) As soon as my charges were asleep, however, I began rifling through their parents’ bedrooms. I examined the vibrators in the nightstand drawers, opened the pale pink plastic diaphragm cases, stretched out on the king-size beds, and studied
Penthouse Forum
. In the last years of the Me Decade there seemed to be a fad for journal keeping
among young mothers, and I read, my eyes usually glazed with boredom, endless handwritten passages about arguments with husbands and mothers, attempts, occasionally successful, at achieving orgasm, the trials and tribulations of potty training, and the machine politics of the PTA.

I was always careful to leave everything exactly as I’d found it, and while I could be wrong, I don’t think anyone ever realized that their sweet, trustworthy babysitter was anything but. I should, thus, not have been surprised to realize that I’d gone and bred four spies of my own.

My daughter’s admission that she pays attention only when we are fighting, given so casually, brought me immediately back to myself at her age, perched on the top step of the staircase, listening to my own parents’ bitter exchanges. My childhood memories are restricted to the tone and volume of these arguments, their precise words and topics having long since faded from my memory. What I do remember is that listening to my parents fighting was not the terrifying experience you might imagine it to be. My parents were never physically abusive to each other; I could listen to them argue without fearing that they would cause bruises. At least not ones you could see. There was a certain thrill involved in eavesdropping on them, a kind of vicarious excitement to the drama of their discord.

That scene, the child at the top of the stairs, the parents fighting below, is a staple of the young-adult novel. As a child, I read countless renditions of it. But I never reacted like the characters in those books. I didn’t sit, my heart in my mouth. I didn’t weep soundless tears or clutch my teddy bear to my chest. I remember leaning forward, listening closely, with a kind of clinical detachment. All but taking notes.

I think my daughter is cut from the same cloth as her mother.
Decades apart, we both determined that the best way to figure out the complicated and incomprehensible world of adult relationships is to evaluate them at their worst, to dissect them when they are fragile, even broken.

She and her siblings do this all the time. Their father and I talk constantly—our marriage is really one long conversation, interrupted only when absolutely necessary. The children by and large ignore us, entirely wrapped up in their own complicated universes and in one another. They pay only sporadic attention to our discussions about our work, the books we are reading, the movie we saw the night before, their uncle’s new job, the latest episode of
Entourage
. When we kiss or hug, their eyes skate over us; at best they snort in derision or utter a disdainful “Gross.”

But let one of us mention an instant of conflict, let one of us recount a bit of bad news, and they snap to attention.