Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace (3 page)

The question becomes: How does one find consolation in the face of all this failure and guilt? One way is by reveling in the dark exploits of mothers who are worse, far worse, than we are. We obsess about these famous bogeymamas; we judge ourselves for a little while not against the impossible standard of the Good Mother but against the heinous Bad Mother. The more rigid the prescription
of the Good Mother is, and the more complete our failure in emulating her, the more extreme the Bad Mother needs to be. Terrified of our own selfishness and failures, we look for models further on the spectrum from ourselves than we are from the Good Mother. We may be discontented and irritable, we may snap after the sixty-seventh knock-knock joke, our kids may watch three hours of television a day because we’re too afraid, after checking our local map of sexual offenders, to send them outside to play, we may have just celebrated the second anniversary of the last time we had sex with our husbands, we may have forgotten to bring a snack to the playground, or, God forbid, brought a snack replete with partially hydrogenated vegetable oils, we may be divorced from our children’s fathers, our children may not have fathers, our kids may sleep in our beds, our kids may not sleep in our beds, we may bottle-feed, or we may breast-feed for too long, our kids may score in the twelfth percentile on the verbal-reasoning section of the Iowa Tests, we may feed our kids peanut butter or strawberries too early and give them allergies, we may be so vigilant about not feeding them anything allergenic that they refuse to eat anything that’s not white, we may yank on our daughters’ ponytails while we are combing their hair, we may feel like the world notices and keeps track of each and every one of our maternal failures, but at least we’re not Andrea Yates or Susan Smith. We’re not Wendy Cook or Britney Spears. Hell, we’re not even Ayelet Waldman.

That is,
you’re
not.

Another strategy some of us have come up with to deal with our sense of failure and guilt is to rebel, to embrace the very identity we are afraid of, to loudly proclaim ourselves bad moms. We bad moms proudly wear our ambivalence on our sleeves. We vociferously resist and resent the glorification of the self-abnegating mother. We snarl at the mention of Dora the Explorer or Raffi. We
shrug at the orange Cheetos dust smeared across our children’s mouths. We swap stories of our big-box travails (“Your kid ran away from you at Target? That’s nothing. I yelled at mine in the parking lot of Ikea and someone called the cops!”). We commiserate about how much we loathe the wannabe Good Mothers with their aggressive school volunteering, their Bugaboo strollers, and their Petunia Pickle Bottom diaper bags. We even confess that on rare occasions, and only under duress, we spank our children.

We bad moms are happy to confess our sins because we’re confident that those who come closest, and with the most sanctimony, to emulating the self-effacing, self-sacrificing, soft-spoken, cheerful, infinitely patient Good Mother are the
real
Bad Mothers. After all, what is a child like whose mother has sacrificed herself on the altar of his paramount importance? What is a child like whose mother has selflessly devoted herself to his every need and desire? Is he thoughtful and kind, empathetic and liable to put others’ needs before his own? Or is he so packed full of self-esteem, so conscious of his own sense of entitlement, that he is impossible to be around? Our children may wear unmatched socks, we trumpet, but they’re better people than yours are.

The vogue for honesty, for exposing and embracing the ugly side of motherhood, is not a new thing. As far back as Erma Bombeck’s weekly columns or Peg Bracken’s
I Hate to Cook Book
, women have been attempting to derive comfort from the act of ruefully confessing their maternal failures. One seminal text of the bad-mom movement, for example, Anne Lamott’s
Operating Instructions
, published in 1993, describes a mother who clings to sleep so fiercely that she doesn’t even notice when her baby falls into the crack between her bed and the wall. Salon’s Mothers Who Think page debuted in 1997 as a forum for this kind of resistance, although it sometimes functioned as its opposite. The literary anthology
The Bitch in the House
is a Bad Mother’s manifesto, as are the stacks of volumes with cutely sour titles like
Confessions of a Slacker Mom
and
Mommies Who Drink
. I began my career as a writer by publishing a series of murder mysteries—the Mommy-Track mysteries—about a mother so bored with staying home with her small children that she turns to solving crime just to keep herself from losing her mind. As an antidote to the Web sites UrbanBaby and Babble, the Bad Mother movement offers up the delightfully bilious Crabmommy and Heather Armstrong’s Dooce, who writes that “most days with a toddler are the emotional equivalent of running over your skull with a car.”

We bad moms defy the world to come up with an accusation we have not already leveled against ourselves. Beating our critics to the punch is certainly effective as a way of short-circuiting attacks. How much do they think it hurts me to be accused of being a Bad Mother when that is the name of my book? But in our conscious rebellion, we bitches and slacker moms are as focused on the Bad Mother archetype as any of the vigilantes of the Bad Mother goon squad. If we truly didn’t care, we wouldn’t be writing all these articles, memoirs, and books. We wouldn’t be blogging. We don’t insist that we’re Good Mothers despite our failings. On the contrary, we seem to be saying only, okay, yeah, we’re bad. So what?

Despite the effectiveness of this technique, despite its power to inoculate you against attack, it allows you to define yourself only in negative terms. We don’t call the entire project of identifying Bad Mothers into question; we simply embrace the role. And in the end, there is something hollow in that. There is no inherent nutritional value in the antidote to poison.

Moreover, if examined too closely, all this defiance starts to
ring false. I may be defiant about my failures and my selfishness, but I still feel guilty. I still feel bad. As happy as I am to crown myself Queen of the Maternal Damned, part of me still believes that my children would be better off with June Cleaver.

Is there really no other way to be a mother in contemporary American society than to be locked into the cultural zero-sum game of “I’m Okay, You Suck”?

Despite the Internet, the enabling technology that makes it ever easier for us both to judge others and to internalize our own self-judgment, couldn’t we at least attempt to forge a positive and humane attitude toward mothers, one that takes into account their welfare as well as that of their children? Or is that an impossibly naive idea, the very consideration of which dooms me to be bitch-slapped by the meta-hypocrites of Gawker under the headline “Ayelet Whines: Can’t We All Just Get Along?”

It shouldn’t be that hard. We possess, after all, a perfectly adequate model, one that operates smoothly, almost imperceptibly, without engendering vitriol or causing much pain: the Good Father. There are no “daddy wars,” and while Alec Baldwin and Michael Jackson have both served their time in the Bad Father stocks, it is rare for a father to feel that his own identity is implicated in or validated by their offenses. Self-flagellation is not the crux of the paternal experience.

I’m not calling for a national lowering of maternal standards to the rather minimal level considered acceptable by society for fathers. In fact, if more were expected of fathers, mothers might not end up shouldering such an undue burden of perfection. But it’s hard enough to minister to the needs of children without trying to live up to an impossible standard at the same time. It’s hard enough to achieve a decent balance between work and home
without feeling like our inevitable mistakes are causing our children permanent damage. It’s hard enough to braid a kid’s hair on a moving train without worrying about an audience of censorious commuters.

Can’t we just
try
to give ourselves and each other a break?

B
efore I had children, I knew exactly what kind of mother I would be: my mother had told me. She was a feminist of the 1970s consciousness-raising, pro-choice-marching, self-speculum-wielding school, and she expected me to fulfill her own ambitions, which had been thwarted by a society that resisted viewing a woman in any sphere other than the domestic, and by an imprudent marriage. My mission as her daughter was to realize the dream of complete equality that she and her fellow bra burners had worked so hard to attain.

My mother met my father the summer before she entered graduate school. Fifteen years older than she, he had custody of four children from his first marriage. His oldest child, a son, was only ten years younger than my mother.

When my mother went off to graduate school, my grandparents breathed a sigh of relief. Then, in a moment of utterly uncharacteristic romantic grandeur, my father sent my mother a telegram that said, “I’m pregnant. Come marry me.” To me, the text of this telegram has always smacked of a calculated attempt to mask, with charm and humor, his very practical need. From the vantage point of decades, it seems clear that the subtext of the telegram was, “My children are running wild, driving me crazy, and I need a wife to take care of them!”

My parents have been married forty-four years, and my mother has never once described the story of their engagement, telegram
and all, as anything other than the beginning of a mistake. When I ask her why she threw everything aside to marry a man so much older, with four difficult children and no steady source of income, sometimes she says it was because she was swept away by love—he was handsome, charming, a war hero. Sometimes she says that she was afraid, at twenty-two, of becoming an old maid, or that her best friend had just married an older man with four kids, and that made it seem like a less crazy thing to do. She always says that she realized almost immediately that she had made a mistake, but by then she was already pregnant with me—fecundity runs in my family—and it was too late. And even if she had the madness or the courage to take her baby and make her escape, there were those four motherless children to consider. She couldn’t abandon them.

Not long after I was born, my mother discovered Betty Friedan. Had
The Feminine Mystique
been published a few years earlier, my mother’s life might have been very different. She might have had a fulfilling career, instead of working at a series of frustrating and uninspiring jobs. She might never have married my father; she might have stayed at the University of Michigan, become a professor of art history or a museum curator. She might not have backed into a career as a hospital administrator because she happened to be working in a health clinic when someone finally realized that she was too smart to be relegated to typing and filing.

My mother struggled for her entire life to find professional satisfaction. She worked for men who were neither as intelligent nor as qualified as she was. She watched the steady rise of women just a few years younger, women who refused to settle, who refused to subsume their ambitions to a sexist world. She was angry—and is angry still—about the mistakes she made, and she was determined that I would not make similar ones. She raised me to believe not
only that I was capable of anything but that I had an obligation—to myself, to society, most of all to her—to succeed. My future—a term I understood to be synonymous in her mind with “career”—was meant to fulfill her ideology and redeem her own frustrated professional and personal life.

That I was to have children was a given—feminist or not, she’s a Jewish mother after all—but my career was to be paramount. Family would follow, and would be integrated, seamlessly and without challenge, into my life. She wasted no time in wondering whether I would be a Good Mother—that was a given—what was important was that I would be a
working
mother. Or, rather, a successful professional who just happened to have children.

At heart, and despite my occasional behavior and my frequent protestations to the contrary, I was a nice Jewish girl, and I wanted to please my mother. Moreover, I believed in her causes as fervently as she did. I accompanied her to pro-choice demonstrations, I helped her leaflet the neighborhood on behalf of liberal Democratic candidates for office, I responded with appropriate horror when kids showed up at school wearing “Students for Reagan” T-shirts. Most important, I did well enough in school to get into a good college, and although I betrayed her by refusing to attend her beloved Swarthmore, Wesleyan University was still an adequate sticker for the rear window of her car. A few years later, her red Aspen station wagon became unto a chariot of the gods when she was able to decorate its window not just with Wesleyan and Swarthmore stickers but with that most powerful of Jewish-mother incantations: Harvard Law School.

In college, I discovered my own brand of feminism, one that for a time involved great quantities of body hair and an intense program of sexual experimentation. My cousin Marcie had the misfortune of getting married during this period of my life, an
event I celebrated in a strapless pink taffeta gown accessorized with two tufts of wiry black armpit hair.

My mother was so proud of me during those years and the ones that followed. I will never forget the expression of pure joy on her face when, in my very first year out of law school, my salary was higher than my father’s.

My mother taught me that ambition was my right and my duty, and that I needed to be careful to structure my life in order to accommodate it. One of the keys to creating the life she wanted for me was to find a mate who would be a willing foot soldier in my battle for equality. I needed a husband who would value my professional identity as much as his own, who would assume half the household and child-care duties. Who would, if anything, subsume his ambitions to mine. I needed, in short, a man different from my father.

My father doesn’t think of himself as sexist, and neither, really, do I. Born in 1925, he is no more nor less than a man of his time. It never occurred to him that his wife’s career should have or could have been taken as seriously as his own. If asked, he would probably say that it was merely a function of earning capacity. He made more money than my mother, thus his job was more important. As strapped as they always were, it would have been foolishness to behave otherwise. If he was offered a better position two hundred miles away, then they had to move, whether or not she was working at the one job she ever really loved.