Living Out Loud (13 page)

W
hen I was nineteen years old, the temporary female caretaker of four younger siblings and a split-level house on a corner plot in the suburbs and desperate to get back to college, I put an advertisement in the local paper. It read:

At the time I was surprised that only one person called. (Now, I am amazed that anyone did.) I arranged an interview with the sole applicant and read the letters from the past employers that she carried in her purse. Then I hired her. Her name was Ida. She moved in with a collection of wigs, a half-dozen housecoats with snaps up the front, and a Bible with a black Leatherette cover. She was my salvation.

Ida is blind now, and lives in Florida. “Girl,” she said at the christening of my second child, her sinewy hand curled around that of the woman who was caring for my children, “if the Lord had not taken my eyes you’d be out of a job.” And she was right. Ida was perfect. She was a passable cook, a marvelous raconteur, and a good sport. Most important, she believed she was on a mission from God. One day in her second week of work, a strong wind blew through the open windows of our house and Ida took it to be the meteorological incarnation of my deceased mother. It did no good to mention that my mother was not the strong-wind type; Ida felt that she had been called and that God had charged her with looking after us.

I have been thinking of Ida lately because the person who most recently helped with my children left us in the lurch. I like to think that I would not be so angry if she had handled it better, but that is a delusion. When Kay, who after two years with my children had become my friend as well as theirs, gave me plenty of time to plan for her departure, I was irrationally enraged. How dare she leave, I thought, not soothed by her willingness to stay until I found someone else. And when, after nearly a year, Margaret suddenly decided to move on, I thought the same: How dare she abandon my children, my wonderful, well-behaved, happy little boys? I didn’t allow myself to think of the other side of that question: How dare I?

That isn’t fair, exactly; it has become clear to me that my kids do very well with a judicious mixture of Mommy and someone else, and that I do very well with that mixture, too. But still, when it collapses I become aware of how tenuous this structure is, of how my work life is built on sand.

My husband is more businesslike about all this, but then, he is more removed from all this. One of our friends was flabbergasted, two weeks after Margaret had begun working for us, to find out that he had never met her. Despite all our best efforts
at an equitable distribution of parenting, it seems that the public perception, and the private one, too, is that I have hired these people to do my job. I work, and they work at the life that takes place while I am working. I hold the money, they hold the power to give me peace of mind while I make the money. No matter how good the relationship between us, we are ultimately at each other’s mercy, which is not a comfortable place to be.

I felt helpless and at sea when I realized that Margaret would not be coming anymore, and I am not a person who feels that way often. Put an advertisement in the paper, my husband said, but it was not as simple as he made it out to be, like hiring a carpenter. There is not even a name for what I am searching for. Nanny? Too starchy and British. Sitter? Too transient to describe someone who (please God) shows up every morning. Housekeeper? If it was the house that needed looking after, I could be calm right now. Mother? Bite your tongue! What I want is what I had with Ida, the illusion of mother, the feeling of total care without the total emotional commitment on the part of those cared for. I want an understudy, someone who knows the role but will step aside for me at performances. I want a paid member of the family. I want permission to sometimes go my own way.

I’ve heard all the horror stories, but somehow I’ve been very lucky in my searches: first Kay, smart and funny and full of an endless supply of silly nursery songs, the disenchanted former manager of a rock-and-roll band; then Margaret, the mother of four grown sons, warm and nurturing even if she did take off on me. Now it is Sandy, quite literally the girl next door, more like a big sister than a surrogate mother, who carts the kids off to Burger King and teaches them how to moonwalk. My sons, who never called any of them Mommy by mistake, loved them while they were around and yet let them go with equanimity. Each of these women was discreet enough not to mention the
first step or the first word if it took place while I was away from home.

Of course, between one leaving and the other arriving, I have thought the same thing: Do it yourself. No one can do it as well as you. That’s not true, actually; each one of them did certain things better than I did, gave something that I simply don’t have in me. It is hard to find someone who will give your children a feeling of security while it lasts and not wound them too much when it is finished, who will treat those children as if they were her own, but knows—and never forgets—that they are yours.

It is a paradoxical relationship. And, if the truth be told, when I put the advertisement in the paper what I really want to write is PERSON WANTED: Must be on a mission from God.

I
n the bottom drawer of the changing table, beneath the snowsuits and the hats, is a pink-and-white striped dress with a white pinafore. It is a size twelve months. The wife of one of my husband’s law partners sent it, when my first child’s somewhat androgynous name and my stubborn feminist refusal to put a colored ribbon on the birth announcements led her to the conclusion that Quindlen Krovatin was a girl. He was not. I wrote in the thank-you note that I would return the dress for a jogging suit or a pair of overalls, but I never did, and there it lies in the drawer, with the tissue still stuffed inside it, like some limp little body. It has been joined by a pair of white socks with pink birds on the cuffs and a pink cardigan sweater.

There she stays, my phantom daughter, equal parts of cotton, wool, and fantasy. For I am the mother of sons. Somehow I always knew it would be so. Never fastidious, always a pal or a sister, a
haphazard fan of both the Yankees’ uniforms and their bullpen, I was the girl always taken aside by some boy who confessed his love for someone remote, tremulous, girly—that is, someone else.

I have been mothering boys all my life, from brothers to boyfriends. The only girl I ever mothered was my sister, who has turned out awfully well, but it was a struggle for me. I remember one long drive to the Y, when she was nine and I nineteen, when I delivered a long-rehearsed explanation of copulation and conception, as one of the most torturous moments of my life. She says it never happened. Who knows which of us is right? The fact is that, rightly or wrongly, with a boy it would have been more matter-of-fact for me, less a lesson in life than biology. Try as I might not to do so, perhaps I am perpetuating stereotypes. I am the mother of boys the way we’ve long thought of boys as being. In fact, it seems to me now, the way they are.

Once it was fashionable to suggest that there were no differences between little boys and little girls; in fact, I was one of the people doing the suggesting. But I don’t believe that anymore. I’m not sure whether we treat them differently from the moment those little pink or blue signs are plastered on the maternity ward bassinets, or whether it is hormones, or whether it is some mysterious alchemy like puppy dogs’ tails and sugar and spice, but when we watch our children from the park bench at the playground, I and the other mothers can’t help noticing that something is different. It is not so much that at school the girls head toward the tables and chairs and modeling clay and crayons, while the boys careen down the slides and build with blocks, although all of us remark on it. It is that the girls seem reactive, subjective, measuring reactions, gauging responses. My son, a simple machine, direct, transparent, is as like them as a hammer is like a Swiss watch.

And so I am the other in my family. They are all three like
this, hammers to my Swiss watch. My husband and my two young sons will all wear the same sort of underwear, and they will all have the same last name, and I can see sometimes, although one is still at the age when he is little more than a collection of firing synapses, that they sometimes think there is something a little strange about me. But I do not feel lonely, although strangers on the street feel compelled to feel sorry for me and say that maybe next time I’ll have a girl.

That would be nice, but in some ways more difficult. The other day a friend called and told me that her newly adolescent daughter, with whom she had been only moments before the best of friends, had just told her to do something that, included in a movie, would change its rating from PG to R. From what I’ve seen of the world, her son will not do that. Or as my mother-in-law, the mother of six boys—and never mind the sympathy, because she likes it just fine—said to me, “My boys have respect for me.” If my sons are like a good many others I know, they’ll reach a point when they will measure themselves against their father and find him wanting: a has-been, a never-was, a sellout, a fat cat. My husband has sufficient backbone to stand up to those few years when his children will preoccupy themselves with what a flimsy figure of a man he is and how they will never be like him. Falling in the toilet occasionally because someone has forgotten to put the seat down will be a small price for me to pay for taking a pass on that.

This is not to say that I will abdicate the tough-guy stance with my boys. (I recall my brother sitting in his room, his face dark, after he had been suspended from school. “Dad is going to kill you,” I said. “I don’t care about Dad,” he said. “I just don’t want HER to cry.”) And I am already at work on making them warm and caring and easy with the idea of women as intellectual and professional equals. In short, I intend to make some nice woman a wonderful husband. I just think I am more
naturally inclined toward doing that, rather than making the nice woman herself.