Suburgatory (32 page)

From the back of the police cruiser, Giroux tried to explain leaving her family and home to Officer Clark. “I just wanted to turn back the clock, just for a day or two. No whining kids, no clueless husband, no ‘accident reports' from the preschool.
NO
goddamned
OLIVE GARDEN. NO PLAYDATES.
”

“Do you realize what you've done, Mrs. Giroux? You left your little kids in the hands of their father. The school said one of your kids came in with a single mitten and another with no scarf. No juice boxes either. Your husband thought Fruit-by-the-Foot was real fruit. Their field trip forms, remember those? No, you don't, do you? And you don't care. You're disgusting. You are disgusting to me.”

“You're right, you're right, I am disgusting,” Giroux said, weeping as they made the inevitable slog back to town through the commuter traffic. “I just wanted to go back. But you can't go back, can you? Not even for a visit.”

Back-stories

Okay, I didn't need to be
literally
dragged back to the suburbs, like “escaped” mom “Trink Giroux,” but let's just say that a lot of the material in this book was based on personal experience. I wish I could dish even more dirt I've heard over the years, but I have to be careful in giving you the back-stories, at the advice of counsel. (I've always wanted to say that! It sounds like I've arrived!) So if this stuff sounds very much like “me me, more about me!” the reason is simple: I don't have to worry about suing myself.

The “escaped mom” piece and the one that led the book, “Atheist Mom So Lonely She Accepts Christ,” were among the very first I wrote back in 2007—when I was still praying to Brooke Shields, the patron saint of deeply depressed mommies. I was then and still am an atheist. Sort of like, “God? Come again? Oh yeah, THAT dude!” But loneliness is a powerful motivator, and it was a mom friend, Liz, who first suggested going to a Baptist church playgroup/“parenting classes” by saying, “I'm a Jew from Jersey, and I
love it!
” At first, this idea seemed—hmm, what's the formal term—‘ass-stupid'? Still, I began going, and sure enough, this battle-scarred ex-Catholic got an unexpected religious education. The Christ I knew from childhood seemed like He was saying, “Look what a scary mess I am because of you, sinner! Guilty now? Good!” But at this Church, their Christ looked serene, as if He were fresh from yoga class.

I was constantly stepping in shit, yet they always politely looked away. I asked one of the ladies, “Oh, what's Ryan going to be for Halloween?” And she said, haltingly, “Well, we don't celebrate Halloween.” I looked over at my son, who was wearing a snaggle-toothed pagan pumpkin, and my friend Naoko's son, sporting a merry white skeleton, and I thought, “Great, we just paraded our boys around their church in Satan-shirts.”

I was bowled over by their hospitality to me. But I still felt like a fraud, hiding my lack of faith and boundless social liberalism, and I wondered if at, say, a gay rights rally or pro-choice rally, would my new friends be on the other side of the line? Did I care?

Well, I do care very much, as a long-standing fag hag, about gay rights. In “Lesbian Hamsters ‘Just Grew Apart'” I am definitely the annoying “Flora” who foists my homophilia on my child. We have a really old game of Life (free from the town dump) with the classic blue and pink pegs, and I actually did tell my son that “a blue peg should be able to marry a blue peg if they love each other.” Now my son asks his friends when playing, “Do you want to marry a blue peg or pink peg?”

You might notice, ahem, a little anger in places over breast-feeding. When I told an (ex) pediatrician that breastfeeding wasn't working for me, while looking disheveled and ready to careen off a bridge, she looked at me as if I had served her a turd on a plate. I wanted to say, “You know, a near-suicidal mom is quite the problem, too, lady, and breast-feeding is making it worse.” Just a note, ex-ped: My kid has no allergies, so here's a heartfelt “fuck you” to you.

I have spoken to at least a dozen women about the guilting they've gotten over breast-feeding, and for a while I got sucked into a real online breast-feeding collective, which I called the Titty Tribe in “Purchased Breast Milk Tainted by McDonald's.” I found it fascinating how obsessed they seemed to be with breasts—their own and other women's. They seemed to be mostly highly-educated, third-wave feminists. I was flabbergasted that a few seemed willing to take even untested bodily fluids from perfect strangers rather than bottle-feed, as I mention in “Wolf Blitzer: Live from the Lactation Room.”

Closely allied to the breast-feeding guilters are the natural birthing guilters, the target of my ad for “C-Secrets,” a business that will give you a believably “natural” birth story to throw off finger-waggers. This is in tribute to friends Colleen, Kate, and all my many, many other C-section moms who've been told the only “true” way to have a baby is through your vagina. Sure, C-section rates do seem excessive. (Call that the Ricki Lake
Business of Being Born
concession.) But that doesn't mean women should demean one another about such a private experience that the vast majority probably had little choice in making.

You might notice Wal-Mart gets a starring role a few times in the book. I'm intrigued by Wal-Mart's role in affluent suburbia as a class divider. Few friends will admit to going there. “Terry Gotlieb” in “Woman Shops at Walmart to Feel ‘Pretty, Thin'” was actually based on a woman who one day described Wal-Mart shoppers as if they were sub-human. Wal-Mart is the single most diverse place I visit in suburbia. Chuck E. Cheese comes in second.

I also get my cheap on at the town dump, described in “Join My Weirdo Junior League!”—which is almost entirely true, except for Dumpster-diving and the very end, when my friend Laura notices I'm wearing her discarded shirt. That actually did happen, but I got the shirt at her school thrift store, where I've gotten literally $1,200 worth of clothes in one bag for, oh, thirty bucks.

Laura is the unexpectedly sane leader in “PTO Stunner: New President ‘Not a Power-Mad Psycho.'” Now, the PTO leaders at my son's school have been fantastic—nothing at all like the evil PTO terrorist Emily “Bin Fahdin.” But that supermarket ambush by a crazed PTO honcho actually happened to a friend in another corner of Suburgatory. This piece was also inspired by working parent friends who feel shut out of PTO. I see a lot of lip service given to the idea of “Can't we all just get along, mommies?” But the fact is, I see a whole lot of judgin' going on everywhere. That's what inspired “Mommy War Combatants Embrace Mutually Assured Destruction.” I so hate it when women tear each other apart.

Oh, who am I kidding? I
love
it!

Really, though, I wished I could have worked more into the book for working moms, but I'm a stay-at-home mom. It's what I know, it's pretty much
who
I know, and many pieces reflect my efforts to combat whiny white mommy malaise. Besides the church, I did become an IKEA regular and a mall semi-regular who bought nothing but took massage chair breaks, not unlike the “Dad Forcibly Removed from Mall Massage Chair.” And I am the pathetically eager, unstoppable Facebook queen lambasted in “Mom Crushed to Learn that Facebook Isn't Job.” If you can believe it, not one but
two
apparently single Pakistani mariners did friend me through the Jewish Maritime Historical Society. But they are not learning how marvelous the US is: All they're learning about American women, from me at least, is that we dress and speak like whores.

You might notice race comes up quite a lot, and race is certainly whispered about in the very white towns I've lived in. The playground encounter described in “‘Funny Racist Lady' Enchants Prominent Black Townsman” actually happened to a friend. She is in no way racist, and I doubt the famous black athlete would be “enchanted” if she was. But my friend did think the other park-goers were being racist for subtly pointing at them. And he did invite her home for take-out, which is when she figured out he was a superstar and apparently a very nice one at that.

Other moments I can cop to include an acquaintance referring to Indians as the “New Jews” because of their fierce determination to succeed. It had that strain of admiration plus disgust I see in anti-Semitism. The Ice Cream Man really is universally hated by my parent-friends, no matter his religion or color. But I did indeed meet someone who talked about one of them—a “brown” man of indeterminate ethnicity—as if he was a gypsy at best or a terrorist at worst, saying, “Just who ARE these people?”

One of the fun things about writing this book was getting back the very insightful copyeditor notes from the whip-smart Imee Curiel. In a couple spots, she said, “Come on, this is just far-fetched.” But in the grand cliche of fact being stranger than fiction, these instances were actually real. There is indeed a high-end car in town with a bumper sticker that says
Had Enough?
, which is what inspired “Mercedes- Driving Dad Dreams of Easier Life for His Children.” It was a different fancy make of car I couldn't place. (Being Super Crazy Mega Cheap, I don't know a thing about new cars; my own cars are old enough to start cramming for their PSATs.)

I wanted to tailgate this guy, to ask, “Had enough of what?” Inherited wealth? Profound luck? Because I can say without hesitation that the vast majority of people I've met who live in affluent suburbia got here by growing up affluent, marrying someone affluent, or getting themselves advanced degrees through hard work but also because they won the IQ lottery—better known as luck. That's how I got here: luck. So, yes, rich dad apparently fed up with your enviable life, I've had quite enough. Enough of you and other rich people complaining endlessly about their taxes.

One person who endlessly complains to me is a delightfully inappropriate mom friend determined to snag an invite to a supposed swinger party held each year on Halloween. I really did think that key parties were suburban folklore, but I've since been convinced that, while surely a teeny-tiny subculture, they actually do exist. I have no doubt that if we did go, we would be the moms who are all talk and no walk that swinger “David Dowd” complains about in his Shout Out. Though I would be all over his seven-layer dip.

I do love my trashy food, and at some point, obsessive “foodie culture” began to both annoy and alarm me. It alarmed me to think that the healthiest food seemed to be becoming the sole province of the affluent, which is what inspired “Dog Fed Better than Scholarship Child, Says School Nurse.” And like the character “EatMyShit” in “Waitress Wages Anti-Foodie Jihad on Chowhound,” I became irked by constant Facebook pictures of everyone's spectacular, one-of-a-kind dinners. My own response to this is on Facebook was a “Moms Against Food Porn” picture series I did of really gross crap food sitting around my kitchen.

And there's quite a lot in here about women aging and loathing their own bodies. I go through phases when I become obsessed with one topic, and for a while it was that photo-collage “Faces of Meth” described in “Woman with Eating Disorder Considers Meth.” I showed it to everyone I knew, and no fewer than three mom friends looked at those ghoulish faces, paused, and then said, essentially, “Wow, meth really makes you lose a lot of weight, huh?” The fact is, I thought the same thing and hated myself for even thinking that.

And I leave you with one more self-loathing incident that I didn't explain fully in “Child Can't Convince Mom She's Beautiful Inside and Out,” because I thought no one would believe it. I did go through a midlife crisis a few years ago, the cheapness was very briefly tossed aside, and I actually bought laser hair removal—bikini line—on an impulse buy. It came with a special bonus: micro-dermabrasion! The day I went to redeem my “bonus,” I brought my son. (
Too cheap for baby-sitting, but not for lasering? Hypocrite!
) When I got there, they said, “So sorry, we have you in for lasering your bikini line, and you'll be charged if you cancel.” So, yes, dear reader, my son sat in the corner, oblivious, wearing oversized protective glasses that kept slipping off his face, while his mommy sat on a table, legs spread, getting her bush lasered off. At least, I thought he was oblivious, until I heard him say, “Mommy, why are your pants on the floor?”

Acknowledgments

I had this fear that some of my work might seem, at times, woman-hating, so I'm happy to see how many actual women I have to thank here.

To my sisters Joellen, and especially on this project, Terry (plus Benno and Ron), who pushed me to get a backbone.

To the amazing Laura Yorke and Carol Mann at the Carol Mann Agency in New York, to Steve Fisher at APA in Los Angeles, and to attorney Eric Rayman. And thank you to Willow Bay, for connecting me to Laura Yorke. Laura saw just a few writing samples in 2009 and said, “You must write something.”

Laura placed this book with another superstar, Lara Asher. Besides being a terrific, turbo-charged editor, Lara got the material instantly and is just a lovely, spunky force. And thanks to project editor extraordinaire Meredith Dias for her expert execution.

To beloved college friend, architect David Tabenken. David named this book, and I am only sad his wonderful mom, Helen, along with my own Mommy, aren't here to see David's title appear on national television. To my Aunt Nancy, Uncle Matt and J. Spellman, among the few people left who knew and loved my Mommy and Daddy.

To my favorite Reuters anchor, Jen Rogers, who fought hard alongside my sister in making this project happen. I consider Jen a sister in everything but blood. The same goes for my dearest college friends—Rachel Laiserin, Lisa Epstein Jay, Tina Hohn Schissel, Geri Clark, and Ashley Gravelle Morse—as well as CNN's finest, Rachel Brown (who brought me sisters-in-crime Peg Rettino and Joanna Joplin) and all-around producer/ball-buster Amber Briscoe. And to my honorary brothers: scary-smart journalist Chris Nolter, my first friend at CNN and someone I still treasure all these years later, and the brilliant Dr. Scott Schissel.

To bosses and boss-friend hybrids who accepted my considerable idiosyncrasies over the years: Steve Rosenbaum/Pam Yoder, Kathleen Campion, Kathy O'Hearn, David Bohrman, Jen Zeidman Bloch and Gene Bloch, the late Jeff Gralnick, Andy Breslau, Warren Kozack, Terry Baker, the irrepressible star-producer Kara Kasarjian, and especially Jenny Harris, a force of nature I was blessed to sit next to and learn from for years. Jenny makes that Holly Hunter character in
Broadcast News
look like a slacker.

To Hillary St. Pierre of Baldie's Blog, whose courage against cancer leaves me slack-jawed daily, and to her son Xander, who's even braver than she is.

To Arianna Huffington, who, at a dark moment confidence-wise, responded to an email seeking help in, oh, forty-five minutes? Thank you.

To some of the real parents of Suburgatory, the friends I'm lucky to have in town: Adam, Alex, Alexandra, Carl, Dan, Doug, Glenn, Glynis, Jen, Jeremy, Jim, Julie, Laura, Liz and Liz, Mark, Michele and Michele, Molly, Nancy, Naoko, Sandra, Sarah and my book club ladies, Suzanne, Valerie, and Yuki. I left out last names, in case I get run out of the state and some of you get run out with me.

Finally, the two groups people who made Suburgatory bearable besides my actual family and helped save me from postpartum depression: my Facebook family (those I know IRL, and those I don't). Wish I could name you all. You deserve your own sitcom. I'm working on it.

And, a diaspora of comrades who have fed me ideas and friendship and I needed a lot of both for this book: Adam, Alda/Bo, Alex, Alexandra, Alicia, Allison, Amanda, Ami, Amy, Andre, Andrea, Angela/Paul, Anne, Annemarie, Antonella, Antonetta, Bruce, Caitlin, Caleb, Cheryl, Chris, Christine, my “Church Ladies,” Claire, Clint, Colby, Colleen, Dan, Dana, Daniel, Dave, Debbie/Ed, Derek/Manon, Diane, Dianne, Eddie, Elaine, Elizabeth/Kati, Ellen/Tom, Eric, Erin, Evelyn, Evelyn/Andy, F & E, Fitz, Flip/Tom, Frankie, Fred, George, Gretchen, Gudveig, Harold, Hasmeena, Iain, Ildi, Inger, Jackie, Jagger, all the Jennifers, Jess/Dan, Jessica/John, Jill, Jim/Geoff, Jodi, Johanna, Jonathan, JTL, Judi, Judy, Julia, Julie, Karen, Kate, Katey, Kelli, Kellie/Jens, Kerry, KimChi, Kirsten, Kirstin, Kitty, Laura, Leanne, Leslie, Leyea, Lindsey, Lisa, Liz, Lobo, Luis, Lynne, Marc, Marcia, Marcy, Marina, Mary Anne, Melissa, Merideth, Merlynda, Michelle, Nancy, Nicole, Pat, Penelope, Peter, Rebekka, Rev, Ripu, Rob, Robin, Roo, Robin/Lee, Roo, Russell, Ruth, Sally, Sarah, Sarav, Scott, Shane, Sharon, Sherman, Steve/Kyle, Sue, Susan, Susswein, Suzanne, Tanya, Tarun, Theresa, the Thibodeau and Morlock cousins, Tina, Toby, Tod, Todd, Tom, Tommy, Tony, Trader Guy, Tricia, Vanessa, Varman/Sarwat, and Wendy. Love to all!