Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace (10 page)

Things never degenerated into true ugliness, however, because we were not anonymous. We used our real first names, and while it’s possible that Julie or Joanne was really a troll named Philip wearing crusty boxer shorts and a coffee-spattered wife-beater, sitting hunched over his laptop in a cockroach-infested studio apartment in Van Nuys, and getting off on pretending to be a twenty-eight-year-old Mormon woman from Salt Lake expecting her third baby on June 14, it seemed unlikely. And even if there was such a troll, Philip (or Brian or Ahmed or whoever) was such a good actor and generally such a supportive correspondent that it didn’t really matter if the Mormon mom was only a figment of his twisted imagination.

On the Junebug list, most of us got what we were looking for:
reassurance that we were normal, that we were doing things well enough, that we were—or were going to be—Good Mothers.

It was when I expanded my Web communities beyond this fairly personal list that the level of discourse deteriorated, and what support was on offer began slowly to be outweighed by a toxicity that seemed designed to destroy my sense of well-being rather than encourage it. Web sites like UrbanBaby and Berkeley Parents Network, while still providing plenty of useful tips on where to buy discount Robeez and what you should pay your babysitter, seem to degenerate with surprising frequency into full-pitched battles, the subtext of which is not only that we disagree but that your opinion, in its utter and fundamental wrongness, makes you the worst mother in the world. It is in the poisonous sludge of the comments sections that you see the worst in people.

During 2005 and 2006, I had a column on
Salon.com
in which I wrote about all sorts of subjects ranging from my mother’s battles with Medicare, to the rights of juvenile defendants, to how much weight I gain every holiday season. I tried to be timely, and I tried to be honest, and I tried to write with humor about difficult subjects. By the time I’d published my second column, I had stopped looking at the comments. So many people wrote, and while many responses were complimentary or even just respectful in their disagreement, many others were laced with such venom, expressed such a loathing for absolutely everything about me, that I simply couldn’t bear to read them anymore. For someone who writes memoir, I am unfortunately rather thin-skinned, and respond to most criticism—at least the personal kind—by falling into a pit of self-loathing. “She’s right,” I think. “I am that bad, and worse. Oh, my poor, poor children.”

I’ve decided, in the interest of full disclosure, and because I am in the mood to indulge my masochistic streak, to include a few
typical examples of the kind of response my columns received on Salon:

Even the process of cutting and pasting those sentences makes me cringe, in spite of the fact that when they were written I was already no stranger to controversy, nor to hate mail. The essay I wrote about loving my husband more than my children, the one that made me the butt of such hysterical fury all over the Web, landed me on
Oprah
, where I faced down a studio full of wrathful mothers, with only the eponymous host at my side.
*
But being defended
only
by Oprah is like relying for nuclear deterrence
only
on the U.S. arsenal of nuclear warheads. You won’t be surprised to learn that I won the daytime TV battle. By the end of the show all the angry mommies were reassuring Oprah that they agreed with me.

No, I was no neophyte to insult. I had been treated to plenty of rage and sanctimony—I live in
Berkeley
after all. But there is something special, having nothing to do with me in particular, about the kind of abuse people hurl at one another over the ether. It’s ubiquitous, from the political Web sites where people attack even the most neutral of comments, to the vacuous echo chamber that is Gawker (and I say this even though they honored Michael and me with the title of third-most-annoying literary couple). It is a truism to point out that it is because of its anonymity that the Web has become a snark-filled cesspit. If the person who called me a freak had not been permitted the cloak of anonymity, I bet he would have figured out another way to state his objection. The folks who hawk phlegm in letters columns are always too cowardly to sign their real names.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the Web. I revel in its breadth and depth of information. In the past twenty-four hours alone I have used the Web to look up the following pieces of information: the maximum speed of a classic single-hulled wooden schooner; current presidential polling figures for Colorado, Florida, Ohio, and Minnesota; how incomplete grades are awarded at Harvard College; who on my street gave the maximum donations to which presidential candidate; the hours of low tide in Blue Hill, Maine, on July 4 of last year; the square footage of the average boxing ring; the hours of operation of the Two Bird Café in San Geronimo; what percentage of Americans are idiotic enough to believe Barack Obama is a Muslim; the cost of custom-designed Vans; the winner of last year’s National Book Award; the cost of a set of sails for the above-referenced schooner; which of Paganini’s capriccios is more challenging to play, no. 5 or no. 24; the names of string quartets; the starting time of the movie
The Incredible Hulk
at my local cineplex; the relative merits of local Ethiopian restaurants; Golden
Gloves rules regarding the composition of boxing gloves; the average weight of five-year-old American boys and the correlation of emaciation with delayed cognitive development; the efficacy of Cetaphil as a remedy for lice infestation; whether frequent lice reinfestation has ever been used as a justifiable defense in a case of assault; the cost of a flight between Oakland, California, and New York City; the cost of a flight between New York City and Bangor, Maine; nutritional information on agave nectar; and the average number of puppies in a litter of dachshunds. (I fear that list may be incomplete.)

I have been involved in a myriad of Listservs and online communities—one for owners of Bernese mountain dogs, another for devotees of raw-meat dog food (I know, I know), a whole host of sites dealing with various aspects of the 2008 presidential elections. I have lurked on sites offering information on the treatment and care of children with ADHD, on up-to-the-minute information and photographs of women’s high-heeled shoes, on the side effects of psychotropic medications, on writing, and skin care, and the proper treatment of plantar fasciitis. All of these get ugly, some with more regularity than others. But with the exception of the political Web sites, the vitriol is worst when the subject is motherhood. And even on political Web sites, the targets of the most venomous cyber-assaults are, I believe, more often women than men.

Periodically over the course of human history we come upon an intersection of technology and some long-dormant trait of human or animal behavior, some characteristic we would never have suspected without the arrival of an invention that unexpectedly reveals it. Dogs offer a perfect example. Humans worked to domesticate the descendants of wolves, creating over millennia a canine companion that can hunt, herd sheep, protect its human and his home, and guide the blind. Then, in 1903, the first Model A’s
rolled off Henry Ford’s assembly line, and it suddenly became clear that the entire fifteen-thousand-year effort had served to create a creature perfectly suited to one activity: sticking its snout out the window of a car traveling down the interstate at sixty-five miles per hour.

It’s the same with mothers and the Internet. When the ARPANET first came online, nobody in the Department of Defense had any idea that they were creating the most critical piece of the mommy war
*
puzzle. There have always been plenty of forums in which to make mothers feel insecure, but we have, with the creation of the Web and the proliferation of motherhood-related Web sites, reached some kind of nexus, a con junction of maternal anxiety, misogyny, guilt, leisure, and tech no logy that has been, on balance, a big bummer for contemporary mothers.

In 2006 the University of Maryland published a study that showed that women are twenty-five times more likely to be the targets of malicious online attacks than men. The Web doesn’t just bring out the worst in all of us, it brings out the most misogyny, and the most self-loathing. Women have always been nasty to one another, but the Internet has widened the reach of each individual’s venom. Where once you actually had to know someone to make her miserable (or at least know someone who knew someone), now you can spew bile on tens of thousands of strangers with a single click of the mouse. And it’s not just the breadth of the effect; it is its depth, too. Because so much of the traffic on the Web is anonymous, we allow ourselves to sink to a level that would
sicken us if we heard ourselves speaking out loud. Remember that Bad Mother police force? How many of those cops might have opted for early retirement if they were not able to sit around in their nightgowns in the middle of the night, slapping virtual cuffs on each other and sentencing strangers to the chair?

I am by no means ready to give up on the Web. I’m not going to go off and join a Luddite community of Wi-Fi-phobes deep in the Arizona desert. (Did you know that there are people who claim to be
allergic
to Wi-Fi?) I am not even ready to give up on joining online affinity groups of mothers. I made it through the bleak months of trying to get Abie to nurse in part because of the wisdom and support of the women of PumpMoms, who not only taught me how to get three letdowns in a single pumping session but also refrained from criticizing me when I decided that, with my nipples the size and shape of elderly ballpark franks and my baby thinking of me as merely that lady strapped to the bright yellow pumping machine on the other side of the room, it was time for me to quit.

I think the time is past when we can hope for a civil society to prevail on the Web. That genie is out of the bottle. The only thing we can do is try to remember that the Internet can be a pastry laced with poison, especially for mothers, and as we enjoy its many benefits, we must remind ourselves to take small bites. We can protect our kids with cyber-bullying statutes, but as far as their mothers are concerned, I fear we have no choice but
caveat prolaptor
. Let the surfer
*
beware.

A
number of years ago, Michael’s cousin David was killed in an accident. He was commuting to work on his bicycle when he was hit by a car speeding through a turn. After he died, his wife, Ariel, told me that one of the many things she missed about him was having a man in the house to fix a dripping faucet, put together an Ikea cabinet, change the batteries in the smoke detector. David was killed the day before trash pickup, and that night the cans did not go out. The next week, as Ariel hauled out the heavy bins brimming with the detritus of a week’s shiva—paper plates, plastic cups, uncountable wads of damp tissue—she realized that she was alone.

There was nothing traditional about those two. David was like Michael, as involved a father as I’ve ever seen. He didn’t just change the occasional diaper; he assumed equal responsibility for the care of their daughter. Ariel is a massage therapist, a doula, and while I’m not sure, I’m willing to bet she’d call herself a feminist. Still, when it came to home repair, the division of labor fell along traditional lines. That’s the way it is in my marriage, too.

For all my adamant feminism, it never occurred to me to take Michael’s name when we married, and not just because to do so would have horrified my mother. I am a supporter of abortion rights, of equal pay for equal work, of the rights of women prisoners, of all the time-honored feminist causes, and then some. During the periods in my marriage when I chose to stay home with
my kids, even though I knew I was contributing to our family by caring for our children, I still felt that my worth was less because I wasn’t earning.

Even given all this, I haven’t changed a lightbulb in sixteen years, since the day I met my husband.

Before I was married, I didn’t consider my failure to manage even basic hand tools a feminist inadequacy. I thought it had more to do with being Jewish. The Jews I knew growing up didn’t do “do-it-yourself.” When my father needed to hammer something, he generally used his shoe, and the only real tool he owned was a pair of needle-nose pliers. My non-Jewish friends had fathers who changed faucet washers (they knew what faucet washers
were
) and re-planed sticky doors. My father hacked with a pair of needle-nose pliers at anything my mother was not willing to call a repairman to fix.