Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace (5 page)

Yes, lucky me, I thought. While you’re busy making a series of monster box-office hits, including the most lucrative romantic comedy of all time, I’m spending my days analyzing the frequency and consistency of infant bowel movements. While you’re totting up box-office receipts, I’m totting up ounces of pumped breast milk. And while you’re evaluating the relative merits of different literary properties up for adaptation, I am—without irony—evaluating the relative merits of Huggies and Pampers. Lucky, lucky me.

I went back to work.

But not, as it turned out, for long.

I made myself a little sign for my office door. “Pumping, please knock.” Three times a day I would put up the sign, and within three minutes the door would burst open and reveal one of the guys from the mail room bearing a stack of letters or an urgent fax. “Oh my God,” he’d say. “Am I interrupting something?” It turns out that young men are unable to resist the temptation of bared breasts, no matter how pendulous and mapped with bright blue veins. The first few times I sprang back, grabbing for my blouse and spraying precious breast milk in all directions. But after a while I would simply roll my eyes and shove my nipples farther into the horns, as if the clear plastic provided any kind of concealment. Why it never occurred to me to just not put up the sign, I
have no idea. Perhaps because I refused to give up my belief in people’s better natures, or perhaps because I was too addled by hormones to realize that the guys were matching their mail deliveries to my pumping schedule.

I made an art out of multitasking. I could do anything while pumping—research a motion, write a brief, negotiate a plea agreement. Figuring that a twenty-two-year-old slanger from the Raymond Avenue Crips 102 was not likely to recognize the rhythmic suck and hiss of a Medela Pump in Style, I even accepted collect calls from my clients in lockup while pumping. If they asked what was going on, I would fob them off with a puzzled “Noise? What noise? I don’t hear anything.”

The various frustrations and humiliations of pumping—the forty-five minutes spent with my nipples clamped in a vise in order to produce two ounces of watery blue milk, the embarrassment of being the object of the (truly) indiscriminate lust of postadolescent young men, the lugging of the pump back and forth, the incessant jocular comments (“Better label that clearly or someone will use it in their coffee, heh heh heh”)—were not what led me to quit my job. What finally drove me out of the office and back to my baby was
jealousy
, bilious green envy. I was jealous of my husband, who spent his days with her, and I was jealous of my daughter, who spent her days with
him
.

There I’d be, crouched in my car trying to pump a few ounces before going into the Metropolitan Detention Center to explain to a client that he had less in common with O. J. Simpson and more with, say, Bruno Hauptmann, and Michael would call to tell me how cute Sophie looked playing in her new baby pool. I’d be stuffing Kleenex in my bra during court recesses, and Michael and Sophie would be enjoying a picnic lunch in the park. I’d be frantically finishing a sentencing memorandum, trying to convince
the judge to overlook my client’s really very short flirtation with that whole Aryan Brotherhood thing, and Michael would be reading Sophie
Goodnight Moon
, putting her down for her nap, and doing his e-mail.

I grew more and more frustrated with myself. I was confident that I was still doing a good job at work—I had a few important victories during this period, including the dismissal of a serious ten-year mandatory-minimum case against an innocent client (a rarity for a public defender—both the dismissal and the innocence). I was doing my job well. A competent, confident working mother, just as my own mother expected me to be. At least that’s how it seemed.

Caring for my clients took a tremendous amount of emotional energy. So much so that even when I was able to get home at a reasonable hour, I found myself with little left to give to the person who was most entitled to my maternal devotion. I would walk in the door and dump my briefcase, my bag, and my pump just in time for Michael to pitch Sophie at my head like a football and take off for some downtime in his office. (In retrospect, perhaps I should have examined more closely the source of his early evening desperation.) After not seeing me all day, the baby wanted to play, she wanted to show me things, she wanted me to get down on the floor and roll around with her. This was not a baby who was interested in cuddling. She didn’t want to snuggle up in her mother’s arms. She wanted to
move
. But all I was capable of doing after my long day at work was lying there, virtually inert.

One night, in desperation, I turned on a videotape of
The Lion King
. To my surprise, Sophie scrambled up on the couch next to me, cuddled up, and sat, rapt and still, for the next eighty-seven minutes.

When I got home from work the next evening, she glanced at the television with a cocked eyebrow. Then she roared.

“Do you want to watch
The Lion King
?” I asked hopefully.

She roared again.

For the next month, every night after work Sophie would roar like a lion cub, I would pop in the video, and we would veg out in front of the television in a state of mutual, trancelike bliss. Until, finally, one day, the music came on and I began singing, and found that I was able, from memory, to recite the entire movie. All of it. Every song, every line of dialogue, from the first “
Nants ingonyama bagithi baba”
(“Here comes a lion, Father,” for those of you who don’t speak Swahili or are, perhaps, better parents than I) to the final “Circle of life, circle of life.” I knew it all by heart. And Sophie, who otherwise possessed no more than the vocabulary one would expect of a precocious toddler, was right there with me.

I quit work the next day. My boss, one of the best lawyers I’d ever met, a woman with two children, a woman who had not allowed her babies to interfere with her career, a woman who had not betrayed her feminist mother, smiled at me and said, “Why don’t you take a leave of absence?”

“No,” I insisted. “I’m quitting. I want to stay home with my kid. I want to go to Gymboree and take her to the zoo. I want to put her down for her nap and be there when she wakes up. I want to be a full-time, stay-at-home mom.”

“See you in a few weeks,” she said.

I packed up my office, leaving nothing behind this time. I had no intention of returning.

I did not have the courage to break the news to my mother. Instead, I found a job teaching a class at Loyola Law School, a few hours once a week for about what I would have earned at Star bucks, and informed my mother that I was merely in the process of switching careers.

My mother was not pleased. She began a campaign to bring me
back to my senses, her initial concern swiftly turning into anger. What was I
doing
? Did I not understand that I was throwing it all away? I was going to regret it. I was going to be miserable. This would be the worst mistake I ever made. Did I not remember what had happened to her?

I dug in my heels. This was
my
decision, I told her. I had an obligation to my baby. I wanted to be there for Sophie (with the implication, of course, that she, my mother, who had gone back to work when I was a baby, had not been there for me). This was the right thing to do for my family, and nothing she said could dissuade me.

I never let her know that within a week of quitting my job at the federal public defender, I had already begun to lose my mind. There was no way I would admit to her that the sheer monotony of caring for a baby was killing me. It turns out that entertaining someone with a two-minute attention span for fourteen hours is infinitely harder than trying to convince a jury of Orange County Republicans that your illegal immigrant client had no idea that the cardboard box he was carrying contained eight kilos of cocaine. Negotiating with a prosecutor over a plea agreement had nothing on trying to convince a two-year-old to go down for a nap. And cross-examining a scumbag confidential informant was a whole lot easier than wrestling a howling child into her car seat when what she really wanted to do was have one more ride on the merry-go-round.

I wasn’t prepared for how ill suited and poorly trained I was for the job of full-time mother. I was not accustomed to performing poorly. Whether because I’d so completely assimilated my parents’ expectations or because I enjoyed both the fruit and the feeling of success, I had not, before I became a mother, had much truck with failure.

But almost as soon as I gave birth, I came to the sickening realization that this particular enterprise would be
defined
, for me, by failure. I failed every day. I forgot the baby wipes or the diapers at home. I forgot a change of clothes and ended up running into babyGap to buy a new onesie for my shit-covered baby. I didn’t put on the Baby Einstein video, or I left it on for two hours more than the prescribed twenty minutes. I was short-tempered and unhappy, and I couldn’t remember the Gymboree teacher’s name.

Worst of all, I was bored. I was just absolutely and completely, soul-crushingly bored. The playground became this purgatory of swinging, swinging, swinging (whence this baby’s infinite capacity for swinging? She was never willing to do anything else for more than eleven seconds), forgotten juice boxes, and upper lips encrusted with that ineradicable epoxy of sand and booger.

But it wasn’t all bad. There were a myriad of moments so replete with joy that thinking back on them now makes me flush with pleasure. I remember with perfect clarity taking a bath with Sophie when she was about eighteen months old. I remember the rubbery plumpness of her skin, the slip of her body against mine. I remember the feel of her hands on my face as she fashioned me a bubble beard and matching hat. I remember the brilliant pink of her lips against the white of her own bubble beard. I remember the grip of her tiny toes as she dug them into my thigh. I remember the wriggling heft of her when the bath was over and I rolled her into a towel that covered her from head to toe.

I remember those moments, and I remember the day when I had, by some miracle, enough quarters in my pocket to allow her to ride the miniature merry-go-round in front of the grocery store. I remember rides one through six, and I remember the color of her face (beet red) when I told her that I had neither the time nor the quarters for a seventh. Her wail was piercing enough to frighten
the pigeons, who abandoned their tussle over the bounty of the supermarket Dumpster and took off into the air. It was piercing enough to attract the attention and the censure of the passersby. It was piercing enough so that when I wrenched her out of the saddle of the pink duck around whose fiberglass belly her legs were clamped so hard that they had to be pried free, it made my ears ring.

I hoisted her up on my shoulder, trying to avoid her wildly kicking legs and regretting my decision to buy those cute little saddle shoes with the hard soles instead of the less-likely-to-bruise Keds. Dragging my laden grocery cart behind me, I manhandled her over to the car. As I was shoving her into her car seat, she suddenly stopped screaming. With a sneer the likes of which I wasn’t to see for another decade, she warned, “Daddy’s going to come home and see what’s going on with Mommy and Sophie.”

She was planning on snitching me out! And the worst part was that I knew I had no defense, other than that she was being a miserable brat and had pissed me off.

Another C– day. No maternal dean’s list for me. Instead, I looked to be heading for detention. I should have listened to my mother.

But I have always been more stubborn than is good for me. Once I made the decision to stay home, once I decided that that was the right thing to do, I could not bring myself to concede defeat. I had made such a
point
out of it with my mother. I was doing the right thing, which by implication meant that she had not. I began to spend a lot of time ranting that we daughters of feminists had essentially been lied to. Our mothers and the professors of our women’s studies courses had told us that it was our job to do it all,
without warning us how impossible that task would be. What was needed, I said at the time, was a dose of realism.

I had spent my whole life up to that point working toward a goal set for me by my mother, a goal I had supported with unquestioning commitment. Suddenly not only was I questioning the goal, but I was no longer buying its very premise. I was still reacting to my mother’s ambitions, but now, instead of living the life she’d intended for me, instead of redeeming her lack of options by embracing my own, I was turning my back on everything. I was turning into a housewife—albeit an incompetent one—the very misery she and her generation had rejected.

My mother could not, and still cannot, understand why I did what I did, why I left a job I loved and a career that I had worked so hard to attain. Still, my life and my choices have not proved after all to be such a disappointment to her. I gave that stay-at-home-mom thing my all, but only managed it for a couple of depressed years. Eventually I found something else to do, an ambition as consuming as the law, if not quite so demanding. I began writing when I was pregnant with Zeke, my second child, although I didn’t publish my first novel until he was three years old.

I have organized my life so that, to a great extent, my children take priority over my work, but I do things like pack up and leave for two weeks on a book tour, or miss a school talent show because I’m on deadline. I still think my mother should have prepared me for how fundamentally impossible this juggling business is, but I’m glad she inspired me to keep looking until I found a man like my husband. I’m glad she made me expect equality. I’m glad she pushed me so hard, because had she not I would never have had the confidence to become a writer. My mother taught me chutzpah, a critical trait if you want to survive and succeed. It’s true I wish she had not responded to my announcement of my fourth
pregnancy with a horrified “Oh, Ayelet,” but I love how proud she is of my work. She buys dozens of copies of every one of my novels and gives them to (forces them on?) all her friends, her coworkers, people she meets at the supermarket (or at the Obama for America office; my mother is still as political as she ever was).