Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace (6 page)

I have two daughters now, whom I am no doubt burdening with my own set of expectations. Sophie and her little sister, Rosie, know that I expect them to have careers, that I expect them to marry men like their father, who will not foist upon them all the labor of raising the children and keeping the home. I boss them around like my mother bossed me.

I know that someday my daughters will chart their own courses, they’ll make their own mistakes. They in their turn will have to figure out how to keep all those balls in the air, how to maneuver despite inevitable frustration and failure. But just as I burden my daughters with my expectations, I also try to remind them that jugglers invariably drop balls, and no matter the persistent criticism of the Bad Mother police, balls do bounce. When they fall, all you need to do is pick them up and throw them back up in the air.

I
spent a key portion of the 1970s stretched out on the shag rug of my parents’ home in suburban New Jersey, clutching a pink record jacket in my hands, and singing lustily along with Marlo Thomas.
Free to Be You and Me
showed up in the house when I was about eight years old, and my mother immediately put it on constant rotation, supplanting Pete Seeger and Peter, Paul, and Mary on the family playlist.

With the exception of the grammatical (would it have killed them to call the record
Free to Fly, You and I
?) we took Marlo Thomas’s lessons very seriously. My mother went out and bought my younger brother a doll, although he, unlike the eponymous hero of “William’s Doll,”
never
wanted one. Whenever I heard someone say the words “Ladies first,” I chorused back, “And mighty tasty, too,” making me seem like a lunatic, until I explained about the tender, sweet young thing and the tigers (which probably didn’t, in retrospect, help much). My brother and I learned that it didn’t matter if we were boys or girls; we didn’t have to be pretty or grow tall. We didn’t, in fact, have to change at all.

And we learned—from the three-pack-a-day rasp of Carol Channing—that when there was housework to do, we were to make sure that we didn’t do it alone. Good mommies and daddies did their housework together.

About 250 miles away, on a shag rug in a living room in Columbia, Maryland, Michael was being taught the very same lessons.
His mother’s purchase of
Free to Be You and Me
coincided, perhaps not coincidentally, with her divorce. No longer able to rely on a comfortable future as a doctor’s wife, my mother-in-law went back to school, first to finish college and then to earn a law degree, giving her significantly less time to manage the domestic details of the lives of her two sons. Michael was eleven when his father left, old enough to start helping around the house, regardless of his gender. Humming along to “Dudley Pippin and the Principal” and “It’s Alright to Cry,” he got busy cleaning up and cooking dinner. His chores at the time, in fact, significantly outnumbered my own, which consisted mostly of lackadaisically cleaning my room, walking the dog, and shifting a few dirty dishes from the table to the sink after dinner.

Michael’s first marriage was to a woman who was similarly schooled in second-wave-feminist record albums, and thus, by the time we met, he was well trained to take on more than his share of the domestic duties. In the early days of our relationship, he used to say that he was the only husband in the world who had to pick up his
wife’s
socks. I admit to having been a bit of a pig, something he teased out of me by the diminishingly amusing tactic of standing in front of the pile of my tossed-off clothes and saying, “Look! My girlfriend exploded.” His mother taught him how to cook, thank God, because my own mother’s lessons in that area went something like “Just dump the bottle of salad dressing on the cut-up chicken pieces and toss it in the oven.”

To the delight of both of our mothers, we are in many ways living out Carol Channing and Marlo Thomas’s dream. How important that has been to the success of our marriage I only really understood when I started to get responses to my notorious essay about loving Michael more than the kids.

Most of the feedback came in two varieties: (1) “Your kids
should be taken away from you, you cretinous bitch”; and (2) “Right on! That’s how we’ve managed to stay married for fifty years.” Every once in a while I receive e-mail from a pastor or priest congratulating me on following the injunction of Genesis 2:24 and cleaving unto my husband as a good wife should. And occasionally, I find winking in my in-box an e-mail from a man asking for advice on how to make his wife more like me.

I could and sometimes do reply with some version of “be careful what you wish for,” but I know what it is that they are looking for. It’s not that they want a crazy wife with a terrible temper who can neither cook nor change a lightbulb. They don’t want a Weebleshaped lover who not only wobbles but falls down. They certainly wouldn’t enjoy having their personal lives splashed between the covers of books and magazines. What they want is to get laid.

The part of the essay that intrigues these men is where I wrote about how I am still interested in having sex with my husband. The men who write me these letters have wives like the women who sat in judgment of me on the set of
Oprah
. They have wives like the one who told the studio audience that she, unlike me, was a
Good
Mother, and on the very rare occasions when she let her husband “do his business,” she watched television (
Jeopardy!
, not cable porn). I consider it a great personal victory that I managed to restrain myself from handing her a pair of pruning shears and saying, “Here you go, honey. Go ahead and snip it off at the base. You might as well finish the job.”

The men write me, “Please tell me how to make my wife interested in sex again.” Most of them reassure me (honestly or not) that they have not yet cheated on their wives, but the threat lies implicit in the e-mail. I just want some pussy, the more honest among them say. If she doesn’t give it to me, can I really be blamed for looking for it somewhere else?

I know these men want me to give them some kind of magic spell, some words to incant or a particular gift to buy that will cause their wives to rip off their stretched-out sweatpants or highwaisted mommy jeans, toss their nursing bras into the trash, and slither into the scraps of lace and silk advertised on the cover of this month’s Victoria’s Secret catalog.

Save your money, I tell my male correspondents. If she’s not sleeping with you now, you’re not going to wake up her dormant libido by giving her a pair of tiger-printed crotchless panties. On the contrary. If you do, next Christmas you might find yourself the recipient of the gift of a twenty-class yoga card or a twelve-hundred-dollar Miele vacuum cleaner. It’s a present, sure, but who’s it really for?

What I tell these men is that if they are serious about wanting to salvage the erotic part of their marriages, they should unload the dishwasher. They should do a load of laundry (and fold it, too). There is nothing sexier to a woman with children than a man holding a Swiffer.

It can’t come down to something as silly as that, can it? After all, as I wrote in the essay, it is not merely Michael’s domestic prowess that inspires my devotion. I argued that I, unlike most women I know, have failed to make some kind of amorous transition, to supplant my husband with my children as the object of my passion. So yes, perhaps my advice to my correspondents is reductive, but the truth remains that one of the main reasons Michael is still so alluring after fifteen years of marriage, the reason I’d rather go to bed with him than do pretty much anything else in the world, is that I’m not angry. I’m not saying we don’t fight. You bet we do. But I no longer suffer from that slow burn, that simmering fury that characterizes so many of the women I know, both stay-at-home moms and those with jobs that reward them with a salary.

Let me say (again) that I know that there are multitudes of women who are both sexually satisfied and deliriously happy with the choices they have made. There are also many (although I’ll bet you not
multitudes
) whose husbands are equal partners in all aspects of their domestic lives. If you’re one of those lucky people, you should just turn to the next chapter. This one’s not for you.

This chapter is for those women—and the men to whom they are married—who have ended up, contrary to their expectations, living lives disturbingly similar to those of their mothers. Even the mothers who bought us the
Free to Be You and Me
albums never really expected that their husbands would take on half the childcare and household responsibilities. But we, their daughters, listened to the record and took for granted that our husbands would. This chapter is for the women who are surprised and, frankly, pissed off to find themselves, like their mothers before them, shouldering the bulk of the domestic burden.

It is kind of remarkable how little housework the men who marched next to me at the Take Back the Night vigils have ended up doing. Their approaches toward the work of caring for a family, while significantly more generous than those of their fathers, many of whom probably would have collapsed at the sight of a meconium-filled diaper, don’t come close to parity.

Not long ago, the journalist Lisa Belkin published a cover story in the
New York Times Magazine
about how housework is shared by men and women in heterosexual relationships. She offered some numbers from a University of Wisconsin study: “The average wife does 31 hours of housework a week while the average husband does 14—a ratio of slightly more than two to one. If you break out couples in which wives stay home and husbands are the sole earners, the number of hours goes up for women, to 38 hours of housework a week, and down a bit for men, to 12, a ratio of more than
three to one. That makes sense, because the couple have defined home as one partner’s work. But then break out the couples in which both husband and wife have full-time paying jobs. There, the wife does 28 hours of housework and the husband, 16. Just shy of two to one, which makes no sense at all.”

Frankly, I’m surprised by her surprise. That’s certainly an accurate reflection of the relationships I know, and I live in
Berkeley
, a nuclear-free zone where the city council awards Code Pink a free parking space to make it easier for them to protest the Marine recruiting station. One would think that if any town had a significant proportion of adherents to “Equal Shared Parenting,” it would be this one. And it’s true that the cafés, the homeopathic pharmacies, the dog parks, and the aisles of Whole Foods are replete with men wearing drooling, gurgling fashion accessories strapped to their chests, men who are expert at slapping on a Seventh Generation chlorine-free diaper without tearing off the tabs, men who never miss a single back-to-school night (okay, maybe not that last one). It’s just that most of those men don’t spend their weekends cleaning the toilet (or arranging with the maid service to do it for them).

I just don’t get it. I know Michael’s and mine were not the only copies of
Free to Be You and Me
sold in the United States. Didn’t those former little boys get the message? Or is it that menial household tasks are, for those of us who don’t suffer from advanced cases of OCD, incredibly unpleasant? It was Carol Channing herself who told us, “Your mommy hates housework, your daddy hates housework, and when you grow up, you’ll hate housework, too.” Should it be a surprise that as soon as people are given the opportunity to opt out of it all, they do so? Is the problem not that men choose to do only a third of the domestic labor but that women let them? In other words, is this women’s fault, too?

There is likely a grain of truth to that—I have often felt like shaking my most bedraggled and downtrodden friends and saying, “Stop
complaining
, just dump the kid on his lap and take a personal day.” And plenty of husbands insist that when they try to do something around the house, they inevitably fail to accomplish the task to their wives’ satisfaction.
*
So yes, women need both to ask for the help they need and to let go of their preconceptions about how a job should be done.
†
But perhaps if my correspondents want to get laid, demanding even more from their wives isn’t the best way to accomplish that goal.

What men who describe spending an afternoon with their children as “babysitting” need to realize is that after an evening spent rushing from work to the grocery store, back home to cook dinner (or order it in—I’m a Jewish girl from the New York area, after all), then folding a load of laundry while supervising homework (and yes, thank you for doing the dishes, but it’s not like you cured cancer; don’t act like you deserve the Nobel Prize), before getting the kids to bed, packing their lunches for the next day, and then sitting down at the computer to answer twelve e-mails from the first-grade room parent about Pizza Day volunteers, fill out and submit the nursery school strategic plan survey, and create an Evite for the birthday party you’ve left yourself less than a week to plan, most women just aren’t in the mood. And pretty much the same
goes for eighteen hours spent chasing and cleaning up after the kids, even without the workday crammed in there, too.