Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace (7 page)

Most men I’ve talked to
understand
that the women in their lives are not interested in sex when they are feeling beleaguered and frustrated, but they don’t really
get
it. The average man can be angry and frustrated with his wife, but still be perfectly happy to fuck her. The anger might even be just the pinch of Spanish fly he needs. Your typical man uses sex to unwind, while the last thing your typical woman wants when she’s wound up is to have sex. Women—or most women, or some women, or the women I’m talking about, or maybe just women like
me
—do not find resentment erotic. On the contrary. If I am angry with you, or even just irritated, then the last thing I want to do is give you pleasure. I’ll withhold it, even if that means I’m hurting myself, too.

Despite how it sounded to the men who read the article, it isn’t like Michael and I haven’t gone through our own periods of connubial drought. The postpartum hormonal swamp is nature’s friendly way of trying to keep you from getting knocked up again, so that you’ll be able to keep caring for the baby you already have. For the first couple of months after I gave birth, it was as if I were standing beneath a shower of estrogen, progesterone, and oxytocin, and not one of those environmentally correct low-flow showerheads, either. This was a spa deluge, dumping a hundred gallons a minute over my head. I would sooner have leaped into a shark tank full of starving great whites—while having my period—than have sex. Whatever sensual satisfaction I needed was amply provided by my sweet-smelling, plump, and delicious baby and the wash of oxytocin released every time he or she latched onto the breast. Even after the hormone flood had ebbed, breastfeeding was enough to keep me from wanting any other physical contact. I spent my days and nights at the baby’s beck and call, my
body and breasts available whenever the baby wanted them. The last thing I could tolerate in the few hours I had my body to myself was to give it to someone else. And don’t even think of touching my breasts. If Michael accidentally brushed against my nipple while he was opening the car door for me, it took me a monumental exertion of will to keep from severing his hand at the wrist.

But even after these purely physical impediments to sex abated, there was a time when I still didn’t want it. This was the period when I had left my job and was staying at home full-time. I was bored, and depressed, and had lost the sense of self that had kept me company over the last thirty years. I wasn’t who I had once been, and I wasn’t sure that I wanted to be who I was. Because I felt lost, I also felt ugly. Or at least unattractive. During this period I dressed disturbingly like my children, in overalls and T-shirts, stretchy pants and capacious blouses. It was as if I were advertising by my attire my sexual inaccessibility.

This was a particularly grim period in our marriage. Here we had made together these two babies, whom we both adored, who gave us such constant pleasure, for whom we shared such intense love that it sometimes felt like pain, and the two of us were further apart than we had ever been. I remember lying in bed next to Michael and telling myself that all I needed to do was take a page out of Queen Victoria’s book and lie back and think of … well, not of England, nor of Berkeley, but of my marriage. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I was too tired, it was too daunting, and although it took me a long time to realize this, I was too angry at him. I was too jealous.

Becoming a parent had not changed Michael’s sense of himself, it had not destroyed his confidence, it had not made him feel lost. He definitely developed a new conception of his role in the world, but not one that was negative. That is not to say he didn’t
experience moments of panic. He marked the births of each of our children with a series of ailments. A few days before Sophie was born, he woke up in the middle of the night with chest pains. He felt like he had swallowed a ball. Convinced that he was having a heart attack, he had me rush him to the emergency room (I’ll never forget the look on the guard’s face when the hugely pregnant woman dropped her husband off at the entrance and then went off to park the car). An anxiety attack, diagnosed the doctor. As my pregnancy with Zeke progressed, Michael developed this floating blind spot in his left eye. Stress, the ophthalmologist said. No cure but to relax. With Rosie it was hives, with Abe it was hives
and
the blind spot. But even in the throes of these bizarre physical manifestations of his provider anxiety, Michael still knew who he was. If anything, he felt more sure of his place in the world. He had to continue doing what he was doing, because now he had a family to support.

I, on the other hand, was supposed to be doing this Good Mother thing, this caretaking thing, this Gymboree and Music Together and baby-massage thing, but unlike Michael, I wasn’t happy filling my traditional domestic role. It didn’t feel like I had come into some deeper understanding of what it meant to be a woman and a mother. It just felt like I’d gone astray, that I was stuck in a hole I had dug for myself, a hole I was not supposed to want to escape. And complicating all this was the fact that I
loved
these children so much. They were adorable and sweet and a never-ending source of sidesplitting amusement. I have never laughed as hard as I did the day, for example, that I caught Sophie dipping Michael’s toothbrush into the toilet, with a seriousness of purpose that approached that of an EPA inspector testing Lake Michigan for PCPs. (Oddly, Michael did not find this quite as amusing as I did.) The fantastically adorable image of her chubby
two-year-old face peeping out of her dinosaur Halloween costume is one that I will forever be able to rely on to make me feel happy. But even so, even with all these moments of joy, I was still glum and irritable, and about as horny as a … well … as a depressed mother of small children.

In retrospect, it’s hard for me to believe Michael hung in there through all this. Why he had faith that I would figure it out, I’ll never know. But he always did. When I first experimented with writing, he was immediately supportive, even though he had been through one marriage that collapsed at least in part under the weight of literary competition. He never reminded me that I had made a toast
at our wedding
in which I promised never to be a writer, both so that I could provide him with a steady income and health insurance and so that he need never fear that his success would make me jealous. Instead, he just told me how great he thought my writing was, and encouraged me to keep going. He was relieved that I had found what I needed—the beginnings of an identity separate from that of mother to my children. I was relieved both that the fog was lifting and that I was happy again. And we were both certainly relieved that my interest in sex had come out of its long hibernation.

In light of the seriousness of the sense of dissatisfaction I describe, in light of how profound a problem a young mother’s loss of sense of self can be, I know that it seems unduly lighthearted to prescribe as a solution merely that the men who write me those sad e-mails try to pick up a little of the domestic slack. But what kept Michael and me together through the worst of my stumbling was the sense that we were on the same team. He never seemed to be saying, “Well, you chose to make this bed, why should I have to lie in it?” He had learned his
Free to Be You and Me
lessons too well to make what some might see as a pretty reasonable request—if this is
the division of labor that we’ve chosen, if I am to earn the bulk of the money like my father did, then I am entitled to expect you, like my mother, to make my home and care for my children.

There may be plenty of women who are fine with things that way, plenty of women who don’t object to carrying the extra domestic load, who think of that as a Good Mother’s task, even if they work as hard and earn as much money as their husbands. But it’s at least possible that Carol Channing was right, that everyone hates housework. Taking care of a house and family is work that never ends; like Sisyphus’s wife, you and your basket of laundry never reach the top of the mountain. Feeling like it’s all—or mostly—your responsibility is depressing. And even if you buy into the system, it still makes you happy to have help. You inevitably feel warm toward someone who is clearly thinking enough about you to relieve you of part of your burden. It’s at least possible that my male correspondents might find that if, when they get home from work, instead of taking an hour to decompress, they put down their briefcases or toolboxes, roll up their sleeves, and scrub the stain out of the sink or puree some bananas to feed to the baby, their wives might suddenly be much more content. Hell, the men might even find themselves treated to that holy grail of male pleasure, and not just on their birthdays.

I suppose that it is disingenuous to discuss menial household labor without acknowledging that many of us are spared at least some of the most unpleasant of those duties: we subcontract them. There are, of course, millions of people who don’t have the resources to off-load their toilet scrubbing, just as there are people who on principle refuse to participate in a system that compels the lower economic classes to deal, like untouchables, with the filth of the higher. But I grew up in a decidedly middle-class house (with periods of real financial instability), and my mother did everything
she could to find the money to hire a cleaner every other week. I think she just decided that if she were to come home from a long day at work, make dinner, and then set about scrubbing the floors and de-scumming the shower, she’d end up killing herself, and taking us along with her. During the headiest era of my mother’s feminist phase, she even figured out a way to spare herself the bulk of the cooking; she and the other members of her consciousness-raising group formed a supper cooperative. Each day a different one of them would cook for the group, separate the food into individual family-sized portions, and drop them off at the others’ houses.

My mother had help, and so I grew up with a series of women or cleaning services coming to the house once every two weeks for a couple of hours. I rarely met them—they came when I was at school—and my only real experience of their presence was the hours I spent grumbling the night before cleaning-lady day when my mother forced me to clean my room in anticipation of their visits. “I don’t pay them to pick up after you” was the refrain.

When I moved in with Michael, he suggested that we avoid any discord about who was going to do the really gross jobs by hiring a cleaning service. We have had various amounts of help since then—weekly cleaners, babysitters, nannies—and while I am grateful to them beyond measure, I am never anything but uncomfortable with the idea of being a lady with, essentially, a maid. A friend once told me about hearing a conversation between two nannies in which one of them said, “You should always make the beds. These women aren’t used to having servants, and they
love
it when you make the beds.” The comment caused me a stomachchurning moment of recognition. Our kids’ nanny
did
make our beds, and every time I walked into my bedroom and saw the crisp sheets and smoothed pillows, I felt a wave of gratitude and pleasure. Because I feel so guilty about hiring someone with less money
to clean my house, and because I feel a certain amount of shame at the idea of being able to afford a cleaner, my relationships with these women (and they are almost always women, and often, though not always, from third-world countries) tend to be fraught. I find it incredibly difficult, for example, to fire anyone, and have more than once found myself in the situation of hiring a maid to secretly clean up after my other maid, because I felt too bad for the first one to fire her, even though she wasn’t able to manage the job.

So yes, I pay someone to scrub my toilets (although as the mother of two boys with poor aim, there are plenty of times when I’m down on my knees with a brush and a bottle of organic, nontoxic, unscented, all-natural toilet cleaner). Still, with four children and a huge hairy dog, I could have a staff of three arrive at my house at 6:00 a.m. and not depart before midnight, and there would still be plenty for Michael and me to do.

Belkin’s article on housework included a reference to a survey on the division of labor by a pair of Berkeley (surprise, surprise!) academics, and Michael and I decided, just for the hell of it, to fill it out. The questionnaire is called “Who Does What?” and while our results more or less conformed to our expectations, it highlighted a few improvements that we’ve since tried to implement, albeit with limited success.

The survey divides up all the chores of maintaining a family and a household and asks you to score how much of it you do, how much your partner does, and how you
would like
the work to be divided. The tasks in the survey include, among many others: shopping for and preparing meals, cleaning the house, making calls to family and friends, caring for the family car or cars, providing the income, financial planning, initiating lovemaking, determining the frequency of lovemaking (different category!), and deciding how involved to be in religious or community activities. After
you’re done scoring all those categories, the survey asks you to evaluate both your and your partner’s competence at a series of tasks, including, again among many others: reading to your child, choosing toys for your child, doing your child’s laundry, disciplining your child, talking to your child’s doctor, and making playdates. Then it asks you a bunch of questions about how you feel about how much you do, and how you think your partner feels.

No surprises in the last category of questions. I’m basically thrilled with how much Michael does, and he thinks I’m doing my share. He’s proud of how much of the housework and child care he does, and I think I’m a crappy mother. Sigh. How much self-awareness would it take for me to stop internalizing the chorus of the Bad Mother choir?

In the first two categories, we agreed that, for example, I score a 9 on laundry, and he scores a 1, he wipes me out in the putting-to-bed category, and we let the mow-and-blow guy deal with the garden. There was a moment of discord around the bill-paying item, but Michael was finally forced to acknowledge that having not paid a bill in fifteen years, he cannot possibly be said to have earned a 2. Gross overestimations were accordingly erased and the appropriate figure inserted. He wished I would get down on the floor and play with the kids more, I wished he took more responsibility for making their doctors’ appointments.