Growing Girls (14 page)

It’s hard to know when, exactly, to proclaim a beautiful family experience a disaster, but this does seem to be their way. A beautiful family experience is a snapshot of hope. As if obeying a call for family unity, you pack that picnic and go to that
beach, only to find those horrible green flies, but you did think to bring bug spray so you spray the bug spray, but it coats the croissants, and then one of the kids has to go to the bathroom, and then the other one does, and then that luscious mimosa you drank just leaves you caving into a most miserable need for a nap.

“Oh, well,” I said to Alex, after he called the teacher’s ear a skirt. “So we bond over our shared stupidity. It’s still
bonding?
”

“Look, we are not going to go down without a fight,” he said, vowing on behalf of the entire dolt family to be in charge of homework.

We lasted clear into the end of October. Sunday after Sunday we went through this. Anna drew a lot of cats, but somehow absorbed everything; she learned to count from one to one hundred in Chinese and at dinner would drill her dolt mother and dolt father. She’s going to grow up a scholar, the type who can glance at her notes once and ace the test. Sasha went along for the ride happily enough, and if I plied her with enough candy, I could get her to sit through an entire class. Plus, she was promised doughnuts at break.

When I started hearing myself yelling at my girls to turn around and pay attention, to sit up and stop throwing their papers on the floor, when I found myself restricting all use of crayons and markers during Chinese class because-you-girls-are-not-paying-attention, and if-they-did-not-listen-to-what-the-teacher-was-saying-they-would-get-no-doughnuts—that was when I knew.

The leaves had fallen and the yellow jackets were hiding inside the stone wall and one Sunday morning Anna finally said
please, she didn’t want to go to Chinese school; she wanted to stay home and draw chickens. Sasha cheered with the news that we were going to stay home and maybe make apple cider and carve a pumpkin. We had other things to do besides just learn Chinese. We had church and we had each other and we had a gonkey to feed and there was football on TV.

I think we’ll go back to Chinese school again next year. Maybe the girls will be ready, or more ready, or maybe we’ll end up quitting again in favor of piano lessons. I don’t know how to do this, but I don’t think force-feeding is how. Exposure without expectation, that’s what I want. Anything more is to oblige, demand, slap into an obedience that stinks of apology.

I don’t want to apologize to my girls for taking them out of China, a homeland that was not, in the end, a home. I don’t want them to grow up apologizing for leaving, as if that crowded country gave them any choice. A lot of people seem to want to romanticize this situation, dressing their girls in Chinese silks and taking them to the mall for professional photographs to hand out. Maybe that’s good. I don’t know. Maybe that’s better than just walking around as a woman who finds herself awakening in fits and starts with a stubborn rage.
How dare you leave these girls to fend for themselves, even for a second. How dare you! What is the matter with you people?
Discipline keeps me from going any further. Discipline and a duty to protect that runs so deep I know it in my toes.

Look: My girls are fine. My girls are home. My girls are part of a family. We are Mom and Dad and Kikki and Et. We are yellow jackets hiding in the stone wall. We have our reasons.

fossil

“It’s always a leap of faith to infer behavior from fossils,” the paleontologist said. I’m guessing he had to say that because everyone was inferring behavior from the fossil. I saw a picture of it in a magazine and felt depressed for days. The fossil was found in Liaoning in northeastern China and at its center is an adult Psittacosaurus, a small, squat dinosaur with a parrotlike beak that lived 125 million years ago. The skeleton is curled around those of thirty-four babies, each about the size of a Chihuahua. The babies are crowded together with their legs tucked underneath them and their heads raised, indicating that they were watching as their impending doom came to pass. It could have been a flood or a volcano or some other sudden act they couldn’t escape. Or maybe the group was hiding from a predator and the mother was holding her babies tight as they all
watched the predator pass. They were about to breathe a sigh of relief, but then, in one loud boom, a mud slide happened and in an instant buried the whole family alive.

You can make up endless stories that fit the picture, but the one thing I can’t escape is the mother’s futile attempt to protect. Millions of years have passed and here I sit, feeling an ache I believe must be hers. My bones come from her dust, brittle under the weight of her same problems, one more mother trying to figure out how to do the right thing, if her babies are eating enough, or too much, if she’s got them well enough socialized, if she’s giving them all equal time.

One more mother. We do everything we think is right—except when we’re too damn tired to think at all. Now and again we find ourselves screaming into the wind, words never intended for the child but there they are, stinging, sticking. We are quick to clean up, lick with the guilty tongue that shames us. But that is the exception. Really the exception!

We are sanctuaries, designed as houses to protect our babies, no matter how stupidly. Not long ago in this current millennium I was in a department store when a guy came running into the shoe department and tackled another guy and the two wrestled on the floor while display shoes flew. The one on top—he must have been a cop—had a gun in a holster. That really was quite enough for me. Instinctively, I threw my coat on my girls’ heads
(I threw my coat on their heads?)
and I shoved them forcefully into the back storage area where there were stacks of shoe boxes high above us, and we kept running until I saw an exit door that warned that it was for EMERGENCY USE ONLY and I didn’t care. I crashed my body into the door, tripping the
alarm, a bell, a very loud bell, and I didn’t care. We stood outside panting in the winter air. Safe. I didn’t care about anything else. Maybe I overreacted, but my girls were safe, so I truly did not mind that I had to fill out a false alarm report with that fire chief who showed up.

Now I imagine a big earthquake happening somewhere in the middle of that story and 125 million years later they find us fossilized, a woman with her coat over her kids’ heads lying on top of a bed of shoes, and the paleontologist is warning against inferring behavior from the fossil, but some mother takes one look at it and figures it out instantly.

Now they’re saying we should relax more. It’s in my
Newsweek
this week, right there on the cover. “The Myth of the Perfect Mother: Why It Drives Real Women Crazy.” There’s a photo of a woman with a baby in her lap and she has all kinds of extra arms bearing the weight of a soccer ball and a pan of bacon and a telephone, the image intended to say exactly what so many of us are saying: This Is Ridiculous. We’re over-parenting. We’ve turned into high-intensity moms because our friends are high-intensity moms and this race toward perfect parenting is driving us mad. I tore into this magazine one night when I was down in the dumps because I forgot, just completely forgot, that I was in charge of the game for Sasha’s Valentine’s Day party at her preschool. Worse, I got to school that day feeling so damn proud of myself because I had remembered that she was supposed to decorate a shoe box and bring it in so all the kids could put their valentines in it. So I strode into school like
Cocky Mother with my shoe box wrapped in red paper with kitty stickers on it. Then I got to her room only to discover that all the other mothers had also remembered, but their boxes were bigger than mine. And more elaborate. One girl had a castle with a drawbridge and gum drops on top. One boy had a volcano with candy worms on it. These were … valentine’s boxes? Yes, they were. You put the valentines in the top of the volcano and inside the drawbridge.

I stood there with my little shoe box. So pathetic. So sad. Poor Sasha, having an underachieving mom like me. I kissed her and said, “Have fun at your party,” and went home and ate Doritos. Later, when Sasha got home with her loot, it became clear that the valentines that she and I had so lovingly prepared the night before—a little card with a lollipop attached—were duds. Other kid offerings included whole bags filled not only with candy but also with pencils and puzzles and little stuffed toys. Bags and bags of this stuff—none of which fit in Sasha’s little shoe box. The teacher had donated to her cause, giving her a shopping bag to carry her loot home in. So, I understood, finally, why the other kids’ boxes were so big. And now I wouldn’t make that mistake again. I figured next year I’d use a beer case and I’d make it into a unicorn head or maybe a treasure box with fiber-optic rainbow lights spewing forth.

I was thinking this through. I was planning ahead, berating myself for not getting it together. I was about to throw Sasha’s stupid little shoe box in the trash when the phone rang and it was the homeroom mother saying they missed me today, didn’t I know I was supposed to bring in a game for the Valentine’s party?

“Oh, God,” I said. “I forgot.” I forgot! I had no excuse for forgetting
I was, what, too busy taping lollipops onto those pathetic little cards?

So, I got an F for Valentine’s Day. Or maybe a D-. The really sad part is I walked in that day feeling like an A.

The really,
really
sad part is this has happened to me numerous times with my girls, at picnics with other moms who think to bring tablecloths and fondue pots filled with chocolate for dipping strawberries in—and there I was feeling so proud I thought to bring pretzels—at birthday parties with other moms who think to make doll clothes featuring swatches from the clothes of the birthday girl’s baby wear—and here I was so proud I thought to cleverly wrap the Barbie in Barbie paper. On and on and on, the failures pile high until I wonder why I ever got into this mom gig in the first place, seeing as I’m such a flop.

So of course I tore into that
Newsweek
. How comforting it was to find kindred souls and to know there may be so many of us we had mass-market potential.

So wrote Judith Warner, author of
Perfect Madness
, excerpted in that
Newsweek
issue. It was stunning. To read about yourself so explicitly and perfectly is to be jolted into a kind of awareness that you exist outside of your own daily slogging from here to there. You are part of a greater whole. One of those fish in a school offish that goes on swimming until one of you turns so you all turn; here you thought you had choices but it turns out the whole lot of you functions as one organism going with the flow of a time and a place and a set of influences and a history simply living itself out.

It makes me mad that when I was younger, busily delaying motherhood, that I wasn’t stronger, wasn’t the great killer whale I thought myself to be. That young woman I was in grad school, trying to become perfect, running up the hill in Frick Park one hour each day, eating nothing all day but an apple and a piece of toast, writing stories and rewriting them and rewriting them,
hiding from the world until I got myself perfect—I was special! I was a uniquely neurotic young thing terrified of love, too engaged with life to bother signing up for the tired grown-up world of marriage and babies.
Special!

No. It turns out, no. That’s not who I was. I was a product of a trend toward “muscle-bound, tightly wound, uber-achieving, all-encompassing, never-failing self-control that passed, in the 1980s, for female empowerment.” A cliché. I may as well have been a character in a movie, Jennifer Beals in
Flashdance
, a welder/would-be ballerina sweating bullets to a pop tune.
She’s a maniac, a maniac on the floor/And she’s dancing like she’s never danced before
.