Playing House (7 page)

Most women, in becoming mothers, feel they finally come to understand their own mother with more depth and compassion. For me, in becoming a mother, I felt I finally came to understand my father and what must have been his inevitable feelings of “fringeness,” as the woman he married ran the domestic show. To be loved second best, how have men tolerated that all these years? How awful, how hurtful. It makes you want to withdraw. Now I see why fathers fade away. There is no way to compete with the fierce love a child has for its primary caretaker, and it’s so easy to feel rebuffed when the little one shakes off your hand and runs for her obvious favorite. So you retreat, to your study, your den, your desk, your TV, where there is always football. At one point, early in my daughter’s life, I actually started to watch football, half out of humor, half out of resignation. Men so padded they couldn’t feel a thing rammed helmeted heads and tossed a rawhide sphere through the air. “What are you
doing
?” Benjamin asked me, coming into the room one day as the Patriots and Jets had it out.

I looked up. He was carrying Clara in one arm, a stack of freshly washed bibs in the other. Crowds cheered, touchdown. The baby gave him a huge, open-mouthed kiss, and something lurched in me. “I hope you washed those bibs in Dreft,” I said, a detergent for very young skin.

“I didn’t,” he said. “I don’t believe in Dreft. Tide’s just as good.”

“What do you mean you don’t
believe
in Dreft?” I said.

Whereupon followed a long, exhausting argument about the relative merits of Dreft over Tide. This is just one of the liabilities that happens when a husband becomes the mother, the mother the father. It’s sociologically complex, and the power plays perpetual. As “the primary caretaker,” Benjamin feels it’s within his purview to choose the detergent, the clothes, the types of diapers. While, on the one hand, I’ve asked him to do this, at least partially, on the other hand, I’m
a woman
; I gave birth to that baby, no one else, just me, and I secretly believe he should step aside and let me assert my innate rights over her life when I want. This leads to frequent bickering. In traditional arrangements, one parent inhabits the work sphere, one the domestic sphere, and the division of labor is not only clear but in keeping with gender. However, in our case, the gender thing is confused, and on top of that, or because of that, both of us dabble in both spheres, he a little more in one, I a little more in the other, but there is overlap. The politically correct thing to do is not always the easiest or most efficient or sanest. Having both parents mucking about in sex roles while also weighing in on detergent, binkies, and shoe size can make for pretty slow going. If I were a real football father, I’d just step out of the way, but I’m not. I’m also a mother. When Clara kisses him, calls for him over me, I feel in part resignation—
well, what the hell, I’ll just watch the game
—but in part a kind of fierceness that has led me to feel ever more confused as to why so many men have for so long been willing to sit on the sidelines. As a parent, the sidelines is a radically free and lonely place to be.

My problem is, I want it both ways. I want the freedom that comes with traditional fatherhood and the closeness and primacy that comes with traditional motherhood. I want to be the center of my baby’s life while I leave her for eight, nine, ten hours at a time to pursue my own central interests. I see the essential impossibility and selfishness in my desire, but even more surprising to me is that underneath my working-woman, let’s-get-it-done feminism exists a real reservoir of traditionalism, even conservatism; what I call Phyllis Schlafly-ness.

For instance, a few weeks ago the baby got sick. Because we have been blessed, so far, with an incredibly robust little girl, any illness we experience as a deviance, a departure. I had been in California on a writing assignment for a few days, one of the many work-related trips I’d taken since her birth. When I got back to Boston, rain was pounding down, the taxi stunk of smoke, and I keyed open the front door of our house to find a fever-faced child lying on the couch with a dozy-looking dad. “She’s got a little cold,” he said to me. A little cold? The child’s nose was plugged from nostril to neocortex; her breath was wheezy and her eyes had the glazed look of predelirium. I put down my suitcase. “Benjamin,” I said, “she looks awful. Have you taken her temperature?”

“We don’t need to take her temperature,” he said. “I can feel her fever with my hand. It’s about one hundred.”

“A hand is not a thermometer,” I said. “I’m going to take her temperature.”

“No you’re not,” he said to me.

“
What
?” I said. “You’re telling me what to do? I’m her
mother
.”

The word hung dead in the air.
Mother
.

“Lauren,” he said, “it upsets her to have that rectal thing in her butt. There’s no need. I gave her Motrin.”

“I’m her mother,” I said again and started to cry.

I was crying in part because my baby was sick, in part because I had jet lag, and in part because, at that moment, as in many others, I wanted just to be her mother and have all the prerogatives that role has traditionally enjoyed: to choose the medicine, to take the temperature, to be
in
charge
, solo. Somewhere in my heart exists a trenchant traditionalism that says a “real mother” does not share the work of parenting; she hogs it; it’s her special domain. And I wanted to dance there, in that domain, a real mother, cheek to fevered cheek, with my own sick girl.

After this incident I decided to change things. I’d had enough of my modern ways. I was going to quit my day job as a psychologist and spend more time with my daughter. I was going to insert myself into her heart. To be honest, I was after her love, but other things too. I was feeling competitive with her father. And I wanted to take a crack at old-fashioned caretaking, see what it felt like to claim the kind of expertise that comes only when you’ve spent hour upon exclusive hour watching the toddler toddle, charting the bowels, mixing the mash,
women’s work
. The fact that I started to yearn for women’s work shows, perhaps, just how far feminism has taken us, for what exhausted mother one hundred years ago could possibly have romanticized the difficult labor of raising a baby?

So I cut down my hours at work. This coincided with a three-week trip my husband, a chemist, was taking, the first time he’d been away from the baby since she’d been born. I couldn’t wait. I felt, secretly, like
good, now we’ll get him out of the way
. He left, and Clara and I were alone. It seems odd: she was over a year old now, and never had we really been alone for an extended period of time. The house was so quiet, the mornings were so yellow, the spring was so soft, the nights were so long and lush, it was blissful. Hour after unbroken hour we were together, and I experienced how a child changes time, how the moments are marked not by the ticktock of a clock but by the blurrier cycles of a baby’s sleeping and waking, crying and eating; by how long a morning can be, a saffron egg yolk, the brightness of tangerine juice, the drip drip of silver drool. One year after my child was born, one week into leaving my day job, I experienced, at last, what people must mean when they say “the rapture of motherhood,” for indeed it can be rapturous, and it is definitely radical, how such a small being can tip over time and make you see the tiniest thing, hour after hour, the piece of plastic on the floor, the twig, the pebble, the zigzag crack in the concrete. Like I said, there was rapture, and also revenge. Benjamin called on the phone and he said, “It’s
Papa
,” and she said, “
Mama
,” and my heart went high up in my chest, beating both good and bad.

However, not all is so simple. Two days passed. Three days, four days. After a while, I started, sometimes, to feel bored. Well, let me be honest here. After a while, I started a lot of the time to feel bored. This is not easy to admit, and I’m in no way saying my daughter is boring but, rather, that I, as an adult with serious cerebral tendencies, lack the capacity to imaginatively enter her world on an on-going basis. Zigzags, cracks, pebbles, and plastic are enchanting for only so long. I am sure, in this sense, I am no different from many, or most, mothers, who find the world of a baby tiring over time. But, somehow, I didn’t think it would happen so soon. Or, perhaps, I found the boredom harder to tolerate because I am a person so naturally inclined towards product, whereas a baby is all process. In any case, it didn’t take long before my mind was wandering back to a Trollope novel I wanted to finish. By day seven, she’d be building a tower and I’d be sneaking furtive glances at a manuscript. By day fourteen, I was propping her in front of
Sesame Street
and encouraging an Elmo obsession. By day eighteen, I had hired a babysitter for four hours and then paid her for an extra hour overtime because, well, I had a few writerly ideas I thought I might like to scribble down. By day twenty, I was singing
Papa
Papa
Papa
, eager for his return. Eager to go back, sixty-forty, seventy-thirty, for he, her papa, possessed caretaking talents I do not. He likes to build towers hour after hour, day after day. He likes red-wagon rides and yellow ducks. He does excellent animal imitations and knows how to toss her just shy of the ceiling while she squeals in ecstatic delight.

Benjamin returned. Not long after, I went back to work full-time because, well, I like work. It was with sadness and also relief that I came to this understanding, and that I let my husband reinsert himself into Clara’s life in a major way. The sadness had to do with giving my daughter up, but it was more than that, for many parents give their child up to other caretakers. What’s different in my situation is that this caretaker also happens to be my husband, not a paid outsider. And this adds a complex element to our marriage. Our marriage now has an edge of competition, a little lake of loneliness for me, and an off-kilter triangle shape that it didn’t have before and for which there are few social role models. None of my women friends have this particular challenge, by which I mean none of my women friends feel like fathers in the triad of a family. None feel, as females, as mothers, left out, on the sidelines. None struggle with their husbands over the mundane details of raising a baby. They choose the binkies, the shoes, the doctors. On the one hand, I feel I am very lucky, for I am in the unique situation of being both with and without child, a paradox that, like all paradoxes, confers confusion and possibility. On the other hand, I know I have willingly lost an opportunity to be the
one and only
, the
most adored
, and my girl, well, my girl has lost the opportunity to have the close, conflicted kind of mother-bond that most daughters enter the world with, a bond full of edge, anger, and, almost always, passion.

But I am oversimplifying. My daughter, after all, blows me
besitos
and rests the scrumptious pad of her cheek against mine, not as often as I’d like, but a kiss, even air-blown, lingers on the skin for a very long time. After my three weeks solo with the baby, it is true, I have gone back to work full-time; it is true I have left my daughter physically with her father, but make no mistake about it: Clara lives in me.

Perhaps what differentiates humans from animals is their capacity to imagine. Hours and hours during the day go by when I do not think at all of Clara and then suddenly, unbidden, she leaps into my mind, and I miss her with a fierceness bred of distance. This is its own sort of passion, is it not? By the end of the day, I cannot wait to see her, my girl! I come rushing home. Yesterday, rushing homeward, I got stuck behind a funeral procession. I wanted to lean in on my horn and honk mortality away, let me through, let me through! I couldn’t get through, though, so I had no choice but to trail the mourners, and I saw, after a while, that I was one of them. I miss my girl a lot. I wonder if, when I come to the end of my life, I will regret having opted out of being the primary parent, even while I know that the option connotes luxury, luckiness; most women in this country
have
to work, which means they have to turn the child care over to someone else. I also wonder, sometimes, if my marriage will survive the tilted triangle it has become. Trailing behind the mourners, being one of the mourners, I pictured myself—maudlin writer that I am—on a ridiculously overdone death bed, a powdered satin pillow under my graying head, and my girl standing by my side. What will I leave her with? Many, many things: Empty spaces. An unusual father I was selfish enough and generous enough to really let into her life. A paradoxical mother who, if push came to shove, in some big, ultimate way, would lay down her life for her—I have no doubt about that: shoot me, save her, absolutely—but who, on a daily basis, chose work pursuits. And of course, the fruit of those pursuits are these words, every one of which tells a certain story, and the story is this: I am not my mother. I have not had a hollow life. Follow me, Clara, I am trying to do for you what my mother could not do for me. I am providing you a path, etched in ink, full of spiky sounds. I hope it will help you on your way. I hope, in knowing my full life, you will be better able to shape your own. This is my way of telling you. Not the best way, but my best way. A tale. The trade-offs. The luckiness, the luxury, the difficult choices. Read them. Rewrite them, better.

Eighteen months after the birth of my first, the wand turned positive once again, the delft-blue lines unmistakable in their message. Actually, I’d known before the test; I had the tell-tale signs, the loginess, my sense of scent enhanced, so barbecue sauce, fresh snow, hot coffee, and catsup were broken down into their component parts: tang and iron, fruit and dirt.

I took the test at Pizzeria Uno, where I’d gone with my girl after an all-too-common spat with my husband. What the spat was about, I don’t recall; money maybe, or
you do the dishes
, or
you work too hard
, or
you accuse me all the time
, stupid fights, dingbat fights, the sorts of fights we’d rarely had before we became proud parents, washed out, worn out, our child glowing with good health.