If It's Not One Thing, It's Your Mother

by Julia Sweeney

  Norma: In Los Angeles?

  Julia: Yes. It was in Los Angeles. There were two things that made having the baby impossible. The biggest one that trumped everything was that we didn’t have the money to have a child. We were both starting out in highly precarious careers. Secondly, I was feeling ambivalent about the marriage itself. On top of all of this, I was in the middle of rehearsals for a play. So, when I found I was pregnant and I told my husband I was going to get an abortion, he didn’t object. I wanted to take care of the whole business myself, and not involve him.

  Looking back, I think I may have been afraid that the abortion itself would bring us closer together emotionally. I was worried that I would feel pressure to be emotional about it when I just wanted to be done with the procedure. I didn’t want to cry with him. I wanted to cry by myself. Looking back on it now, I feel sad for me, because it is another example of me going my own individual way and refusing help. But in the long run, I understand why I felt this way, because this marriage was not working, and I knew it.

  Norma: Where did you have the abortion?

  Julia: I drove myself to East L.A., to this clinic, and I went alone. I had to pay three hundred and twenty dollars, in cash. I went in and they tested me for my pregnancy and I went in this room and I put all my clothes in a locker and then put on a gown. Then I had to sit on these long locker benches, filled with women. It was like an abortion assembly line. They took in four women at a time. When the next group of women went into the operating room, we all moved down the long bench. I wasn’t feeling conflicted about this decision, but when I got close to the door, I began to cry really hard. I wasn’t really crying for me, either, but for the whole situation, for all these women, for all these women who were making this big decision. It was like you could feel how big a deal this was for everyone, and everyone’s lives were going to be forever changed when they left, and none of us were going to forget about it, ever.

  There was a woman next to me, she was Hispanic, and older. She had a Mexican accent. She said, “Do you have children?” And I said, “No. But I just can’t.” She patted my back and said, “You do what you need to do.” And then she said, “I have four children already. I can’t.” Then she comforted me and hugged me. That was the most astonishing thing of all—she comforted me, this woman with four children. I’ll never forget her. The abortion itself, as you said, too, was nothing at all.

  Afterward, I had to lie and tell them I had someone to drive me home. I parked my car a couple of blocks away so no one who worked there could see me get in the driver’s seat. I came home and I felt a little sick. I had cramps. But I went to a play practice that night—I went to rehearsal. I couldn’t miss that. Mostly, though, I felt very heroic. The thing is, that abortion was really a turning point for me. The unexpected feelings I had about it weren’t loss or regret or guilt, feelings I anticipated to wash over me. I was surprised to feel deeply empowered. I knew I had to get out of that marriage. I knew I wanted to do so many things, and go so many places. By myself. My abortion made me feel that I had control over my future. I wasn’t going to just let certain things happen to me. Soon after this my husband and I did split up. He went on to marry a beautiful woman and have three lovely children. He is actually a very nice guy. But our situation was not the right one for me.

  Norma: I can’t believe we’re even talking about abortion in politics right now. This is really a sign of our lunacy. I have to tell you, your experience might have had its poignant side, but at least it was legal. You didn’t have to get into a big black car with a gangster and be blindfolded. Your experience seems quite normal, and ordinary and not fraught with this kind of encompassing drama that really could take over your life. You know, sometimes I get in bed and these images come up in my head. It’s something to live with that. As long as women like me are still alive, there will be stories to tell that are just like my story.

  Julia: That’s true. Let’s hope it stays legal.

  Norma: The sad truth is, wealthy women have only the children they want to have. They will always be able to get an abortion if they want one, and relatively speaking, all of us women, those five women getting the abortion with me, in 1960, they were wealthy compared with the general population. So if it becomes illegal it will only be the poor women who won’t be able to get an abortion, because the wealthy will always have a way. And those poorer women are exactly the women who need to have that choice the most.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Baby on Board

  Speed along the highway

  Honey I want it my way.

  —Paul McCartney, “The Back Seat of My Car”

  I have a minivan, a Honda Odyssey. I told you already that I loved my minivan. But let me tell you more about why. I can easily take eight people anywhere; I can carry a dresser and a double-bed mattress if I need to. I can drop off several children after a sleepover with all their gear, and we can travel up to Door County in Wisconsin to camp with all our equipment and a dog and even bikes and everyone is comfortable.

  Yes, it’s a big car. Yes, I’ve written adamantly about the obnoxiousness of big strollers. So you could say I’m full of it. But I’ve moved to a place that accommodates big cars. When I took Mulan to her first gymnastics class at the Wilmette Recreation Center, I pulled into the parking lot and was stunned, momentarily overcome with emotion. There were so many parking spaces! I said to Mulan, as I got choked up with tears, “Look, I could park here. Or over there. Or over there. I can choose!” At Mulan’s gymnastics venue in L.A.—ten miles from our house—forty-five minutes each way in traffic—we had to wait in a line to valet park our car. Then the attendants parked the cars in tandem, adding much time and expense after each class.

  The best thing of all about being here, however, is that I barely drive. Maybe fifty miles a week, at most. Everything is less than two miles away. In Los Angeles I was driving three hundred miles a week on average. So yes, I have a big minivan. But mostly it sits and waits for me to drive three blocks to the grocery store. So don’t give me those looks, you people who live in big cities and drive Priuses. In the environmental transportation wars, I win.

  On the other hand, I do not live in a cool, hip place. I do not get to be astounded very often at the style and flair of a random person walking down the street. I don’t get to be surrounded by the urban mix, the entrancing graffiti, the sense of many peoples of many backgrounds converging in the talky, energetic soup of a big city. Mostly what I see are women pushing strollers. Leading the way as a couple of more kids walk behind. The entire city of Wilmette is set up to accommodate families. While I appreciate this, it can be mind-numbing. Also, I should add that I live in the city of blond ponytails; one might describe it as a sea of blond ponytails. It’s practically the required hairstyle of the town. Truth be told, after a year here, I realized that the blond ponytails were not all the same, as the distinctions among the blonds revealed themselves: strawberry, platinum, dishwater, sandy, ash. And the placement varied, too: up, high, low, off to one side. (Okay, I admit it, I’m jealous of women with thick long hair. If I could have a ponytail, I would.)

  On the other hand, Evanston, less than a mile from us, is a university town where many of the shop clerks have dreadlocks and everyone is tattooed and super-groovy. I describe to my Los Angeles friends that residing here is like living in Logan, Utah, six blocks from Berkeley, California.

  But I’d like to put all this aside now, and discuss something related to cars and children. I would like to describe some of the driving dramas Mulan and I have had.

  Recently, Mulan and I had one of our worst fights. She was riding in the front seat, had tossed off her shoes, and was resting her bare feet on the dash. She was texting her friends but also looking up from time to time to ask why I hadn’t turned at this or that street. I used to have many discussions with Mulan about “tone.” Tone is a very important concept. The same words can have a million different meanings based on what tone is used. I taught he
r that in Cantonese (the language of her people) there are seven different “tones.” (Yes, I know I’m mixing up the definitions of the word. And I’m sure Noam Chomsky would have a heart attack over how I’m conflating attitudinal tone with phonological tone, but uh . . . suck it Chomsky.)

  The reason I bring up tone in this story is that I felt Mulan’s body language was expressing an overly casual and superior “tone.” I realized in that moment that not only language can have a “tone”; bodies can as well. And I didn’t like hers right then.

  We got to her piano lesson and there were, uncharacteristically, no parking spaces in front. Mulan insisted that I could get into one particular parking space that I didn’t want to try because it looked too small. Finally I got really angry and basically stopped the car in front of the building and yelled, “Get out! Get out!” A student (Mulan takes piano on the Northwestern University campus) who was walking by turned to look at me. Mulan grabbed her piano books and bolted, while making an exasperated, angry sound, conveying a frustrated and dismissive tone.

  Caught by the student, I turned red. Angry mommy yelling at daughter. Shit, I had to pull myself together.

  Our troubles in the car go way back. In fact, Mulan was a backseat driver even when she was a baby, in her car seat.

  First, I must tell you about the seating configuration in my former car. I put the car seat in the backseat near the right passenger door. It made it easiest to get Mulan in the car, and when I was driving I could turn my head to the right and see her.

  One day, when Mulan was about three, I was driving and suddenly noticed a sound, a sound like a window was open. In the split second I had before I could see what was really happening, I had a thought: Oh, she’s figured out how to open the electric window. But when I actually did turn to look, I could see that she had not learned how to open the electric window. She had learned how to open the car door. In fact, she was leaning out of her car seat and watching the pavement slide by beneath her arm, which had thrust the car door open. Her left leg was splayed out toward me as if she might voluntarily dive into the street. She exhibited no fear, only fascination.

  It looked like she could topple out of her car seat at any moment and I would have driven over her. Looking back, she was probably securely strapped into the car seat and the car seat was strapped into the car. But still.

  My heart nearly squeezed out of my eyeballs. I immediately pulled over and closed her door. Of course, I began to use the childproof locks. Duh. But then, having had the thrill once, Mulan would just pull the latch to open the door and let it flick back into place with a thwack. Over and over. Over and over. Over and over into mother madness.

  I decided to move her car seat to the middle of the backseat. Away from both windows. But while my car didn’t have bucket seats (are there bucket seats anymore?), it did have a little hump in the middle of the backseat. This is important because it put Mulan in a subtle but significant new position. She was now sitting up, an inch or two higher than she had been before. In fact, if I looked into the rearview mirror, I saw only her smiling face. I had to reposition the rearview mirror. Now that Mulan’s head was a bit higher in the car, relative to mine, she began to look out the windshield. She began to look a bit like Carl Sagan in the series Cosmos. It was funny; it made me laugh. Big Baby Head coming down the road.

  But after a while I wasn’t laughing anymore, because Mulan suddenly had a lot of opinions about my driving. “Why are you in this lane?” she would say, age four or four and a half, her big godhead looking out and surveying the land. “Why don’t you get into the right lane and pass? No one’s in the right lane; just get over there.”

  “Mom, why did you take a left? We don’t usually go this way.”

  “There was a parking space, Mom. You missed it!”

  “You better get gas soon; we’re running a little low.”

  All from her goddamned car seat. When Mulan was about five, I was telling a friend about this, and Mulan overheard us. I said, “She’s a backseat driver, from the car seat!” Mulan came in and said, “Mom, I know what a backseat driver is, but why do you add ‘from a car seat’ to it? Why is that important?” I said, “Because you are a little kid, a little kid so small that you require sitting in a car seat.”

  “Oh, I get it,” she said. “But why is that funny?”

  “Because people wouldn’t think that such a little kid, a kid in a car seat, would have so many opinions about how her mother was driving! Because she is essentially a baby, and does not drive.”

  “Oh,” Mulan said. “Now I get it. Funny.” She was not smiling. I think she was mimicking me. Comedians don’t usually laugh at each other; we just label something “funny,” and Mulan had picked up on that.

  But I could tell that her tone was slightly condescending.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The Color of Skin

  Whose little boy are you?

  —James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

  Why am I including this essay in here? I suppose it’s because it’s about the death of innocence. Except it’s also about innocence regained (or maintained) in an odd way, through distraction and obliviousness, two states of mind that are often maligned. (But without which we’d all be much worse off.) I’ll explain.

  In first grade, Mulan’s class began to learn about Martin Luther King Jr.

  I never brought up the idea of race with Mulan. I suppose I figured I would discuss it with her when I had something to say to her about it. But up to age six, there was never an opportunity. Frankly, it wasn’t on my radar in any way.

  Some people claim that our racial prejudices are innate, and that accepting people who look different requires learning tolerance and acceptance. Maybe that’s true if you’re raised in an environment that’s dominated by one race, and it’s a shock to see someone who looks unlike the established in-group. But Mulan had gone to a public school that was very racially diverse. In fact, there were days when I nearly laughed out loud as I walked into the play yard to pick her up from school: the California sunshine streaming down on an idyllic landscape of nearly equal numbers of light-skinned to very dark-skinned children all laughing together as if they were posing for an ad about the melting pot of America.

  In fact, at Mulan’s school, Caucasians were in the minority. I never mentioned it to her, because I barely registered it myself. There were times when her lack of awareness about race was touching—as if she were truly color-blind. If Mulan was telling me about a friend at school and I asked her to describe this friend, she would say, “Sarah—she has black curly hair and wears a lot of red?” Only when I met the friend would I know that she was black.

  Once when Mulan and I were talking about a group of triplets she knew at school and sometimes played with, I said, “You know, the triplets are also from China and—” Mulan stopped me and said, “The triplets are adopted?” The fact that the triplets’ parents were both extremely blond and fair-skinned made this more poignant (and funnier) to me. I knew that eventually Mulan would notice these things, but I enjoyed that she was living in a Garden of Eden when it came to race.

  Naturally my ears perked up when Mulan said her class was going to learn about Martin Luther King Jr. to get ready for the holiday. One evening, I was washing dishes at the sink, getting Mulan to tell me about her day at school. She stood next to me and said, “Mom, did you know that in the past, people who have really dark skin, who are called ‘black people,’ were slaves?”

  “Yes, I did know that,” I said.

  “Did you know that even today some people don’t like people who have dark skin?”

  “Yes, I did know that,” I said, “Isn’t that sad—”

  Mulan suddenly thrust her arm toward my face. “Mom! Look!” she said, pointing dramatically toward the middle of her forearm. “My skin is kind of dark!”

  “Yes, I see that,” I said. “Skin color doesn’t mean anything good or bad.”

  “To a lot of people, it does. Some people h
ave been killed because of their skin color!”

  “Yes. That’s true,” I said. “Which is really wrong and sad.”

  “I’m just so glad I’m not black!” Mulan announced.

  Oh God, I realized Mulan was learning to be racist by learning about racism. Not what her teachers intended, probably.

  “That was true in the past, that a lot of black people were slaves,” I started, scrambling to figure out what exactly to say. “Things are better now, although not completely, and other groups of people who happen to have darker-colored skin have been discriminated against, too. Things are getting better and the most important thing to understand is that while some people may think this way, it’s not right. Skin color is just skin color, like the color of your eyes or the color of your dress or the color of an apple. It has nothing to do with better or worse; it’s just skin color.”

  “Sarah’s black, and I’m almost as dark as Sarah,” Mulan said gravely.

  “So what?” I said. “It’s just the color your skin is.”

  “But not everyone feels like you do,” Mulan said.

  “Yes,” I said. “That’s true.”

  I realized I was handling this terribly. I had to acknowledge her fear. I couldn’t downplay it. I said, “That must feel scary to think that because of something that means nothing and something you have no control over, that would make other people think things about you . . . automatically . . . that are probably not true. Plus, we live in a place where race matters very little, except when it does.” Involuntarily I made a face. “And then it really does.” At this point, I stopped talking, because I was still making things worse.

  Mulan asked, “If I’m Asian, what are you?”

  “I’m Caucasian,” I said.

  “Cock Asian?” Mulan asked, adding, “Like Asian, but also Cock?” She did not know that cock is a synonym for penis, so it made for hilariously uncomfortable moments when Mulan would occasionally announce to me, “I’m Asian and you’re Cock Asian.”