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

by Julia Sweeney

  Wow. I could see that was true. One day I was on the playground and saw a mother who had given birth two months previous. She was holding her baby, and she was wearing a very thin, undersized, fashionably ripped tank top that exposed her already flat belly. I looked to my left and saw a strikingly good-looking woman and I thought, Jesus Christ, these mothers are absurdly beautiful, I mean, that mother looks like Catherine Zeta-Jones.

  The woman came closer. It was Catherine Zeta-Jones.

  I did find friends at the preschool. A group of parents in Mulan’s class and I all bonded deeply. We lived relatively close to each other. We mingled at birthday parties, we came to be each other’s best friends. But it was still otherworldly. No one was a single parent like me.

  “Where are all the single parents?” I asked my friend Jeff. “I thought the world was filled with single parents like me. Aren’t I just the kind of mother that Dan Quayle was all up in arms about? Where are they?”

  “Wait till second grade; a lot of divorces will happen around then. Then there’ll be other single mothers.”

  “Why second grade?” I asked him.

  “Because kids are hard and parents . . . well, a lot of parents turn on each other. It’s like they didn’t realize that by having kids they were signing up for that Dirty Jobs reality show. Little kids put a lot of pressure on parents; a lot of people realize that the person they joined with for “America’s Toughest Jobs” was a model who liked to be pampered, or an actor who is completely self-absorbed, or a film executive who feels little need to do anything with the family. And now they are at sea and the boat is rocking. A hate grows. Resentment takes root. Weirdly, they often wait until the kid is about six or so before really calling it quits. And that’s when it all gets a lot better! You’ll see, a lot of divorces around first and second grade.”

  I shrugged and hoped I never had such a cynical view of marriage.

  In the meantime, I began to really dislike the elite environment of the fancy school. I wanted my kid in a school with a real-world feel. Other parents at the preschool, in our little group of friends, felt the same. We decided to send our kids to our local public school. We all agreed we would get involved and try to make the public school as good a place as possible.

  As soon as Mulan was at the public school I felt much better. The parents all looked exhausted and haggard and beaten down by the reality of life. Nobody was trying to hang out at the school, smiling, with their Intelligentsia coffee cups. I was so happy.

  When I went into the front office of the public school and donated two hundred dollars for office supplies, the principal’s assistant nearly burst into tears. At the fancy school, the annual benefit cost $350 per ticket just to attend, and then the raffles and auctions were on top of that. I did a benefit performance for our new public school. I performed a monologue I had recently written. The school decided to charge ten dollars a ticket. And they had forms for people who might want to come and couldn’t afford the ten dollars, in which case their ticket fee would be waived. When I raised four hundred dollars from this performance, I had to stop the school from putting a huge banner outside the school congratulating me for my efforts. How could this school and the fancy preschool be less than one mile from each other?

  The whole experience made me feel bad about ever having had my kid at the fancy preschool. I hated the class system, which in California was not so much about race as it was about money.

  And like Jeff said, around first and second grade, parents began to get divorced. Women began to slide up to me and say, “I’m a single mother, too.”

  But this began to bother me. They weren’t single parents. They were divorced parents. Many of them got child support. They got weekends free because their child was with their ex.

  “I would kill for an ex!” I said to my friend Jeff.

  “Having an ex is not always as dreamy as it sounds,” Jeff said.

  Then I began to notice that this public school really wasn’t as fantastic as I thought. Budgets were being cut. Teacher assistants were losing their jobs. Classes had thirty kids. I began to see the exhausted looks on parents’ faces differently. They looked more like they were beginning to see that the system was rigged against them. They couldn’t afford the fancy schools. They looked like they were trying to just make it through the week.

  During one spring, I was helping with the student fair, making cotton candy with another mother. The mother and I surveyed the playground. To me it looked idyllic, kids of all races and ethnicities, food from around the world, as we listened to beautiful Caribbean music, which alternated with American blues, and then traditional Korean music. The sun was shining.

  Then the mother said casually, “You know, these public schools are really best for two types of kids. One type is the kid who needs extra help and attention. Kids who have a real mental disability. Or the opposite type. If your kid is very, very smart they can get into the accelerated, well-funded high-honor school. But if your kid is middle-of-the-road, it’s actually not a great place.” This particular mother had a son with autism, and after she told me that, I began to notice how well the public school system was serving her and her son. For example, there was a person assigned to hang out with her son individually, in each class. This companion would help her son integrate into the school system as best as he could. This was all paid for with public funds. (Which I think is great; I’m just sayin’.)

  Then one of Mulan’s friends tested into the genius kid program, which got her out of our public school and into one of those elite public schools that that mother was talking about. When we visited her friend, the school was on a campus with expansive green manicured lawns, and white, freshly painted buildings with Greek columns, overlooking the Pacific Ocean. They provided a bus to pick up kids and transport them, an hour each way, to and from school, all paid for with public funds. Wow.

  I began to look into what it would take to get Mulan into this school or one like it. It turns out there is a fairly complicated point system that you have to participate in from the beginning. You earn “points” for test scores, but also for having applied to these schools in the past and not being chosen. Being rejected actually conferred benefits. Mulan could get extra points for being Asian, but I couldn’t go back in time and collect all the points needed for testing as far back as kindergarten. I realized I had blown it. Part of the reason was that I looked at the testing itself with disdain. I didn’t like how some parents were working the system. I didn’t think their kids were necessarily so spectacular; they just had a parent who was an active, nearly full-time advocate figuring the system out. But although my inaction and my disdain had left me with my principles intact, I was not in a position to get Mulan into the best public school I could.

  Then Mulan started second grade. When I went to the parent orientation with Michael, we noticed that the teacher looked a little checked out. School had been in session for only two days. She was older and wore a printed dress that looked like it was made out of feed-sack cloth. She had really big bags under her eyes and her voice sounded scratchy and hoarse. She did not smile. The first thing she said was “I’ve been in the system for thirty-two years.” The system. Michael leaned over to me and said, “. . . and nobody can kick me out now.”

  Afterward I said to Michael, “That teacher looks like she’s about to have a nervous breakdown.”

  “She doesn’t seem so bad,” Michael said. “Maybe she’s just realistic.”

  But I turned out to be right. Mulan’s second-grade teacher did go on “bed rest” after only four weeks of school. Two weeks later she took early retirement and for the rest of the year Mulan had a new substitute almost every week.

  Mulan never liked any of them. All of them called her “Tara” because that was her legal first name and she had to tell them she was “Mulan.” She hated this because it reminded her how much her teacher didn’t know her. She never got her homework returned. Finally she had a teacher she liked a lot. He really
stood out because he was her substitute for two weeks. And he called her Mulan, not Tara.

  “Maybe he’ll take a permanent position as second-grade teacher!” I said to Mulan hopefully.

  The next week Mulan told me he was gone. “Oh no,” I said.

  “He got a recurring on Bones,” Mulan said, sighing. Bones was a TV show on at the time. My God, Mulan knew the definition of recurring. (It means you are on a TV show intermittently but regularly.)

  I’d had enough of this school. Michael and I were getting married and the plan was that he was going to live with us in L.A. and somehow commute to do his business work. Spring came around and we did get married.

  However, during the summer between Mulan’s second and third grade, she went to camp (the one she’s at right now) for the first time, for two weeks. At only eight years old, she was really nervous about going to camp, even though she had campaigned to go in the first place. Michael and I planned to spend the time she was gone camping ourselves, in a tent, all around California. This meant that we couldn’t get regular mail (the only mail the camp allowed). I told Mulan to send any mail for me to my mother, in Spokane. That way my mother could read me what Mulan wrote over the phone.

  “I don’t know if I want to read this to you,” my mother said about the first postcard she got from Mulan addressed to me.

  “Just read it,” I said.

  “Okay . . . she wrote, ‘Dear Mom, I don’t miss you. Love, Mulan.’ ”

  I laughed really hard. But the thing was, I knew what Mulan meant. Before Mulan went to camp she had gotten really worried about missing me too much. We talked about it a lot. What would she do? She even said, “What if I can’t stop crying because I miss you so much? What then?” We talked about ways to cope. She had a special picture of me that she could put under her pillow, along with a small flashlight. This way she could look at the picture in the middle of the night if she needed to.

  So I was actually relieved that Mulan wrote me that. She was telling me she was okay.

  That night, by our campfire in the Sierra Nevada, I thought about Mulan’s postcard. I realized that if Mulan was resilient enough to go to camp where she didn’t know a soul, and make friends quickly and figure out how to be happy, she could change schools and it would be okay. I asked Michael if he would consider Mulan and I moving to the Chicago area instead of his moving to Los Angeles. He agreed. Even though he had moved around a lot as a kid growing up, and went to many different schools, and he really didn’t like that, he said he could see that Mulan would be better off getting out of Los Angeles at that moment. This meant Michael would have to give up his dream of living in California.

  “The schools are great in Wilmette,” he said quietly, looking into the campfire. Wilmette, huh. It was all I could do not to jump up and rush to a place where I could get cell reception so I could start googling schools in Wilmette.

  When I finally did, it appeared the schools were fantastic. The high school, New Trier, was consistently written up as one of the best public schools in the country. That was it. We were moving.

  We moved during Mulan’s third-grade winter break. We bought our minivan, and planned our Odyssey with the whole gang. We had a moving company come and take our belongings. Norma, Michael’s mother, decided to sell her house in Washington, D.C., and rent my house from us. This way we could keep the house, and Michael and I plan to move back in as soon as Mulan goes to college.

  So we loaded up the minivan. Val was going to stay in the front part of the van, and Arden was to be relegated to the back end. When the house was empty and we were all in the vehicle, Arden snuck out of the car and ran back in the house, traumatized by its emptiness and the unfamiliarity of what seemed to be happening. He didn’t want to go. We had to drag him on his leash back to the car as he whimpered. We headed out: Mulan, me, Arden, and Val all looking back at our house as Michael drove us away.

  We drove through warm, sunny (not very humid) weather into snow and cold. When we drove into the driveway of our new house, on Christmas Eve, the car temperature reading for the outside was fifteen below zero. But I was as excited as I’d ever been about anything.

  We slept on sleeping bags upstairs because our furniture hadn’t arrived yet from Los Angeles. On December 26, we took the Metra train to downtown Chicago and went to the federal building. We went before a family court judge who completed the adoption proceedings so that Michael was now Mulan’s legal father. Mulan wanted to change her name from Tara Mulan Sweeney to Mulan Sweeney Blum. The judge sat on a traditional bench, which was high above the three of us. She leaned over and asked Mulan, “Is he going to be a good dad?”

  “I think so. It seems like it,” Mulan answered.

  “Who’s funnier, your mother or your father?” the judge asked.

  “Oh, my father is much funnier,” Mulan replied.

  I laughed.

  “But has he gotten paid to be funny?” the judge asked.

  “Oh, no. No, he hasn’t. Not yet, anyway,” Mulan answered.

  Mulan’s grade school was so close I could hear the school bell ring. The teachers at her new school were enthusiastic and dedicated to the point of parody. I was living the dream.

  When I stood outside the elementary school on Mulan’s first day, waiting for her to emerge, I waited with a lot of other caretakers. They all looked like college students to me, and that seemed right because we are so close to Northwestern University. I could imagine that a lot of students would be available to be babysitters after school.

  But no. They were not college students. They were the other mothers.

  They all looked so young. I looked so old.

  Three times, and I want to repeat that, three times, people said to Mulan, “Mulan, your grandmother is here.” Referring to me. As her grandmother.

  It was true that I had let my hair go gray. But I thought I had that youthful, athletic, Seattle-y look of a woman who does not want chemicals on her hair. So natural! But my gray hair didn’t give me that look. I found I really just looked like I was someone’s grandmother.

  Also, I am really old.

  I decided to start dying my hair brown.

  So far the schools here have exceeded their promise. Mulan began to thrive immediately. She has a lot of friends; they all live within walking distance. They sometimes meet up at the library across the street. They ride their bikes to the beach and run into each other on corners and spontaneously hang out.

  We pay nearly three times the taxes here that I pay on my house in Los Angeles. (My small bungalow in Los Angeles is worth exactly the same as our four-bedroom house here.) But it’s public school. That means a lot to me. I went to Catholic schools, and while I have a lot of fond memories of my education, I didn’t want that for Mulan. If it were up to me, there wouldn’t be any private schools. And schools wouldn’t have their budgets tied to property taxes, either. Every kid should be in a school as good as Mulan’s school is now.

  On Memorial Day Michael and I watched a parade, which made its way right in front of our house. We sat on the parking strip and watched Boy Scouts with flags and fire trucks go by, along with parents with toddlers in red wagons and dogs on leashes.

  “We live in the quintessential small town,” I said to Michael.

  “No, we live in a town, where if you have enough money, you can buy the small-town experience,” Michael said, smiling.

  I have lived a particularly privileged life. I was able to choose not to be a mother, and I was able to choose to be a mother, on my own terms. I was able to choose to move to a place with good public schools, just because we can afford to pay these kinds of taxes. I was enabled by a system where the deck was stacked in my favor, and now I am able to stack it in my daughter’s favor. I am well aware that I am lucky beyond reckoning.

  So Michael is right. We have bought our way into this “small-town” experience. But I’ll take it. I love it. Right now, for us, it’s perfect.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE


  Hinky Dink Is Sinking

  Every man is an omnibus in which his ancestors ride.

  —Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes

  I felt an overwhelming urge to go to the Calvary Catholic Cemetery, which is about four miles from my house. This is the one with our family crypt where all those great-aunties are buried. I had to tell them about Bill. Like they wouldn’t know if I didn’t go there. Of course, I know this is not literally true, but I had to indulge that part of me that still believes this, like a child who must be satisfied.

  I’ve taken Arden for walks in this cemetery. Last year, I was looking for a particular headstone, of Michael “Hinky Dink” Kenna. I was surprised when I realized that the headstones are sinking underneath the grass. I didn’t know. I didn’t know until Arden scratched at something hard and concrete underneath the lawn.

  You see, there are swathes of the cemetery that appear to be grassy parkland. They seem to be empty, waiting for you and me and anyone else who might enjoy a nice burial plot. But no. It’s not empty. It’s filled with bodies. Headstones are just an inch or two underneath the turf. Sometimes a name peeks out—part of a last name, a “Mc” or an “O,” and that’s it. So many Marys. And variations of Mary—Marion, Marie, Meg, and on and on. The dead are disappearing.

  It turns out cemetery upkeep is all about lawn care. Cutting the grass around headstones is tedious and labor intensive. The Catholic Church is busy scrambling to pay off former (understandably disgruntled) altar boys who were molested and everyone else who’s just woken up and wondered, What the hell was that Bible passage about, anyway? Don’t get me wrong. I have a rather intense, affectionate, love-hate relationship with the Catholic Church. You might have guessed that by now.