BONDING, PHASE 2: Son is now covered in white and red pustules and looks not unlike Elliott Smith. When people come to see him, blurt out, “Can you believe how bad he’s got baby acne?!” so that they know you know it’s there. Feel bad that this is the first thing you say about your child. Try to pump bottles so Baby Daddy can do 4:00 AM feedings, but “allow” the occasional bottle of formula (okay, use formula every night).
COPARENTING: Swing between smugness that you and baby’s father literally share the work and expense of child rearing, unlike most “real” couples you know, and blind rage that you have to parent with irrational man you broke up with two years ago. Wag finger in ex’s face and whisper sotto voce threats that you won’t follow through on.
BEDTIME: As child grows older, have him on late schedule so he’ll sleep in the morning. By the time he is twelve months, his bedtime is 10:00 PM; by eighteen months, it’s midnight. Keep this a secret from friends, relatives, and your own parents.
SCHOOL: Take son to preschool the day after he turns two. Sneak out of school, sniffling, when he isn’t looking because that’s your strategy when you leave him with baby sitters. Walk home talking on cell phone to sister about how son is in school and next thing you know you’ll be taking him to college, when other line beeps in. Learn that son is hysterically crying—“desperate,” as the teacher terms it—and that you are to pick him up immediately. At the pickup, start to cry when teacher asks if you even said goodbye to son before leaving.
PSYCHE: Notice son winds his tresses in his fingers as he is falling asleep, plucking out many strands during each nap, creating small bald spot.
FOOD: Son appears to consume about a gallon of milk every day, eggs, and very little else. He asks for Tic Tacs and cough drops as a treat, demanding in a loud, rude voice, “Need Tic Tac! Need Tic Tac!” Try to resist giving child Tic Tacs or cough drops, as it seems weird and he’s crunching them and probably going to break one of his tiny teeth. Despite anorexic’s diet, son is extremely tall. Sometimes he will emerge from his bedroom chewing on something and when you inquire what, he’ll say, “Hair.”
PSYCHE, PART 2: Notice son gets up from a nap covered in strands of hair. Call pediatrician for advice. Pediatrician says to ignore that son is pulling out hair ritualistically, that son is soothing himself, like thumb sucking. Ignore hair pulling for one day and then take to whispering intensely to son not to pull his hair; you’ll give him cough drops if he’ll stop pulling hair. Please stop pulling hair.
LOVE: At son’s school, three weeks into the term, as you are fluffing his hair to obscure thinning areas, receive wet, mentholated kiss from balding two-year-old. Wince as heart nearly breaks from how lucky you are.
—Originally published in Babble, December 2006
ALL THE SINGLE LADIES
The summer of 2007, when my son Skuli was almost three, I flew back early from a trip to Fargo so I could attend a party for Jenny and Sara Jane, two friends of mine who were celebrating their five-year relationship. Jenny and Sara Jane were a decade younger than I, Smith graduates with great style and even more beautiful politics. I was excited to go to their ceremony, which struck me as risky and brave. Their families weren’t always comfortable and on board with their daughter’s sexuality. Having everyone convene for this celebration of a gay relationship was, to my mind, a big deal. I was hungry for examples of alternative family-making, having logged nearly three years as a single mom by choice.
I was used to traveling alone, but that didn’t make it any more pleasant when things went awry. Skuli was easy, but it wasn’t like I had another adult to carry the bags, figure out the missed connection, or help clean up the milk vomit after the bumpy flight—things which happened with annoying regularity. It was a blazing hot July afternoon when we arrived at JFK after a long flight. I threw our bags in Skuli’s Sit ‘n’ Stroll, a car seat/stroller combo that I used in airports like a wheelbarrow when I traveled with him. Carrying him on one hip, I slogged out to the long-term parking lot. Our car, a 17-year-old red Honda Civic, shimmered in the heat. This isn’t good, I thought, heart sinking, because one of the many quirks of this vehicle (passed down from mother to sister to me) was that it wouldn’t start when parked in direct sunlight. I fastened Skuli’s car seat into the cauldron of the backseat and turned the ignition, praying it would turn over. Nothing. I waited two minutes. Still nothing. Again—
“We should call someone to help us,” Skuli offered from his microwave oven perch. He was good at intuiting our next step.
I called someone (JFK Roadside Assistance, maybe?) and soon a young guy arrived to jump our battery. “It’s not the battery,” I said, wishing I had thought to pack snacks and a water bottle for Skuli. “This car doesn’t start in heat. I have to wait until sundown.”
“It’s the battery, Ma’am,” the car guy said. After ten more minutes of needless jumping, hope, and disappointment, he offered to drive us in his tow truck to the nearest garage. Feeling a familiar financial panic, I mentally calculated the cost of this crisis—$60 for tow, $50 for car service home, God knows how much to “fix” the car (i.e., let car come to room temperature)—and wondered if witnessing Jenny and Sara Jane’s commitment was worth the expense. I decided it was. We got home in time for me to shower and change, drop Skuli at his dad’s for the night, and head to the party.
On a Brooklyn rooftop that night, drinking restoratively, I met Sara Jane’s mom. A former nurse with great bone structure, frosted blonde hair, and a mini dress, her whole body vibed, “Be surprised that I have two adult daughters.” She was a former single mother, and as we continued to drink and listen to the iPod playlist Jenny and Sara Jane had selected for this night, she prodded me for stories about my life. After each story, she’d shake her head and say, “Be selfish, Jen. You’ve got to be selfish.”
I was used to getting unsolicited advice about my life, especially from people I considered to be less than knowledgeable. Some of it I gratefully accepted, like the offers to come over for Sunday dinner, and the used baby equipment my friends were always finding for me. Sometimes, though, I sensed not so much helpfulness but pity. I mean, I felt bad for some of them, what with their unhappy marriages and wilting sex lives, but I got the feeling that they used me to feel better about their own lives. “I know it must be so hard,” these friends would say, flattening me into a stereotype with their sympathy faces (furrowed brow, lips pressed into a droopy frown) and their “Does Skuli have male role models? Is his dad, you know, involved?” concerns.
The truth is, it was hard. I woke up in the middle of the night worried about bills, anxious that I’d have coverage for Skuli while I was working. I brought him to parties with me not because he loved hanging out at adult’s houses at 11:30 PM, but because it was that or never socialize. But . . . I was happy. I’d never felt so much love and independence at once.
Back at the party, I attempted to respond to Sara Jane’s mom. As a single mother, I was not selfish—that suffix “ish” connoting something gross or halfway. It’s more like I was selffull. It was definitely a time in my life in which I had to rely on myself more than ever before, and yet my life was very rich with other people: Christine dropping by on the way home from work because I’ve conveyed that friends are always welcome, saying yes to spontaneous invitations to the Bronx Zoo because Skuli and I don’t have to negotiate anyone else’s schedule, New Year’s Eves with Amy and Peter, sleepovers at Gillian’s because we only need one bed.
The nuclear family, I noted, was a more closed home, electrons orbiting around the nucleus of the dinner table, ordered primarily by the schedules of its members. In my single-lady status, my home was open. I controlled the doors and I wanted people to come in. My friends and family showed up for me all of the time. My sister Jessica, happily married and also a mother, marveled at how much help from friends and family I marshaled. “I guess I’m not afraid to ask,” I said, attempting to analyze the discrepancy. “And people assume I need it, of course, which is kin
d of humiliating.”
“Not as humiliating as needing it even though you have a partner,” Jessica responded.
Clearly, Jessica wasn’t one of the condescending types, but I gravitated toward single parent friends after Skuli was born. We were the ones who always dropped our kids late at school and got stern, condescending looks from the teachers. We brought our children to cocktail parties and readings, because it was that or we couldn’t go. The single moms had scuffed shoes; our roots grown out from a little too much time between hair appointments. Superficially, we were more bedraggled, but we were also a really sturdy, actualized crew. Alan (as a man, an honorary single mom) was a poet, professor, and art critic who kept a perfect house for himself and Sophie. Sixty-something Merle owned the largest abortion clinic in the country and became a self-made millionaire before adopting Sasha from Siberia. Liliana had left Poland, escaped her abusive husband, and was raising Anna and Alex while working full time and going back to school. Sally wanted the baby but not the bad-boy baby daddy, and was raising her son exactly how she wanted—with organic food, no sugar, and lots of travel. Lorraine had three children, two exes, three enormously successful salons, and, in spite of being dyslexic, had written a book. We shared a common currency—the bracing combination of independence and terror. The independence was precious—“I get to write three nights a week,” as Alan would often say—but it was the terror (food on table! clothes on kid! Insurance! Tuition!) that kept us motivated.
I felt lonely some days—the obvious ones, like Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day—but the other days I felt this magical self-reliance. “Trust thyself,” as Emerson wrote, “every heart vibrates to that iron string.” I had ample opportunity to learn to trust myself, and maybe opportunity (also known as necessity) is just what one needs. Single parenthood was good for me, but people tend to feel bad for the children of single mothers, too, I noted. The assumption was that boys needed a role model and girls needed to know their dad would love and protect them. Heading into the subway one day, I was struggling with the stroller (Skuli in it and heavy) and my bags. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a teen thug walking toward me with a menacingly blank look on his face and his pants drooped. He leaned over, picked up my carriage and, without a word, carried Skuli down the two flights of stairs to the subway platform. I sputtered a thank you. He looked me in the eye and said in a soft voice, “I was raised by a single mom, Ma’am.”
My friend Amy was raised by a single mom. When she turned thirty, her friends made a book for her, each of us taking a page to extol her work ethic, dance ability, and generosity. Her mother’s page had a snapshot of the two of them, taken when Amy was about five and her mother was in her young twenties. The photographer was behind the two. Her mother is pointing at a flower right in front of them, showing it to Amy. And Amy is pointing up and away, to something that her mom can’t even see. She wrote that it wasn’t the most flattering photo of the two of them, but it was a good example of their relationship. The caption Amy’s mother wrote was “We make a good team. We make a good team.”
The fact that she wrote it twice slayed me, but I was most struck by seeing my tough, confident, sunny friend cry as she read the words. I think Amy knew that thing that I know and that Skuli knows and that all of the single moms know: the joy, beauty, and hard-earned satisfaction of being a good team. Days before that awful moment at JFK when my car wouldn’t start, we visited my cousins at their lake cabin in Minnesota. Their house was crawling with kids and my cousin and her husband appeared to have an attractive, invitingly healthy relationship. The kids swam and hunted for minnows and played with toy cars. When it was time to leave, Skuli threw himself on the ground and cried, “No, I won’t go! I belong here.”
He had done the same thing a few weeks earlier at Amy’s house, at which there was the same appealing constellation of happy and fun parents, cool toys, and siblings. Both times, I felt a chill course through me, because his response struck me as maybe true and certainly insightful. Not that he needed to have two parents, but there was something about the joviality and regularity of that home that either vibrated with what he knew about other people and missed in his own life—or it just felt right in some meaningful way that his three-year-old self needed to assert.
To me, it hurt, because I knew I belonged with him but I didn’t belong there—and I wanted him to believe, as I did, that we were lucky that things had worked out as they did, that our lives were unique and wonderful. Was I just being selfish?
“Be selfish”—these words echoed in my brain the summer Skuli was three. What did it mean? Was it selfish to stay a unit of two, because Skuli would have to shoulder the burdens of my aging alone? Or was it selfish to have a love life when I had a young child who needed me? I could see it both ways and many more.
It may have just been a coincidence, but after that “selfish” conversation, I got my mojo back. By mojo, I mean my sexual self. I began dating again later that month, and within a few weeks I met the man that would become the father of my second child and, later, this same man—BD—became my husband. Skuli has thrived in our nuclear family, stricter and more constant than what he knew before. I wonder sometimes if he remembers our former way of being. Will he know to help a struggling mom with her stroller in ten years?
“We don’t spend as much time together,” Skuli told me one day, while walking home from school. We were holding hands and he had been telling me about his life in an alternate universe he calls Boneland. “You spend a lot of time with BD now.”
I squeezed his hand.
“Remember when we were just the two of us,” Skuli asked, “and we’d sleep together in the same bed?”
“I do remember,” I said. “We made a good team, Skuli.”
We made a good team.
Ani DiFranco
THERE WAS A TIME IN THE MID-‘90S WHEN I BEGAN to feel the core of my generation assert itself. I worked at Ms. magazine at the time and was frequently asked what my peers had done for feminism lately. Liz Phair and Courtney Love were being hailed as feminist thinkers in New York magazine, Rebecca Walker was coining “Third Wave,” and Bust, Bitch, and HUES were saying you could be a feminist and care about pop culture. During that time, I looked to Ani DiFranco (my exact same age) as a beacon, inspiring me to believe in the daughters and sons raised in the wake of the Second Wave. First, there was her example of independence: She wrote her own music, played her own guitar, had her own label, Righteous Babe, owned her publishing . . . the list went on. But most of all, there were her poetical, philosophical lyrics, which always seemed to comment directly on my own innermost thoughts. It was as if Carol Gilligan and Shulamith Firestone had made a baby with Sappho. Or Dorothy Allison had mated with Flo Kennedy. Ani wrote revenge fantasies about bleeding through one’s pants in public, love songs to men and women, breakup songs to men and women, goodbye songs to fetuses, and beautiful odes to voting.
At Ms. I was often asked who the new feminist leaders were. “Where is your movement?” they’d wonder. I’d point to Ani and then paraphrase a lyric of hers I especially loved: “Everytime she moves, she makes a women’s movement.”
Jennifer: I was hoping we could talk a little bit more about being a mother and how that’s informed your thinking about feminism. It’s made me think about misogyny. I don’t think my sons hate me yet, but I feel like the process of their growing independent involves some betrayals on my part—just saying no or helping them do things on their own, even when they don’t want to—and they betray me sometimes by not needing me. That’s the process of differentiating and growing up, but how might this profound relationship and dependence between a baby and its mother contribute to misogyny? For both to survive—psychically and physically—they have to learn to be separate.
Ani: The whole process of birthing and then mothering, nurturing, growing the next generation is a real potent reminder of the basis of feminist thought. Feminism springs inherently out of this experience that is unique to
women. The male child especially has to separate to become himself. Not only the creature realizing, Oh, I’m not my mom— as they’re sucking on a big tit—I’m separate; the male child has to go much further with that separation in order to realize himself than does the female child. I haven’t been wondering so much about the journey from there to misogyny, as I’ve been thinking about the female journey and how this very early experience of connectedness, of oneness with the mother that then is continuous through the whole life, is a very useful experience in terms of saving humankind from doom.
Yes, we are autonomous, in a sense. Yes, we are individuals, in a sense. But an even more important truth in the twenty-first century is, we are not autonomous; we are connected. We only exist in relation to each other, and we couldn’t exist without each other. That focus on relationship and the connectedness is inherent to female development, and therefore female thinking, and it is that sensibility that is lacking in our big social and political structures.
J: It’s In a Different Voice.
A: Yes. I long for the whole world to read that Carol Gilligan book, because it changed my life. Gilligan identifies the squashing and marginalizing and otherwise ignoring of the female understanding that comes out of female experience. We deny our connections to one another, and this is at the root of many of our social problems. We think we can make nuclear waste and then dump it over here, where we can’t see it; then that’s okay.
F 'em! Page 12
