Welcome to My Breakdown

by Benilde Little

  As time went on, the housewife hat became harder to wear than I’d anticipated. I tried hard to put on a good face, even though inside I had to fight daily the feeling of being nobody and nothing: a loser. I’m in no way saying that stay-at-home moms don’t work hard; it’s an incredible challenge raising kids and running a house. But for me, I wasn’t cut out for the job.

  I went to a birthday party with Ford for one of his friends from nursery school. It was held at Bradford Bath and Tennis Club. The club sat on a hill, with the main pool in the center of gorgeous, manicured rolling lawn, a pergola swathed with wisteria giving the place a Gatsbyesque feeling while providing shade for parents and toddlers in the kiddie pool. There were New York City views from the upper-level adult pool; there was also a larger family pool and a small one for babies and toddlers. The tennis courts required white attire only (no trim), and they were surrounded by white wooden benches and white planters filled with annuals. The club was just beautiful. After spending the afternoon there, I decided to join. I was going to be one of those moms who hung out at the pool all day, looking peaceful and fit.

  The reality was that I never could bring myself to actually sign up for tennis lessons, although I did lug Ford in for tennis and swim lessons. But the half hour he was in the pool was almost less time than it took me to park the car and put sunblock on him. The attempt to force myself into some kind of fantasy version of myself merely cost me a lot of aggravation and self-criticism for not going there more often. I’d fooled myself into believing that if I paid a lot of money and just showed up there, I could seem normal, and then I’d become that. We probably went a total of ten times during the three years we were members—I think Cliff was there twice. I figure at the cost of the membership, it amounted to about three hundred dollars a swim. I knew a few people by name and plenty by face, some who actually talked to me. From the others I heard far too often: “Are you a member here?”

  “Why don’t you ever come?” the friendlier ones would ask, catching a glimpse of me on one of my rare visits.

  At Ford’s second birthday party with Baldwin and niece Sumayyah.

  It was a question I asked myself often, but I just said, “I don’t know.” The truth was too embarrassing to admit: That I would never be one of those mommies who pack up the cooler with just the right lunch and snacks and wipes and change of clothes for the kids, who smile beatifically at their charges, and chat away animatedly with other mommies, feeling hopelessly fulfilled. The one time that I did remember to pack all the right stuff, Ford, his best friend Ryan, and I were going to stay till evening for family movie night on the lawn, with popcorn provided in old-fashioned paper containers. I thought it might be the start of a lovely tradition, but that day it rained so hard that we got wet even as we tried to wait out the storm on the screened-in snack bar porch. And movie night was canceled.

  10

  “This Created Some Schizophrenia”

  SOON AFTER moving to Montclair, I had gone to our local bookseller, Margot Sage-EL, and told her that I desperately needed to meet other women novelists who were also mothers. I had been creatively isolated when we lived in South Orange, and I didn’t want to repeat that. She immediately said, “You need to meet Christina Baker Kline.” Margo gave me Christina’s number, I called her right away, and she came over the next day, coffee in hand and six months pregnant. We sat on my living room couch and talked for hours, like old friends. I even asked her why she was having another baby; she had two sons, the older one the same age as Baldwin. Christina didn’t flinch at my bluntness. She understood that the question had been asked only in relation to her being a working writer, a novelist no less, and the difficulty involved in also being a mother. She laughed at my question, saying that she had three sisters and was used to big families. Later, I’d realize that she was the energizer organizer. She introduced me to another author/mother, Alice Elliott Dark, and we three started meeting once a week. Pamela Redmond Satran joined our group a few years later.

  For six years, we’d meet at Starbucks or Bluestone Coffee Co., have breakfast—sometimes it was lunch; occasionally it would be wine in the early evenings—and we’d talk about everything having to do with writing and life. After I stopped publishing regularly in 2004, they became my only contact with my writer self, and by 2006, when my last book came out, I’d sit there, not having anything to say about what I was working on, my writing routine, or my characters, but for a while the discussions were my life support. I lunged like a bearcat at every piece of publishing gossip or discussion of their writing process that they cared to share.

  When we had started our weekly gatherings, I’d published the most novels and had gotten a lot of acclaim. Alice had had her second short-story collection, In the Gloaming, made into a movie starring Glenn Close. But by this point, 2007, Pam, who had already published a hugely successful series of baby-name books, had added two novels, The Man I Should Have Married and Younger (just made into a TV series). Christina had published two novels, Sweet Water and Desire Lines, and two anthologies, plus a nonfiction book with her mom. Christina, who’d had her own four-year stint in the mommy hole, was up and running again with her third novel, The Way Life Should Be. A fourth one had already sold, and she had a teaching fellowship at Fordham.

  Several years later, Christina’s most recent novel, Orphan Train, would hold steady on the New York Times bestseller list for over a year, at times hitting number one. Pam went on to publish seven more books, and Alice eventually got a tenure-track writing professor gig at Rutgers.

  Just as I was about to start wallowing in self-pity at being unproductive, a New York Times editor reached out to me through Alice and asked me to write an essay about mothering, suburban life, really anything I wanted to write about. I jumped at the chance. I decided to write about what was burning a hole in my consciousness at the time: all the permutations around deciding between public and private middle school for Baldwin. I’d considered sending her to a private middle school and then bringing her back to town for public high school. This was part of my article:

  Images of the Pingry School in Martinsville, the Rolls-Royce of educational institutions, danced in our heads as my husband, Cliff, and I headed home from a meeting with the admissions director and alumni. The school was indeed impressive, but the travel time, a good hour each way, was just too much for an 11-year-old to handle every day.

  Then I spoke with the parents of students at Kent Place in Summit, a bucolic all-girls’ school that Baldwin refused even to consider . . . because it was all girl. (She also said that she could go there for high school—a fib. We later realized that she had no intention of going there.) Cliff had explored Newark Academy’s 68-acre campus in Livingston a while ago, and I revisited it online, again weighing the pros of independent schools (smaller classes, more individualized attention and fabulous-looking facilities) and the cons (elitist attitudes of some children and more than $20,000 in tuition added to property taxes that are already enough for a private school education) . . .

  I would wake Cliff in the middle of the night with all kinds of scenarios, many of them products of being a black parent in suburbia. If we sent our daughter to public school, suppose the girls were mean, suppose she had to start choosing her friends based on race and not common interests, suppose some eighth-grade boy turned her head. The same things could happen in private school, of course, plus she would be around youngsters with so much money she could end up feeling as if she were underprivileged. Suppose she felt she had to choose to sit at the black table at lunchtime or, worse, what if she was a minority of one in some of the private-school classes and felt she must wave the race flag full time.

  Now I was getting to the guts of my insanity. I was tortured in the Newark public school I attended, which was practically all black; the misery began in sixth grade, and it was downhill from there. I was reliving my demons—the taunts of “Who do you think you are?” “You think you cute?” and my personal favorite, given the
junior revolutionary that I was, “You think you white?” I worry that things are neither worse nor better, that they have probably, pathetically, stayed the same . . .

  But as a black parent I have an extra job. Not only did I have to help Baldwin navigate her class work, always do her best and all that, but I’ve also got to teach her that when three black boys act out in class, it’s not because they’re black . . .

  I have to teach my girl and my little guy, who just started kindergarten, to be proud of their heritage. I have to encourage them to immerse themselves in black history, both in and out of the classroom, so they understand why some history books talk about enslaved people as if they were born that way—without a culture and centuries-old traditions. I have to teach, as so many of my peers were taught, that no one is better than you and you aren’t better than anyone. As my old pal, the director George C. Wolfe said of his Kentucky childhood, “This created some schizophrenia.”

  I had also looked at Montclair Kimberley Academy without Cliff, because we’d already toured it together when Baldwin was entering pre-K. During the wrap-up with the head of the elementary school, he’d raised his hand and asked her what extras the school offers children at $18,000 a year. The principal paused, then said, “No hitting, no biting, and no spitting.” Cliff was done with MKA after that.

  After talking with parents whom we respected whose kids had gone through the public middle school we were slated for, Glenfield, Cliff, Baldwin, and I decided that she would get a great all-around education there. I had many feelings and opinions on the topic, most of it centering on socioeconomic background. I had to get real honest with myself about who I was and what I wanted for my daughter. I believe when the education is good, public is best. I think education should be democratic, and I think that the public process educates the whole child, and that when they go to school with a variety of kids from a variety of racial, economic, and familial backgrounds, kids become better citizens of the world. They understand that some kids have two moms or two dads or not enough money to afford a cell phone or have single parents or spend winter weekends at ski houses. Private schools are a select group of kids from families with money and/or social-status awareness. Many parents do send their kids to private school for the education, period. And if I’m completely honest, the resources are much better and, depending on the school, the education is deeper. But some parents do it simply because they want their kids to socialize with kids from more privileged backgrounds—and not with poor kids.

  Glenfield was no panacea, nor was it a picnic. Baldwin did end up having all White friends, and she did get asked, “Why all your friends White?” by one or two Black girls. She answered with aplomb: “Why are you in my business?”

  Her response pretty much shut that down. One day in eighth grade, while watching a film, sitting on the floor in an elective at the end of the school year, a girl said to Baldwin, “So y’all like mad rich, huh?” Rich is obviously relative, and this kind of misperception of us was real to kids who were getting free lunch. I imagined Baldwin answered that question with her version of Girl, please. It was an issue I knew would be raised as we made the decision to go to into public school. In a large part, Black parents who are middle- or upper-income in our area tend to send their kids to private school, so a Black kid with two parents and an above-median income could be a double minority in public school.

  One thing I consciously did in order for Baldwin and some of her Black classmates to have a more natural way to get to know each other was always provide a ride. When she was playing middle school lacrosse, there was a girl, Lakisha,* on the team. She lived in the low-income apartments on the other side of town, miles away from the field. The coaches had asked her to be on the team because she was an amazing lacrosse player, but because her mother worked nights, she could never drive her daughter to and from practice. The girl would walk about five miles to get there.

  The second day of practice, Baldwin asked me if I could give Lakisha a ride home. Every day, I happily drove her home, even though it was in the opposite direction of our house. The three of us would talk on the ride. She was a great girl, with a funny, outgoing personality. As a result of her getting to know Baldwin, and probably as important, her mom, Lakisha would report back to her friends at school that, “Honestly, Baldwin is cool.”

  In a similar way, the New York Times piece put me in the spotlight in my town among people who hadn’t read my novels or even known that I was a writer. I had some “burb cred,” and that kept me going for a time because the piece was read, discussed, and debated all over town: public school people loved it, while a few parents at the local private school hated it and vehemently disagreed with me, and let me know it. Black women from around the Northeast told me they’d sent the piece to friends across the country. Some said that they kept it posted on a bulletin board. This was the stimulation I needed, and it was cathartic.

  After a while, though, I wasn’t feeling fine. I started to dread the now bimonthly get-togethers with my writing women’s circle. I kept telling them that I felt like a fraud being there, since I had no work to talk about, but they wanted me to come anyway; we’d become good friends. But I didn’t like how I felt, like I was a housewife first and an author second, as if my work had become a hobby, not my primary occupation.

  Even though they welcomed me and wanted me to stay, by the end of the year I’d stopped meeting with our group. I’d gotten tired of hearing myself complain about not writing and not being able to figure out why. I was already deep in the domestic dungeon, but I didn’t actually know it.

  11

  I Could Sell Shoes

  JANE, THE other half of Tory Janes, and I had gotten to be friendly at a step-funk-sculpt class taught by a woman who at the time was the workout goddess of Montclair. She had lost more than two hundred of her former four hundred pounds through exercise. One day, while we were waiting for her class to begin—you had to be there early to get a spot—Jane and I were talking about how well the shoe store was doing and the fact that they needed to hire more people.

  “I’ll work there,” I said.

  Jane looked at me. “You’re kidding.”

  “No, really. I need something to do.”

  Jane was skeptical.

  “Well, we need someone who can work around three.”

  She figured that would deter me.

  “I can do it then.”

  “Don’t you have to do pickup?”

  “Ford goes to aftercare.”

  I’d put Ford in aftercare run by the Y three days a week. It was generally for kids whose parents worked full-time. Enrolling him there had been one of my many attempts to force myself back into a regular writing schedule.

  “I’m serious,” I said. “I need a job. I need to do something.”

  “Okay, email me the hours you’re available.”

  After sweating it out in Angel’s class, I sat in the lobby of the sports club, downing water and talking with Joy Kay, a Jack and Jill cohort. We complained about how hard mothering was, the constant monitoring of homework, driving to sports and tutoring, all of it. We agreed it wore us down, that it could sometimes be soul depleting. I then shared with her that I’d decided to work at Jane’s shoe store.

  “What?”

  I thought she hadn’t heard me. I repeated my plan.

  “You can’t work in a shoe store. You’re a writer. Why aren’t you writing?”

  “My brain is spent,” I whined. “I just don’t have the focus anymore. I’m perimenopausal. I’m renovating the basement and picking out all these paint colors and carpet and tile. It’s all a distraction.”

  “If I can write grant proposals, you can get your work done,” Joy said. “Once the renovations are over, you can get back to it. Take your laptop to Starbucks, or even better, to Panera, like everybody else.”

  Joy and I walked out of the sports club with my trainer Lisa and gym pal Sarah. Lisa pointed out that working in the shoe store would really be wo
rking.

  “You’re gonna have to do what they tell you to do and deal with customers, and not all of ’em are gonna be nice or considerate.”

  I hadn’t played out the details of the actual work. I’d just pictured myself putting on makeup and clothes that weren’t yoga pants.

  “It’s not going to be like now, where you go there and just hang out.”

  Lisa was right and so was Joy. I was going to have to show up at a certain time and deal with all the things one has to do when one has a minimum-wage job. I hadn’t had one of those decades. I’d even forgotten what it was like to have a boss. I’d worked in magazines and newspapers, where one doesn’t really punch a clock but you still must answer for your time. I had to admit that I loved my free days. Sometimes after walking the dog with a group of people with whom I’d become friendly, we’d go to breakfast. Sometimes I’d go to Target, which never failed to lift my mood. Sometimes my friend Hillary and I would go to the diner for a Greek salad, or I’d go to the Short Hills Mall with Liz. But then I’d feel guilty because I wasn’t doing enough after I dropped the kids off at school, walked the dog, went to the gym, shopped for dinner, cooked dinner, and helped my son with his homework.