My mother was a den mother and used to have her Boy Scout meetings in our unfinished basement. I remember the boys coming in the back door and going down the stairs in their blue uniforms with the yellow-gold ties, my brothers Marc and Duane among them. I hated the time the scouts got with my mom. I used to listen as they gathered around the pool table working on some project—my mother loved a paper towel craft—so jealous that sometimes I’d sit at the top of the basement steps and shout, “Why don’t you go home to your own mommies!”
One of my brothers would tighten his lips, the other would show me a fist, but my mother would stifle a laugh and pretend to ignore me.
She was also president of the Block Association. She was able to do all these things because she didn’t sleep. I couldn’t do what she did, even if I wanted to. At one time, I imagined filling twenty hours a day as she had, but I’d planned to do it by finding a great nanny who would be with us the entire time my children were young, and I would go off every morning to write, travel, go to dinner with my husband. Although by my midtwenties I recognized that I wanted to be a mother, I had thought I would still live in New York City, with the simple addition of a child, an accessory or more like a goldfish—a low-maintenance kind of pet. I clearly had no idea.
I was never one to gush over children or really pay much attention to them—other than my nephew Kamal, who’d been born when I was eighteen. I loved him immensely and took him on outings, but he was my nephew, sometimes like the younger sibling I’d never had. And because he was an only child he was preternaturally mature; not like a kid at all. I had always wanted children, but I saw myself as the kind of mother who was like an older camp guide. I never saw myself as someone who would nag about homework or cleaning up. I didn’t grasp what a Herculean task it would be to instill the importance of self-discipline in a child. My actual mothering bears no resemblance to what I’d imagined.
“You don’t just mother, you inhabit their skin; it’s very interesting to watch,” said Lynne, who has been my friend since our firstborns were babies. She was right: I tried fiercely to protect my kids’ emotional and psychological lives. Lynne’s observation helped me to understand why I find mothering so exhausting. When you listen to, process, and analyze everything that happens to them, it’s straight-up draining. If something happens to one of my kids, it’s as if it has happened to me. I don’t just empathize; I feel it in my body.
When Baldwin was new to middle school, I was near her school during dismissal one day and decided to pick her up instead of having her ride the bus. She didn’t have a cell phone, so there was no way for me to let her know that I was there. I saw the buses lined up and went through throngs of eleven-, twelve-, and thirteen-year-olds to locate her. As I looked around, trying to remember what animal her bus was named for—red swan, green rabbit, blue monkey—I heard a girl from a window of the bus I was standing next to say in a nasty tone “Baldwin is a . . .” and before a noun came out, I felt heat rising to my head. I went to get on the bus, but the door was shut. The driver was midway up the aisle, I assume trying to quiet the kids before driving off. I saw a boy who had been in Baldwin’s class all through elementary school, quietly sitting in the front seat, near the door. I waved my hand and got his attention and told him to open the door. He did, and I got on the bus, squeezed past the driver, and headed directly to where the girl was sitting. The two girls—one of whom had been Baldwin’s friend in elementary school—saw me coming. One tried to hide her head in the other one’s chest. I jabbed my pointer finger into her shoulder. She looked up at me, confused and a little terrified.
“Don’t you ever, as long as you live, say anything bad about my daughter.”
The two of them nodded their heads at me, as if in a trance, in unison.
I walked off of the bus and resumed looking for my child.
I never imagined I’d be like this, and I guess that’s part of what veteran parents try to tell you when you’re pregnant. You’ll never love anyone else like this; you’ll do things you can’t imagine.
Our family when Baldwin was in middle school.
I was craving a drink after lunch. At least it’s not noon, I rationalized, even though I’d promised myself that I wasn’t going to have a drink for a week. I was taking a break just to show myself that I could easily do so. By the night of day three I ached for this drink like I used to crave chocolate right before my period. I got out of bed, where I’d been reading a novel, and went downstairs. I squeezed the juice from a lemon, then a lime, and poured it into a glass with tequila and agave, added some ice, and voilà, I’d made myself a margarita. I savored it, standing at the kitchen counter. It was good. Did that mean I was an alcoholic? I’d just had one. I didn’t want another, and I went back to my bed and book. I had a glimmer of insight that I drank mostly because I was bored. Thinking up the drink, mixing it, sipping it gave me something to do that was just for me, but I also felt that I needed something to take the edge off the mind-numbing demands of domestic life.
This was year three of not writing, of being a stay-at-home mom. Here is what my life looked like on any given day:
• Call the sprinkler guy, Brian (we’re on a first-name basis).
• Wait for “door specialist” to come and fix the garage door for the third time.
• Wait for handyman to hang silk valances in Baldwin’s room.
• Have firs replanted after intense spring snowstorm dropped a foot of snow on them and forced them to the ground.
• Shop for end-of-year class teacher gift (last year witnessed disappointed face of Baldwin’s teacher when she saw the brown velour hoodie; volunteered to do better job).
• Paint Adirondack chairs in yard.
My week-in, week-out list was more relentless:
• Walk the dog, feed the dog, and put in eye drops for cataracts after wrestling twelve-pound dog wearing oven mitts to prevent him from taking my skin off.
• Pick up Ford from school, take him to tae kwon do. Sit and wait for the half-hour lesson. Repeat twice a week.
• Take Ford to soccer practice one day, baseball two other days.
• Take Baldwin to the math tutor two to three times a week, depending on whether she has a test.
• Pick Baldwin up from bimonthly hair salon appointment.
• Take and pick up Baldwin from lacrosse practice. Sometimes tutor, hair, and lacrosse fall on the same day, but never get the hair done before lacrosse. Can’t sweat out the new do.
• Clean up breakfast dishes to make room to cook dinner.
As I’d plan dinner, feeling weary, pissed, and bored from my day, I’d get a lift just looking at the clock and realizing that it was five-thirty and I’d completed my driving responsibilities. I could have a cocktail. Usually it was a glass of wine, but sometimes it was a Cosmo or a margarita, something fun and youthful, something to make me feel like the girl I’d been when I was single and living on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, alone in my one-bedroom, rent-stabilized apartment, hanging with my girls Eleanore and Shannon. Just like Carrie and her crew. I’d inhale Sex and the City episodes, the escapades often mirroring those of my girlfriends and me, such as being broken up with via a Post-it. The best one, which actually happened to one of my best friends, was finding out that the guy she was dating was about to be a father when his baby’s mama’s voice came over the answering machine announcing that she was in labor while my friend was underneath him in his bed. None of this had been fun at the time, but the memories were now a hilarious distraction.
After about six months of my solitary Happy Hour, Cliff told me that he was concerned that I was drinking too much. I started to clean up the bottles and glasses before he came home. I didn’t want to hear what he had to say. He was worried. Shit, I was worried, but not about my drinking. I was resentful and afraid that I was losing my fucking mind, but I felt as if I couldn’t really complain because I lived in a beautiful brick Colonial partially covered with ivy and had a big, gorgeous yard
with a garden of climbing Pink Peace, thistles, pink dogwoods, yellow forsythia, blackberry bushes, peonies, and clematis over an arched Walpole gate. I drove a Mercedes SUV, and my kids were cute and bright and nice, and my husband was cute and bright and nice and brought home the bacon. I was aware that only a small percentage of women—and an even smaller percentage of Black women—shared this life, and very few of them ever acknowledged ennui. Which made me feel worse, lonelier. I knew many would hear my complaint and wonder what the fuck was wrong with me.
During this period, an after-lunch margarita wasn’t my only distraction. My shopping addiction was also getting a little out of hand. Twice a year, Cliff and Baldwin would go on a father-daughter camping trip sponsored by the YMCA. Ford and I were on our own. I remember we were walking from his soccer game toward the town center in our neighborhood one day when I saw a sale sign outside Coco, one of my favored boutiques in town. It was right next door to my most beloved store, a vintage spot called My Inheritance, owned by my buddy and “colleague” Carrie. Ford and I were holding hands, and I steered him across the street. Even at six, my son detested shopping, so I took him into My Inheritance first, where I could distract him with the bowl of Jolly Ranchers that Carrie kept on the counter. Nina was working that day. I told her I wanted to peek in on the sale next door at Coco. She offered to watch Ford for me. She was a social worker during the week and moonlighted at the store on weekends. I felt very comfortable leaving Ford with her. I went next door and proceeded to try on jeans, then a top and then a dress. In my shopping zombie trance, I had no idea that a half hour had passed. As I was stepping out of the dressing room, I looked toward the entrance and saw Nina holding Ford’s hand.
“He has to go to the bathroom,” she said kindly.
“Oh, sweetie, I’m sorry.”
I told them to hold on to the clothes, slinking out of the store to take him to the bathroom.
The look on his face made me feel as if I’d been caught by a neighbor drinking brown liquor in the morning. He just said: “Can we go home now?”
Some of the things I bought during this manic shopping phase from Coco were a Chan Luu bracelet (before everyone starting wearing them and knocking them off—I should’ve waited); a Paul & Joe leather bolero; Red Engine jeans; a silk polka-dot halter dress that could be a tunic or a dress, which I’d seen in the window and coveted but didn’t buy until it was on sale. From My Inheritance, over time, I bought a black classic lambskin Chanel purse; Gucci sunglasses; La Perla sunglasses; an Hermès belt; a fox boa; a red bouclé Adolfo suit; and too many other things to remember.
At my shoe store in town, Piazza Del Sole, I scored a great pair of brown suede ’40s-style pumps, a pair of pointy-toe Donna Karan boots (that I don’t wear anymore); a pair of over-the-knee La Canadienne boots (that I do still wear pretty much all winter). At Tory Janes: a pair of Tory Burch ballet flats, high-wedge sandals (neither of which I wore more than a half-dozen times—the flats became way too ubiquitous); Cordani wedge sandals. From Ruby, my other favorite: Vince T-shirts and Vince cashmere sweaters, J Brand jeans, Seven jeans, earrings. You get the picture.
This is not counting the department-store booty bought during mindless mall shopping: Nordstrom, J.Crew, Neiman Marcus, H&M, Zara. I can’t even recall all the costume jewelry, cashmere wraps, wallets, and handbags I bought from Jillian, who held private sales two to three times a year. After this went on for three years, Cliff started to turn up the complaints.
Mom and Dad on their fiftieth anniversary, dancing at the wedding ceremony they’d always wanted.
I decided that it was my marriage that must be the problem. This was after having my chakras realigned in October; seeing a naturopathic doctor and having hair strands tested for metal in my body in November; and drinking green-ocean scraps for a year. When I still felt like shit, I called a therapist for Cliff and me to see. The psychiatrist came highly recommended by some friends in the city. Over the telephone he asked me how many children we had and their ages—Baldwin was fourteen then, and Ford was eight. The doctor asked how old Cliff and I were; when I told him that we were both fifty-one, he made a sound, something like humph.
“Why’d you do that?” I asked him.
At first he said, “Oh, no, no, no reason.”
He quickly realized that I’d caught him having a reaction, and he relented. He knew that I wasn’t going to stop pushing him until he said what it was.
“Well, I was just thinking that most people at this age might be free of raising children, that your children would be almost grown and you’d be taking care of yourself, and not still have children as young as you do.”
Yes, I thought, this makes perfect biological sense. I booked the appointment and anxiously looked forward to meeting this man.
Dr. Henry McCurtis’s voice was a combination of Morgan Freeman’s and what I imagined God might sound like—if God were a man. The doctor’s accent was a mixture of Oklahoma and Texas. In sessions, he offered down-home compassion—“Bless your heart,” he would say, upon hearing something especially horrendous—and utilized the intellectual training he’d received at Columbia Medical School, riffing on human needs and dissecting Siddhartha. Cliff and I saw McCurtis for five or six sessions. He sent us on our way with tools to better understand each other’s stressors and triggers, and a good marital prognosis.
So now I knew the problem wasn’t my marriage, but I still couldn’t find my footing; I couldn’t shake the feeling of teetering on a precipice.
“Girl, you need to relax and go on and live Miss Ann’s life,” said my hair colorist and pal Joy Harris one day as I sat in her chair. Meaning just enjoy the house, the car, the club, and being a stay-at-home mom.
“Miss Ann” wasn’t a positive term for Black people. Miss Ann was the lady of the plantation, weak, mean, and prone to fainting spells. These proverbial Southern White women relied on their Black maids to do everything from breast-feeding and raising the children, to cleaning the house, cooking, and submitting to rape from her husband if said husband/master requested. An updated version of Miss Ann is portrayed in the bestselling novel and movie The Help. White people couldn’t understand why Black people resented, hated The Help. We understood that our foremothers had toiled for Miss Ann, who was still the heroine of the story.
That didn’t mean that we were above honest work, only that we meant to preserve our dignity. When my mother was a young girl, high school age, she worked as a nanny and a maid for White women after school in the Elmora section of Elizabeth, New Jersey. In the summers she would go with them to their vacation homes on the Jersey Shore. After a few summers with one Jewish family, she and the woman she worked for managed to get beyond the social expectations of the time and became something resembling friends. When the summer was over, the woman, Susan, invited my mother to visit her at her home in Washington, DC. My mother took her up on the offer. When my mother arrived at the tasteful, elegant home on a tree-lined street in Northwest, a Black maid, “the help,” let’s call her Esther, answered the door. This was the late ’40s, below the Mason-Dixon, where Jim Crow was still law.
“Hello, is Susan home?” my mother said.
Esther appraised my mother and told her yes, but she’d have to go around to the back door.
My mother with her Northern ways told Esther no, she wasn’t going around back.
Esther insisted.
My mother insisted that she would not.
After a few moments of a standoff, Susan appeared behind Esther to see who was at the door. Upon seeing my mother, Susan screeched, “Clara!” and stretched out her arms. Esther moved aside as Susan and my mother embraced.
Remembering this story from my mother’s past, I knew that Joy was basically advising me to just chill, to be the proverbial lady of the manor. But my mind was jammed and my soul felt tangled. All of me was unaligned, though I didn’t fully understand this at the time. I only knew that my normally iron will to keep moving had started to rust and was begin
ning to give.
“Why you drinking so much?” my mother said one day as we sat at my kitchen table during a visit. She said she’d noticed that I often had a drink in my hand.
I blew her off.
“Ma, I’m not an alcoholic. I just like to drink right now.”
She took her concern to Joni, my oldest friend, the sister I never had, who now lived in LA. Joni, the most balanced person I know, was like my mother’s other daughter. They had their own relationship apart from me. When I went away to Howard, Joni continued having dinner with my mom two or three times a week after her classes at Seton Hall and before heading to her job as an assistant manager at Bamberger’s. Joni convinced Mom that there was nothing to worry about. She told her that the motherhood thing was just difficult for me right now, especially since I wasn’t writing.
“She’ll be okay,” Joni assured my mother, and I think my mother believed her. At least she stopped bugging me, or maybe she was becoming consumed by health concerns of her own.
A few nights after Joni allayed Clara’s fears about my drinking, I had a small breakthrough. Homework, dinner, bath time were over. Ford was in bed. Cliff and Baldwin were talking in her bedroom, and I was in my dressing room with Charlie at my feet on the chaise. I pulled out my new MacBook Air, the beautiful laptop that my husband had surprised me with for our anniversary the previous June, and began some writing. The audio guy was banging in the basement, installing the kind of TV sound system that I’d soon learn I would need a PhD to operate. I was typing away. I was writing. It occurred to me what I was doing; I was like a kid who realizes he’s riding a two-wheeler without training wheels. I stopped typing to observe myself: Maybe writing through noise and when everybody was home was the new normal. Maybe I wouldn’t have six hours undisturbed in my office away from the family rhythms like I used to. Perhaps what I had to learn was to write around tending parents as well as children—the stuff of life—not alone in a quiet room. It wasn’t perfect, but it was clearly doable. I was writing.
Welcome to My Breakdown Page 12
