Bad Mother

by Ayelet Waldman

  It was everything that I thought it would be. Mommy & Me, story time at the library, Gymboree, long stroller walks with my stay-at-home-mommy friends. And then the next day it was Mommy & Me, story time at the library, Gymboree, and long stroller walks with my stay-at-home-mommy friends. And the day after that, and the day after that, and the day after that.

  Within a week I had gone mad.

  I took a certain satisfaction in the fact that I was now the most important person in the day-to-day life of my child, but I was also bored and miserable. And the fact that I was bored and miserable terrified me. A Good Mother is never bored, is she? She is never miserable. A Good Mother doesn’t resent looking up from her novel to examine a child’s drawing. She doesn’t stare at the clock in music class, willing it along with all the power of a fourth grader waiting for recess. She doesn’t hide the finger paints because she can’t stand the mess. A Good Mother not only puts her children’s needs and interests above her own but enjoys doing it. If I wasn’t enjoying myself, then I wasn’t a Good Mother. On the contrary, I was a bad one.

  The intense Bad Mother anxiety felt by me and by so many of the women I know has everything to do with what the journalist Peggy Orenstein, author of Flux: Women on Sex, Work, Love, Kids, and Life in a Half-Changed World, calls “making pre–Betty Friedan choices in a post–Betty Friedan universe.” When we were little girls—we daughters of the late 1960s and the 1970s—none of us said we wanted to be wives and mothers when we grew up. None of us said we wanted to run the nursery school committee or frost perfect cupcakes or spend our days ferrying children back and forth from hockey games to music classes. We all had ambitions that went beyond the confines of our own houses. We wanted to work, to have careers, to have professions. But for so many of us, the realities of the workplace and of family life have either defeated or drastically changed these expectations. When career advancement demands a sixty-or seventy-hour workweek, when the child-care bill approaches or exceeds your paycheck, or when simple survival requires a second job, juggling home and family suddenly shifts from the challenging to the impossible. Someone usually ends up sacrificing his or her career to some extent, and in a world where a woman still earns roughly seventy cents to a man’s dollar, and where a man’s identity is still almost exclusively defined by what he does, that someone is almost always the mother.

  So here we are, either staying home or making serious professional compromises in order to be more available to our children or feeling like terrible mothers for having failed to make those sacrifices. I imagine there are some mothers who have without regret channeled all of their ambition and energy into making homemade Play-Doh, organizing the nursery school capital campaign, and directing the fifth-grade social committee, but I have never met one. Most of the women I know feel an underlying and corrosive sense of disappointment and anxiety. The women I know are, on some level, unfulfilled. And the women I know spend a lot of time trying to avoid wondering whether the sacrifice was worth it.

  It’s that very wondering, it’s the being unfulfilled, that makes us feel the worst. That’s what triggers our most intense anxiety. Feeling dissatisfied, bored, and unhappy is unpleasant, yes, but what really scares us is the very fact of our dissatisfaction, boredom, and unhappiness. Because a mother who isn’t satisfied with being a mother, a mother who wants to do more than spend her days with her children, a mother who can imagine more, is selfish. And just as the Good Mother is defined by her self-abnegation, the single most important, defining characteristic of the Bad Mother is her selfishness.

  Even if we sympathize with Andrea Yates’s postpartum depression, even if we’ve suffered from it ourselves, even if we are ready to acknowledge that homeschooling five children in a converted school bus would probably on its own be enough to drive us to homicide, we condemn Yates for having succumbed to her despair. She valued her own misery more than her children’s lives. We condemn the Bad Mother even when she is the primary victim of her own tragedy, like, for example, Carol Anne Gotbaum, the Upper West Side mother of three who, while on her way to an alcohol rehabilitation facility, died in police custody after an altercation in the Phoenix airport. “Yes, I’m sure she was mother of the year,” snapped an UrbanBaby mom-squad assassin, after someone wrote a sympathetic post about Gotbaum, “what with her severe alcoholism, suicide attempts, and tendency towards verbal abuse.” Another deemed the entire incident an example of “self-indulgent nonsense.”

  When Susan Smith drove her two children into a lake, one of the most compelling facts about the case, one reported in the press over and over again, was that she had allegedly done so because the man she was dating didn’t like kids. Here was this woman who was clearly insane, but the media narrative about her was that she valued the satisfaction she got from her lover, she valued his wealth and attention, more than she valued her children’s lives. Instead of getting a real analysis of the psychology of her crime, we were told that Susan Smith killed her children in order to be loved, and to be rich. Selfish bitch.

  Even the maternal crimes of idiot starlets like Britney Spears amount essentially to selfishness. She’d rather go out to clubs than take care of her kids. She’d rather sleep in than report for her drug tests. She’s spoiled rotten, and a rotten mother because she’s so spoiled.

  Not long ago I reread Anna Karenina, in Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s magnificent new translation. In the novel there is an achingly sad scene where Anna, who has abandoned her husband and beloved son to be with her lover, excoriates herself with the worst insult she can imagine—she’s an unnatural mother. A natural mother, one who understood the relative insignificance of her own happiness, would never have indulged it. Most of us are, obviously, not about to fling ourselves beneath the wheels of a locomotive, but the fear of being an unnatural mother, a Bad Mother, is all too familiar to us. We are supposed not only to sacrifice ourselves for our children but to do so willingly, cheerfully, and without ever feeling any seething resentment, and when we fail, as we must, we feel guilty and ashamed.

  The question becomes: How does one find consolation in the face of all this failure and guilt? One way is by reveling in the dark exploits of mothers who are worse, far worse, than we are. We obsess about these famous bogeymamas; we judge ourselves for a little while not against the impossible standard of the Good Mother but against the heinous Bad Mother. The more rigid the prescription of the Good Mother is, and the more complete our failure in emulating her, the more extreme the Bad Mother needs to be. Terrified of our own selfishness and failures, we look for models further on the spectrum from ourselves than we are from the Good Mother. We may be discontented and irritable, we may snap after the sixty-seventh knock-knock joke, our kids may watch three hours of television a day because we’re too afraid, after checking our local map of sexual offenders, to send them outside to play, we may have just celebrated the second anniversary of the last time we had sex with our husbands, we may have forgotten to bring a snack to the playground, or, God forbid, brought a snack replete with partially hydrogenated vegetable oils, we may be divorced from our children’s fathers, our children may not have fathers, our kids may sleep in our beds, our kids may not sleep in our beds, we may bottle-feed, or we may breast-feed for too long, our kids may score in the twelfth percentile on the verbal-reasoning section of the Iowa Tests, we may feed our kids peanut butter or strawberries too early and give them allergies, we may be so vigilant about not feeding them anything allergenic that they refuse to eat anything that’s not white, we may yank on our daughters’ ponytails while we are combing their hair, we may feel like the world notices and keeps track of each and every one of our maternal failures, but at least we’re not Andrea Yates or Susan Smith. We’re not Wendy Cook or Britney Spears. Hell, we’re not even Ayelet Waldman.

  That is, you’re not.

  Another strategy some of us have come up with to deal with our sense of failure and guilt is to rebel, to embrace the very identity we are afraid of, to loudly pro
claim ourselves bad moms. We bad moms proudly wear our ambivalence on our sleeves. We vociferously resist and resent the glorification of the self-abnegating mother. We snarl at the mention of Dora the Explorer or Raffi. We shrug at the orange Cheetos dust smeared across our children’s mouths. We swap stories of our big-box travails (“Your kid ran away from you at Target? That’s nothing. I yelled at mine in the parking lot of Ikea and someone called the cops!”). We commiserate about how much we loathe the wannabe Good Mothers with their aggressive school volunteering, their Bugaboo strollers, and their Petunia Pickle Bottom diaper bags. We even confess that on rare occasions, and only under duress, we spank our children.

  We bad moms are happy to confess our sins because we’re confident that those who come closest, and with the most sanctimony, to emulating the self-effacing, self-sacrificing, soft-spoken, cheerful, infinitely patient Good Mother are the real Bad Mothers. After all, what is a child like whose mother has sacrificed herself on the altar of his paramount importance? What is a child like whose mother has selflessly devoted herself to his every need and desire? Is he thoughtful and kind, empathetic and liable to put others’ needs before his own? Or is he so packed full of self-esteem, so conscious of his own sense of entitlement, that he is impossible to be around? Our children may wear unmatched socks, we trumpet, but they’re better people than yours are.

  The vogue for honesty, for exposing and embracing the ugly side of motherhood, is not a new thing. As far back as Erma Bombeck’s weekly columns or Peg Bracken’s I Hate to Cook Book, women have been attempting to derive comfort from the act of ruefully confessing their maternal failures. One seminal text of the bad-mom movement, for example, Anne Lamott’s Operating Instructions, published in 1993, describes a mother who clings to sleep so fiercely that she doesn’t even notice when her baby falls into the crack between her bed and the wall. Salon’s Mothers Who Think page debuted in 1997 as a forum for this kind of resistance, although it sometimes functioned as its opposite. The literary anthology The Bitch in the House is a Bad Mother’s manifesto, as are the stacks of volumes with cutely sour titles like Confessions of a Slacker Mom and Mommies Who Drink. I began my career as a writer by publishing a series of murder mysteries—the Mommy-Track mysteries—about a mother so bored with staying home with her small children that she turns to solving crime just to keep herself from losing her mind. As an antidote to the Web sites UrbanBaby and Babble, the Bad Mother movement offers up the delightfully bilious Crabmommy and Heather Armstrong’s Dooce, who writes that “most days with a toddler are the emotional equivalent of running over your skull with a car.”

  We bad moms defy the world to come up with an accusation we have not already leveled against ourselves. Beating our critics to the punch is certainly effective as a way of short-circuiting attacks. How much do they think it hurts me to be accused of being a Bad Mother when that is the name of my book? But in our conscious rebellion, we bitches and slacker moms are as focused on the Bad Mother archetype as any of the vigilantes of the Bad Mother goon squad. If we truly didn’t care, we wouldn’t be writing all these articles, memoirs, and books. We wouldn’t be blogging. We don’t insist that we’re Good Mothers despite our failings. On the contrary, we seem to be saying only, okay, yeah, we’re bad. So what?

  Despite the effectiveness of this technique, despite its power to inoculate you against attack, it allows you to define yourself only in negative terms. We don’t call the entire project of identifying Bad Mothers into question; we simply embrace the role. And in the end, there is something hollow in that. There is no inherent nutritional value in the antidote to poison.

  Moreover, if examined too closely, all this defiance starts to ring false. I may be defiant about my failures and my selfishness, but I still feel guilty. I still feel bad. As happy as I am to crown myself Queen of the Maternal Damned, part of me still believes that my children would be better off with June Cleaver.

  Is there really no other way to be a mother in contemporary American society than to be locked into the cultural zero-sum game of “I’m Okay, You Suck”?

  Despite the Internet, the enabling technology that makes it ever easier for us both to judge others and to internalize our own self-judgment, couldn’t we at least attempt to forge a positive and humane attitude toward mothers, one that takes into account their welfare as well as that of their children? Or is that an impossibly naive idea, the very consideration of which dooms me to be bitch-slapped by the meta-hypocrites of Gawker under the headline “Ayelet Whines: Can’t We All Just Get Along?”

  It shouldn’t be that hard. We possess, after all, a perfectly adequate model, one that operates smoothly, almost imperceptibly, without engendering vitriol or causing much pain: the Good Father. There are no “daddy wars,” and while Alec Baldwin and Michael Jackson have both served their time in the Bad Father stocks, it is rare for a father to feel that his own identity is implicated in or validated by their offenses. Self-flagellation is not the crux of the paternal experience.

  I’m not calling for a national lowering of maternal standards to the rather minimal level considered acceptable by society for fathers. In fact, if more were expected of fathers, mothers might not end up shouldering such an undue burden of perfection. But it’s hard enough to minister to the needs of children without trying to live up to an impossible standard at the same time. It’s hard enough to achieve a decent balance between work and home without feeling like our inevitable mistakes are causing our children permanent damage. It’s hard enough to braid a kid’s hair on a moving train without worrying about an audience of censorious commuters.

  Can’t we just try to give ourselves and each other a break?

  2. The Life She Wanted for Me

  Before I had children, I knew exactly what kind of mother I would be: my mother had told me. She was a feminist of the 1970s consciousness-raising, pro-choice-marching, self-speculum-wielding school, and she expected me to fulfill her own ambitions, which had been thwarted by a society that resisted viewing a woman in any sphere other than the domestic, and by an imprudent marriage. My mission as her daughter was to realize the dream of complete equality that she and her fellow bra burners had worked so hard to attain.

  My mother met my father the summer before she entered graduate school. Fifteen years older than she, he had custody of four children from his first marriage. His oldest child, a son, was only ten years younger than my mother.

  When my mother went off to graduate school, my grandparents breathed a sigh of relief. Then, in a moment of utterly uncharacteristic romantic grandeur, my father sent my mother a telegram that said, “I’m pregnant. Come marry me.” To me, the text of this telegram has always smacked of a calculated attempt to mask, with charm and humor, his very practical need. From the vantage point of decades, it seems clear that the subtext of the telegram was, “My children are running wild, driving me crazy, and I need a wife to take care of them!”

  My parents have been married forty-four years, and my mother has never once described the story of their engagement, telegram and all, as anything other than the beginning of a mistake. When I ask her why she threw everything aside to marry a man so much older, with four difficult children and no steady source of income, sometimes she says it was because she was swept away by love—he was handsome, charming, a war hero. Sometimes she says that she was afraid, at twenty-two, of becoming an old maid, or that her best friend had just married an older man with four kids, and that made it seem like a less crazy thing to do. She always says that she realized almost immediately that she had made a mistake, but by then she was already pregnant with me—fecundity runs in my family—and it was too late. And even if she had the madness or the courage to take her baby and make her escape, there were those four motherless children to consider. She couldn’t abandon them.

  Not long after I was born, my mother discovered Betty Friedan. Had The Feminine Mystique been published a few years earlier, my mother’s life might have been very different. She might have
had a fulfilling career, instead of working at a series of frustrating and uninspiring jobs. She might never have married my father; she might have stayed at the University of Michigan, become a professor of art history or a museum curator. She might not have backed into a career as a hospital administrator because she happened to be working in a health clinic when someone finally realized that she was too smart to be relegated to typing and filing.

  My mother struggled for her entire life to find professional satisfaction. She worked for men who were neither as intelligent nor as qualified as she was. She watched the steady rise of women just a few years younger, women who refused to settle, who refused to subsume their ambitions to a sexist world. She was angry—and is angry still—about the mistakes she made, and she was determined that I would not make similar ones. She raised me to believe not only that I was capable of anything but that I had an obligation—to myself, to society, most of all to her—to succeed. My future—a term I understood to be synonymous in her mind with “career”—was meant to fulfill her ideology and redeem her own frustrated professional and personal life.

  That I was to have children was a given—feminist or not, she’s a Jewish mother after all—but my career was to be paramount. Family would follow, and would be integrated, seamlessly and without challenge, into my life. She wasted no time in wondering whether I would be a Good Mother—that was a given—what was important was that I would be a working mother. Or, rather, a successful professional who just happened to have children.