Bad Mother

by Ayelet Waldman

  My mother had help, and so I grew up with a series of women or cleaning services coming to the house once every two weeks for a couple of hours. I rarely met them—they came when I was at school—and my only real experience of their presence was the hours I spent grumbling the night before cleaning-lady day when my mother forced me to clean my room in anticipation of their visits. “I don’t pay them to pick up after you” was the refrain.

  When I moved in with Michael, he suggested that we avoid any discord about who was going to do the really gross jobs by hiring a cleaning service. We have had various amounts of help since then—weekly cleaners, babysitters, nannies—and while I am grateful to them beyond measure, I am never anything but uncomfortable with the idea of being a lady with, essentially, a maid. A friend once told me about hearing a conversation between two nannies in which one of them said, “You should always make the beds. These women aren’t used to having servants, and they love it when you make the beds.” The comment caused me a stomachchurning moment of recognition. Our kids’ nanny did make our beds, and every time I walked into my bedroom and saw the crisp sheets and smoothed pillows, I felt a wave of gratitude and pleasure. Because I feel so guilty about hiring someone with less money to clean my house, and because I feel a certain amount of shame at the idea of being able to afford a cleaner, my relationships with these women (and they are almost always women, and often, though not always, from third-world countries) tend to be fraught. I find it incredibly difficult, for example, to fire anyone, and have more than once found myself in the situation of hiring a maid to secretly clean up after my other maid, because I felt too bad for the first one to fire her, even though she wasn’t able to manage the job.

  So yes, I pay someone to scrub my toilets (although as the mother of two boys with poor aim, there are plenty of times when I’m down on my knees with a brush and a bottle of organic, nontoxic, unscented, all-natural toilet cleaner). Still, with four children and a huge hairy dog, I could have a staff of three arrive at my house at 6:00 a.m. and not depart before midnight, and there would still be plenty for Michael and me to do.

  Belkin’s article on housework included a reference to a survey on the division of labor by a pair of Berkeley (surprise, surprise!) academics, and Michael and I decided, just for the hell of it, to fill it out. The questionnaire is called “Who Does What?” and while our results more or less conformed to our expectations, it highlighted a few improvements that we’ve since tried to implement, albeit with limited success.

  The survey divides up all the chores of maintaining a family and a household and asks you to score how much of it you do, how much your partner does, and how you would like the work to be divided. The tasks in the survey include, among many others: shopping for and preparing meals, cleaning the house, making calls to family and friends, caring for the family car or cars, providing the income, financial planning, initiating lovemaking, determining the frequency of lovemaking (different category!), and deciding how involved to be in religious or community activities. After you’re done scoring all those categories, the survey asks you to evaluate both your and your partner’s competence at a series of tasks, including, again among many others: reading to your child, choosing toys for your child, doing your child’s laundry, disciplining your child, talking to your child’s doctor, and making playdates. Then it asks you a bunch of questions about how you feel about how much you do, and how you think your partner feels.

  No surprises in the last category of questions. I’m basically thrilled with how much Michael does, and he thinks I’m doing my share. He’s proud of how much of the housework and child care he does, and I think I’m a crappy mother. Sigh. How much self-awareness would it take for me to stop internalizing the chorus of the Bad Mother choir?

  In the first two categories, we agreed that, for example, I score a 9 on laundry, and he scores a 1, he wipes me out in the putting-to-bed category, and we let the mow-and-blow guy deal with the garden. There was a moment of discord around the bill-paying item, but Michael was finally forced to acknowledge that having not paid a bill in fifteen years, he cannot possibly be said to have earned a 2. Gross overestimations were accordingly erased and the appropriate figure inserted. He wished I would get down on the floor and play with the kids more, I wished he took more responsibility for making their doctors’ appointments.

  I heartily recommend that my male correspondents take the survey. It manages to reveal essential truths about your marriage and family without—at least in our case—making you angry. It makes you realize how much there is to do, how really endless the tasks are, and how hard it is to imagine, whatever your circumstances, doing it alone. Gentlemen, maybe after doing that load of whites and getting the resulting blow job, you can do the survey with your wives. I promise you’ll both learn something.

  As many of my other (generally female) correspondents take great pleasure in reminding me, there are lots of ways in which I am hardly the ideal mother and wife, lots of ways in which my family surely suffers because of my ineptitude and personality defects. And it’s not because of me that we manage this housework thing so well. It’s Michael, and the mother who trained him, who are the engineers of our happiness. It’s also not just the two of us (and, yes, the cleaning service) who do the work. We’ve expanded this notion of shared household responsibilities to our children. Every one of them, even the little one, has a job. Sophie sets the table for dinner, and provides unlimited babysitting services. Zeke takes the garbage to the curb every week, clears the table, and gives his younger siblings their baths. Rosie is responsible for straightening up the shelf on the porch where we keep our shoes and (when she remembers) for feeding the dog. And Abe helps Zeke on garbage night, helps Rosie clean her room, and periodically goes through the yard picking up trash.

  They work and we work because we, like Carol Channing, want the days of our lives to seem sunny as summer weather. So when there’s housework to do, we make sure and do it together.

  * I’m as guilty of this as any wife. Never once has Michael loaded the dishwasher according to the system that it took me years—literally years—to perfect. More often than not, I shove him aside and redo it myself. Frankly, my method is quite clearly the only way to load a dishwasher, not to mention the only way to make sure the little arms don’t snap off those French onion soup bowls. And it’s not like I haven’t given him detailed instructions about the system dozens, even hundreds of times. Honestly, how hard is it to remember to put the bowls on the top rack?

  † With the exception, of course, of the aforementioned loading of the dishwasher. And folding towels, too. They just look better in the linen cupboard if you first fold them in thirds. And yes, even the washcloths, although I suppose I could muster a little flexibility on that issue.

  4. Breast Is Best

  Once, when my son Abraham was six weeks old, I was standing in line at my local bakery. I had him in a sling, and I was feeding him. The sling’s fabric was twisted and my hair was caught in the knot, but the baby had finally taken his bottle, and I was loath to adjust anything for fear of disturbing our tenuous peace. I rocked a bit on my heels. The baby paused in his sucking, and I held my breath.

  Suddenly a voice behind me said, “You know, breast is best.” I turned. The speaker, a woman a few years older than I, smiled pleasantly.

  Now, the correct response to that comment might have been a stern rejoinder to mind her own business. It might even have included a series of expletives. Instead, what I did was burst into tears and launch into a long explanation about how the milk in the bottle was my own, pumped at four in the morning while everyone else in the house was asleep. I had in fact been pumping breast milk for Abraham every two hours, I told this stranger, because my son was born with a palate abnormality that made it impossible for him to suck properly from the breast.

  Abe’s feeding problem wasn’t diagnosed until he was two weeks old. He weighed a healthy seven and a half pounds when he was born, a nice, plump baby. Imm
ediately, however, he began losing weight, and by the time, ten days later, the pediatrician finally made time to see him, he was dangerously thin. No one, not the nurses in the hospital, nor the pediatrician who visited him there daily during the four days of my recuperation from my C-section, nor the hospital lactation consultant, nor even I, his mother, had noticed that the baby was getting no milk when he nursed. None of them had noticed his abnormal palate. He had probably not managed to extract more than a few ounces of milk a day since he was born, a tenth of what he should have been consuming. He was, in short, starving to death.

  I had been worrying about the baby’s weight from the day after he was born. For the first few days, after he nursed, my breasts would leak colostrum, the substance responsible for clearing the baby’s bilirubin and meconium and passing on a jolt of immunoglobulins. Loath to waste the precious liquid, I’d asked for a breast pump. My plan had been to pump my breasts empty immediately after he nursed, and then mix the colostrum with a bottle of sugar water, which I would then encourage him to drink. The hospital lactation consultant had walked in on me. “Why are you doing that?” she’d said, pointing to the bottles hooked up to the pump. “You’ve got plenty of milk.” I’d pumped for only a minute, but produced at least an ounce of colostrum. Instead of wondering why my breasts were still so full after the baby had supposedly nursed, she confiscated the pump.

  For the next week or so, my brain still fogged by painkillers and sleep deprivation, I fretted. Whenever anyone came to see him, I would ask, “Do you think he looks too skinny?” When I changed his diaper, I would measure the circumference of his thigh with my thumb and middle finger. Again and again I asked Michael if he thought the baby was gaining weight as he should. When I couldn’t get an appointment with the pediatrician, I asked the local public health nurse to come by and weigh him. Unfortunately, and for reasons I never understood, she was far more interested in screening me for domestic violence than in evaluating the baby. “He’s fine,” she said absently, ticking off an item from her checklist. “Has your husband physically assaulted you in the past thirty days?”

  I was worried, but not sufficiently to take action. I accepted everyone’s reassurances that Abraham was doing fine, that my concern was nothing more than a reflection of my own neuroses. What Jewish mother doesn’t think her baby should eat more? I even went forward with Abe’s bris, performed by a moyel who happened to be a pediatrician and who also missed the fact that the baby was slowly dying of dehydration. The red wine the moyel dripped into Abe’s mouth might in fact have been the most liquid the baby consumed in a single sitting in the entire previous eight days of his life.

  I was, however, sufficiently concerned not to be altogether surprised at our pediatrician’s response when she finally put him on a scale. She disappeared from the room and returned with a bottle of formula. “Give this to him,” she said. “Now.” Abe drank four ounces of formula in five minutes, astonishing for a baby his age. I sat there feeding him and weeping, horrified that I had allowed my baby to starve, sick at the thought that he’d been in pain. He had cried a lot during his first few days of life, doing what he could to let us know that he was hungry. After a while, however, he had stopped. He was a good baby, we told people. We hadn’t realized until that moment that he had simply grown too weak to utter more than the smallest whimper.

  The pediatrician told us that she would allow us to take him home for one night, but if we couldn’t put half a pound on him by the next morning, she would have to admit him to the hospital. Twenty-four hours later, when she put him on the scale, he had gained almost a full pound. I had not slept for even a moment the night before. Instead, I’d held him in my hands all night long, watching his emaciated chest rise and fall. During those long hours the membrane between life and death seemed so very thin. He was tiny, a weightless bundle of sticks wrapped in translucent skin. I felt his heart beating and the blood flowing through his thread-thin veins. Every breath seemed like it could have been his last. As soon as he opened his mouth, I or Michael popped in the bottle. We kept feeding him long past when he was full, long after he wanted to go back to sleep. We unwrapped him from his blankets, tickled the soles of his feet, anything to keep him awake and drinking. I began pumping that night, for forty-five minutes out of every two hours, giving myself no more than an hour and a quarter rest between sessions.

  All this I told the woman standing in line behind me at the café. I told her how I had weathered plugged ducts and breast infections; I showed her that the milk in that very bottle was colored a faint shade of purple, from the gentian violet I’d been applying to treat a brutal case of thrush. To establish my breast-feeding bona fides, I even told her how especially traumatizing my failure to feed this baby was, given that I’d successfully nursed three children, one for nearly three years.

  She gave me absolution. I was doing great, she said. Keep it up. Because, you know, breast really is best.

  Over the course of the next six months I continued my punishing pumping schedule. I gave over the actual feeding of the baby to Michael, who, with the help of a bottle designed for babies with cleft palates, managed to keep Abe steadily gaining weight. I enlisted the assistance of a team of lactation consultants, one of whom visited nearly every day to help me try to teach Abraham to nurse. Every few hours I settled into the glider rocker in the darkened room, a nursing pillow circling my waist, and tried to cajole Abraham into doing something more with my nipple than halfheartedly moving it around his mouth with his tongue.

  In a final, doomed effort, I took him to Los Angeles to consult with the Lactation Institute, a place that promised me it could solve the problems of any “nursing pair” (that is, mother and baby). I had imagined a medical clinic with dozens of labs and consulting rooms, staffed by white-coated experts spouting the latest in breast-feeding medical research. What I got looked less like a doctor’s office than like the headquarters of a Marxist student newspaper circa 1971. There were the usual frayed posters on the wall—War Is Not Healthy” et cetera, the usual pile of magazines with names like the Vegan Quarterly, the Lesbian’s Guide to Yoga, the Spelt-Lovers Review, and the usual assortment of herbal teas and mismatched crockery mugs. The lactation consultants were just like the others I’d been working with. Warm and supportive, they mothered me in a pepper-and-salt-crew-cut, Teva-sandals kind of way.

  Best of all, they were confident they could help. Showing me an oversized syringe attached to a long, thin silicone needle, they said, “You fill the syringe with breast milk. Then you put your finger in his mouth and slide the needle in alongside it. While he sucks on your finger, slowly, slowly, depress the plunger. Make sure that you go no faster than he can swallow.”

  Easy as pie. Except that it took a full twenty minutes to give him a single ounce. At the time, Abraham was consuming about thirty-six ounces of breast milk a day. At that rate twelve hours of my day would be devoted just to feeding him. And unlike giving him the bottle or breast-feeding, syringe feeding took two hands and full concentration. No multitasking was possible. And add to that the six hours a day I spent pumping.

  “But I have three other children!” I wailed when I did the math. “When do I sleep?”

  “Well,” the lactation consultant said, giving my shoulders a squeeze, “it’s really just a question of how committed you are. In a few months I’m sure he’ll have learned how to do it on his own.”

  I packed up the baby and took him back to the airport. I pumped on the plane, crouched in the space between my seat and the one in front of me, the baby precariously balanced against the armrest. I resolutely ignored the people around me who stared, transfixed and horrified, as I struggled to produce a replacement for the bottle of breast milk I’d just spilled all over my baby and my lap when turbulence shook the silicone needle out of his mouth and sent the full syringe flying.

  When I returned home, I laboriously instructed Michael in the new technique.

  “If he stops sucking your finger, you back
off on the plunger,” I said. “That way he only gets milk when he sucks, like he would from a nipple.”

  Michael had by now stopped looking at the baby and the syringe. Instead, he was staring at me, his mouth gaping. “Are you kidding me?” he said finally.

  “I know it’s really time-consuming,” I said.

  “You could say that,” he said.

  “But it’s really just a question of how committed we are.”

  “You know what?” Michael said. “It turns out we’re not that committed.” He threw the syringe and the pack of replacement silicone needles into the trash.

  That night when the lactation consultant called to check up on our progress, Michael took the phone away from me.

  “We’re finished,” he told the lactation consultant, who had just communicated so effectively her disappointment in me. “Enough is enough.”

  I pumped for a month or two after that, until I’d stockpiled enough breast milk in the freezer to take the baby through his six month birthday. Then I returned the pump to the rental center and called it quits.

  For the next year, whenever I mixed up a bottle of formula for Abraham, I felt a sense of stabbing shame, shame I still feel, despite myself, to this day. In the park and at preschool, the other mothers—the Good Mothers—would cast a censorious glance at Abe’s bottle and ostentatiously loose their pendulous breasts from their cow-spotted nursing bras. As they cuddled their expert nurser babies, I would blush. They, unlike me, were committed. I was a Bad Mother.

  The reaction I had to having failed to nurse a baby whose malformed palate made it impossible was the same one I’d experienced after my attempt at a VBAC, five years before. That effort had resulted in forty-four hours of unmedicated labor, followed by another C-section. With Abraham, I immersed myself in the community, virtual and actual, of lactation consultants and La Leche groups, and when pregnant with his older brother, Zeke, I spent most of my time online, chatting and reading about how to avoid a medically unnecessary Cesarean. And all Cesareans were, at least according to the “experts” in natural childbirth populating the online VBAC communities, unnecessary. The women around me were having their babies in birthing tubs and presenting their midwives with eight-page, lavender-scented birth plans. Granted, I live in Berkeley, where the idea of an elective C-section is about as remote as a twenty-four-hour Rush Limbaugh marathon. Perhaps in other parts of the country a woman who ends up under the knife is not derided as “too posh to push.” Posh or not, I never got to push. After forty-four hours a doctor shoved my midwife aside and, after asking me, “Are you trying to kill your baby?,” ordered a C-section.