“[P]leeeaassseee pleeeeeease take her awaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyyy: she’s RUINED Michael Chabon for me. I’ll never read another of his books, EVER. I won’t be ABLE to—just THINKING of him married to HER makes me ILL.”
“I always need to take a shower after I read Ayelet Waldman’s pieces.”
Even the process of cutting and pasting those sentences makes me cringe, in spite of the fact that when they were written I was already no stranger to controversy, nor to hate mail. The essay I wrote about loving my husband more than my children, the one that made me the butt of such hysterical fury all over the Web, landed me on Oprah, where I faced down a studio full of wrathful mothers, with only the eponymous host at my side. * But being defended only by Oprah is like relying for nuclear deterrence only on the U.S. arsenal of nuclear warheads. You won’t be surprised to learn that I won the daytime TV battle. By the end of the show all the angry mommies were reassuring Oprah that they agreed with me.
No, I was no neophyte to insult. I had been treated to plenty of rage and sanctimony—I live in Berkeley after all. But there is something special, having nothing to do with me in particular, about the kind of abuse people hurl at one another over the ether. It’s ubiquitous, from the political Web sites where people attack even the most neutral of comments, to the vacuous echo chamber that is Gawker (and I say this even though they honored Michael and me with the title of third-most-annoying literary couple). It is a truism to point out that it is because of its anonymity that the Web has become a snark-filled cesspit. If the person who called me a freak had not been permitted the cloak of anonymity, I bet he would have figured out another way to state his objection. The folks who hawk phlegm in letters columns are always too cowardly to sign their real names.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the Web. I revel in its breadth and depth of information. In the past twenty-four hours alone I have used the Web to look up the following pieces of information: the maximum speed of a classic single-hulled wooden schooner; current presidential polling figures for Colorado, Florida, Ohio, and Minnesota; how incomplete grades are awarded at Harvard College; who on my street gave the maximum donations to which presidential candidate; the hours of low tide in Blue Hill, Maine, on July 4 of last year; the square footage of the average boxing ring; the hours of operation of the Two Bird Café in San Geronimo; what percentage of Americans are idiotic enough to believe Barack Obama is a Muslim; the cost of custom-designed Vans; the winner of last year’s National Book Award; the cost of a set of sails for the above-referenced schooner; which of Paganini’s capriccios is more challenging to play, no. 5 or no. 24; the names of string quartets; the starting time of the movie The Incredible Hulk at my local cineplex; the relative merits of local Ethiopian restaurants; Golden Gloves rules regarding the composition of boxing gloves; the average weight of five-year-old American boys and the correlation of emaciation with delayed cognitive development; the efficacy of Cetaphil as a remedy for lice infestation; whether frequent lice reinfestation has ever been used as a justifiable defense in a case of assault; the cost of a flight between Oakland, California, and New York City; the cost of a flight between New York City and Bangor, Maine; nutritional information on agave nectar; and the average number of puppies in a litter of dachshunds. (I fear that list may be incomplete.)
I have been involved in a myriad of Listservs and online communities—one for owners of Bernese mountain dogs, another for devotees of raw-meat dog food (I know, I know), a whole host of sites dealing with various aspects of the 2008 presidential elections. I have lurked on sites offering information on the treatment and care of children with ADHD, on up-to-the-minute information and photographs of women’s high-heeled shoes, on the side effects of psychotropic medications, on writing, and skin care, and the proper treatment of plantar fasciitis. All of these get ugly, some with more regularity than others. But with the exception of the political Web sites, the vitriol is worst when the subject is motherhood. And even on political Web sites, the targets of the most venomous cyber-assaults are, I believe, more often women than men.
Periodically over the course of human history we come upon an intersection of technology and some long-dormant trait of human or animal behavior, some characteristic we would never have suspected without the arrival of an invention that unexpectedly reveals it. Dogs offer a perfect example. Humans worked to domesticate the descendants of wolves, creating over millennia a canine companion that can hunt, herd sheep, protect its human and his home, and guide the blind. Then, in 1903, the first Model A’s rolled off Henry Ford’s assembly line, and it suddenly became clear that the entire fifteen-thousand-year effort had served to create a creature perfectly suited to one activity: sticking its snout out the window of a car traveling down the interstate at sixty-five miles per hour.
It’s the same with mothers and the Internet. When the ARPANET first came online, nobody in the Department of Defense had any idea that they were creating the most critical piece of the mommy war* puzzle. There have always been plenty of forums in which to make mothers feel insecure, but we have, with the creation of the Web and the proliferation of motherhood-related Web sites, reached some kind of nexus, a con junction of maternal anxiety, misogyny, guilt, leisure, and tech no logy that has been, on balance, a big bummer for contemporary mothers.
In 2006 the University of Maryland published a study that showed that women are twenty-five times more likely to be the targets of malicious online attacks than men. The Web doesn’t just bring out the worst in all of us, it brings out the most misogyny, and the most self-loathing. Women have always been nasty to one another, but the Internet has widened the reach of each individual’s venom. Where once you actually had to know someone to make her miserable (or at least know someone who knew someone), now you can spew bile on tens of thousands of strangers with a single click of the mouse. And it’s not just the breadth of the effect; it is its depth, too. Because so much of the traffic on the Web is anonymous, we allow ourselves to sink to a level that would sicken us if we heard ourselves speaking out loud. Remember that Bad Mother police force? How many of those cops might have opted for early retirement if they were not able to sit around in their nightgowns in the middle of the night, slapping virtual cuffs on each other and sentencing strangers to the chair?
I am by no means ready to give up on the Web. I’m not going to go off and join a Luddite community of Wi-Fi-phobes deep in the Arizona desert. (Did you know that there are people who claim to be allergic to Wi-Fi?) I am not even ready to give up on joining online affinity groups of mothers. I made it through the bleak months of trying to get Abie to nurse in part because of the wisdom and support of the women of PumpMoms, who not only taught me how to get three letdowns in a single pumping session but also refrained from criticizing me when I decided that, with my nipples the size and shape of elderly ballpark franks and my baby thinking of me as merely that lady strapped to the bright yellow pumping machine on the other side of the room, it was time for me to quit.
I think the time is past when we can hope for a civil society to prevail on the Web. That genie is out of the bottle. The only thing we can do is try to remember that the Internet can be a pastry laced with poison, especially for mothers, and as we enjoy its many benefits, we must remind ourselves to take small bites. We can protect our kids with cyber-bullying statutes, but as far as their mothers are concerned, I fear we have no choice but caveat prolaptor. Let the surfer* beware.
* As if finding out your baby’s gender is any less of a surprise at three months than at birth.
* There were a few mothers who were there to agree with me, and an expert on fatherhood, too, but somehow they paled in comparison to the woman who lunged across the stage screaming, “Let me at ’er!”
* Yes, I know, I hate the term, too. It’s usually used by people like Dr. Phil, because the image of professional women and stay-at-home mothers tearing out each other’s throats spikes ratings, but I’m not using it like that. I’m just talking here about all th
e ways we mothers make one another feel like shit.
* Technically, slip-and-slider, but it was as close as I could get.
6. Like a Fish Needs a Bicycle
A number of years ago, Michael’s cousin David was killed in an accident. He was commuting to work on his bicycle when he was hit by a car speeding through a turn. After he died, his wife, Ariel, told me that one of the many things she missed about him was having a man in the house to fix a dripping faucet, put together an Ikea cabinet, change the batteries in the smoke detector. David was killed the day before trash pickup, and that night the cans did not go out. The next week, as Ariel hauled out the heavy bins brimming with the detritus of a week’s shiva—paper plates, plastic cups, uncountable wads of damp tissue—she realized that she was alone.
There was nothing traditional about those two. David was like Michael, as involved a father as I’ve ever seen. He didn’t just change the occasional diaper; he assumed equal responsibility for the care of their daughter. Ariel is a massage therapist, a doula, and while I’m not sure, I’m willing to bet she’d call herself a feminist. Still, when it came to home repair, the division of labor fell along traditional lines. That’s the way it is in my marriage, too.
For all my adamant feminism, it never occurred to me to take Michael’s name when we married, and not just because to do so would have horrified my mother. I am a supporter of abortion rights, of equal pay for equal work, of the rights of women prisoners, of all the time-honored feminist causes, and then some. During the periods in my marriage when I chose to stay home with my kids, even though I knew I was contributing to our family by caring for our children, I still felt that my worth was less because I wasn’t earning.
Even given all this, I haven’t changed a lightbulb in sixteen years, since the day I met my husband.
Before I was married, I didn’t consider my failure to manage even basic hand tools a feminist inadequacy. I thought it had more to do with being Jewish. The Jews I knew growing up didn’t do “do-it-yourself.” When my father needed to hammer something, he generally used his shoe, and the only real tool he owned was a pair of needle-nose pliers. My non-Jewish friends had fathers who changed faucet washers (they knew what faucet washers were) and re-planed sticky doors. My father hacked with a pair of needle-nose pliers at anything my mother was not willing to call a repairman to fix.
Now when something breaks in the house, I respond with the panic of my forebears. Every popped lightbulb is a catastrophe, every leaky faucet spells, if not the end of the world, then surely the beginning of months of crack-assed plumbers hunched over my sinks and toilets, flushing my hard-earned dollars down their mysterious drains. It always takes me a minute to remember that Michael is not like my father. He’s got a set of needle-nose pliers, even two, but he’s also got slip-joint pliers and groove-joint pliers and pliers I don’t even know the names of. When the faucet leaks, he not only knows what a washer is, he can replace it. Moreover, he enjoys the job. He hangs pictures, he unclogs toilets, he knows what to do when the computer flashes that scary little bomb icon.
Each time, after my initial moment of hysteria, I feel a wave of contentment, of security. I feel protected. I am a damsel in clogged-drain distress, and he is my knight with shining plunger. It is uncomfortable for me to admit that when it comes to this part of our lives, I want to feel sheltered and cared for. There is something seductive about letting go of this area of concern. Instead of causing anxiety, a dripping faucet now reminds me that there is someone in my life who can take care of such things.
When Michael goes away, I allow things in the house to fall into a state of ridiculous disarray. I avert my eyes from the blinking oil light in the car; I prop a door closed with a chair until he comes home to fix the latch. I lie in the dark and listen to the toilets running, waiting for him to do whatever it is he does to make them quiet again. As lightbulbs burn out, the kids and I just squint in the ever-increasing gloom.
When I was single and lived alone, I was perfectly capable of getting the ladder out and changing bulbs on my own. So what is it about marriage that has made me so dependent, and why, even witnessing the warning of Ariel’s example, do I continue to allow myself to behave like some helpless 1950s sitcom wife?
Now that I am working again, this is the only area of our lives where traditional roles hold us in such sway. Otherwise, as I’ve told you before, our partnership is remarkably equal. Michael does as much or more of the actual floor time of parenting. He cleans more than I do. He does all the cooking. Given this, and given that I am someone who takes equality between the sexes so seriously, shouldn’t the fact that I seem to enjoy a certain kind of helplessness bother me? Feminism, for all that the word has fallen out of fashion, is ubiquitous enough that it feels vaguely shameful for a woman to want to feel protected. A good feminist mother would be able to do it all—assemble the crib, prepare her own organic baby food, snake the drain, breast-feed the baby, and regrout the bathtub.
What I feel worst about is that I am perpetuating this dichotomy into the next generation. Michael is training our sons to follow in his competent footsteps, but not, alas, our daughters. It’s not that he doesn’t want to teach the girls. Every time he busts out his electric screwdriver, he tries to recruit an assistant, but the only volunteers for the job in our house are male. The girls would rather stick to building elaborate fairy houses for their tiny Japanese rubber hamsters or running up leg warmers on their sewing machine, and I never try very hard to convince them to drop everything and hold the clamp for Daddy while the wood glue dries. A Good Mother, one who took seriously her obligation to prepare her daughters for an egalitarian world, would be cracking the home-repair whip, wouldn’t she?
Michael feels no counterpoint to my feminist crisis. I am solely responsible for our finances, a job that, while many women do it, might be considered the traditional purview of a man. Yet he doesn’t find it emasculating that he hasn’t paid a bill in as long as I haven’t changed a lightbulb. On the contrary, he’s relieved.
Perhaps my lack of concern with my home-repair incompetence is nothing more than a vestige of that patriarchy I spent so much time reading about and demonstrating against in college. Maybe I’m not as much of a feminist as I think I am. After all, I stopped working and stayed home with kids for years, and neither Michael nor I even considered for a moment the possibility that he would stop writing. Maybe I enjoy feeling inept with a hammer and a screwdriver because part of me thinks that’s how girls are supposed to behave. Maybe that’s why I haven’t been more aggressive about making my daughters learn the intricacies of the toilet’s balky flushing mechanism.
But I don’t think so.
I think this has more to do with the nature of marriage. In every union roles are assumed, some traditional, some not. Michael used to pay his own bills; I used to call my own repairman. But as marriages progress, you surrender areas of your own competence, often without even knowing it. You do this in part because it’s more efficient for each individual to have his or her own area of expertise, but also as a kind of optimistic gesture. By surrendering certain skills, you are affirming your belief that the other person will remain there to care for you in that way.
This kind of capitulation is not without its pitfalls, of course. Every woman who has given over the financial reins only to find herself divorced and penniless knows its dangers. Still, one of the wonderful things about an intimate partnership is the division of life, the parsing out and sharing of responsibility.
One of the tragedies of a lost love is the collapse of this system, and the confrontation of the ways we’ve allowed ourselves to become dependent. When I think of Ariel alone in her house, learning for herself the things that she once relied on David for, my heart breaks. Ariel is a strong and able woman. Of course she can put together a cabinet or unplug a toilet. So could I, if I set my mind to it, and checked out a few books on home repair from the library. My heart breaks because this enforced proficiency is symbolic of Da
vid’s absence, of all the ways in which she and her daughter must do without the man on whom they would still rely if only fortunes were different, if only that driver had taken the corner more slowly.
I suppose you could argue that this is precisely why we shouldn’t give in to this seductive loss of expertise. You could even argue that we could view the end of a relationship as an opportunity to become stronger, to relearn or learn new skills. I don’t know. I do know that I am not going to be picking up a hand tool anytime soon. I will continue to pay the bills; Michael will unclog the toilets. That is the way our marriage works; that is the bargain we struck without a word. My only wish is that I could take a page out of his book and refrain from feeling guilty about it.
7. My Mother-in-Law, Myself
When Zeke was in preschool, he came home every day and headed straight for the couch. He pulled me down next to him and cleaved his plump body to my own less adorably rotund one. He pressed his soft lips to my neck, nuzzling under my chin, breathing deep, as if he wanted to inhale every molecule of the fragrance he had missed in the four hours of our separation. He placed his palms on my cheeks and kissed me on the lips, languidly yet gravely, like a very small, round-cheeked lover.
I can’t say that while he was gone, I missed him as much as he missed me; I did not prove my devotion by spending our time apart dripping tears onto the sand table and rocking in misery on the cushions of the book nook. I was too busy reveling in my time alone, getting my work done, going for solitary walks, reintroducing myself to my husband. But when Zeke returned, I leaped onto the couch with as much eagerness as he. Holding his fleshy, silky body was the most satisfying tactile experience I have ever had in my life. The flawlessness of an infant’s skin is a trite metaphor, but his baby skin was even more buttery than most. And I’m not a child-aggrandizing mother blinded by love. I have four children, and this boy’s skin was different. It felt like the freshest heavy cream tastes: smooth and round, fat and thick on the tongue. His body, too, was different. It’s a wonder how what can inspire such disgust on an adult can be so delectable on an infant. Zeke is eleven years old now, as thin and wiry as a half-starved whippet, but when I close my eyes, I can still feel the give of his plump baby flesh under my fingers.
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