Bad Mother

by Ayelet Waldman

  Since my experience with Rocketship, I have come to question most things about the abortion debate, except my commitment to the right to privacy and to choice. In the deepest throes of my pain, my mother, trying to comfort me, told me that it was nothing more than a fetus, not a baby, just a glorified bundle of cells. Cells, I said, with fingers and toes, a tiny but visible penis, arms and legs and elbows and knees, and a brain, damaged, perhaps, or simply unlucky. Even though the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade specifically declined to rule on the question, the debates about abortion often degenerate into an argument about when life begins. Does it begin at conception, at birth, at viability? Before Rocketship, I never questioned the terms of this debate. But now I worry that if all this hinges on the question of when life begins, then our right to terminate our pregnancies will be lost.

  Although I know that others feel differently, when I chose to have the abortion, I feel I chose to end my baby’s life. A baby, not a fetus. A life, not a vague potentiality. As guilty and miserable as I felt, the only way I could survive was to confront my responsibility. Rocketship was my baby. And I killed him.

  I know my opinions on the subject are harsh and unpopular. Many mothers who have gone through what I have shy away even from the term “abortion.” As if merely having once wanted this baby so badly makes choosing to end its life something different.

  In the weeks following my abortion, I spent hours of every day on the Web site A Heartbreaking Choice, reading other women’s stories, seeking and giving support. What drove me away, finally, was the language of discourse on the Web site. Women there did not have abortions. They made heartbreaking choices. They had “AHCs.” As in, “After my AHC it took six months to get pregnant again.” Or “My religious Catholic mother hasn’t spoken to me since my AHC.” The word “abortion” was forbidden, as was the word “death,” and the word “anger.”

  But I was so very angry. Angry at fate, angry at myself. I felt like that epitome of evil: a mother who has killed her child. Whatever maternal crimes I had committed before were nothing to this one, mere whitecaps to this tsunami. If ever I felt like I earned the title of this book, it was then. I was not just a Bad Mother; I was the worst of mothers.

  I woke from the anesthesia absolutely certain that Rocketship’s collection of triplicate chromosomes would have done him no harm. I was sure that if he had had a mother with more faith and courage, he would have been perfectly normal. This certainty was hardly a surprise; a pessimist is committed with all her heart to the notion that the worst will happen, and the worst that could happen at that moment was that I had killed my baby with no cause or justification.

  These feelings were ugly—too ugly, it turns out, for the Inter net. I frightened the other members of A Heartbreaking Choice with my shame and anger. I made them uncomfortable—especially the many pro-life women among them—by insisting that we accept the term “abortion” for what we had done. There is no denying, I wrote in my posts, that this is what we did. We cannot hide from the fact that when Congress or the courts restrict abortion, we are the women they are talking about. Our refusal to confront this truth will be the undoing of the women who come after us. If we allow the language of the debate to encompass only the experience of those women who abort for what others like to call “convenience,” and they themselves know as necessity, then we risk losing this precious right altogether. How many of us, I asked, would want to have been forced to carry these babies to term?

  In the end, I and a small group of like-minded, bitter women with black senses of humor and hyper-developed political consciousnesses went off to form our own support group. A group that we, in all our bitterness and black humor, called the Dead Baby Club. Our club grew larger and larger. Once something like this happens to you, you learn that among the happy community of Bugaboo strollers and preschool picnics is a secret society of loss, of miscarriage and stillbirth, genetic termination and SIDS, like a single black thread winding through a length of white silk. The club has more members than you would believe.

  The Dead Baby Club met regularly. We worked our way through the restaurants of the Bay Area, weeping in one after the other, frightening waiters and driving away customers. We shared an embarrassing fury at pregnant women, whom we considered ridiculously naive. We used to joke that we would take our lunch one day to our obstetrician’s office and tell our stories in the waiting room, just to teach the smug pregnant ladies a lesson. Yeah, maybe you’ll have a baby. And maybe you won’t.

  This anger was a kind of insanity, one of Kübler-Ross’s stages of grief, I suppose, that was alleviated in the end only by becoming pregnant again. One by one most of the women in the Dead Baby Club got pregnant. I did, after five long months, during which I sank into a despair unlike any I experienced before or since. Although none of us ever again approached pregnancy with the blissful hopefulness of an unburdened mother, we all managed to pass through and out of our fury. After a while we were able once again to express congratulations to other pregnant women, rather than issuing dire and dour warnings.

  On Yom Kippur, the day when Jews gather and confess our sins to ourselves and each other and request absolution from our God, I wrote a letter to Rocketship and read it aloud in our synagogue. Because I don’t believe in the kind of God that sits in judgment on our confessions, I did not atone before God. Rather, I atoned before my community, my family, and myself. I atoned before my husband, and my baby. I begged Rocketship’s forgiveness for being so inadequate a mother that I could not accept an imperfect child. I told him that I wished I was more like his father. I wished I had been able to play the odds.

  When the day of fasting was over, I did not feel an immediate sense of release. I did not forgive myself right away—nor have I yet, nor will I ever—but I did feel the beginning of an easing, a slight shifting in the way I was experiencing the guilt.

  Before Rocketship, I had published the first few of my Mommy-Track mysteries, lighthearted little novels featuring a heroine who cracks jokes about being a mom while she solves the many murders that crop up in her peculiarly fatal corner of suburban Los Angeles. But in the immediate aftermath of the abortion, I found it impossible to return to those books. I had no funny in me about motherhood. I felt like the worst Bad Mother in the world, a mother who had killed her baby. What could possibly be funny about that?

  Yet I also found myself desperate to write. I had the sense that I wasn’t ever going to understand and learn to live with what had happened unless I wrote about it. I wasn’t going to return to even a facsimile of the person I’d been before without the comfort of solitude and words.

  I could not, at first, write directly about Rocketship. The pain was too fresh, and I lacked the necessary perspective and emotional distance. Instead, I wrote a novel, Daughter’s Keeper, which I intended to be a manifesto, a screed against the destruction of society wrought by the War on Drugs. Instead, and inevitably, I suppose, I wrote a novel about a mother who loses her daughter. I wrote a novel about the debts a mother owes her children, even when the children are themselves adults. I wrote about the fear that your child will be taken away, or that you will drive her away, and the shame of making a decision that prioritizes your needs above hers. I gave the mother and daughter in the novel an ending that, although bittersweet, redeemed the mother’s love. Feeling like the worst mother in the world, I gave the mother in my novel a chance to be good.

  It was as though I were writing in concentric rings around the heart of what happened—Daughter’s Keeper the farthest out. Some time passed, and I felt like I could jump one circle in, but only one. I wrote a short story about a mother who breast-feeds the ghost of her dead baby. The story is creepy and frightening and, like all ghost stories, turns a real pain into a supernatural one, thus making it easier to stomach. One ring closer to the truth of Rocketship was my novel Love and Other Impossible Pursuits, where I confronted full force the terrible grief and guilt of a mother whose baby has died.

  And now, with this
eleventh of eighteen chapters, I am in the innermost ring, the core of the circle. This is the first time I have written with such detail about what happened to Rocketship, about what I did and how I felt. And because I can write about Rocketship, I can accept that all wounds, even the most painful, finally heal.

  Aborting my baby is the most serious of the many maternal crimes I tally in my head when I am at my lowest, when the Bad Mother label seems to fit best. But although I still sometimes find myself in that place of judgment, I also know that my children need me too much for me to waste my time on the malignant indulgence of guilt.

  The morning of the first Mother’s Day after the abortion Michael led me to the window of our bedroom and pointed out into the yard. In a patch of earth next to our front gate, he had planted a slender plum sapling.

  “Happy Mother’s Day,” he said. “I love you.”

  Rocketship would have been eight years old this year. In those eight years the sapling has grown into a tree, its trunk four hand spans round, its masses of leaves golden red in the spring sun. “Rocketship’s tree” we call it. This spring, for the first time, the tree bore fruit, little purple plums that we were at first afraid to eat. Sophie was the only one brave enough to pop a plum into her mouth. Her smile was wide. “Delicious!” she said. “Perfect!” She handed me a plum.

  I bit into it. The ripe flesh was sweet, sweeter than any plum I’d ever eaten. But the inside of the skin was sour. Not inedible, but a little zing of tartness against my tongue, a reminder of both joy and pain.

  12. A Nose for Bad News

  One evening not long ago, while enjoying a family dinner at the kids’ favorite restaurant, a diner owned by members of the band Green Day that specializes in meat loaf and milk shakes served by be-pierced young people suffering from a desperate surfeit of cool, Michael and I discovered that we have been under surveillance. The night before we had gotten into a fight—neither a rare nor a common occurrence. Michael and I see eye to eye on almost every question of importance that arises in our household, we enjoy no one’s company as much as each other’s, we spend the vast majority of each day together, but every so often things take a turn for the bombastic. Over the course of a marriage of a certain length—we’ve been married for fifteen years—all arguments tend to coalesce and devolve into a meta-argument, an argument about the nature of the argument, revolving around slippery questions such as who started the argument, who was the one doing the yelling, whether an apology is required, by whom any such apology should be offered first, whether the resulting tone of contrition is genuine or adequate, and so on. The fundamental absurdity of the process, and the fact that both of us care far more for each other than for it, means that while our fights are loud and all-consuming, they never last for more than a few minutes, and are usually resolved when I storm out of the house, drive around the block a few times, and return, bored or contrite. Never once in fifteen years of passion and debate have we gone to bed angry, and by the next day neither of us can recall much of what happened.

  We live in an old house with, we thought, solid, thick walls. And thus we were stunned to find out that Sophie had heard our fight. Sitting amid the hipsters and alt-rock junkies with their barbed wire, Japanese demon mask, and nautical star tattoos, the blood draining from our faces, we listened as she calmly recounted the argument in all its specific detail. To us this particular argument, whatever its source or flash point, had within minutes merged into the undistinguished gray mass of all its predecessors. But Sophie, it turns out, has a far better memory for our discord than we do.

  “That was a very nice apology, Mommy,” she said to me, with a hint of condescension in her tone. “Although you might have made it earlier on, the first time Daddy asked you for it.”

  My tongue scraped against the dry roof of my mouth. I took a drink of water. Then I said, “Did you hear a lot of what Daddy and I were talking about?”

  Talking. Yeah, that’s one way to put it.

  “Yes,” my daughter said brightly, “I heard everything. I can always hear everything you guys do and say.” Across the table Michael covered his mouth in wordless horror. “But I only listen when you’re fighting,” she continued. “Otherwise I don’t really pay any attention.”

  I turned to her younger brother, busy with his fried chicken and biscuit.

  “Can you hear everything, too?”

  “No.”

  “Thank God.”

  “I only hear it when you’re doing mm-mm-mm,” he said, giving his eyebrows a lascivious waggle.

  I don’t know why I am surprised by any of this. My children are moderately more precocious than I was—it took me until junior high school to start invading my parents’ privacy on a regular basis—but by the time I was thirteen, searching through my parents’ drawers and listening to their conversations were two of my primary preoccupations. Why did I ever imagine that my own secrets would be any more sacrosanct or less interesting than theirs?

  My parents both worked, and from the time I was in sixth grade and my younger brother in second, we came home to an empty house. There were strict rules about what we were supposed and forbidden to do. We were to do our homework and walk the dog. We were not to fight or eat candy. Most important, we were never, never to watch television. Not once did we consider following these edicts, but in the late 1970s television was not the wonderland it now is. In the late afternoon our favorite reruns came on—old episodes of Happy Days or The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Occasionally, if we had achieved a deep enough state of desperation that we were willing to risk being educated, we’d even watch The Electric Company. But, while I indulged a brief infatuation with the goings-on of Luke and Laura (was it rape or true love?), the early afternoon offered little more than a wasteland of game shows and local news. Usually, in the hours before a decent show would air, I amused myself with exploring my mother’s underwear drawer, the shelf on the top of my father’s closet, his bottom desk drawer, her top corner bookshelf. My preoccupation, of course, was sex, and I was looking for anything that smacked of even the remotest licentiousness. It was the 1970s, and my parents satisfied me with the occasional Playboy magazine, a dog-eared paperback copy of Fanny Hill, and the ever-popular Joy of Sex, that hairyarmpits staple of the fantasies of suburban teenagers across America. Once, during a disturbingly transgressive phase of all our lives, a copy of The Joy of Lesbian Sex even showed up on the bookcase, next to a volume of Victorian porn, The Pearl.

  As I grew older, my interests expanded beyond the purely sexual. I rifled their filing cabinet, looking for letters and documents, preferably ones that would cast aspersions on my siblings or on my parents themselves. Panicked missives from deans of students, psychologists’ reports, medical evaluations, accusatory letters from my father’s ex-wife. I would tremble with a kind of delighted horror when I found them. There was no similar thrill to be found from the notification that my sister made the dean’s list or a form letter indicating that my father’s cholesterol was in the normal range. I took pleasure only in bad news. It was misery and only misery that satisfied me.

  Neither were my parents’ drawers the only ones that fell victim to my snooping. I was a popular babysitter, my services in high demand throughout the neighborhood. I enjoyed being with children and they liked me, I could be trusted to clean up the kitchen (when did that become an unimaginable request to make of a teenage sitter?), and, most important, I had never once turned down a job because I had a date. (Note to parents: Fun-loving social rejects make the most reliable babysitters.) As soon as my charges were asleep, however, I began rifling through their parents’ bedrooms. I examined the vibrators in the nightstand drawers, opened the pale pink plastic diaphragm cases, stretched out on the king-size beds, and studied Penthouse Forum. In the last years of the Me Decade there seemed to be a fad for journal keeping among young mothers, and I read, my eyes usually glazed with boredom, endless handwritten passages about arguments with husbands and mothers, attempts, occasionally successful, a
t achieving orgasm, the trials and tribulations of potty training, and the machine politics of the PTA.

  I was always careful to leave everything exactly as I’d found it, and while I could be wrong, I don’t think anyone ever realized that their sweet, trustworthy babysitter was anything but. I should, thus, not have been surprised to realize that I’d gone and bred four spies of my own.

  My daughter’s admission that she pays attention only when we are fighting, given so casually, brought me immediately back to myself at her age, perched on the top step of the staircase, listening to my own parents’ bitter exchanges. My childhood memories are restricted to the tone and volume of these arguments, their precise words and topics having long since faded from my memory. What I do remember is that listening to my parents fighting was not the terrifying experience you might imagine it to be. My parents were never physically abusive to each other; I could listen to them argue without fearing that they would cause bruises. At least not ones you could see. There was a certain thrill involved in eavesdropping on them, a kind of vicarious excitement to the drama of their discord.

  That scene, the child at the top of the stairs, the parents fighting below, is a staple of the young-adult novel. As a child, I read countless renditions of it. But I never reacted like the characters in those books. I didn’t sit, my heart in my mouth. I didn’t weep soundless tears or clutch my teddy bear to my chest. I remember leaning forward, listening closely, with a kind of clinical detachment. All but taking notes.

  I think my daughter is cut from the same cloth as her mother. Decades apart, we both determined that the best way to figure out the complicated and incomprehensible world of adult relationships is to evaluate them at their worst, to dissect them when they are fragile, even broken.