Bad Mother

by Ayelet Waldman

  The buzz of hypomania is one of the reasons that I, like my siblings, refuse to take lithium. Lithium and other mood-stabilizing drugs work on mood from above, flattening the highs that can be so dangerous. Lows, while debilitating, do not usually result in an involuntary stay in the hospital. It’s the mania—the spending sprees and racing thoughts, the paranoid delusions and frantic rages—that get you locked up. But I have never been manic. At my worst, I suffer from those mixed states, which are unpleasant and destructive but not dangerous enough (so far) to bring out the heavy joy-sucking and creativity-destroying artillery. And at my best? At my best, I am glorious. When hypomanic, I am busy and confident, vivacious and funny. I bring a laser focus to my writing, like a kid who pops Adderall before the SATs. I produce reams of prose of far better quality than the tiny constipated bundles I normally squeeze out. I entertain crowded dinner parties with anecdotes, and cheerfully volunteer for tasks that others avoid. In fact, one of my biggest problems with my bipolar disorder is struggling while depressed with the commitments I make while hypomanic.

  Every once in a while the hypomania goes a little too far before it abates. I have to take an extra Ambien to fall asleep, or I monopolize the conversations at those dinner parties, unable to keep myself from interrupting. Worse, I over-share. I can always spot the other bipolar at the party. She’s the one regaling the room with the hysterical tale of her husband’s virulent herpes outbreak. Hypomania, like its bizarro twin, the mixed state, involves a loss of control. Normally people maintain a decorum in their actions and conversations that is appropriate to the circumstance they are in. Hypomanics lose that judgment. While hypomanic, I am capable of writing three books in a single year, but I am also in danger of posting intimate details about my marriage on a blog. The bipolar inability to resist the impulse to reveal inappropriately intimate details of one’s life is why there are so many bipolar memoirists. Writers who lie, who try to put themselves in the best possible light, who shy away from the ugliest parts of the truth, don’t in the end teach us very much about anything other than their own narcissism. It’s only when you do the bipolar dance on the razor’s edge of brutal honesty, when you are willing to put yourself in danger, that you can move beyond self-absorption to some kind of universal honesty. And yet, at the same time, indulging one’s bipolar compulsion for self-revelation can all too often end up as solipsism. It’s a thin, thin line, one that I spend a lot of my time worrying about crossing, or regretting having crossed.

  However, while lots of us enjoy our hypomania so much that we feel an ambivalence toward the idea of curing our disease, our families rarely take the same pleasure. While they can appreciate our high-spiritedness and the fruits of our over-productive labors, the downside is too costly. Our families are the ones who suffer at the hands of our rages, and they are brought almost as low as we are by our despairs.

  However much I embrace my hypomania, however much I’d love for my children to be writers and artists, to enjoy the madness of creativity, I love them far too much to wish this burden on them, or on the people they love. And so I watch them. I calibrate their moods the way they calibrate mine. Is he more angry than he should be after that quarrel with his sister? Was her wildness in the playground just high-spiritedness or did it evince a troubling lack of control? Is that normal adolescent melancholy? Is that a normal tantrum? Is he okay? Is she okay? Have I passed this to them, along with my green eyes, my short stature, my intelligence, and the shape of my pinkie toe?

  This unremitting vigilance is itself a cause of anxiety. Even parents who aren’t crazy struggle with the balance between monitoring their children and allowing them independence, between keeping them safe and giving them space in which they can make their own mistakes. For Michael and me, our inherent natures—his optimism, my pessimism—influence our different approaches to the way we monitor our children. Convinced that things could turn out terribly wrong, I observe and evaluate like a safety inspector at a nuclear facility. My dear cheerful husband (most often correctly) dismisses my concerns.

  What happened with Rocketship was such a devastating blow to us in part because that bad test result bore out my pessimistic vigilance. If it had been up to Michael, we probably wouldn’t even have had the amnio. But, unwilling to trust fate or probability, I insisted. And look what happened: as blessed as we had always been, here now the universe had dealt us a shitty hand. Being right about this added fuel to my fatalistic fire. If we could be that unlucky once, then anything—everything—could happen.

  Since then, my eye for the evil eye has been proved right on other occasions. For years I fretted and worried about Zeke’s behavior in school. He was unhappy. He acted out. When his standardized test scores came back off the charts—at both ends—I pressed his teacher about whether he should be evaluated. Something was off. Again and again I questioned and was rebuffed, told to calm down, not to worry so much. Finally, sure that there was something going on that we were missing, I insisted, over Michael’s objections, that we take Zeke to a neuropsychologist.

  He has, it turns out, a series of fairly minor problems. He has ADHD, and processing-speed delay, and a really bad working memory. None of these rises to the point of disability, and all are eminently treatable, and had I just insisted on testing him earlier, we would have spared him what was a truly agonizing fourth-grade year. And again with his little sister; for a year I felt like a neurotic nut, asking over and over again if it was really okay that she wasn’t reading, even though I knew that it sometimes took kids a long time, even though it had taken her sister until she was seven to comfortably read a book. But I pushed for evaluation, and it turns out Rosie has a decoding problem, and now that she’s got a tutor to teach her how to work around it, she’s making progress by leaps and bounds.

  So the vigilance works, right? Oh, the glory of being able to say “I told you so,” a mother’s four favorite words. Except that, by constantly watching for defects and disability, you run the risk of pathologizing your perfectly healthy children. You risk focusing so hard on the possibility of the negative that you lose sight of the positive. You risk, in the words of my friendly neighborhood Berkeley scold, imposing “your negative view of the universe” on your kids.

  Because I know that I am by nature such a catastrophizer, and because I am really afraid of bipolar disorder, I run a terrible risk of seeing every case of the blues, every burst of energy, as a symptom. I cannot let hypervigilance define my experience of motherhood, or of my children’s experience of being mothered by me, so I must resist the temptation to see every mood of my children as a symptom of a disease. I have to be vigilant, in other words, about policing my vigilance.

  When I was about three months pregnant with Abraham, Michael and I went to have a CVS, a genetic screening test that we chose because it can be done far earlier than an amnio. We’d had one with Rosie, and were prepared for the experience. What we were not prepared for was the look on the ultrasound technician’s face as she measured the baby. She stepped out of the room and returned with the doctor, who very gravely told us that the chances were good that there was something seriously wrong. The fetus was measuring far too small for eleven weeks.

  He sat back on his stool and gently pulled a sheet over my gel-covered belly. “Are you sure about the dates?” he asked. “Do you know when you had your last period?”

  “Yes,” I said flatly. I had marked it in my calendar. Moreover, our obstetrician had given us an ultrasound early in the pregnancy, and back then the fetus had measured right on target, six weeks.

  “What do you think it is?” I asked. “What could cause this kind of growth retardation?”

  The doctor shook his head. “It could be one of any number of things.”

  I prodded and pressed, and in the end he was no match for the cross-examination of a former criminal defense lawyer with a geneticist’s encyclopedic knowledge of what can go wrong with a chromosome. I could tell he was sorry as soon as he told me which defect he susp
ected. He knew that I knew it was fatal, that the baby would last through the period of gestation only to die soon after he was born. He cautioned me that there was no way to know yet, and that trisomy 13 was just one possibility among many. In a week we would return, and he would again measure the fetus and sample the chorionic villi so that we would know for sure what was wrong.

  That afternoon we told our parents that there seemed to be a problem, although we said nothing to the kids. We couldn’t bear to put them through that again. We made an appointment with the same gentle doctor who had taken such good care of us the last time we needed his unfortunate services. And we cried. Of course we cried.

  The next evening was Rosh Hashanah, the New Year, when Jews go to synagogue and listen to the blasts of the shofar, the ram’s horn, as it trumpets in another year’s worth of joy and misfortune. After the sound of the shofar had faded, the rabbi stepped up to give a sermon about fate, and hope, and trusting in ourselves and in God. He said that if we set ourselves the task of hope, we may find ourselves rewarded in ways we might not have expected. I am not a spiritual person. I was raised by my parents to be skeptical of God and of religion. My parents so loathe religion that my father once told me, somewhat oxymoronically, that he would sit shivah for me (act as if I had died) if I ever became an Orthodox Jew. My mother complained when we told her we were being married by a rabbi, “Can’t you just find a nice judge?” I do yoga and meditate not because I think it will connect me to the supernatural but because I want to lose weight and calm my nerves. But sitting there in the sanctuary, listening to the rabbi’s sermon, the strings of Michael’s prayer shawl looped through my fingers, I felt as though a pure golden light was being poured into my body. I felt warm and blessed. I heard a voice whisper in my ear. It said that my baby was fine. He was healthy. There was nothing wrong with his genes. At that moment I knew as well as I knew my own name that I would give birth to this baby, hold him in my arms, hear his first words, hold his hand while he took his first steps, and dance (kanehara) at his wedding.

  My face was wet with tears, but I was smiling. I leaned over and said to Michael, “He’s fine. The baby is fine.”

  “Oh, darling,” Michael said sadly. “I’m so sorry.”

  “No,” I said. By now the rabbi had stopped speaking and the congregation was singing, an ancient melody that connected me to my husband, to my family, to thousands of years of Jews blessing each New Year with the words of this song. “No, Michael. The baby is fine. I promise you. There is nothing wrong.”

  Michael looked at me, at first with pity, and then with a dawning realization. He says that he thought, “If the world’s most pessimistic person has a flash of optimism and faith, who am I to argue?” At that moment he made the conscious decision to have faith in my faith.

  If I was not wrong, then the ultrasound was. I called the obstetrician and asked her if she had ever had problems with her ultrasound machine. “You know what,” she said. “I think it’s been known to measure on the large side.” Then Michael went on the Web and did research on fertility and air travel (we had been in Italy the month before). It turns out jet lag is correlated with delayed ovulation. The baby was fine, I was certain. He was just younger than we thought.

  A week later we were cheerful as we stepped into the genetic testing center. When you are expecting bad news, they treat you very differently at places like that. You don’t wait in the waiting room with all the joyfully expectant parents. You are ushered inside, kept away from people whom you might scare and who might make you sad. The nurses were shocked at our smiles.

  “The baby’s okay,” I said to them.

  They lowered their eyes.

  “Don’t even bother taking off your clothes,” the ultrasound technician said to me, urgently. “Just jump up on this table and let me measure you.”

  In the intervening week of sorrow and sudden certainty of redemption, the baby had grown exactly as much as he should have. When I went for that first ultrasound, I thought I was six weeks along, but in fact, because of my jet lag, I had ovulated a week later than I normally would have done. So I was only five weeks pregnant. The skewed ultrasound machine had measured the baby as larger than he was, a mistake we hadn’t noticed, because it conformed to our mistaken expectations. The genetic testing center’s scan was the outlier, but it was correct.

  A week later, the results of the CVS confirmed what I already knew. There was no genetic defect. The baby was fine.

  We had known from the beginning that we would name him after my grandfather, but it is hard for me to believe that it was a coincidence that the rabbi whose sermon inspired my faith was named Abraham, too.

  As you know by now, Abraham turned out to have problems. He was a sickly baby. But none of his problems were genetic, none were serious, and after the first harrowing days, none were life threatening. When I am in the throes of my worst anxiety about my children, when I seem almost eager to find issues for concern, I try to remind myself that pessimism has its price, and optimism its reward. I tell myself to remember that golden light of hope, the pure, joyful certainty. That moment, and the faith I place in it, are my legacy to my children, too.

  15. Darling, I Like You That Way

  The readers of Salon.com were very worried about Zeke. They were worried that he had been “betrayed and humiliated,” and they worried that in order to please his selfish mother, the poor boy will have to be gay. The source of their collective anxiety is an essay I wrote in 2005 about gay marriage in which I recounted my son’s comment “I think I might be gay.” Lest you dismiss the hue and cry as more homophobic red-state vitriol, let me assure you that only liberals and the odd libertarian read Salon. The only reason the state legislatures of Alabama and South Carolina don’t ban the site altogether is that, aside from one or two New York English professors forced by the sad state of Ph.D. hiring to relocate to Tuscaloosa or Jackson, no one in the land of Dixie has ever bothered to log on.

  No; the worry, the rage, the horror, came from my brethren on the left.

  The essay was about Zeke’s (seven years old at the time) attitude toward homosexuality. I begin with a story about his best friend, a fifty-nine-year-old lesbian with whom he shares “a passion for the San Francisco Giants, dark chocolate truffles and New York frankfurters … Other than his dad, Zeke would rather be with Laura than pretty much anybody else, including me.” Zeke has always known about Laura’s sexual orientation, and her loving relationship with her partner is one of the many reasons he was able to muse unself-consciously about his own sexual orientation.

  In the essay, I wrote about the moment when I first introduced the subject of homophobia to my kids, ironically at a moment of joy for all of us who care about the civil rights of gay people. We had always referred to Laura’s partner as her wife, because, as I wrote in the essay, “there seemed no other way to describe that relationship in terms the kids could understand, in a way that would align this romance with the other long-term commitments the children knew—our marriage, those of their grandparents—and distinguish it from more transient ones.” When Gavin Newsom, the mayor of San Francisco, first began issuing marriage licenses back in 2005, we celebrated, but we also had to explain to the kids that this was the first time gay people were allowed to be legally married in the United States of America. That shocked Zeke. He believes that you’re supposed to marry the person you love, whoever and whatever that person happens to be.

  But what really freaked people out was that I wrote that not only does the prospect of my son being gay not bother me but I actually hope he might be. The reason I gave for wanting a gay son was lighthearted: “How many straight men maintain inappropriately intimate relationships with their mothers? How many shop with them?”

  I was taken to task for my biases. One gay reader chided me: “Shopping? Inappropriate relationships with your mother? This is not the 1950s and this type of stereotyping is insulting and one of the reasons it’s still hard to be gay in Bush’s America.
” And: “As a gay man, I found these comments to be condescending, out of touch, and quite a bit insulting. Either support gay rights or don’t; but please don’t equate them with some deep desire on the part of gays and lesbians to trash sex-role stereotypes.”

  Good points, and ones with which I agree. That’s why I described my stereotypes as “shopworn and musty clichés.”

  However, at the risk of incurring yet more wrath, I’m going to just go ahead and dive headfirst into the roiling lava pit of bias. While I know and love a few straight men, for every straight male friend I have, there are three or four or more gay men with whom I’d rather spend my time. By and large, the gay men I know are simply more fun. My gay friends dish with more relish and verve. They have a better design sense and are far more willing to discuss the proper placement of a piece of furniture than any straight men I know. For a long time, being part of the gay community mandated a familiarity with a certain kind of culture. You listened to opera, you went to the theater, you wore something fabulous to a Madonna concert. This may be a function of my generation—do nineteen-year-old gay men even know who Barbra Streisand or Maria Callas is?—but I have never met a straight man, other than Michael, who would comb the antiques shops of Venice with me, searching tirelessly for the perfect tasseled pillow. As far as my joke about close relationships with mothers, I’m terrified at the prospect of daughters-in-law. With good reason: I am one myself. I hope my sons are gay so that they will bring home lovely young men who will redecorate my kitchen (another stereotype!). Zeke, his boyfriend, and I would be a giggling and gossiping threesome, going shopping for Jimmy Choos and beaded Victorian lamps (and another stereotype!) before the boys head off to a circuit party. (Now, that’s just real life.)