Small Animals

by Kim Brooks

  Once, when I was in my early twenties, I was riding a bus in San Francisco. Across the aisle from me sat a woman with twin toddlers. I don’t remember the woman’s face or anything about her, because my eyes were on the children. They were playing, and then they were fighting. They were being difficult—bickering, hitting, whining. I was watching them, wondering why the mother didn’t do something, and then suddenly, as the bus slowed and then stopped, she rose, pushed the children aside, and yelled, “Get the fuck away from me!” Then she pushed past them, got off the bus as though she were abandoning them. They both cried and howled and lurched after her. “Mama, Mama!” they screamed, tripping down the stairs of the bus as she pretended not to hear them. That is a horrible mother, I thought. I will never be that kind of mother.

  Or another memory: Growing up, I was friends with a girl who lived in a house at the top of a grassy hill beside a lake. She was my best friend, and I loved her. We played for hours, singing, dancing, chasing the geese into the water. Her mother was always kind and gentle and loving. When I was there, she called us “my girls” and treated me as if I were her own. Whenever we wanted to watch a movie, she would make us an enormous bowl of popcorn and sit on the floor with us while we watched The Goonies or Back to the Future. She didn’t just turn it on but watched it with us, laughed when we laughed. Sometimes we’d lean against her and she’d put her arms around us, bowl of popcorn on her lap, and she would pick up the popcorn with the tip of her tongue, piece by piece, which delighted me. When I grew older, after they moved away, I’d remember her and think, She was a very good mother, the best kind of mother, the opposite of the woman on the bus in San Francisco. My mother, with her temper and impulsivity and anxious love, was somewhere in between, impossible for me to idealize or dismiss. These were all faint memories by the time I had kids, but it didn’t matter, because after I became pregnant, almost no day went by without my evaluating someone’s mothering in present time, forming these categories, erecting these columns.

  In some ways, I suppose, this is inevitable. We are social animals. We thrive together and falter alone, vying for status, guarded against others’ attempts to knock us down. We learn things by watching others do them and seem programmed to share what we know. It’s hard to imagine any moment in history when women didn’t look to one another for models or guidance. When one reads of the way the Puritans parented, or the Victorians, or the ancient Babylonians, or the early cave dwellers, one reads about their customs and practices and values regarding children. Their as in they. A plural unit.

  And yet that day when the nurse at the clinic asked me what kind of pregnancy I wanted, she was inducting me into our current culture of parenthood as an expression of individualism. The way we parent today is molded by our particular class affiliation, political orientation, aesthetic preferences, and personal convictions and beliefs. Attachment parenting, helicopter parenting, free-range parenting, permissive parenting: There are as many brands of parenting as there are of breakfast cereal, and every decision we make about raising our children enhances or detracts from our chosen brand. In a country and culture where so much of our life is commodified and monetized, this shouldn’t be surprising—and yet surprising or no, it creates a particular and peculiar tension, a space between us and our fellow parents that can be difficult to bridge.

  * * *

  About a month after I returned to Chicago, on a windy afternoon in April, I finally broke down and decided to confide to a non–family member about what had happened. Well, decided isn’t exactly the right word—confessed seems closer to the truth. I opened my mouth and found myself describing what had happened—or what was happening. I hadn’t heard back from my attorney and didn’t know how the case would proceed. The person I decided to tell was Tracy.

  She was still one of my closest friends in the city, though in the years that had passed since our pregnant days of frequent lunches and drooling over stroller porn, our friendship had changed, atrophied in the way so many of my friendships did during those first few years of parenthood. Spontaneous lunches or evenings out had become impossible. Get-togethers were now scheduled weeks or even months in advance. And whenever we finally did manage to hang out, there was now only one topic of conversation, our children, which in some ways was fine; I appreciated the chance to talk about parenthood, to have someone who was in the same place. And yet as we talked about whose kids were doing what, who was struggling more with sleeping or nursing or preschool admissions, there was also a part of me that thought, Wait … Is this all that we are now? Didn’t there used to be something else?

  Our lunch that day went well at first. A warm morning. The thawing snowbanks glistened. The sun shone lavishly across the sidewalks, the pools of melted slush, reflecting off the lake, scattered bits and shards of light across the Loop’s glass towers. We decided it was just warm enough to eat outside, so we snagged a table at a French bistro off Michigan Avenue. There was sliced baguette, salades Niçoises, and coffee, the usual declarations of how it had been too long, the usual inquiries into how the kids were doing, the husbands and parents and work. And then, at some point in the conversation, I grew quiet, began to speak, stopped myself. I confided that I’d been dealing with something difficult, the aftermath of something really scary.

  I told her what had happened the day I left my son in the car. I told her I still didn’t know what would come of it, if I’d face criminal charges, if there would be an investigation from Child Protective Services. I was shocked by it all, lost and afraid, and I still couldn’t get my head around the fact that it was really happening, that what I’d done was wrong, that we lived in a culture where letting a kid wait in a car for five minutes was a criminal offense.

  As I finished talking, the busboy came to refill our glasses. I took a sip of water, fiddled with my napkin, waiting to see how she’d react. What was I expecting? I suppose I was expecting her to be as stunned by it as I had been, to say, “Are you kidding me?” Or maybe that wasn’t what I was expecting. Maybe there was doubt beneath the expectation, a flaw beneath the surface of our friendship that I wanted to test with the weight of this confession to see if it would crack.

  “So now I’m just waiting,” I repeated. “I’m sort of a mess.”

  She said nothing. She was looking down at the food on her plate, moving it around here and there without eating. Then she was nodding, nodding vigorously as though to wrap up the conversation. If people still wore watches, she would have looked at hers. She would have said, “Look at the time.”

  “Tracy,” I said.

  She was trying to smile and not quite making it. She took a sip of her coffee, then put down the cup. Then she took another sip. A gust of wind blew in off the lake and we clung to our napkins. She was sinking into her sweater, squinting a little, the sun and shadow moving across her forehead. I closed my eyes for a moment against the brightness and then opened them.

  “I don’t know,” she said at last. “I don’t know what to say. The whole thing. It’s intense.”

  “Intense? Do you mean ridiculous? Absurd?”

  She didn’t answer. She looked off in the distance.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I mean, I wouldn’t do it. I just wouldn’t. The world is crazy. You never know who’s around. But I obviously don’t think you’re a bad mom…” She seemed to be searching for the words. “I think you made a bad choice.”

  I started to defend myself, to spew off some of what I’d learned over the past weeks of late-night Google searches. I’d read about the statistical near impossibility of child abductions, the fallacy of stranger danger. I started to explain, then I stopped. I realized that nothing I said would change her opinion on the matter. We’d entered the realm of religious devotion and vaccination debates, a realm where facts were useless. I went to pick up my glass and found I was shaking.

  “Well,” I said. “I guess we see things differently.”

  “I mean,” she went on, “I know you’re a good mom
. We all make mistakes.”

  “Thanks. That’s nice of you to say. Now I know who to turn to if the judge wants a character reference.”

  “I’m sorry this is happening. It’ll be okay,” she managed. “It will probably be okay, right?” She was wincing as she spoke, holding back. There was something off about the pitch of her voice. It was too high, too effortful.

  I felt nauseated and gestured for the bill. I remember the effort it took to pretend to eat my salad while we waited. One olive. One green bean. “Well, then,” I said. That was the best defense I could muster. “Well.” It was like someone had tugged a loose string on a sweater and our years of friendship were unraveling in my hands. I wanted to cry. I wanted to run away. And at the exact same time, I wanted to tell her to go fuck herself. I wanted to say something hurtful like, “I might leave my kid in a car for a few minutes, but at least I don’t leave him to stare at a wall at some shitty day care five days a week.” I’d never felt more hurt, more defensive.

  I’d like to say this story has a happy ending, that that night one of us called the other and both of us apologized, her for not being more empathic, me for being so defensive. I wish I could say that we put the whole thing behind us and brought the bad feelings out into the open and became better friends in the end. I’d like to, but that’s not what happened. We didn’t talk for a long time, and when we finally did, something had changed between us. It was never quite the same. The element of competitiveness and insecurity that had been submerged was now unearthed, impossible to ignore. And as tempting as it might be to blame it all on that one lunch, looking back, I can understand how satisfying it must have been for her in that moment, how irresistible after years of listening to my unsolicited parenting advice, all those tips and friendly suggestions and mentions of helpful resources from the mom who knew everything, the mom who told you when you’d improperly installed your car seat or were using non-BPA-free bottles, finally to be the one who knew better, who hadn’t been caught in the wrong. I see that lunch now as the final scene in a subtle drama of insecurity and competition I’d been enacting for four years, a drama that made genuine friendship impossible.

  Of course, I didn’t know any of that then.

  I knew nothing other than my feelings—anger, hurt, fear. I cut my boiled potato with my fork. I blinked back tears and tried to swallow and kept checking the time on my phone. Finally, I looked around more urgently for the waiter, reached for my wallet. “I really have to get going,” I said.

  * * *

  Even now, years later, I can remember the details of that lunch because it signaled the beginning of a shift for me. Until that day, beginning with the moment that nurse gave me all those brochures about pregnancy, I’d been an uncritical consumer of anxiety. I’d been dangerously incurious about the cultural forces informing my thoughts and deeds. Or perhaps I simply didn’t have time to be curious or to formulate good questions. My days and nights were taken up with protecting my little ones from the realities of modern life: its cars; its germs; its hordes of nameless strangers; its overcrowded, impersonal public schools; its processed, sugary foods; its sharp or electrical objects and addictive, digital screens. This parade of worries didn’t abate after that day in Virginia, even as I began to see it for what it was, a socially contagious stream of general anxiety that attached itself to one threat, then another, then a different one after that, morphing and evolving but ultimately inextinguishable. If anything, after returning from Virginia, my anxiety intensified. Suddenly I had more to worry about: the stranger in the crowd, the anonymous Good Samaritan deputized by the camera on her phone, ready and waiting to record every misstep. How would my mothering look to a tired caseworker from Child Protective Services? Was the oven clean? Were the beds made? Was I nurturing enough, attentive enough, cautious enough? And when had I last trimmed Felix’s fingernails, which grew so fast, or changed the batteries on Violet’s electric toothbrush? Were their bodies healthy enough, their minds well nourished, their bedrooms tidy and inviting? Was I cautious enough, protective enough, doing everything in my power to keep them safe? How good a mother was I really? And did others see me as I saw myself?

  The hoary, cobwebbed old wisdom is that parenthood is supposed to make you a better person. In some ways, this is true. Parenthood offers the opportunity to engage in a deeply intimate relationship with a human who is dependent on you for all of his physical, emotional, and psychological needs. It demands patience, sacrifice, compassion, and humility. It stretches us in ways not many experiences can. But at the same time, I began to realize, there was something about it that made people worse or, at least, worse to each other—worse neighbors, worse citizens, worse friends. That something, I’d come to see, was not parenthood itself but the anxiety that so often surrounds it. Parenthood and fear: Somehow, somewhere along the line, the two had become synonymous. I began to feel it that day, leaving the restaurant. But I didn’t yet understand it. And so over the next two years, as I navigated my way through the consequences of what had happened in Virginia, I read and researched and began to challenge notions about parenthood I’d never before questioned. Where did parental fear come from, and what were the forces that sustained it? How had a biological imperative become a labyrinth of societal anxieties? How had we managed to take this thing—raising a child—that’s already next to impossible, and make it even fucking harder?

  3

  THE FABRICATION OF FEAR

  “I suppose,” I said to my friend Claire, “that I’ll get a lot of writing done if I go to jail. Maybe I’ll even finish my novel. Will you smuggle me in paper so I don’t have to write on my bedsheets?”

  “Of course I will,” she said. “But also, stop.”

  Four months had passed since the incident in Virginia. We were sitting on her porch, watching our kids chase each other with bubble makers through the yard. Violet hadn’t figured out how to blow bubbles yet, but she seemed to be enjoying squirting the soapy liquid at the plants, the dog, her friends. It was a lovely summer evening in the suburbs. Fireflies blinking, the smell of cut grass, a cool breeze coming in off the lake. For the first time, I felt calm enough to joke about the situation, even if my family couldn’t appreciate the humor.

  “This whole thing is insane,” Claire said. “I still can’t believe it.”

  Coming from a mere acquaintance, this would have been reassuring, but from Claire, it was more than that; it felt like a pardon. Claire had always seemed to me the sort of mother to whom I could never measure up. When she adopted her first daughter, ten years earlier, she decided to leave behind a career in advertising because she wanted to pursue work that was more compatible with family life and wouldn’t require long hours and travel. She stayed home with her daughter, had two more kids, started a blog about her experiences as a mother. The blog led her to other forms of advocacy, writing, and consulting. She launched a second career related to this work, and amid all this she kept a clean house and tight schedule. She was the sort of mother who folded the fitted bedsheets, drove multiple carpools, and volunteered for everything. Her children’s birthday cakes were home-baked and sometimes gluten-free. She wrote personal thank-you notes promptly, kept photo logs of all of her children’s accomplishments, and scoured her kitchen until it smelled like lemons. If anyone were in a position to judge me for what had happened, it seemed to me it would have been her. Instead, she was indignant on my behalf.

  “Who in the world hasn’t left their kid in the car for a minute while they run a quick errand? I’ve done it! How could anyone not do it occasionally? Every time my one daughter falls asleep in the car on my way to dropping off my other daughter, I pull up and leave her there while I run her in. What, I’m supposed to wake her up, drag her screaming across an icy sidewalk? I just can’t believe what you did was against the law.” Claire grew quiet for a moment, and I thought maybe she was reconsidering, letting her mind run through all the unlikely disasters that might happen in those few minutes of school drop-off.
But when she spoke again, it was to say, “You know who you need to talk to about this? There’s this woman … this parenting author I interviewed once for my blog.”

  I was skeptical, to say the least. A parenting expert was the last person I wanted to talk to; how could a self-proclaimed expert make me feel anything but more shitty about my lack of expertise? But Claire assured me this woman was different, not the usual sanctimony and smugness that came off the pages of those books. Indeed, the more I got to know this expert in the years that followed, the more I began to see she wasn’t really that interested in parenthood at all, but in society, superstition, and fear. Her name is Lenore Skenazy, and she founded a blog, a book, and a movement called Free-Range Kids.

  * * *

  I reached out to Lenore in a Facebook message a few days later. I described my situation and asked if she might have time to chat. I hardly expected her to reply, so it came as a surprise when she responded right away.

  “Would be happy to talk. When’s good? After dinner and before kids’ bedtime?”

  Skenazy founded Free-Range Kids in 2008 after writing a column for the New York Sun about her decision to allow her nine-year-old son to take the subway by himself. The column resulted in a flood of both support and outrage. Supporters pointed out that parents had been giving their kids this kind of opportunity for independence for generations, that this notion of child imperilment in public spaces was in many ways a new and arbitrary construct. Critics dubbed her the worst mom in America, a criminal child neglecter, a woman who didn’t deserve to be a mother. To these charges, Skenazy fought back, arguing that allowing children freedom and a reasonable amount of independence was not incompatible with (and was even indicative of) good parenting. On her website, she devotes the movement to “fighting the belief that our kids are in constant danger.” I wasn’t sure what to expect of her, much less how she might help me. I had little interest in talking to a fringe expert who would tell me to forgo seat belts and bike helmets to help my kids toughen up. But I was also desperate for advice and emotional support from anyone who had been through anything similar.