Bad Mother

I was a third of the way through the ARC of Ayelet Waldman's memoir Bad Mother (courtesy of the Kenyon college bookstore) before I realized--because she says it--that she's married to Michael Chabon, author of Summerland and therefore one of my favorite writers. So I continued reading with heightened interest.

Not that I wasn't pretty much absorbed from the first page, when she reveals "I busted my first Bad Mother in the spring of 1994, on a Muni train in San Francisco." How many times have we all done that? I think I busted my first Bad Mother in the fall of 1993, at 9 pm on an ordinary Wednesday night in Wal-Mart. I was buying disposable diapers, my own new baby safely at home in her crib with her father in the next room. The toddler in the cart ahead of mine was clearly tired, wailing and being ignored by her harrassed young mother. I will never do that, I thought. And then, like all mothers, I proceeded from the disposable diapers to even bigger maternal sins. Let she who is without sin cast the first vote for Bad Mother of the Year. Ayelet Waldman has twice the opportunity for Bad Mothering that I do, because she has two more children. No matter how bad your life as a Mother may have gotten, I can almost guarantee that reading about Waldman's experiences will give you the company that misery loves, as it did for me.

My experience of reading Bad Mother was fascinatingly illuminated by my surroundings; I was accompanying my just-13-year-old son to his first big chess tournament. As I opened my book and began reading during the "Simul," in which chess masters and grand masters play up to twenty challengers at one time, a woman I'd nodded to earlier as our sons struck up an acquaintance came over to me and told me what lovely manners my son has. As I beamed, she asked "is he home schooled?" and when I said no, she looked surprised, saying something about how home schooled children tend to be more polite than others. Strike one for me at the Bad Mother competition, with consolation points for the compliment.

The tournament weekend provided the right context for me to read this book. My husband had to be in Chicago and my son was missing a soccer game. The three-hour car trip to the city where the tournament was held had to be coordinated with my daughter's play rehearsal and set building schedule, her overnight with a friend, and care of all our pets. All of our trips necessitated fast food meals--Bad Mother points. But Waldman reminds me that "jugglers invariably drop balls, and no matter the persistent criticism of the Bad Mother police, balls do bounce. When they fall, all you need to do is pick them up and throw them back up in the air."

And Waldman reassures me that I'm not the only mother to ever do specific bad things to my children. How? By telling about all the bad things she's done! And they're not all minor, I assure you. The chapter about Rocketship is particularly brave, as I know of few other mothers who can compete with her in that particular mode of Bad Motherhood. One part I found especially reassuring is when she says "The capacity for extravagant emotion that Michael finds so attractive in me can be exhausting, especially to a child. My moods are mercurial, and this can be terrifying. I know, because I was a daughter of a mother with a changeable temperament." So was I, Ayelet, and I know exactly what you mean. Also I know a number of mothers who have said almost exactly what you say when they found out what was causing some problem for their child: "I felt so ashamed of all the times I had berated him...."

The chapter about homework was balm to my soul on a busy April weekend: "apparently, by slaving over homework with my son, I am expressing to him how important school is. (Of course, this rationale assumes that I'm not also expressing audible rage at his teacher, or muttering curses about the authors of his math textbook.)" I also loved her separation of little girls' Halloween costumes into two main categories: "cereal box" or "ho." And I enjoyed her common sense: "Because while I fear that making promiscuity sound beguiling and chic will lead them astray, I also know that the best way to ensure that your children dispense with your advice is to exaggerate the damage of the activity you want them to avoid." Kind of like the Health Teacher in the movie Mean Girls ("Don't have sex. You'll die."), or the reaction to the anti-gay-marriage "Gathering Storm" video that was taken off YouTube because everyone laughed at it (see the parody, "Gaythering Storm" here).

Bad Mother is scheduled to go on sale May 5, 2009. If you've ever busted a Bad Mother, you want to read it... and you want to tell me about your Bad Mother busts! Because we're all in this together, even if some of us are more polite about it than others.