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Who's a Bad Mother?
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Ayelet Waldman was slammed for writing she loved her husband, Michael Chabon, more than her kids. Susan Cheever says Waldman’s honest new memoir is a tragedy wrapped in a comedy.
Yes, Ayelet Waldman wrote that essay in which she said she loved her husband more than she loved her children. She called her children satellites! When this appeared in The New York Times, she was excoriated by the petty maternal Savonarolas, the furious self-appointed ethical judges who love their children more than anything and need to shout it from the rooftops of cyberspace. She ended up on Oprah! Although I didn’t join in the fray, I too have loved my children so intensely that it has sometimes made my love for their fathers seem unimportant. Now I know why.
Literary heartthrob Michael Chabon is the quiet hero of this funny, moving, important book. When things are good, Chabon shoulders half the domestic load. When things are bad (and things get very bad in this book) he is loving and forgiving.
It’s because I wasn’t married to Michael Chabon.
Literary heartthrob Chabon is a quiet hero of this funny, moving, important book. A man of infinite good humor, fairness, and optimism—in spite of his extraordinary writing talent and Pulitzer Prize. When Waldman wants to work full-time—she is a Harvard-educated lawyer with a job she loves—Chabon is happy to take the children; when she wants to quit and be with the kids, he is happy to switch roles. When things are good, Chabon is steady and shoulders half the domestic load; when things are bad (and things get very bad in this book), he is loving and forgiving.
Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace. By Ayelet Waldman. 224 pages. Doubleday. $24.95.
At first Waldman’s engaging breezy humor seems directly descended from Ann Lamott’s brilliant, pioneering Operating Instructions. Mothering memoirs have become a separate genre; the isolation and sense of failure inherent in mothering inspires many of us to try to break through the cultural wall around each mother and write books with the message that we’re not alone. (My mothering book came out in 2001.) In her opening chapters, Waldman’s wit and honesty seems directed at making mothers feel better about being, well, mothers. “I feel like a bad mother,” she admits, “even when by all reasonable analysis I’m a perfectly fine mother.” As she writes with typical deadpan humor: “A good mother remembers to serve fruit at breakfast, is always cheerful and never yells, manages not to project her own neuroses and inadequacies onto her children, is an active and beloved community volunteer. She remembers to make playdates, her children’s clothes fit, she does art projects with them and enjoys all their games. And she is never too tired for sex.” But Waldman’s book is actually a tragedy wrapped in a comedy. She’s up to something much darker and more complicated than amusement and good company.
More than halfway through this short book, this adorable guide takes the reader by the hand and leads her to a terrible place. The great accomplishment of this book is that tragedy doesn’t alter Waldman’s character or weaken the bond she has formed with the reader by joking and vamping and nailing daily mothering problems on the head. In the second half of this book, the Waldman-Chabon family runs right into a nightmare. First the couple’s third child, who they have seen in the sonogram and affectionately named Rocketship, is diagnosed in utero with a genetic defect. At four months' pregnant, Waldman is forced to make a dreadful choice. The best study she finds “showed a good chance that Rocketship would be born without obvious defects, and a small chance that he would suffer growth retardation, hypotonia, structural central nervous system abnormalities and seizures, facial malformations, failure to thrive and developmental delay. There was no way, however, to tell into which group he fell.”
Waldman is a pessimist, convinced that she carries bad luck with her, but Chabon is an optimist and favors taking chances. In parenting and in marriage, this is where push comes to shove, but this couple doesn’t shove. Instead they talk and do research and cry and even pray. Finally, in a misery which Waldman describes brutally, they decide to end the pregnancy. Her post-abortion discussion of abortion is one of the clearest treatments of that controversial subject I have read. When Waldman’s writing about the worst thing that can happen, she writes as well as when she is writing about the best things that can happen. “When we choose to have an abortion, we must do so understanding the full ramifications of what we are doing. Anything less feels to me hypocritical, a selfish abnegation of reality and responsibility.” The last thing Waldman asks the gynecologist before he puts her under is to be sure her baby feels no pain as he is killed.
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Dear me, dear me...many mothers go through this kind of hellish sort of choices it is true. I was raped and had an abortion. I cried about the baby even as I feared it as the result of a very demonic person who had kidnapped me. I wasn't able physically or emotionally to carry the baby to term and remain sane. I had a miscarriage from a semi-serious relationship a couple of years later, an unforseen miscarriage--but yes, even as I agonized I was secretly glad that I didn't have to figure out what to do. Certainly one of my choices was to have the baby. O.K. women with their biological possibilities have it tough sometimes, and really interesting women might write it up in a way that makes one feel something. But bad news, Susan Cheever... Do you really think Waldman or Chabon are good writers? I find them so ho-hum and so self indulgently masturbatory in content. I've genuinely tri--i--ed to like them because,... well, one yearns for good new novelists or essayists. I know this isn't PC to say when we are lacking in high powered couples (à la Plath/Hughes,) but I think their only value is in a sort of titillating Mailer-esque self-aggrandizement without the Mailer talent and power. Where, for God's sake, is some grandeur like what emerged from Georges Sand and Chopin, from Voltaire and his countess, from Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett?
You used the words masturbatory and titillating in the same paragraph. I think you are a potty mouth.
Methinks thou dost protest too much. Titillating is simply derived from a word meaning "tickle."
At the risk of you calling me a "potty mouth" (insert my gagging here)--I daresay you seem to have a DICtatorial streak.
I'm glad that it's a book that doesn't "over-simplify" the issue. It's a terrible choice and most don't take it lightly. Whether we agree with the choice... it is up to the individual to make that choice.
Yeah, you're right. Then the individual should try to make a little $$$ off the choice.
I was absolutely convinced the adoption would work. Because I would try really hard to make it work. But it didn't work. The little boy who was my son was damaged beyond repair or hope. Working hard was irrelevant. While writing about what was most definitely loss, in my own mothering book, first in Esquire, then in the book itself, I killed him off. I wanted the reader to know something about that loss while at the same time I wanted to protect the child.
Both were mistakes. The reader doesn't want to feel anything but revenge, and the child cannot be protected. Mine was hunted down like a dog.
You either give them what they think they want or the death threats can get as bloody thick as a placenta you bury underneath the porch.
I reunited with my son and we now live in exile.
Writing about that reunion has only produced more hate, more revenge, more contempt, and more death threats.
I would abort writing entirely. It has only produced a visceral grief. The miscarriage is one of forgiveness or understanding. There is nothing more American than that. I now labor under the delusion that the further I can get the two of us -- AWAY -- the easier it will get.
http://le-too.blogspot.com -- Tim Barrus, Amsterdam
What the hell are you talking about??
Tell me this was lost in translation. Otherwise, WTF?
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Wow! Please call 911. That first paragraph is evidence that you have suffered a stroke.
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I don't share in the opinion that most memoirists are brave. I would argue that most of them are semi-talented narcissists and it sounds like this description might be apt in this case. How does a bi-polar woman with three children with health issues have the time to write down her every thought about her courageous life? Michael Chabon clearly has a bit of the saint in him.
I remember reading that essay in the Times a few years ago, and the mommy freak-out that followed.
The entire time I was reading it, I kept thinking, "Wow, I sure am jealous of her marriage." The gift a loving couple like them gives their children is priceless... their feelings and impressions of love will be formed by their parents, who clearly adore each other. I look forward to reading Ayelet's book!
You would. One of her personalities paid you to write that.
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Just in time for Mother's Day, another blah, blah, blah why I need to tell you about killing my inconvenient baby book.
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There are some groups of people who restrict marriage/procreation to their own small group (often for millennia). They tend to have children with strange abnormalities. Then, of course, they have to explain away why these inconvenient pregnancies have to be terminated. Instead, they should be mating outside of their tribes. And/or, shut their pieholes, and stop trying to make a buck off of it. Boo, hoo, hoo, we've been intermarrying in the same small group since the dawn of time and we've got some very strange-looking kids (the ones we let live, that is.)
wanting
I applaud your efforts (however futile) to reason with scough (a limp,"witty" variant of scoff...yawn). Pity him, instead. For the sad irony here is that he/she appears to be a product of one of those "small groups" who didn't benefit from "mating outside their tribes."
And he really should "stough" it in his "piehole."
This woman/writer sounds like a very weak person... gutless in her pessimism and decision to kill her baby. Gutless in her inability to love something imperfect in her world.
After reading this, I am not at all interested in her story. I'd be more interested in a book about how her children survived life with her.
Didn't these genius dingbats- Waldman and Chabon -ever hear about family planning? They had two healthy kids. They didn't need a third or fourth. Both of them should have gotten fixed... and focused on the kids they already had. ( But then again, what would her next book have been about?)
Wow. I had no idea. I was so jealous of this woman for so long and never dreamed that she had problems and pain. I always imagined her as Queen of Park Slope, or wherever, with her gorgeous writer husband.
I am a little shocked at myself that I went mad for self revelation and relevance above--but what an interesting bunch of comments. I have to mildly mitigate my wild swings at Waldman. I read two or three of her Salon posts and one, about her abortion, was decently written. Then the bakery sobbing one where she launches into very congratulatory and I-am-such-an-appealing-smartie-who-is-so-adorably-flawed routine and gratuitously bashes her Berkeley cohorts made me cringe again. How happy I was not to have to be her Nanny or something. It was so clear how "superba"(I quote some satirist) she would be, and how sad that she can't love her kids and husband all the most in the world, each one.
Thank you.
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