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Who's a Bad Mother?
Healing is slow. First Waldman joins an Internet group called A Heartbreaking Choice, but eventually she starts another group, The Dead Baby Club. “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,” she writes.
Waldman finally has another child, but her life as a mother is dogged with difficulty. She is diagnosed bipolar and finds that she can’t function without the drugs. After doing her research, she decides to continue taking an approved antidepressant while pregnant with her fourth child. Then she’s haunted by the specter that that child’s palate malformation may have been caused by the drug. “It sickened me to think that the treatment I took for my disease might have damaged him,” she writes. But it’s her other son, Zeke, who ends up with a serious learning disability.
People are always telling memoir writers how brave they are. They are always congratulating us on our honesty. I have come to think that the opposite is true. I write not because I am unafraid but because I am very afraid. I write not to reveal the story but to control the story. Of course I also write to bear witness, and to enlighten, but the principal energy I bring to the task is a desire to own the story, to present it in a way that is bearable, to make sense of it, if only by reducing it to 12 point Times Roman. Waldman is a courageous and talented writer. Her greatest accomplishment in this book is to take her experience—some of our worst fears—and make it something we can understand. She drags the scary boogeyman out from under the bed. She opens the door of that spooky closet and turns on the light. Isn’t that a mother’s real job?
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Susan Cheever is the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction including American Bloomsbury, My Name is Bill, Note Found in a Bottle, As Good as I Could Be, Home Before Dark, and Treetops. She is a Guggenheim Fellow, a director of the Corporation of Yaddo, and a member of the Author’s Guild. Cheever teaches at the Bennington Writing Seminars and at the New School.
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Susan Cheever is the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction including American Bloomsbury, My Name is Bill, Note Found in a Bottle, As Good as I Could Be, Home Before Dark, and Treetops. She is a Guggenheim Fellow, a director of the Corporation of Yaddo, and a member of the Author’s Guild. Cheever teaches at the Bennington Writing Seminars and at the New School.
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Susan Cheever is the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction including American Bloomsbury, My Name is Bill, Note Found in a Bottle, As Good as I Could Be, Home Before Dark, and Treetops. She is a Guggenheim Fellow, a director of the Corporation of Yaddo, and a member of the Author’s Guild. Cheever teaches at the Bennington Writing Seminars and at the New School.
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Susan Cheever is the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction including American Bloomsbury, My Name is Bill, Note Found in a Bottle, As Good as I Could Be, Home Before Dark, and Treetops. She is a Guggenheim Fellow, a director of the Corporation of Yaddo, and a member of the Author’s Guild. Cheever teaches at the Bennington Writing Seminars and at the New School.
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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