Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace (22 page)

I have a remarkably patient gay friend who once accompanied me on a research expedition to one of San Francisco’s most notorious strip clubs (for a scene in one of my novels, I swear to God). I was shy about going alone, but I was also embarrassed at the prospect of looking up some woman’s vagina in the company of a straight man—these women are so naked that if I’d had a Q-tip and a speculum, I could have given a dozen Pap smears. I wanted to see what the women did to the men in these kinds of places, but I didn’t want to be distracted by my companion popping a massive boner. Unfortunately, it turns out that friction knows no sexual orientation. I had to cut my friend off after three lap dances.

My affinity for gay men is probably one of the reasons I fell so hard for my husband. Despite what some continue to insist, Michael is straight. Yes, he wrote a book that can be considered a gay coming-out novel, and yes, he’s acknowledged that the story was in part inspired by experience, but he’s straight. However, he also loves gay men, enjoys their company, and is a tiny bit of a sissy himself. For example, he was the one who decided to see
The Devil Wears Prada
, even though it was the opening weekend of
Superman Returns
. He loves to shop; most of my nicest clothes and all of my jewelry were gifts from him. He appreciates music and art, far more than I do.

I want my sons to be just like their father. They may be straight, but unusual, like he is, but if they’re gay, there’s a hell of a lot better chance they’ll turn out that way.

My own prejudice was on full view when I wrote about the idea of my daughters being lesbians. “Would a lesbian daughter
give me grief about shaving my legs? Would her girlfriend the Gestalt therapist bring bulgur salad to family potlucks?” What that stereotype and the others are about, obviously, is prejudice and insecurity. “The stereotypical gay woman makes me insecure, conscious of my failings as a feminist. I make less money than Michael; I rely on him for simple home repairs; I care too much about what I look like; I once got a Brazilian bikini wax.”

But the critique of these admitted biases wasn’t the real issue people, even gay people, had with the essay. Many of the folks who posted comments were aghast because they believed that I had exposed my son to ridicule. They were sure that being gay, or just musing about your sexuality, would necessarily make him the butt of other children’s bullying. That is probably true in much of what someone described as “Bush Country.” But my family lives in Berkeley. There are many gay families in my children’s school. The school shows movies like
Daddy and Papa
, and the high schools all have Gay-Straight Alliances. Our friends are as often gay as straight. My children’s world, thank God, is nearly devoid of homophobia. Sounds bucolic, doesn’t it? It is, and it’s one of the main reasons we live here when we could live so much less expensively somewhere else. Bullying may have been the sad experience of many gay men, but I think things are changing for kids nowadays.

When I was an undergraduate, I went to a concert given by a not particularly talented lesbian folksinger. I have a perfect recollection of her hoarse voice warbling off-key the song she wished her mother had sung to her when she first came out: “Honey, I’m glad that you’re gay; darling, I like you that way.” That’s the response my sons and daughters will receive if ever they make a similar announcement.

At least two-thirds of high-school students support gay marriage,
according to the Hamilton College national youth opinion poll. This generational shift in favor of gay rights has been consistent over the years, and it explains why the religious right is desperately trying to amend the Constitution: they only have so much time before our more open-minded children are old enough to vote.

Other people were upset by my essay because they thought that I had unfairly imposed expectations on my child that he might not be able to fulfill. I think they are guilty of hypocrisy on the grandest scale. Would you prefer that your son were straight? Do you joke about your son “marrying” the little daughter of your college roommate? You, too, are imposing an expectation on your child. My son’s sexual orientation will develop on its own, no matter my hopes and idle fantasies.

How many twin studies have to be done before people understand that homosexuality is innate? It has nothing to do with choice or a mother’s smothering nature. People are gay because of genetics or fetal hormonal exposure or some other random physical and chemical spin of the wheel. Every time we have a child, we spin that wheel. Sometimes our luck is bad, like Michael’s and mine once was. Sometimes it’s marvelous, and fate’s game of roulette gives you a gorgeous and talented gay son or daughter. Bless mutation and complication and all that gives us such magnificent diversity.

T
he young mother wanted to be in that bathroom even less than I did. She scuttled out, her whole body curved in a protective crouch around the tiny bundle hanging in a sling from her shoulders, her nose wrinkled against the malevolent stench of a poorly maintained public restroom. I was there with my two youngest children because there is an inverse correlation between the cleanliness of a bathroom and Rosie’s need to move her bowels.

While Rosie was hovering over the grimy toilet seat and I was herding her younger brother around the stall, trying to keep him from touching anything (one of my grandmother’s most important legacies is the idea that the only part of your body that should touch a public restroom is the soles of your shoes), I caught a last glimpse of the other mother rushing out the exit. She had that swollen, stunned look I remember so well from the first months after each of my children was born, when “exhaustion” seems far too benign a word to describe the extent of your fatigue, when it seems like every part of your body is leaking and sore, when you have trouble remembering why you wanted a baby to begin with. The only part of her baby that was visible outside of the cotton sling was a tuft of mouse-colored hair. I knew how soft that hair was, delicate filaments of spun sugar. I could remember the sensation of silken baby hair against my lips, of a small, warm skull resting in the palm of my hand, the pulse fluttering under my fingertips.

Rosie was not quite four years old at the time, and Abraham had just turned two. Watching the new mother stumble away on shaky legs, I realized with an absolute and sickening certainty that I wanted another baby.

“Mommy, wipe me,” Rosie said.

“Me poop too,” Abe announced, pointing to his diaper.

I have four children. Four is plenty. Four might be too many, if one is to accept the opinion of the people who pass me on the street and ask, horrified, “Are they
all
yours?” Personally, I think four is the perfect number of children for our particular family. Four is enough to create the frenzied cacophony that Michael and I find so joyful. Four is not too many to sit in rapt attention when it’s time for the nightly chapter of
The Wizard of Oz
or
The Twenty-one Balloons
. Four is a gang that entertains and protects its members. Four fit comfortably in a minivan.

Four children is enough.

So why can’t I stop thinking about another?

This may be nothing more than the most biological of urges. I recognize it; I’ve felt it before, and I’ve seen it in my friends, whether they’re mothers of one child, of three, or of five. When I first realized that I was suffering from baby lust, Abraham was barely two. He was walking; he had begun to put together simple sentences. He had even used the potty a few times. Even though we called him (and call him still, though he is now five) the baby, he wasn’t one anymore, and perhaps my body was simply doing what evolution dictates; perhaps my uterus was sending a hormonal message to my brain as I watched him get ready to toddle off to preschool. Okay, Mama, this one’s browned, cool, and ready to slice. It’s time to get another bun in the oven.

I am forty-three years old now, and Abie is starting kindergarten next fall. And part of me still wants another. I know many
women who have happily had children well into their forties, but I started this process younger than many of my contemporaries. At twenty-nine years old, I was one of the first of my friends to have a baby. I remember touring the hospital in my eighth month, waddling through the labor and delivery suites in my red-and-white-striped Betsey Johnson minidress (the only time in my life I have ever worn horizontal stripes, because, well, why not?), staring at the other pregnant women on the tour. They looked so
old
to me, with their gray hair and their crow’s-feet. Almost a decade later, when I was big with Abraham, I could see the same look of pity on the faces of young pregnant women who bumped bellies with me.

My skin isn’t the only part of me that’s old. I pulled my back out twice last week, once, honorably, while lifting weights, and once, ridiculously, while turning on my bedside lamp. Perhaps this whole debate is just a pathetic clutching at youth. After all, wrinkled or not, if I’m toting around a newborn, then I’m young, right? But whatever the state of my skin and my muscles, we all know that my eggs aren’t what they once were. With four healthy children, I tell myself it would be irresponsible to give the dice another throw.

And yet.

And yet.

Never again to feel the sandbag weight of a baby slung over my shoulder? Never again to hold miniature, translucent starfish fingers in my hand? Never again to match my breath to a baby’s shallow wheeze?

I am carrying on such arguments in my head. I tell myself that after four children my belly is already so stretched and flabby that I have to do origami to get my pants buttoned—a line I have used before and one recently
stolen
from me by Elisabeth Hasselbeck of
The View
(although she was talking about her breasts—gross).
One more pregnancy and I’ll be doomed to elastic waists for the rest of my life. I remind myself of what it would be like to confront the decision of going off my meds. I remind myself that it was one thing to have children before my diagnosis, but now that I know I’m crazy, how could I subject a child to that? I remember the look on my good-natured obstetrician’s face when she said, while checking how my last Cesarean incision was healing, “I’m glad I don’t have to go back in
there
again.” Ethel Kennedy reportedly had all eleven of her children via Cesarean section, but I can happily concede that record to her.

Other women in the park are having these same internal debates, I think. When a newborn shows up, there’s a pause, a hiccup in the general hubbub. We all stare, misty-eyed. We coo; we ooh. And then someone’s kid whacks someone else’s on the head with a shovel, or a toddler gets stuck on the top of the slide and gives a wrenching shriek, and we all briskly shake off that gentle longing.

My work, too, should make me want to stay away from the baby fog, whatever its seductions. When the children were very young, I found it difficult to write. Each time I told myself it would be different, but with every child, for the first four months, I would accomplish nothing. Even after I could return to work, I worked on baby time, stopping to nurse, to bandage wounds both real and imaginary, losing days to their sleepless nights. I find myself relieved that that time is drawing to a close. They need me as much as ever, but the way they need me is different; it’s as intense, but it’s not diffused over every hour of the day. They are gone at school all day, and with a certain amount of discipline I can devote that time to my work. I realize that I don’t want to go back to squeezing my writing into the cracks my children leave in the day and in my concentration.

The very fact that I can have this internal debate feels like a kind of gluttony. So many of my friends have struggled with infertility; so many of them fight ferociously for the chance to be a mother to even one baby. And here I want to gobble up so many more than my share. So, too, for now I have the luxury of economic security. I can afford to pay for preschool, for summer camp, for a sitter to watch the baby during the mornings while I work. There are so many people for whom the decision to have a child is determined not by the tugs of their wombs or hearts but by the exigencies of their wallets. We are lucky not to have gut-wrenching financial worries, but like most families we live on the income we earn, and our financial stability depends on our continuing to work.

The real reason not to have another child is because, when I think hard about it, when I get beyond the smell of a baby’s head and the way it feels to take a bath with a newborn, I realize that I don’t want to be there again, that
none
of the members of my family wants to be there again. As much as Michael sometimes misses having an infant in the house, he likes where we are right now. Mealtimes in our house are as raucous and boisterous as they always were, pitched at a volume that makes the children from small families who visit our house quiver with anxiety, but now it’s not because we need to shout over a colicky baby’s screams. It’s because every evening each of the four children has news to report, a perfect score on a spelling test that must be announced with false modesty, an injury, either physical or emotional, to recount with excruciating detail. They talk over each other, vying for attention, bickering over who goes first, and at the same time solicitously pouring milk and helping mop up one another’s spills. Divided evenly into two sets of two, the “bigs” and the “littles,” they engage in elaborate and protracted fantasy games. Abraham long ago
graduated to the role of prince’s page or baby dragon, instead of being shunted off as a piece of furniture or tossed out of the room altogether. Finally, he has evolved from playing a prop to being an almost equal partner.

Even recognizing all this, I was still idly flirting with the idea of a fifth child until one night a couple of years ago when it became clear to me that my own limitations, and the needs of the children I already have, made it clear that four was enough.