Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace (23 page)

At the time I thought we were managing to pay enough attention to each of the children, to know who was anxious about the wavering loyalty of a supposed best friend, whose soccer cleats were too tight. Then the tooth fairy forgot to come.

It was Sophie’s thirteenth tooth, and by now she had the system down cold. I wondered if she still believed in glitter-clad fairies flitting from house to house gathering enameled bricks for their fairy castles, but she wasn’t giving anything away. She presented the yellowed molar proudly, and tucked it carefully under her pillow in the same little box she’d used for the other twelve.

The evening proceeded in its usual hysterical pace, an assembly line of bathing, teeth brushing, story time, and then each child demanding his or her very specific bedtime routine. One child must have someone lie next to her and sing the same two Pete Seeger songs, another requires an elaborate ritual of train songs in a slowly darkening bedroom. It is a good ninety minutes of tamped-down frenzy between the end of supper and lights-out, and I often collapse in my own bed not long after the kids are tucked into theirs.

Sophie’s face, at six the next morning, when she stood over our bed, was one of barely controlled fury.

“The
tooth fairy
didn’t show up,” she said. I knew by the ironic and disgusted quotation marks around the words “tooth fairy” that
she didn’t believe in her anymore. I’m fairly confident that she had begun to doubt even before the tooth fairy failed her, but there was perhaps one last vestige of trust, a glitter-encrusted faith in the mythologies of childhood. That was gone now. I had allowed it to slip through the cracks.

Later, I tried to salvage the experience with a kind of Passover Seder afikomen hunt. I hid the tooth, she found it, and sold it to me for thirteen dollars. It was okay, though there was something vaguely reminiscent of a cash transaction about the whole thing. Not a whole lot of magic.

Sophie had thirteen years of the tooth fairy, I told myself, a good long run. Still, it was a sign that my attentions are divided enough. It’s a sign that juggling the needs, desires, fears, wants, and teeth of four children is both joyful and difficult enough for me, without complicating matters with a fifth.

So this is it. Four wonderful children. More children than I ever thought I’d have, certainly. A big family. The perfect size for us. And yet, remember the eggshell toenails and buttery soft skin of a baby’s foot? Just one more tiny mouthful of a foot …

F
or the last few years a video has been working its way around the Internet. You know how these things go, for months no one notices them, and then suddenly thirty people send you the link on the same day. I’d watched the video before, a few times, I think, and thought it was cute and a little bit silly. It made me smile. Then my brother Paul—a hard-bitten political media analyst living in D.C.—forwarded me the link with a note that said, “For some reason, this almost gives me hope for humanity.” Paul isn’t a sentimental guy, except when it comes to his oldest child, a gentle and charming boy who goes through life with a “Kick me” sign taped to his back. Paul is a supreme cynic; he lost his hope for humanity when he was three years old. So when Paul sent me a sappy note with a link, I had no choice but to follow it.

For four minutes and twenty-eight seconds, some guy named Matt (Matthew Harding, a thirty-something white man from Connecticut living out a protracted and very sweet adolescence) dances the same goofy dance in dozens of different countries. At first he’s dancing alone, in an alley in Mumbai, on a hillside in Paro, Bhutan, atop a causeway in Northern Ireland. But soon people start to join in, a group of small children in Antsiranana, Madagascar, a bunch of hipsters in Stockholm, kids in school uniforms in the Solomon Islands, a blank-faced soldier in the demilitarized zone in Korea, a troupe of dancers in candy-colored saris in Gurgaon, India, Papua New Guineans in feathers and paint, a
beluga whale in Vava’u, Tonga. The music, by the composer Garry Schyman, has one of those incredible melodies that clicks into your limbic system like a key into a lock, releasing a wash of serotonin or dopamine or something that makes you happy to be alive. It was in Madrid, when a crowd of joyful people rushed out from both sides of the screen, gyrating wildly, a giddy swirl of
alegría
, that I started to cry. I kept it up through Chakachino and Cape of Good Hope, Timbuktu and Tokyo, San Francisco and São Paulo, and didn’t stop until Matt did, in Seattle.

I was crying at the sight of this chubby American dude, a self-described deadbeat with no plan other than to travel the world until his cash ran out, kicking up his heels and swinging his arms atop mountains and temples, in alleyways and on beaches, because Matt’s world, where strangers gleefully join you in your dance, is the world that I have always told my children we live in.

For all that I profess such a wholehearted belief in honesty, I have been committing that worst of maternal crimes on a near daily basis. I have been lying to my children. I’ve been feeding them this tale about how if they came across a Bedouin in the Negev desert, he would welcome them into his tent and serve them a cup of mint tea, and that if they found themselves in Burkina Faso, a seven-year-old kid might kick around a soccer ball with them, and when lost on the Métro, they are likely to be given directions to the Musée d’Orsay by a haughty but polite Parisian matron with a bichon frise tucked under her arm.

It’s not that I would not warn them, say, that while on the Via Veneto in Rome it’s wise to clamp a hand over their wallets if rushed by a group of Gypsy kids, or that I would allow them to apply to a student exchange program in Harare, Zimbabwe. I’m not sheltering them from the truth, exactly. The older ones know what an IED is, and that hundreds of thousands of people, both
soldiers and civilians, have been killed and maimed in Iraq. They know what happened in Abu Ghraib. All four kids are conversant in the looming global-warming crisis (when she finds a light on, Rosie is apt to snap it off and shout, “Are you people
trying
to kill the polar bears?”) and they hate John McCain with a passion they normally reserve for … well … Dick Cheney. They know it would probably not be safe for our family to travel to certain countries because my passport lists my birthplace as Jerusalem, and they worried about their friends who were lucky enough to go to China for the Olympics because the air pollution in Beijing is, Zeke tells me, some of the worst in the world.

They are not naive children. But in a way they are
innocent
. As honest as I’ve been about all the world’s calamities, I’ve also tried, despite knowing full well that I was deceiving them, to instill in my kids a faith that at heart all people are just like them, and that justice, if it is not prevailing now, is bound to one day.

That woman who told me when Zeke was a baby that I was imposing my negative view of the universe on my children had it only half-right. On the one hand, I’ve successfully managed to raise at least one punk rock kid, Zeke, who periodically becomes convinced that the human race has, on balance, brought little but destruction to the world, and that it would be best if our species, like the saber-toothed tiger or the great auk, simply became extinct. But at the same time I’ve also so successfully sugarcoated the world that Zeke is able to have his faith in human decency completely restored just by listening to Rush (“And the men who hold high places, must be the ones to start, to mold a new reality, closer to the heart”). Which is worse? Lying about hope or telling the truth about hopelessness?

The myth Michael and I have been telling our kids—that each individual in the world shares a core of human decency—has a
corollary in the way we discuss the history of America. Our kids get a slightly more honest view of American history than we did back in the 1970s, but the lessons being taught today are not that different in tone from those bygone rose-colored paeans to melting pot and opportunity. While our children learn in school that Columbus cannot be said to have discovered America, they are also told that he did make a very important journey. As the song they teach Berkeley schoolchildren every Indigenous Peoples Day goes, “It was a courageous thing to do, but someone was already here, yes, someone was already here.” Because their teachers wouldn’t, Michael and I taught them (with the assistance of the brilliant Sarah Vowell and Ira Glass’s
This American Life
) about the Trail of Tears, and the brutality of Andrew Jackson, but we also told them about heroes like Tecumseh and Sitting Bull. We wanted to make sure that while they understand this country’s history of brutality, they also saw grace and courage. We taught them that once, in the far past, women were not allowed to vote, but now, thanks to suffragists like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Hillary Clinton can run for president and California can be represented in the Senate by not one but two women.

You see where I’m going here? We teach them about our nation’s history of racism—I once played the older kids Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit,” and we talked about how lynchings were common not so long ago in the South—but then we tell them that thanks to people like Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks, whom Sophie portrayed in her nursery school’s civil rights pageant, the struggle for civil rights was won. (I think Ms. Parks might have enjoyed the sight of a little white moppet furiously refusing to sit at the back of a cardboard-box bus.) My kids are proud to live in the Bay Area, where there is a mayor like Gavin
Newsom, brave enough to stand up for justice and allow gay people to marry. We spend a lot of time talking about injustice in our family, but the way we tell it, those days are mostly over. The Voting Rights Act passed into law, and equal protection means that every individual, regardless of race, ethnicity, nationality, or sexual orientation, is entitled to be treated the same. We tell them that the end of racism and prejudice of all kinds is inevitable. I spout to my children an optimistic version of America and the world, in which bad things happen but good people of all kinds struggle for and ultimately receive justice. But I have always feared, in my heart of hearts, that I have been selling them a bill of goods.

Michael is a natural patriot. If it were up to him, we’d have an American flag flying from a pole in front of our house, not because he is naive about what the flag has come to mean both here and abroad, but because he refuses to allow jingoistic bigots who substitute a flag pin for a commitment to the Constitution to own that symbol of freedom. I’m the one who won’t have it.
Freedom
? I scoff. To a kid on the streets of Iraq or Iran, of Kigali or Rafah, the American flag sure as hell doesn’t symbolize freedom.

But it
should
, Michael says. And if we keep up the struggle, if we don’t cede the nation to people and parties whose conception of liberty begins and ends with the right to keep a loaded semiautomatic pistol tucked into the waistband of their jeans, if we keep teaching our children that America is a fundamentally decent place, the flag will one day be a symbol that we can take pride in.

What comes easy to him had to be learned by me. When he tells those stories to our children, a large enough part of him believes what he’s saying. But I was raised by Canadian parents
whose defining attitude toward the United States was a distrust of its power and rhetoric. My father, who after thirty years in New Jersey finally became a citizen solely so he could vote against George Bush, always wanted to move back to Israel. He and my mother, who was born in Brooklyn but grew up in Montreal, taught me that while the United States was a fine enough place to live, its citizens were in many ways as foreign to us as Masai warriors or Ladakhi sheepherders. My parents instilled in their children not just a suspicion of the U.S. government but a sense of superiority toward its citizens, at least those that didn’t live in New York or teach at a select few institutions of higher learning. Americans were stupid, bovine, easily fooled by conniving politicians and telemarketers. They watched hours of television every day. (As did we, but that didn’t keep us from looking down our noses. We watched
Masterpiece Theatre
and
M*A*S*H
, they watched soap operas and game shows.)

The stories we tell our kids come easier to Michael in part because, unlike me, he spent his childhood in a place that inspired patriotism. He grew up in Columbia, Maryland, in the 1970s, when that planned community came close to achieving its utopian ideal of racial integration. In Columbia black and white families lived side by side. White and black children rode their bikes together along the meandering paths, swam together in the neighborhood pools, got into arguments, made up. They were
friends
.

Even if I were not already predisposed to feel both alien and superior to the country in which I spent the vast majority of my life, my hometown wasn’t anything to be proud of, particularly when it came to race. I grew up in Ridgewood, New Jersey, a town where real estate agents routinely steered minority families to certain
neighborhoods. The African American kids were isolated, segregated, and we white kids made little or no attempt to cross over that divide.

As a little girl, I knew there was a problem, but it never occurred to me that I could do anything about it. It was just another reason to hate my hometown. Now, as an adult, I am not only conscious of and ashamed of my failure to act, but I’m also damaged by it. When Michael meets someone of another race, he does not pretend to be color-blind, or to deny the omnipresence of race, but neither does he bring with him any expectations or biases. But because I did not spend my life in the company of a diversity of people, I’m not as comfortable as he is. I am so conscious of the historical context of oppression in which my conversations take place that sometimes I end up making a fool of myself, trotting out my liberal credentials to prove that I’m one of the good guys.