Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace (25 page)

The diagnosis of processing-speed delay made sense, too. This was why Zeke was always slow at figuring out the value of his Yahtzee roll. I felt so ashamed of all the times I had berated him, saying something like, “Come
on
, Zeke, you
know
what three times three is.” And of course he did. It just took him an extra fraction of a second to come up with the answer. It was a miracle that he could do it at all, with me hollering in his ear.

The next phase I went through was a kind of collapse, in which I actually stopped
seeing
my son, the boy whom I know better, in many ways, than I know myself. I forgot everything I knew about who he was and what he was capable of, and began to panic that he would become lost in the world. The possibilities for his future, which I had once seen as boundless, suddenly seemed constricted and limited. He would not, as I had promised him since he was a baby, be able to do anything and be anything, with only the limitations of his imagination to constrain him. There were skills that would forever be beyond him, jobs he would never be fit to assume. It was in the throes of this bitter phase that I said to Michael, “If he’s got processing-speed problems, he’ll never be able to be an airline pilot!”

Doing his best not to smile, Michael said, “I don’t think he’s ever wanted to be an airline pilot.”

“I know that! But if he ever wants to, he won’t be able to.”

“He won’t be able to play in the NBA, either,” Michael said. “That’s never bothered you.”

Indeed I had never lost a moment’s sleep over the fact that my son would never be a professional basketball player, or a professional athlete of any kind. Michael’s right—I’ve never cared one whit about my children’s athletic limitations. On the contrary, I brag as much about the time Zeke kicked a ball into the opposing team’s soccer goal as other parents brag about their children’s amateur tennis rankings.

But to have my child be limited by something in his
brain
: that thought tortured me. Now, a year later, picking apart my reaction, I can see that this period of panic and fear had two distinct elements. I was afraid for my son, for how hard he would have to struggle to do well in school, for the ways in which he might not be able to do all he wanted, or achieve all his dreams. But there was also a much more shameful element. One that even now I can hardly bear to admit. I was afraid for him, but I was also
disappointed
. I was crushed at least in part because of my own ego. Part of me wanted to be, had always wanted to be, the one with the hand in the air. “What accommodation,” I was afraid I would now never be able to say, “will you make for my gifted child?”

I had these expectations, you see, born of my own and Michael’s academic successes, that our children would be not just smart but smart
er
. I had met all these exceptionally smart children even before I had my own, like the son of college friends who at age four could warble long bits of opera—in
Italian
. The ten-year-old son of people we know works weekends as a sous chef at one of the Bay Area’s finest restaurants. Other people’s children made their debuts with the Berlin Philharmonic; they sat in Washington Square Park, the heels of their Stride Rites pounding a tattoo
on the bench, as they trounced old Russian grand masters at blitz chess. They did quadratic equations in their heads while they were still in diapers.
That
was what my children were supposed to be like. Even before I had them, I knew they would be brilliant. They would be plucked from their schoolrooms and taken to the gifted class. They would play Mozart at age three. They would shine brighter and do better than any other child. There was no room in my elaborate scaffolding of expectations for something like ADHD.

As much as I loathe to admit it, I was fearful of the reactions of the mothers of those perfect, gifted children. I was embarrassed. And certainly there have been mothers (and fathers) who have justified that concern. I cannot tell you how many people have responded to news of Zeke’s diagnosis with disapproving versions of my own initial reaction, informing me of the dangers of over-medicating. They’ve said, “Boys will be boys.” They’ve raised their eyebrows; they’ve been smug or pitying. But just as often, people have responded to my (or Zeke’s) admission with the whispered confession that their son needs medication, too, or their daughter is learning disabled, or can I please,
please
, give them a referral to Zeke’s therapist.

The thing is, you can never really know what goes on behind the closed doors of other houses, and what seems like brilliance and feels like superiority almost always has its own quota of trouble. Things are rarely ever what they seem. That math genius? He was still taking a nightly bottle when he was seven. The opera singer is dyslexic. And while the infant chess master is indeed brilliant, he’s also a narcissistic little pill.

On Zeke’s first day of summer day camp this year he came home in a gloom. Everyone knew each other, he told us. They all
went to school together. They had secret handshakes, in-jokes, private nicknames. They knew whom to sit with, and just what to say. And there he was, on the outs. He would never make a friend.

As parents, we had the presence of mind and the experience to tell him that the way things feel from the outside is rarely the truth of the matter. The people at the fantastic party you think you didn’t get invited to don’t even know there’s a party going on. They don’t feel any more a part of the brilliance than you do. We have a tendency to value idealization over our own experience of messy reality. We fail to recognize that reality is actually wonderful, but for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with the ideal.

The reality of Zeke perhaps did not live up to some fantastically ludicrous ideal of a child I had in my head, the perfect counterpart to the ideal of the Good Mother I dreamed and despaired of being, but what I finally realized, when I passed out of that ugly and painful stage of grief, was that nothing about my son had changed. The neuropsychologist’s diagnosis had not infected Zeke with a disease. It was nothing more than a description of a small part of who he was, who he’d always been. And he was still exactly the same person. He was still the same little boy who’d named all the planets, still the same politically savvy kid who cracked jokes about Donna Brazile, still the same boy who picked up his little sister at ballet class and walked her home, gripping her chubby little paw in one of his hands and her tiny pink slippers in the other. Zeke is exactly what he’s always been, creative and very intelligent, with a heightened awareness of injustice and a mordant wit. He is the little toddler who held my cheeks in his hands, gazed into my eyes, and said with utmost seriousness and certitude, “Mommy, I love you.” What I love about my boy is unlabelable. Who he is can never be quantified by pages of test scores, no matter the size of the sheaf.

The whole notion of the constriction of potential that I had cried over so hard, I see, is just absurd. True, you wouldn’t want to fly in a plane piloted by Zeke, nor will he ever solve the Goldbach conjecture. But as Michael said, he’s never had aviation aspirations, and he’s doing fine in math. The point of a life, any life, is to figure out what you are good at, and what makes you happy, and, if you are very fortunate, spend your life doing those things.

What the diagnosis gave us was a way to help our son. He now has, in the jargon of his various tutors and therapists, a full toolbox of techniques with which to do well in school. He is learning math through a teaching program designed for brains like his, and doing well.
*
He has an ed therapist to help him figure out how to approach his homework. And on school days—only on school days—he takes Ritalin, which allows him to ignore the distractions around him and concentrate on his teacher and his work and on controlling his impulses.

The worst thing about being so devoted to your expectations is that it blinds you to the wonders of the children you have. When Rosie was little, she was a slow talker. At the age at which her siblings were discoursing in long, complicated sentences, she was just beginning to put words together in non-syntactical combinations. She spoke in the most adorable baby talk, but much of the time when I should have been enjoying her babble and celebrating her new words, I was distracted by the nagging worry that she was behind the curve. She would sit on the floor, her fat legs stretched out in front of her, as I built and rebuilt a tower of blocks, laughing each time I toppled it over. I was so busy saying, “Rosie, can you say ‘boom’? Say ‘boom’ for Mommy,” that I barely
registered her full-body smile, the way every inch of her, from her cornflower blue eyes to the pink tips of her toes, wriggled as she grinned at the tower’s collapse.

The most toxic thing parents can do is allow their delight and pride in their children to be spoiled by disappointment, by frustration when the children fail to live up to expectations formed before they were even born, expectations that have nothing to do with them and everything to do with the parents’ own egos.

One of my favorite yoga teachers, the one I go to because she works me the hardest and makes me the skinniest, spends a lot of the time we are inhaling through alternate nostrils talking about right mindfulness, the Buddhist notion of bringing awareness to the present moment, of consciously shifting our attention away from the past and the future and focusing it on the present, on the moment, on the instant at hand. To be mindful means you do not judge or evaluate, you simply experience. Notice. Concentrate on the moment, be aware of it as it happens without stopping to try to figure out what it means.

It feels ridiculous even to write about this, about Buddhism and yoga. I do not meditate, although I know I should and I have periodically tried. The voices in my head are as multitudinous and persistent as the lice that infest my children’s hair at the beginning of every school year. Moreover, I actually kind of hate people who talk about things like mindfulness, or at least the ones I run into around here, in Berkeley. Why is it that the most self-actualized people seem so often to be the most self-absorbed?

I’m no Buddhist, but still I wish I were a more mindful mother. A mindful mother would not get so knotted up about breast-feeding that she would forget that her job was simply to love her baby and keep him healthy, without torturing herself and him with that infernal pump. A mindful mother would not be so worried about
her children being bipolar that she would be too afraid to laugh when her daughter reported hearing a voice in her head. It was not the fact of the voice that was funny (although neither, really, was it a cause for alarm). It was whose voice it was, and what it was saying. At the height of the 2008 Democratic primary, six-year-old Rosie awoke in the middle of the night wailing, “I can’t get the voice out of my head!”

“What voice?” I said, panicking. “What is the voice telling you to do?” Immediately, I saw the rest of our lives. My beautiful fairy daughter, the sparkle in her eyes dimmed by Thorazine, struggling against the straps of her straitjacket, while I stood helplessly by, unable to save her.

Rosie clutched her skull with both hands and whipped her head back and forth. “It’s Hillary Clinton!” she wailed. “Health care, health care, health care, she just won’t shut up!”

The thing to remember, in our quest to do right by our children and by ourselves, is that while we struggle to conform to an ideal or to achieve a goal, our life is happening around us, without our noticing. If we are too busy or too anxious to pay attention, it will all be gone before we have time to appreciate it.

The irony is, of course, that by thinking about mindfulness, I could just be setting up another unattainable goal, another way to fail at this impossible of jobs. A Good Mother is a mindful mother. A distracted mother, what is she? Surely you know by now: a Bad Mother.

But still, perhaps it’s worth the risk.

Even if I’m setting myself up for failure, I think it’s worth trying to be a mother who delights in who her children are, in their knock-knock jokes and earnest questions. A mother who spends less time obsessing about what will happen, or what has happened, and more time reveling in what
is
. A mother who doesn’t fret over
failings and slights, who realizes that her worries and anxieties are just thoughts, the continuous chattering and judgment of a too busy mind. A mother who doesn’t worry so much about being bad or good, but just recognizes that she’s both, and neither. A mother who does her best, and for whom that is good enough, even if, in the end, her best turns out to be, simply, not bad.