This is not to say that I will abdicate the tough-guy stance with my boys. (I recall my brother sitting in his room, his face dark, after he had been suspended from school. “Dad is going to kill you,” I said. “I don’t care about Dad,” he said. “I just don’t want HER to cry.”) And I am already at work on making them warm and caring and easy with the idea of women as intellectual and professional equals. In short, I intend to make some nice woman a wonderful husband. I just think I am more naturally inclined toward doing that, rather than making the nice woman herself.
Of course, this raises the question of why I keep the dress. Why didn’t I return it for something that would be suitable for my boys? It would be easy to say that a little bit of hope springs eternal, that deep down I still want to have a daughter and I’m hedging my bets. It would be easy, but it wouldn’t be true. I have a funny kind of intuitive feeling—reinforced, perhaps, by the sheer numerical force of my husband’s family—that my other children, if they come, will be boys, too.
The dress is really for me. It reminds me of one of those museum exhibits—a party dress circa 1860, the school uniform of an upper-class Victorian girl, those somewhat sad, faded relics of another time, another place. The little collection in the bottom drawer is a kind of monument: to a little girl raised as his oldest son by a man who swore his firstborn would be a boy and never changed his mind; to the girl at the all-girls’ school who was lucky enough to be cast as Peter Pan or Hamlet and only for a minute yearned for Wendy’s nightdress or Ophelia’s robes; to a teenager who was one of the boys and always a little outside the sorority of her own kind. I suppose it reflects all the ambivalence of a tough little girl who had disdain for girly girls and yet somewhere yearned to be one herself. It is for the sort of girl I never was and the kind of woman I may never be, for a place inside me I only lately knew I had when I found it empty and unlikely to be filled.
TAG SALE
There is nothing like a tag sale to force you to confront the hard choices in life. To junk the class notes from Introduction to Psychology and give away the trunk that houses them; to stare with hard, unromantic eyes at the cake plate your husband’s great-aunt gave you as a wedding present and tote it out to the car; to look upon a size 8 suit and accept for all time that the body it fits is no longer yours—these things mark milestones, besides providing much-needed closet space.
The nursery school is having a tag sale. The school hall is filled with merchandise: bad afghans, ill-conceived table lamps, remaindered books. Amid it all are the artifacts of those families that consider themselves complete. There is a changing table, an assortment of stretch suits in pastel colors, a crop of crib bumpers. Tag sales are a godsend when the gestating is through; there is nothing more cumbersome or superfluous than a crib around the house when your former babies are out tearing up the playground, their T-shirts mottled with ice cream, dirt, and a bit of blood.
I know this because the top floor of my house is filled with items gathering dust, with down-at-the-heel walkers and baby gates and snowsuits size 9 months. They are not going to the tag sale. I have looked and looked at them, dumped boxes of old overalls onto the floor and then packed them up again. The tag sale makes clear to me, more clear than watching my kids sleep or explaining to them why llamas spit, that I am not ready to say I am finished with having babies. It may be that I will never have more than these two children, for reasons logical or biological. And certainly, they would be sufficient for me. But if I give away the baby things, I am giving away a part of my life that I am not yet ready to relinquish.
It is so seductive, this part, this making someone out of nothing. It feels so important, and so powerful, which is one of the reasons young girls who feel unimportant and powerless so often embrace it, without a thought to all the work and trouble that comes later. There is a lot of work and trouble, and that is why so many of my friends are happy to call a halt to their baby making. Ecstatic to have them, ecstatic to have it over with, they have pushed the playpen with glee into the back of someone else’s van, gone to their tubal ligations and vasectomies with great happiness. Time to move on.
I am rotten at moving on. There was a time right after college when I gave lots of odd little parties, with not enough chairs and people sitting on the floor and food like Welsh rarebit or chipped beef. What I really needed was a chafing dish with a little candle underneath to keep all this slop warm, but I could not buy one. I was convinced that if I bought a chafing dish, it would somehow mean I would never get married. A chafing dish is a wedding present. (In fact, I got three as wedding presents. I used one once. I don’t prepare chafing-dish meals anymore. I gave one dish to the tag sale last year. I am keeping the two others in case my kids want to have Welsh rarebit parties after they go skating on cold winter days when they are teenagers. But don’t hold your breath.)
Now, I cannot get past the changing pads and the diaper bags. This is not about possessions; I could give away all my baby things and have another baby anyway. It is about what the possessions represent. Last year, someone turned over a portable typewriter to the tag sale, telling herself once and for all that she was never going to be a novelist. It was a shabby typewriter and brought five dollars; only five dollars for what had once been an open door, a possibility, the turn of the kaleidoscope that could alter the pattern of someone’s life forever. Then it was put up for sale, and it was nothing but a typewriter in a pale-blue case.
I don’t see so many open doors anymore, so many ways to change the pattern, alter my life and the world. I don’t want a divorce, and I don’t want to move. I have reluctantly accepted the fact that I am not going to follow any alternative career paths, that I am not going to medical school. But I want to leave this particular door to the future open. Some of the women I know are further along; they are convinced that they have stopped at two children, or three, or one, happy and content. And yet … and yet. “I sometimes still think about it,” one woman said the other day, amid the perpetual chaos of her living room. “And then I think that I still can if I want to.” Then she laid the flat of her hand on her abdomen, which will never be taut again.
Knowing that I still can, knowing that I might, knowing that I will: these are all very different things. I will be thirty-five-years old this summer. Someday a time will come when the apparatus that has worked so well will no longer work for me. For all I know, that time came last month, or will come this year, or will not come for a long, long time. But that will be an ending reached without my acquiescence. This one requires my cooperation. And as I look into a box of crib sheets, yellow with milk stains, yellowing just a bit with age, I know that I cannot cooperate right now. I have a feeling of possibility within me that means too much to give away. I could use the closet space, but right now it is something else I need much, much more.
MOTHER’S DAY
For several years after my mother’s death, I felt about Mother’s Day the way I suppose recently divorced people feel about Valentine’s Day. It seemed to be an organized effort by the immediate world to spit in my eye, and I gladly would have set fire to every card in every card rack in every card shop in town. In time, the rage abated, and what remained in its place was an emotionless distance. Mother’s Day became much like Passover, a holiday that people like me did not celebrate.
Secretly, I suspected that I would be reconciled to it someday, when I had children, when I was a mother. This conclusion seemed logical and sensible and was completely wrong. Mother’s Day is still fraught with strong emotion, if only because each year I feel like a fraud. It is undeniable that I have given birth to two children; I remember both occasions quite vividly. But the orchid corsage, the baby-pink card with the big M in curly script, the burnt toast on a tray in bed—they belong to someone else, some other kind of person, some sort of moral authority. They belong to Mother, and each of us knows quite well who that person is, and always will be.
That person is a concept. I suppose that is where it all goes wrong. I
know few people who have managed to separate the two. My friends speak about their mothers, about their manipulations and criticisms and pointed remarks, and when I meet these same women I can recognize very little of them in the child’s description. They usually seem intelligent, thoughtful, kind. But I am not in a position to judge. To me they are simply people, not some lifelong foil, a yardstick by which to measure myself, to publicly find Mother wanting, to privately find the fault within.
And yet I know the feeling. Although she was long dead when I had my children, my mother and I were then somehow equals, peers, alike in my mind. That was the most disconcerting feeling of my life. I was part of a generation of women so different from their mothers as to sometimes be a palpable insult, daughters who were perhaps as likely to model themselves on the male parent as the female one. For all of my life my mother had been the other: I was aggressive, she was passive. (Perhaps simply reserved?) I was intellectual, she was not. (Perhaps not given the opportunity?) I was gregarious, she was shy. (Perhaps simply more selective in her attachments?) At a family gathering recently, several people I have not seen since I was a girl approached and said they knew who I was because I looked exactly like my mother. I was chilled to the bone. How dare they? How dare they consign me to her shoes? How dare they allow me to fill them?
But in some sense I have slipped into them simply by having children of my own. Nearly every day an echo of my mother’s mothering wafts by me, like the aroma of soup simmering on a stove down the street. Even as we swear we will not do some of the horrible things they did, not pull the thumb like a cork from our children’s mouths, not demand that they clean their plates, our mothers’ words come full-blown out of our mouths, usually in anger: “If you do that it will be the last thing you do.” “You’ve got another think coming.” “Over my dead body.” “Because I said so, that’s why.” Even as we enumerate their shortcomings, the rigor of raising children ourselves makes clear to us our mothers’ incredible strength. We fear both. If they are not strong, who will protect us? If they are not imperfect, how can we equal them?
Perhaps those conflicting emotions help us reconcile ourselves to our mothers, make us able to apprehend the shadow of a human being who is just raising other human beings the best she can, beneath the terrible weight of the concept. In the beginning it is difficult. I have envied my friends who have had their mothers to help them with new babies, then felt the envy evaporate at the distress and doubt my friends sometimes felt about who was really the mother here. “No girl becomes a woman until she has lost her mother,” someone once told me. And there was the proof: women reduced to children again in a way I never could be.
Yet it is having children that can smooth the relationship, too. Mother and daughter are now equals. That is hard to imagine, even harder to accept, for among other things, it means realizing that your own mother felt this way, too—unsure of herself, weak in the knees, terrified about what in the world to do with you. It means accepting that she was tired, inept, sometimes stupid; that she, too, sat in the dark at 2:00 A.M. with a child shrieking across the hall and no clue to the child’s trouble.
Most of this has little to do with the specific women involved. In my case that is certainly true. This firestorm is not about one sweet, gentle mother, perhaps tough and demanding inside, and one tough, demanding daughter, now sweet and gentle with her own children. It has to do with Mother with a capital M: someone we are afraid to be and afraid that we can never be. It has to do with a torch being passed, with finding it too hot to hold, with looking up at the person who has given it to you and accepting that, without it, she is no Valkyrie, just a woman muddling through, much like me, much like you.
RAISING
A
CHILD
THE BIRTHDAY-PARTY WARS
I have returned from the birthday-party wars. My side lost. Balloons were broken, jelly sandwiches fell jelly-side down on wall-to-wall carpets, the wine for the adults ran out. Two of the same dinosaurs were received as gifts. (They were stegosauruses.) There were whistles as party favors in violation of decent human standards. All around us the battle raged. This is why the birth process is roughly commensurate to participating in a triathalon in hell: to prepare parents for the birthday parties. In the thick of one celebration I took a cleansing breath and then panted. It did not help. I realized the following:
—Piñatas are the only things in life that are truly unbreakable. You can knock them, you can hit them, you can beat them with a stick, yet they continue to swing through the air: ruffled crepe paper, papier-mâché, and a smile. Dumb donkey. Kids are not half as discombobulated by this as adults, who understand that the fun is not supposed to be in the hitting but in the breaking. Dumb adults. Finally the fathers move in to tear the thing limb from limb.
—No matter how much you pay a clown to entertain, it could never be enough. Just as you are finally ready to shut all the little guests in the laundry room—“Look, here’s a game—fold the towels!”—he has managed to set up his equipment. You have an hour to eat, to breathe, to discover that someone put the bag of malted-milk balls in the dishwasher and then turned it to the pots-and-pans cycle.
—The most important thing to remember about the spacing of your children is not contained in any book. It is that the older one should have a birthday before the younger one. Otherwise you will hear the sentence “But when is it my birthday?” spoken in a whine for three or four months on end.
—Everything positive you have ever taught your child will evaporate when the gifts are opened. And I’m not talking about when they are opened at his own party, when he will only remove clothing from the box and toss it over his shoulder. All year long you have been talking about sharing, about waiting your turn, and about not going berserk in public, and suddenly, at another person’s birthday party, the child is confronted by an enormous pile of presents, none of which are for him. A chain of ganglia within his little slicked-down head fire off, and he shrieks, “I want them ALL.” He is carried into another room, where he is promised gifts on his own birthday if he calms down. No way.
I would like to blame my mother for not teaching me these things, but she did not know them. When she was raising five children there were no piñatas, no clowns. Birthday parties were easy. If your child’s birthday fell during the school year, you packed two dozen cupcakes in a box and took them to school, where the child was serenaded with the kid version of “Happy Birthday” at recess. “You look like a monkey/And you smell like one too,” everyone sang, breathless with the hilarity of the lyrics; then they ate the icing off the cupcakes and went back to fractions. If your child’s birthday fell during the summer, you had a family barbeque at which the only permissible gifts were underwear, socks, or a new missal. My birthday happens to be in July; I always had a sparkler in my cake instead of candles, which was considered the height of sophistication at that time.
Now those wonderful folks who brought you designer sneakers, baby vegetables, and insider trading are giving children’s birthday parties, and no one gives missals as gifts. One clown told me, his face grim beneath his painted-on happy face, that he had performed at a party at which the children booed his balloon animals. (I hope all such children will someday be tried as adults rather than juveniles, and given life without parole in the fifth grade.) My own children have not gone to enough parties to get uppity over even the most pathetic balloon animals, but the elder one is pushing it. He wants dinosaurs on his cake. “Not brontosauruses,” he says, knowing that I’ll opt for the easy outline. “Styracasauruses.” Last year he wanted helicopters. At midnight my husband found me leaning over an unmarked expanse of white icing with a tube of blue goo in one hand and an old copy of Newsweek with a fairly clear helicopter photograph propped up against a mixing bowl. “I think you’re losing it,” he said. What did he know? No one ever told his analyst that his father never made him a birthday cake. All he has to do is beat the piñata into submission.
I’m in charge of
the cake. It was chocolate. It had Nestlé’s Quik in it. (There’s a confession for you.) It had buttercream icing. I always make the cake. I feel like it puts me in touch with the elemental aspects of motherhood: that is, I get to lick the bowl. All my childhood, all I ever thought on the day before my birthday was “Someday I will be old enough to make my own cakes and to lick the bowl all by myself.” Of course, what I really meant was “Someday I will be old enough to make my own cakes and eat all the batter instead of pouring it into the pan.” Unfortunately I reckoned without the children. The older child helped me make the cake for the younger one. At one point, in violation of decent human standards, I found myself wrestling with him over who would lick the spoon. I lost. I will make his cake in the dead of night, while visions of styracasaurus dance in his head, and I will get the spoon and the mixer blades. We are losing the birthday-party wars, but I will win some small battles. Next year, enough wine.