So, I finished a book that I did not assign for class (and no it is not the long, complicated David Grossman novel of which I have managed 15 pages a night before falling alseep, book on head). Alison was writing something about Ayelet Waldman and I asked to borrow the book Bad Mother (you should know, reader(s) that I never buy books at Amazon and yet I always link these books to Amazon, why is that?). In 18 chapters Waldman recounts her marriage, her life as a lawyer and a writer, and her children -- but more than all of this she recounts her experience of being a mother and her obsession with being a "bad" mother. A bad mother is a mother who is not perfect; and while I appreciate Waldman's argument that we are often inundated with images of maternal perfection as the only ideal, I also think that this theme gets old fast. Waldman clearly wants credit (amusing dinner party credit) for being a bad mom. And her writing is not sufficiently amusing to maintain that tone, but after chapter 10 or so she calms down. And what is clear from then on is not that she is a bad mother (although she, like all the rest of us is imperfect) but that she is an anxious mother. She is anxious about how her moods will impact her children, how her expectations will distort them, how her hopes will stifle them, how her desire to be her own person and continue loving her husband as the number 1 chosen person in her life will bring the whole family down. Waldman is, in part, in love with her own anxiety. But she is also honest about that anxiety.
Yet, she has strange perceptions about the universe and its role in her life, while she does recount in detail how she has worked through decisions about aborting a child with a genetic, trisomy related, pre-natal diagnosis, and dealing with a son's struggles in school and a daughter's delayed speaking and another son's palate issues (and yes, as those who know me will recognize, let me say here: she has one million children....i.e. more than 2). In all of these decisions (most notably about Rocketship, the name the family gave the child she aborted) Waldman speaks honestly about where she is coming from. But then there is an odd (to me) shift to the universe. She says in a later chapter, after the main Rocketship chapter (which is Ch11), "as blessed as we had always been, here now the universe had dealt us a shitty hand" (166). (And here I should link to Alison again for a blogpost on that very subject.) And this is the point where her often compelling focus on her own mental moment seemed off. In the Rocketship chapter, Rocketship is a potential person that Waldman (unlike her husband) does not think she can bring into the world. But now Waldman seems to be presenting a universe that doles out children like blessings and...curses? bits of shit? What I liked about the Rocketship chapter was that it was really honest and her self-asborption was palpable. But now (in the throes of CVS testing for child 4) the universe was saying something.
So if I ever wrote a book about parenting it would be titled: The Universe is Silent.
And the book was lent with a promise that she has a lot of sex with her husband. Which she may well have, but other than that bare assertion, there is little sex to be had here.
Ha! Did I imply that there were descriptions of sex? No, just assertions. Perhaps we can request more juiciness for the next book, "Sexy Mother."
ReplyDeleteI completely agree with you about the anxiety: she's really not a bad mother at all, just an anxious one.
I agree, too, about the universe. The trouble with the universe sending messages is that, if the universe is sending them, they're incredibly difficult to interpret. Is it a shitty hand? Is it a wonderful surprise? Is the universe trying to distract you so that some other message can come along? Who the hell knows? These days when I feel I'm getting a message, I try to hold off on interpreting it at all, because often my attempts to interpret have been shown to be profoundly misguided.