Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace Read Free Page A

with what the journalist Peggy Orenstein, author of
Flux: Women on Sex, Work, Love, Kids
,
and Life in a Half-Changed World
, calls “making pre–Betty Friedan choices in a post–Betty Friedan universe.” When we were little girls—we daughters of the late 1960s and the 1970s—none of us said we wanted to be wives and mothers when we grew up. None of us said we wanted to run the nursery school committee or frost perfect cupcakes or spend our days ferrying children back and forth from hockey games to music classes. We all had ambitions that went beyond the confines of our own houses. We wanted to work, to have careers, to have professions. But for so many of us, the realities of the workplace and of family life have either defeated or drastically changed these expectations. When career advancement demands a sixty-or seventy-hour workweek, when the child-care bill approaches or exceeds your paycheck, or when simple survival requires a second job, juggling home and family suddenly shifts from the challenging to the impossible. Someone usually ends up sacrificing his or her career to some extent, and in a world where a woman still earns roughly seventy cents to a man’s dollar, and where a man’s identity is still almost exclusively defined by what he does, that someone is almost always the mother.
    So here we are, either staying home or making serious professional compromises in order to be more available to our children or feeling like terrible mothers for having failed to make those sacrifices. I imagine there are some mothers who have without regret channeled all of their ambition and energy into making homemade Play-Doh, organizing the nursery school capital campaign, and directing the fifth-grade social committee, but I have never met one. Most of the women I know feel an underlying and corrosive sense of disappointment and anxiety. The women I know are, on some level, unfulfilled. And the women I know spend a lot of time trying to avoid wondering whether the sacrifice was worth it.
    It’s that very wondering, it’s the being unfulfilled, that makes us feel the worst. That’s what triggers our most intense anxiety. Feeling dissatisfied, bored, and unhappy is unpleasant, yes, but what really scares us is the very
fact
of our dissatisfaction, boredom, and unhappiness. Because a mother who isn’t satisfied with being a mother, a mother who wants to do more than spend her days with her children, a mother who can imagine more, is selfish. And just as the Good Mother is defined by her self-abnegation, the single most important, defining characteristic of the Bad Mother is her selfishness.
    Even if we sympathize with Andrea Yates’s postpartum depression, even if we’ve suffered from it ourselves, even if we are ready to acknowledge that homeschooling five children in a converted school bus would probably on its own be enough to drive us to homicide, we condemn Yates for having succumbed to her despair. She valued her own misery more than her children’s lives. We condemn the Bad Mother even when she is the primary victim of her own tragedy, like, for example, Carol Anne Gotbaum, the Upper West Side mother of three who, while on her way to an alcohol rehabilitation facility, died in police custody after an altercation in the Phoenix airport. “Yes, I’m sure she was mother of the year,” snapped an UrbanBaby mom-squad assassin, after someone wrote a sympathetic post about Gotbaum, “what with her severe alcoholism, suicide attempts, and tendency towards verbal abuse.” Another deemed the entire incident an example of “self-indulgent nonsense.”
    When Susan Smith drove her two children into a lake, one of the most compelling facts about the case, one reported in the press over and over again, was that she had allegedly done so because the man she was dating didn’t like kids. Here was this woman whowas clearly insane, but the media narrative about her was that she valued the satisfaction she got from her