Nursery Crimes Read Free

of our apartment into a U-Haul, hooked it to the back of my aunt Irene’s 1977 Buick, and took off for the promised land, Los Angeles. We ended up in a 1930s apartment chock-full of period details and period appliances in Hancock Park, near Melrose Avenue, and I got the job I’d always wanted, as a federal public defender. For the next couple of years Peter wrote script after script, some of which were actually made into movies. We met a lot of interesting and creative people: writers, directors, and even an occasional actor. I represented gangbangers and drug dealers and became familiar with a side of L.A. that most of our new Hollywood friends tried to pretend didn’t exist. I was the only one of our set not either writing a script, producing a movie, or trying to do one or the other. Nonetheless, I managed to hold my own at industry cocktail parties, regaling studio executives with stories about my cross-dressing bank-robber clients and how I was “protected” by the Thirty-seventh Avenue Crips.
    I loved my job, and I was really good at it. Everything was going wonderfully, and we were really happy. And then something happened that destroyed it all: We had a baby.
    Anyone who tells you that having a child doesn’t completely and irrevocably ruin your life is lying. As soon as that damp little bundle of poop and neediness lands in your life, it’s all over. Everything changes. Your relationship is destroyed. Your looks are shot. Your productivity is devastated. And you get stupid. Dense. Thick. Pregnancy and lactation make you dumb. That’s a proven, scientific fact.
    I went back to work when Ruby was four months old, and I quit ten months later. I just couldn’t stand beingapart from her and Peter. I’d call in the afternoon, snatching a few minutes to pump breast milk between court appearances and visiting clients at the detention center. Peter would tell me the latest cute Ruby story. I missed her first word (“boom”) and the day she started to walk. Peter wrote at night, slept in, and took over for the nanny at eleven each morning. He and Ruby spent the day together, going to the park, playing blocks, lunching with pals from Mommy and Me. I was jealous. Completely, insanely jealous.
    I was also doing a lousy job at work. I didn’t want to be there any longer than I absolutely had to. I was relieved when clients pled guilty because that meant I wouldn’t have to put in the late nights a trial demands. I finally realized that I was giving everything short shrift—my work, my husband, and most of all, Ruby.
    So I quit. I dumped three years of Harvard Law School into the toilet and became a full-time mom. That decision blew everyone away, including me. My boss, the kind of working mother who came back to work when her kids were three months old and never looked back, thought I’d lost my mind. My mother kept me on the phone one night for two hours, crying. I was supposed to have the career she’d never been able to achieve. She felt like I had betrayed her feminist dream. My friends who hadn’t yet had kids looked at me with a kind of puzzled condescension, obviously wondering what had become of the ambition that used to consume me.
    As for myself, I couldn’t really believe what I had done. For months, when people asked me what I did, I continued to reply, “public defender.” If pressed, I would clarify by saying that I was on leave to be with my daughter. I never really came to grips with my status as a “stay-at-home mom.” I’d always had just a little bit of disdainfor women who devoted themselves completely to their families. I’d always assumed that they were home because they couldn’t cut it, out in the real world. It had never occurred to me that a person would voluntarily leave a career in which she excelled in order to spend her days changing diapers and playing “This Little Piggy.”
    But that’s what I had done. The worst part of it was that I wasn’t especially proud of my