Bad mother A chronicle of maternal crimes, minor calamities, and occasional moments of grace

Review by New York Times Review

Ayelet Waldman's essays on marriage vs. motherhood. WRITING about motherhood is a little bit like writing about sex - in both cases, the author confronts the challenge of finding something new to say about a subject so powerful that all but the most inspired language sounds either trite or overblown. In an essay she wrote for The New York Times back in 2005, Ayelet Waldman found something new to say about both sex and motherhood, or at least something rarely heard spoken aloud: that she loved her husband even more than she did her four young children. Some readers probably cringed at the way Waldman wrote about her own sex life ("vital, even torrid"), but they weren't the ones who tore into Waldman on "Oprah," or criticized her on the rabid parenting Web site UrbanBaby. Mostly, her attackers were indignant mothers, and they forced Waldman into what she calls, in "Bad Mother," her new book of essays about maternal guilt, the "Bad Mother perp walk," a public and painful drubbing for declarations that - among other things - her children might not appreciate. Bold though it was, the actual message of Waldman's essay probably wasn't quite as controversial as her presentation. Waldman didn't do much to soften the stance, taking her point of view to a rhetorical extreme - she could survive the loss of a child, she felt compelled to spell out, and life would go on, so long as she had her husband. The reverse would not be true. It wasn't the writing that riveted or repelled people in that essay, it was an immoderate honesty, which is precisely what makes "Bad Mother" occasionally absorbing reading. At its worst, that unedited quality translates, in Waldman's prose, into lazy cliché: She writes of her "briefcase traded in for a diaper bag" and makes jokes about her sagging breasts. (I'm begging here: can we please have a moratorium on that particular image in maternal memoirs?) In an essay in which she congratulates herself and her husband for sharing housework (a task made that much easier by the maid they employ), she reminds readers that "there is nothing sexier to a woman with children than a man holding a Swiffer," an insight Redbook has probably been espousing, in one form or another, for, oh, about 30 years. She even makes tired jokes stereotyping her own identity (on ordering in dinner: "I'm a Jewish girl from the New York area, after all"). And yet it's the same uncensored rawness that made me reluctant to speed through any of Waldman's essays, for fear I'd miss some of the more jolting zingers. "Let's all commit ourselves to the basic civility of minding our own business," she concludes in an essay exhorting mothers to stop scolding one another in public. "Failing that, let's just go back to a time when we were nasty and judgmental, but only behind one another's backs." What really makes Waldman's book interesting, as voices on motherhood go, is Waldman herself - the intensity of her positions and the way she thinks. In an essay on teaching her kids to feel good about sex, she writes about her decision to put a colorful bag of condoms on one of the top shelves in the kids' bathroom, just so they get used to the idea for when the time comes (her youngest is now 5). Objecting to her kids' playing dodgeball, she calls the gym teacher to quote, chapter and verse, the official opposing position of the National Association for Sports and Physical Education. (You might think this was in an essay on the perils of overparenting; it's actually one in which she realizes that she can't foist her own childhood anxieties onto her own socially adroit children.) When she screws up she screws up royally, and fesses up. After a mother on one of her kids' preschool e-mail lists sends her a sanctimonious note, Waldman forwards the exchange, along with some expletive-filled commentary, to a friend. "Except I didn't hit the "forward button," she writes. "I hit 'reply to all.'" Waldman, hotheaded and opinionated, digs herself into ditches, and with "Bad Mother," sends candid shots from the pit. SOME of the essays in the collection, like one in which she worries she's failing her daughters because she lets her husband change the light bulbs, feel not just slight but neurotic, given their inclusion in a collection called "Bad Mother." And like many women who write about the difficulty of balancing work and family, Waldman does so from the privileged position of someone who has few money worries and flexible hours, which means she never has to face some of the agonizing challenges so many women do. But that doesn't mean Waldman never puts herself on the line. In an essay called "Rocketship," Waldman takes brave risks that make the title of the book seem less like a feminist wink and more like a tortured cry of self-doubt. She describes the choice she made, over her husband's initial objection, to terminate a pregnancy when a genetic counselor informed them there was a small - but bigger than usual - chance that their son would be seriously developmentally and physically challenged. Waldman is never more moving than when she describes reading aloud, on Yom Kippur, before her entire congregation, a letter of atonement to the little boy or girl who would have been her third child. "I atoned before my husband, and my baby," Waldman writes. "I begged Rocketship's forgiveness for being so inadequate a mother that I could not accept an imperfect child." She wants no consolation from the abortion-rights crowd ("Rocketship was my baby. And I killed him"), and she's clearly unafraid of what the anti-abortion propaganda machine will do with what she has written. Waldman doesn't always tie her essays up in a neat bow, which seems appropriately messy given the subject matter. They say that a good mother is one who doesn't need her kids to like her all the time. Of writers and their readers, Waldman's book leaves me thinking, the same might be true. Waldman, hot-headed and opinionated, digs herself into ditches, and sends candid shots from the pit. Susan Dominus writes the Big City column for The Times.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]

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Review by Booklist Review

Waldman, author of the Mommy-Track mystery series, briefly served as the poster child for bad mothers after publishing an essay about how she loved her husband, Michael Chabon, more than their children. Her outspoken reputation is assured with this memoir, although fans and critics alike will be surprised by the vulnerability she exposes. Waldman writes of her shock at the vitriol sent in her direction from sources as varied as bloggers and Oprah's studio audience. She ponders the definition of a good mother, and wonders why the often-cited fictional examples of June Cleaver and Little Women's Marmee are widely accepted as role models. She faces her own perceived failures (a chapter on abortion is gut-wrenching) and ponders the complicated nature of contemporary motherhood and how casually women attack each other with little regard for or knowledge about their targets. While Waldman's biting humor is ever present, it is her concern for other conflicted mothers that stays with the reader. In all, an unexpectedly tender book in which Waldman candidly considers how difficult it is to be Mommy.--Mondor, Colleen Copyright 2009 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Having aroused the ire of righteous mothers with her confession to loving her husband more than her children, Waldman (Love and Other Impossible Pursuits) offers similar boldface opinions in 18 rather defensive essays. The mother of four, living in Berkeley and married for 15 years to an ideal partner who told her on their first date that he wanted to be a stay-at-home husband and father (he also happens to be novelist Michael Chabon), Waldman was a Jewish girl who grew up in 1970s suburban New Jersey, where her mother introduced her to Free to Be You and Me and instilled in her the importance of becoming a working mother. With her supportive husband to manage the domestic drudgery, Waldman did pursue a law career, until she quit to be with her growing family. As a champion of "bad mothering," that is, dropping the metaphorical ball-making mistakes and forgiving yourself for it-Waldman writes in these well-fashioned essays how a mother's best intentions frequently go awry: she really meant to breastfeed, until one of her children was bottle-fed because of a palate abnormality; she denounced the playing of dodgeball in her children's school, out of her own memories of schoolyard humiliations; and she confesses to aborting a fetus who suffered a genetic defect. Her determinedly frank revelations are chatty and sure to delight the online groups she frequents. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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1. Bad Mother I busted my first Bad Mother in the spring of 1994, on a Muni train in San Francisco. She was sitting on the edge of her seat, her young daughter standing between her knees. She had two barrettes clamped between her lips and a hair elastic stretched around the fingers of one hand. With her other hand she was brushing the little girl's long dark hair, trying to gather the slippery strands into a neat ponytail. It was not going well. She would smooth one side and then lose her grip on the other, or gather up the hair in the front only to watch the hairs at the nape of the girl's neck slide free. The ride was rough, the Muni car bucking and jerking along, causing the little girl periodically to lose her footing. When the driver took a turn too sharply, the little girl stumbled forward, her sudden motion causing her mother once again to lose hold of the ponytail. With a frustrated click of her tongue, the mother yanked a handful of the girl's hair, hard, and hissed, "Stand still!" That's when, indignant, confident that someday, when it was my turn to brush my own daughter's hair, I would never be so abusive, I leaned forward in my seat, caught the woman's eye, and said, in a voice loud enough for everyone in the train car to hear, "Lady, we're all watching you." We are always watching: the Bad Mother police force, in a perpetual state of alert-level orange. Sometimes the avatars of maternal evil that come to obsess us are grave and terrible, like Andrea Yates, who was found not guilty by reason of insanity for drowning her five children in the bathtub. Sometimes our fixation on a particular Bad Mother has to do with our own racism, as in the national obsession in the 1980s with the mythical welfare queen, described by Ronald Reagan as a woman with "80 names, 30 addresses, [and] 12 Social Security cards," or the current hysteria about undocumented women giving birth to "anchor" babies in order to immunize themselves from deportation. Sometimes the crime is so lunatic that it approaches a kind of horrible grandeur, like that of Wendy Cook, a prostitute in Saratoga Springs who snorted cocaine off her baby's stomach while she was breast-feeding. (And here I've always been proud of being able to nurse and read at the same time!) As soon as one Bad Mother fades from view, another quickly takes her place in the dock of the court of public opinion. Not long ago, the dingbat pop starlet Britney Spears was hoisted up as the latest agent of villainy. Her Bad Mother rap sheet is long and varied. It includes being committed to a psychiatric facility, losing visitation rights after failing to submit to court-mandated drug testing, driving with her infant son on her lap, and running in her car over the feet of photographers and sheriff's deputies. And apart from her legal troubles, there are her miscellaneous crimes of lifestyle. Her constant partying, her spendthrift ways ($737,000 every month!), and, most notoriously perhaps, her inexplicable refusal to wear undergarments. We can all agree, can't we, that Britney Spears is at best an incompetent mother and at worst a neglectful one. She's far worse than my first collar, the Medea of Muni, who pulled her daughter's hair on the J Church line. So why, then, do I find myself feeling like she's gotten a bit of a rough deal? Perhaps because in a smaller way, at the periphery of the public eye, I was myself made to do the Bad Mother perp walk. For a Warholian fifteen I became fodder for the morning talk shows and gossip blogs, held up to scorn and ridicule as an example of maternal perfidy. My crime? Confessing in the pages of the New York Times style section to loving my husband more than my children. In that essay I wondered about why so many of the women I knew were not having sex with their husbands, while I still was, and I concluded that it might be because they, unlike me, had refocused their passion from t Excerpted from Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace by Ayelet Waldman All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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