Exploiting My Baby

While most people say having children gives them new compassion for their parents, I’m not having that experience so far. Instead, I’m filled with a renewed, fuming and bottomless discontent about the mom hand I was dealt, which consisted of one truly evil, now fortunately dead, stepmother, and a wildly superior though still problematic biological mom, who raised me with a combination of ambivalence and benign neglect.

The syllogism was as impossible to ignore as a tot shrieking in a high chair, spitting noodles: Mom hates children. I am a child. Therefore, mom hates me. I must be quite an irritating burden. In fact, I grew up thinking that everyone hates babies. It was all I knew.

Don’t get me wrong. My mom is a fun person, and people genuinely like her. If Auntie Mame were less chirpy, more medicated, and prone to dating angry, homeless Berkeley poets or leaving her kids for a month to chop trees in Vermont, that would be my mom. Part Mame, part maimed, all out of her element when it came to lullabies and hugs.

To this day, if a baby cries in a restaurant with my mom around, we all have to bail immediately, but not before she shoots the family several piercing, withering looks. Long looks. She doesn’t look away until she has properly shamed the parents for ruining her meal and her day. When she hears a baby cry—or, frankly, gurgle, laugh or even sing—she fixes her face in an expression to communicate to the world that she is being put upon, that the sounds coming from your child are no less than an ice pick in her temporal lobe.

I am not her, or she, or however you say it. I know that, but there are tinges of her intolerance, times I notice my head involuntarily snapping toward a howling baby in a restaurant, a vestige of that adhesive notion that babies are serenity-piercing killjoys.

I’m terrified that just as I have her broad shoulders and wide feet, I may inherit her lackluster mothering skills. How can I be sure I won’t resent my baby? My therapist assures me I won’t, that true maternal detachment of my mother’s sort is very rare, that even though my baby is only partially cooked, I’m already bonded to the kid, and that seems true. Still, when I think about how much the whole experience sucked for my mom, I worry.

She bought “It’s a Boy” cards when she was pregnant, just trying to sway the gender gods. Her desire for a second boy was based on this chestnut: “A boy would be your father’s problem.” This story isn’t one she tried to hide. In fact, it was in heavy rotation on the “Mom’s hilarious anecdote Top 40,” staying there for an unprecedented twenty years, right up there with predicting my brother would never pass the bar (he did, on the first try) and falling asleep during one of my particularly boring ballet recitals.

“If you look at pictures, your mom holds you like a sack of potatoes, like she didn’t connect. I think she must have had that postpartum thing,” says my dad, trying to explain some of this, trying to defend her even though they have been divorced since I was three. He argues that it wasn’t her fault; she just wasn’t cut out for motherhood. In one old snapshot taken in a park somewhere, she holds me as I hold my stuffed bunny, my older brother is down at her feet, and she is looking away, yellow headband in her black hair, squinting. If there was a caption, it might read, “How can I get the fuck out of this?”

When I was a few months old, she got a job as a Los Angeles County school bus driver so she could afford to pay a nanny named Inez to babysit me for the first two years of my life. Let that sink in for a sec: My mother, a college graduate with an above-genius IQ, who could do Rain Man stuff like counting cards, preferred spending her days driving a diesel school bus through the smog-choked San Fernando Valley over staying home with her kids.

When I was three and my brother five, she decided she needed a break from the whole married-with-kids endeavor and left the family for six months to take a job in Chicago. By the time she got back, she was starting to get that “you’re not such a good mom” look from people, including the judge, who awarded custody of my brother and me to my dad.

Once a month, starting when I was four, she put me on a plane alone to see my dad back in L.A. That isn’t even legal anymore; kids that young can’t fly unaccompanied. Summers and holidays, she put me on a Greyhound bus to stay with my grandparents in Santa Barbara. Those were ten-hour bus rides, just one little girl reading Mad magazine and eating Twizzlers with an assortment of vagrants, fugitives and visitors to the California Men’s Colony. When I confronted my mom about it, she asked, “What was I supposed to do? Drive you myself all those times?”

Back at home during the school year, I spent up to four hours a day on public buses and streetcars, to and from school, to and from ballet, to and from Sunday school. Four nights a week after ballet class, I would trudge to the bus stop in front of a tranny bar with a bun in my hair and a giant book bag across my chest. To get to my bus stop, I would walk past a row of double-parked cars, parents awaiting their daughters. On rainy days I begged my mother to pick me up, but she never did. It didn’t dawn on me to feel sorry for myself until much later, but I’ve sure as hell made up for it since. When I go back to San Francisco, I visit that corner of Church and Market like I can flag down that little girl in her bun and leg warmers and scoop her out of the wind.

My childhood best friend, Amy, lived a couple of blocks away with her “two moms,” who celebrated their anniversary every year with a lavender cake. These people seemed like gay Doris Days living in Pleasantville compared to the chaos at my place.

When Amy came over, we would order pizza and antipasto from Haystack Pizza (I still know the number by heart) and scarf it down while my mom disappeared into her room. To amuse ourselves, we would walk across the thick shag carpet in the living room and count the fleas that landed on our ankles. Mom wasn’t exactly a stellar home-maker, and aside from the emotional mess, the place was usually unkempt, with dirty pots on the stove for days, unpaid bills and junk mail teetering in high piles throughout the house and a cat box that was cleaned at long and irregular intervals.

Once, Amy and I were sitting around the kitchen table with my mom after school (Synergy, an elementary school without walls or desks where we called our teachers “Dusty” and “Cindy” and rarely bothered with things like geography and fractions) when the word “cervix” came up. I don’t remember how, but it was San Francisco in the ’70s and people spoke about sexuality pretty freely.

Ten-year-old Amy responded with some obvious naïveté about the cervix, which prompted my mother to lean toward her in an explosion of incredulity and snap, “It’s your body. It’s your vagina. Stick your finger in there and feel around!”

Granted, this may have been sound advice. In fact, Amy says she has since suggested female friends of hers with a seeming lack of self-awareness and ownership of their bodies do the same. At the time, though, like most interactions with my mother, it was intimidating and freaky. While the overall message may have been a good one—get to know your own body; don’t have vagina shame—Mom was incapable of calibrating it for her audience and, moreover, unwilling to bother. She didn’t have a clue why this would rattle us, still can’t see herself as others see her, doesn’t give a shit, really, which is part of her charm but was also massively disturbing to a daughter. I didn’t appreciate my mother barking at my elementary school chum to stick her finger in her vagina.

Because she spent the bulk of her energy just trying to escape motherhood, either so she could go out folk dancing with her friend Maureen or shut the door to her room and watch a small black-and-white TV, it was jarring when her notable and abiding absence was punctuated by moments of extreme presence. The pattern made me really nervous throughout most of my childhood, because I never knew when she would shift from completely tuned out to right in my face, or my friend’s face, telling us to get into our cervixes.

When she saw a couple of girls picking on me at a Synergy School function she attended, she cornered Amy, as a representative of this group, and probably the only girl she knew by name, and yelled, “Do you know what you’re doing to her? She is devastated by how you girls are acting.”

It was terrifying the way my mother defended me. And confusing. She didn’t want my little friends to treat me like an outcast, but she had no problem sending me off by myself on a Greyhound bus, a far more dangerous experience for which she regularly volunteered me. When my brother stayed with us one weekend a month, she would rip the head off anyone who bullied him, a kid she lost custody of for ditching, a kid she wasn’t even raising. We were everything and we were nothing.

Here’s where I struggle to say something positive so I don’t come across like a horrible, ungrateful daughter just for telling the truth. The more self-reliant we became, the more tolerant she was, and I can say she did have some sparkling mom moments.

Every summer, she would take us to a family camp in Yosemite, where she would mainly work on her tan and leave us to fend for ourselves. At night, however, she would read to us by flashlight, one chapter before bed, usually Vonnegut or Steinbeck. The year she read us Of Mice and Men, we couldn’t wait until sundown, to hear our mother’s voice, low and deliberate, tell the story of Lennie and George and their dream about tending rabbits and living off the fat of the land. I still think my mother has the most perfect voice in the world, can still hear her clear diction, the sound of mosquitoes buzzing and paperback pages turning in the darkness. When George shot Lennie, we were decimated for days. This should be in the bad memory pile, and perhaps linger only as evidence that Mom should have stuck to age-appropriate literature. Instead, getting caught up in that story was like being tucked into a sleeping bag, tight, inescapable and cozy.

Books were holy to my mother, as were plays, musicals and the ballet, all of which she dragged me to throughout my childhood, toting me along to everything from Annie to Richard II. If there was a band of Slavic folk dancers in town, we saw them. If a slapdash improv troupe was giving a never-ending performance in the Mission District, we were there. I was generally the only kid at revivals of Judy Garland movies at the Castro Theatre and poetry readings at Sacred Grounds, the coffee shop my mom owned in Haight-Ashbury. On the way to these outings, she always seemed flustered and quiet (the time I lost my patent leather shoe and made us twenty minutes late to The Nutcracker, she didn’t talk to me for days) and, frankly, pretty bored by my company. Again, if you don’t like kids but have to live with one, even evenings spent at enriching cultural events of your choosing are like bad dates you just have to get through so you can go home, wipe off your makeup, unhook your uncomfortable bra, and relax. Still, she communicated that being creative wasn’t something frivolous, but instead that artists were contributing something deeply important to society.

This is how we came to house a poet named Max, who lived in our garage for about seven years rent-free. He sauntered upstairs to use our bathroom and do his laundry, but otherwise spent most of his time on a dilapidated plastic lawn chair on the sidewalk outside of our place, where he was prone to breaking out into freestyle verse. He wore an army jacket and was freakishly tall and rail thin, thanks to constant juice fasts. His teeth were like piano keys, some permanently depressed, and I dreaded running into him on my way home, especially if I had to explain to a friend why there was a giant (literally) starving artist snapping his fingers and rhyming in our driveway.

I wished every single day that he would leave, didn’t care about his huge following in Europe, just wanted to have a freak-free childhood for a while. If I could say one positive thing about Max’s long stay, it is only in retrospect. I couldn’t articulate it at the time, but our garage poet was a manifestation of my mother’s abiding sense that art was valuable, something to be supported and cultivated.

Even though parenthood seemed a dismal experience, I knew nothing made my mother happier than when I was artistic. Okay, I was a terrible visual artist, and when I brought home a lopsided ceramic ashtray or drippy watercolor painting, she would pretty much mock me and toss them or shove them in a dresser drawer with a pile of old scarves. But however much she disdained my crappy crafts, she paid for those ballet lessons for years without complaint and she always encouraged me to write, something she probably regrets right about now.

I knew she meant it when she said she liked some essay or book report I brought home, because she was incapable of sugarcoating. Although when I think about it, sugarcoating is sort of what moms are for, and I could have used some of that. But I got what I got and sometimes I’m at peace with that and other times I’m sad for what I missed.

Of course, like everyone who tries to correct the things their parents got wrong, I will endeavor never to humiliate my child (knock wood, if I am lucky enough to actually have one) by being super weird or saying tactless things, but there is a strong chance I will fail at least some of the time.

My prime screw-up-the-kid years are far off, though; it’s really the baby thing that concerns me now, the looming possibility that tending to an infant will be at best thankless and boring, at worst a stifling slow death, a suffocation by talc-scented swaddle. If I am truly my mother’s daughter, there is the possibility that before I make my child miserable in ways he will recall, he will make me miserable, just by existing, just by being a tiny bundle of needs.

My therapist says I am at “high risk” for postpartum depression, because of all of what went down with my own mother. She calls in my husband for a joint session, lets him know he will have to look for warning signs and be prepared to toss some Prozac down my gullet if I get all withdrawn and affectless. If this happens, I’m assured that it will pass quickly. As we sit there on her couch holding hands, I like the way we must look to her: happy, respectful of each other, in love, and we aren’t faking it for her sake. It isn’t often I feel like a show-off for anything to do with my sanity, but the best thing I could do for a child, choose a father who is warm and stable and solid, I have already done. And I want my fucking gold star. And I think I see it glinting in my therapist’s eyes. My man is good daddy material, and she knows it.

(Hopefully, it’s not too Woody Allen that I write about my therapist. When you’re as mental as I am, having struggled with everything from paralyzing stage fright to various existential career crises and bouts of crippling loneliness, therapists are important in your life.)

At the moment, I don’t communicate with my mother at all, haven’t spoken to her in about a year. It’s not uncommon for me to take mom breaks when she gets to be too much, because while you might feel too guilty to cut your mom off, I don’t have that problem.

She kept me alive for eighteen years, and while I appreciate that, she did it with such a minimum of effort and aptitude that it sometimes feels like our exchange in this lifetime is complete. She mostly phoned in being a mother and now I phone in being a daughter, which is to say I don’t phone her at all. Oddly enough, she would love me to call her every day, like my brother does; fill her in. I think this is because she is bored and the comings and goings of our lives as adults are interesting, in stark contrast to the misshapen ceramic ashtrays and poopy diapers of our childhoods. I get it. Now that I can wipe my own ass and don’t require full-time un-fun care, I’m a real hoot. But I’m also a resentful, grudge-holding hoot with “Cat’s in the Cradle” playing in my head on a loop.

Before going ahead with the baby making, I ran all of this by my therapist, who did the best thing a therapist has ever done, and I’ve had a lot of them. She offered me $1 million if I have a baby and don’t love it. She’s that positive I’m going to be okay.

She helps me make a plan to get some help for the first few weeks after the baby so I don’t get too sleep-deprived, hire a night nurse to do what some more capable mothers do for their daughters, help out with the bathing and swaddling and midnight comforting, model nurturing behavior, tell me everything is going to be okay.

I am working on this chapter at a diner when a baby starts wailing and chucking Cheerios from a paper bowl. It’s not a beautiful sound to me, but I force myself to question whether it’s the worst, or whether an even more festering sound is my mother’s voice in my head; not reading great literature, but her own flawed script about motherhood.