CHAPTER 36

Other Mothers

From the minute Leda gave birth to her daughter, some kind of unspoken race began between herself and every other mother on earth. She’d figured that having a baby would grant her an immediate support system, but it hadn’t been like that at all. Motherhood seemed to provoke a crippling anxiety in the majority of women. Certainly on the surface the other mothers would commiserate about diaper rashes and colic, the cost of daycare and the dangers of plastics, but underneath it all there was always the lingering competition, a vague hatred fueled by developmental milestones.

When Annabelle was very small, most of Leda’s contact with the outside world was through Facebook, and it was there that she first noticed it. Her friend Ruth from high school had a baby boy named Noah. Ruth generally posted one or two pictures of Noah a week and had been doing so since the day he was born. Leda tried to “like” all of them to be supportive of Ruth as a fellow new mom, but she found the majority of the pictures unsettling. Every single one of them had a filter and a perfectly coordinated backdrop. There were no quick candid shots and nothing was ever a little out of focus. At a certain point Leda came to the conclusion that Ruth was self-conscious of her son, that she thought he was ugly. It was bizarre and it was tragic. Poor Noah, Leda thought. There won’t be any baby pictures of him with his natural skin tone.

Around the time Noah was six months old Ruth posted a picture of him with the description: “And we’re mobile! What am I going to do now?? #mobilebaby.” Virtually seconds after it was posted, nearly a dozen comments lit up underneath. At least seven different mothers chimed in to brag about their own children in relation to Ruth bragging about hers.

“Mobile already? My Nettie started walking at eight months and it was the worst .”

“Uh oh! Preston didn’t walk till he was thirteen months which I was glad about just for this reason! He was such an early talker though. I prefer that! I feel for you .”

“Too soon!!”

At a certain point Ruth had to jump in to clarify that she hadn’t meant that Noah was walking yet, but just that he’d started to crawl. “But I’m sure he’ll be an early walker at this rate,” she said. All the other mothers seemed to take a collective sigh of relief. The comments stopped being catty and started being overtly complimentary.

“What a smart boy! Just like his mama!”

“Can’t wait to see this little guy in person!”

“You go, Noah!”

The day of his first birthday Ruth posted a video of Noah “walking” where the child screamed as he wobbled between parents. His little arms were reaching up in terror for a hand to catch him. “Taking his first steps on his first birthday!” the description read. In the months since her original #mobilebaby Ruth wasn’t about to lose with her ugly baby. He would walk by age one. He would be a mobile baby and he would win, even if it meant forcing him across the lawn in tears. Yikes, Leda thought, and liked the video.

As Annabelle became a toddler, the competitive cattiness of the other mothers became considerably more difficult to avoid. On Wednesdays Leda would walk her down to the park to meet with a group of the local mothers and their children for a makeshift playgroup. The playgroup had originated with just two mothers, Jean and Audrey. Leda had never met either of them but frequently heard their names bantered about in conversations among the other mothers on the playground. Jean and Audrey stood for all that was right in the world of parenting. Leda heard that Jean had heroically saved a child from a bee sting and Audrey supposedly made homemade yogurt. Very often she tried to imagine what exactly these two women looked like and who they were, but she could never envision a clear image of what their faces would be. All she could think of when she thought of them was the silhouettes of two women standing side by side in high-rise jeans with their shirts tucked in tight. Sometimes one of them (Leda figured this was Jean because Jean seemed more like the type to do this from what she could gather) would be clapping and saying, “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go.”

Beth was the only mother in the group who really knew them well. She’d been in the playgroup for seven years with all four of her children. She was the one who organized things and made sure that the snack rotation was in proper order. She was a squarish woman with a triangle haircut. She never wore makeup, and the vast majority of what she wore could best be described as expensive sportswear. Leda suspected that in her younger days she was the type of woman to don miniskirts and too much eyeliner.

Beth’s son Max was a wild little boy whom Annabelle actively tried to avoid on the playground. From a very early age Annabelle seemed to take great discretion in whom she became friends with. She was liked by most of the children, but she generally only spent her time with the toddlers who were unlikely to smack her over the head with a shovel. Her best friend in the group was a little girl named Eliza, a quiet, happy two-year-old who loved to play in the sand. Annabelle and she bonded right away, which was in part due to the fact that Leda and Eliza’s mother, Celia, had become fast friends. Celia was the only other mother in the group Leda truly enjoyed the company of. It was in meeting Celia that she had regained hope in the idea that she could befriend another woman over motherhood. Celia had wide hips and long, dark hair. Her laugh was deep and rich, and she was always joking. But what stood out about her was her seemingly impenetrable ego. She never appeared to be aware when other mothers were bragging about their children or trying to make her feel bad about her own, and what was more, she was happy to admit to her many insecurities and unwilling to run from all that could be perceived as flaws.

Leda took notice of this her third week at the playgroup. She’d been stuck talking to Lindy most of the morning, a woman who didn’t believe in vaccinations and drank green liquid out of a jam jar. Leda had asked her once what it was she was always drinking.

“It’s a mix of lentils and protein,” Lindy said.

Lindy’s son was kind of a strange little boy who seemed well-intentioned enough. Leda could never remember his name so she referred to him as “sweetie” if he ever came over to her.

“Balloon,” he said once and pointed to the sky.

“Do you see a balloon, sweetie?” She looked up, but there was no balloon.

Lindy had been going on all morning about how her son could count to ten in English and Spanish. Leda listened and nodded. She doubted it was true, but simultaneously with the doubt she felt a sense of worry for Annabelle, who, at just a few months younger than whatever his name was, could not count to ten and didn’t speak Spanish of any kind. She was usually unfazed by Lindy, because her son was so strange, and so it was pretty difficult to be jealous of him, but for whatever reason this morning it was making her feel sad. She’d been up late the night before trying to get the house in order and Annabelle had been cranky since she woke up. The whole day was getting to her; she suddenly felt exhausted, like her knees would buckle as they stood there talking. What would she do if I just fell over right now? Would she give me some of her lentils?

“I just think that if you can take advantage of their brains at this young age and teach them a foreign language then you should. I think it’s doing them a disservice if you don’t.”

Leda watched her daughter toddling over to a plastic wobbly horse that was at the corner of the playground.

“There’s just so much you can do,” she heard Lindy say as Annabelle put her arms around the horse’s neck. She stood there just hugging it, too small to get on by herself. Then she turned around and Leda could see that she was smiling.

Just before eleven the mothers gathered around for snack. That morning the snack rotation fell on Sundya. Leda preferred her to Lindy usually, but today she was talking about her older daughter getting into some kind of prestigious pre-K program. All the mothers buzzed around impressed, asking all sorts of questions about flash cards. Leda half listened to the advice that Sundya doled out as she served some kind of fancy cookie she’d baked. Annabelle sat in Leda’s lap and tasted the snack thoughtfully. A few seconds later she shook her head and handed the gnawed-on cookie to her mom. Leda took a bite. It tasted like soap. She put it in a napkin and put the napkin in her purse.

After snack she avoided Lindy for the most part by joining a group of other mothers by the swings. For a few minutes they talked about the weather and the upcoming winter, but it wasn’t long before the conversation turned into a bragging contest.

“Landon just loves his music class,” said Evelyn, a woman who only ever took her son to every third playgroup, as the rest of the time he was with one of his two nannies. “He can pretty much play ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ on the recorder at this point. I keep telling Matt we just have to get him onto the piano, but you know I can’t find a piano teacher willing to teach piano to a toddler, which I think is ridiculous. I mean, am I supposed to wait until he’s a preschooler for everything? It’s absurd.”

“You could give him a toy piano. Eliza loves her little wooden one at home,” Celia said.

Evelyn gave a sort of half smile. She didn’t know how to respond to someone who had so very much missed the point of what she was saying: My son is amazing and better than your child.

Leda couldn’t help but laugh a little. She looked at Celia, who happily pushed Eliza in the swing. That’s what I need to be like, she thought.

“The only thing is then you have to listen to them pounding away all day long. My sister gave her son a drum kit for Christmas. Can you imagine that? A drum kit. We went over to her house for New Year’s, and we couldn’t hear each other talk ’cause he was banging away. I told her to burn it,” Celia said.

Evelyn was still quiet. She looked like she was about to say something but then stopped herself.

“Just stick with the recorder is all I’m saying. Wait till he’s older before you subject yourself to any real torture,” Celia said.

At the end of playgroup as the mothers began to one by one leave the park, Leda went over to Celia.

“You’re hilarious,” she said to her. “Let’s meet up sometime with the girls.”

From that day on Leda and Celia were pretty much inseparable at playgroup. They’d roll their eyes whenever one of the mothers would brag about her child and confide in each other their most desperate motherhood moments.

“Eddy wasn’t watching Eliza this morning, and she smeared poop all over the bathtub. I swear to god I wish I’d married someone else sometimes. Someone with more money,” Celia would say.

“Aw, but you love Eddy!”

“That’s what I told myself this morning as I was cleaning poop off the wall.”

Their friendship and time together gave Leda confidence in herself in a way she’d never felt before. She no longer feared the judgments of the other women as she had. She’d lost that sense of despondency. It was calm and blissfully reassuring.

That was how things were for the first year at the playgroup: Leda would wake up in the mornings and John would have breakfast with her and then he’d go to work and then she’d spend a couple of hours with Annabelle and get her ready and put on her little shoes and little coat and she’d watch each season pass by and her daughter would laugh and run and she and Celia would tell each other about their days and about their worries and in between it all was so much coffee.

In late fall of the following year, Leda sat waiting for Celia and Eliza on a bench by a big oak tree. She and Celia had started getting to playgroup an hour early just to have enough time without the other mothers around to gossip properly. It was cool out, so she wrapped a sweater around her shoulders. Annabelle was playing in the leaves. She clutched a little stack of chosen specimens in her right hand. In her left hand she held a stick. Celia texted that she’d be a few minutes late, so Leda took out The Edible Woman and read the first few pages while she waited. She no longer read as much as she used to, so she’d formed the habit of carrying books around with her in hopes to catch a few minutes of reading in here and there. It was rare that she’d actually get to it, but it made her happy to carry the books with her. Every time she’d come upon them in her purse as she reached for her wallet she had a momentary sense of relief. A relief from what, she was never sure of.

“Hi, hi, hi,” Celia said, running up with two coffees. Eliza was walking alongside, holding a big red ball. “I brought coffee as an apology for my lateness.”

“Oh, please, like I care? I’m late to everything.”

“I know, but I pride myself on being better than you.” Celia sat down and handed her the coffee. “It’s pumpkin spice, which I know you hate, but I forgot when I was ordering it.”

“You cow.”

“Sorryyyyyy.” She blew on the coffee and motioned to Leda with a nod. “So, what are you reading?”

“The Edible Woman,” Leda said.

Celia shrugged. “I’m not a big reader.”

“I’m not much these days myself, honestly.”

“What’s it about?”

“Well, I’ve only just started it, but supposedly it’s about this woman who gets engaged and can’t eat and starts to feel like she’s dissolving or something.”

“That’s really weird,” Celia said.

“Well, I’m probably not explaining it right.”

Celia looked uninterested. She flicked a bit of foam off her finger.

“It’s really good,” Leda said.

Celia nodded a bit but didn’t answer.

The women sat silent for a moment. Up until now they’d only ever really talked about the kids and the other mothers. Leda felt judged and distant from Celia in a way she had not felt before. In her heart of hearts she knew that she and Celia were different people and in any other context probably would not have been friends. She knew deep down that she too was an other mother. One who believed in teaching her child another language or eating organic. She could be both but not at once. Not in this friendship and its fragile dance on the crunching leaves of fall and the smell of a pumpkin spice latte that would grow cold and be thrown away, rotting at the bottom of a park trashcan to the sounds of snack times every Wednesday. Eliza would grow up big and strong and Annabelle would too, and they would go this way and that and maybe they’d keep in touch and think of each other toddling side by side in sandboxes, but probably they would not. It was inevitable, their own lives constantly diverting from the second they were born, the sound of it silent; if they could have heard it they would have heard its speed, the churning loud engine warped in passing, like a train rolling by.

Celia didn’t come to playgroup the next week. Eliza had a cold, and so Leda ended up sitting next to Lindy most of the morning.

“Jean and Audrey didn’t ever do it like that,” Lindy said in mid-memory of a story that had been relayed to her by Beth.

Leda had heard the story before from one of the other mothers who had also heard it from Beth, or maybe from Lindy. It was tough to say.

“What were their kids’ names?” Leda asked.

“What?”

“Jean’s and Audrey’s.”

“You know…” Lindy took a thoughtful pause. “You know, I really don’t know. No one has ever told me. Isn’t that awful?”

“It is.”

And it really was.