PETER and I picked the kids up from school together that afternoon, much to their delight. I didn’t tell them that the only reason Daddy was along for the ride was because he no longer trusted Mama not to put their lives and her own on the line. I punished him, though. He had forgotten, if he’d ever known, that Monday was Tae Kwon Do.
“Do you just sit here?” he said, after we’d wrapped the kids in their belts and sent them into their classes. Ruby was a green belt, and Isaac was struggling to work his way out of Mighty Mites.
“Yup.”
“You can’t go for coffee or something?”
“Nope. There’s nothing close.”
“How is that possible? This must the only corner in the city of Los Angeles without a Starbucks on it.”
“Don’t worry, honey,” I said sweetly. “We’ll pass the time by chatting with the other mommies.”
Peter groaned. Two women joined us on the bench. I knew them by sight, but not by name. A third, Karyan, whose son Jirair was in Isaac’s class, came over, too. She greeted me warmly, and I introduced her to Peter.
“You’re the screenwriter,” she said.
“Yes,” he said.
“We don’t believe in cinema.”
“Excuse me?” he asked.
I suppressed my smile.
Karyan continued, “My husband and I don’t believe in cinema. We think it’s a destructive force. In fact, we think that most of society’s ills can be blamed directly on the mass media. No offense.”
“None taken,” he said.
“So what’s new, Karyan?” I asked. “How are you doing? Did you find a nanny yet?”
“I thought I had,” she said. “We hired a Brazilian woman; she seemed fine in the interview, and came with wonderful references.” She shuddered. “It just shows how meaningless those are.”
“What happened?” one of other women asked.
“I caught her on her first day alone with the children doing the most awful things.”
“What?” the woman whispered, breathless. Her fascination was downright prurient. Like she was listening to nanny porn.
“First, she used our CD player, which my husband expressly told her not to touch. It’s a very fine and sophisticated system, and not meant to be played with.”
“That is appalling,” Peter said. I stomped delicately on his toe.
“She put on this Brazilian music, I don’t know, samba or something.” Karyan shuddered again. “The whole time she was cleaning the house this music was blaring. I can’t even imagine what the neighbors thought. Then, when the baby got up, she microwaved his bottle! When I hired her I told her a half dozen times, never microwave the bottles. If you don’t have time to use the stove, you can microwave the milk in a glass measuring cup, stir it thoroughly, and pour it into the bottle.”
“Why can’t you microwave the bottles?” Peter said.
I said, “Because plastic leaches dioxins that cause cancer.”
Karyan nodded. “And also the microwave heats unevenly and tiny bubbles of boiling milk can sear through the top of the baby’s mouth and into her brain.”
“What?” Peter asked. “That’s ridiculous. That’s the most—”
This time I stomped less delicately.
Karyan ignored him. “The final straw was when she put her cup of coffee right on the table next to the baby. He could have pulled it over and scalded himself. He could have ended up in the burn unit! That did it for me. I can’t have someone like that working for me.”
“How do you know all this?” Peter asked. “Were you peeking from behind a door or something?”
“Of course I wasn’t peeking, what do you think I am?” Karyan said. “I saw it all on the nannycam.”
“The nannycam?”
One of the other mothers explained to Peter, “It’s a little motion-activated camera hidden in the house. We’ve got two, one in my daughter’s bedroom and the other in the kitchen. It’s really ingenious; they can hide them anywhere. We have one in a stuffed bear and another that looks like a cookie jar.”
“You people have hidden cameras spying on your children’s babysitters?” Peter said.
Karyan took umbrage at the horror in his voice. “Of course we do. Anyone who loves their children would. How else are you going to know what’s going on when you’re not there?”
Peter sighed and then looked at me. “When does the class end?” he asked.
“Not for a little while. Why don’t you take a walk?” I suggested.
When he was gone I turned to Karyan and shrugged. “What can I say?”
She waved a dismissive hand. “Don’t worry, Juliet. He’s a husband. That’s all you need to say.”
As we drove home, the kids safely buckled into their booster seats, Sadie whimpering with frustration at having to face the rear of the car in her car seat, Peter said, “You don’t seriously think it’s okay to spy on your nanny, do you?”
“Of course not,” I said. “I think it’s nuts, and depressing, but I can totally understand the impulse.”
I explained to Peter my theory of the panic of contemporary child-rearing. In a society saturated by media, we know in exquisite detail all the risks of childhood. We know about the dangers that lurk outside our doors, and those that lurk inside our houses. We are aware of what sometimes happens when an infant swallows an almond or a bite of hot dog. We understand the risk of iron poisoning from eating a parent’s vitamin pill. We have heard of children who have been the victims of improperly installed car seats. We are warned about the risks to our precious children of eating strawberries before age one and of bicycle-riding without a helmet. There are a variety of forces at play in this culture of peril. Our constant access to news of all kinds, television stations that must find something to fill a twenty-four-hour news broadcast and some way to lure viewers. The litigiousness of our society, which demands that all harms be rectified by the assignment of blame and the awarding of cash. All this is exacerbated by the fact that the infant mortality rate for certain children is so low. Where once childhood was considered a perilous journey with no sure guarantee of arrival on the shores of adulthood, now we expect and demand that every child make the voyage safely, even those born so young and so small that they fit in the palm of our hands. Every child, that is, except those born in poverty to people of color.
Add to these factors educated and competent mothers trained for professions they no longer practice, who have turned aside from the futures they once expected for themselves to focus their attention and ambition solely on their children. These children are valuable beyond measure, because we’ve sacrificed ourselves for them and to them. We now understand that we are as able and skilled as men, that we can do the work of the marketplace as well as they can, but we have left that work to raise these children, not because we have to—most of us—but because we want to. These children must be worth our sacrifice, they must be extraordinary, and they must be safe. We cannot risk the possibility of anything happening to the precious focus of our lives.
For those mothers who have not willingly paid the professional price, guilt provides the same motivating force. It ratchets up the value of their children so that harm to them is intolerable, and all too easily imagined.
“So what are you saying?” Peter said as we led the children up the stone steps to our house, his hand resting on the new banister we had installed because the old one had bars just far enough apart to fit a child’s head in between. “Are you saying that our parents and grandparents didn’t value and love their children as much as we value and love ours?”
“No. I’m saying that their love was less complicated by guilt and fear, and by a sense of the price paid for it.”
“I don’t know, Juliet. I think your parents are pretty adept at the guilt thing.”
“They are adept at making me feel guilty. I don’t think they necessarily feel much of it themselves. Or if they do, it’s about larger things.”
“I’m not convinced it’s limited to our generation. When I was in elementary school I knew a kid, Paul Scofield, whose mother was a complete headcase. She used to dress him in sweaters in the middle of the summer because she was afraid he’d get a cold. She used to make him wear a football helmet when he rode his bicycle or even when we played baseball in the park. She walked him to school and picked him up. Every day for lunch he would get these crazy sandwiches all on homemade bread with, like, tofu on them. He always tossed his lunch and begged off the rest of us. After a while my mom started packing me two Fluffernutters just so Paul wouldn’t starve.”
“You’ve proved my point,” I said. “His mother was a headcase, right? She was a nut, totally different from the norm. Well, how many of Ruby’s friends eat only organic food? Their lunch is all natural almond butter on organic bread, spread with jelly made from organic grapes with no sugar added. That’s if they’re even allowed to have nuts at all, because of the danger of developing an allergy. They wear their helmets when they ride their bikes, their backpacks don’t have their names printed on the outside so that a predator won’t be able to trick them by pretending to know them. Not that this is an issue, because they never ever walk to or from school alone.”
Peter frowned thoughtfully. “So what you’re saying is that what was once considered crazy is now just normal.”
“Exactly. If you don’t do those things you’re crazy. A cautious and decent parent would never let her child do sports without pads and helmets or walk to school alone. You wouldn’t, would you?”
We were standing in the ballroom and we both looked over at the pile of bicycles, scooters, and skateboards in the corner. Arrayed next to them were helmets, wrist guards and kneepads.
“You see,” I said. “We’ve all turned into poor Paul Scofield’s mother. What happened to him, by the way?”
“Paul? He was a huge pot dealer in college. Another guy from our class went to Humboldt State up in northern California. He used to send Paul a package every month. Paul’s mother never asked where he got the money for his car; she just made him buy a Volvo.”
I looked over at Ruby, who was snapping on her helmet as she straddled her pink and purple bicycle. “Jeez,” I said.
Peter said, “I don’t think he kept it up in medical school, though.”
“Medical school?”
“Yeah, last I heard he was doing a psychiatry residency in New York City.”
“It’s nice he could keep the same job, more or less.”
“What do you mean?”
“Drug distribution,” I said. “Helping people alter their consciousness. Back then it was pot, now it’s Prozac.”