The rest of the weekend I did not change out of my pajamas, and I did not leave the house. I sat in front of the TV and watched Cartoon Network for about twenty hours straight. My mother spent most of her weekend on the phone with her lawyer. “Isn’t there anyone we can press charges against?” I heard her say from my nest in the living room. “This BuzzFeed list, for example … Oh, I see. Oh … I understand. Oy. What if we made a list of these commenters who are calling her names? There’s this one person, his username is Troll1776, and he describes her as ‘an ugly excuse for a human, both inside and out.’ That must be defamation of character. Can’t we go after him?… Really? But couldn’t we track down who he is? Find his IP address or … something?”
If I were in a different sort of mood, I might have giggled to hear my mom throwing around references to BuzzFeed and IP addresses, as if she were some sort of internet genius when I know for a fact that she can’t even find the folder where she keeps her MP3s without enlisting help. But I wasn’t in that mood, and I didn’t know if I ever would be again.
“Can we send cease and desist letters?” Mom asked, her voice rising. I turned up the volume on the TV. “Tell Google to stop listing these sites?… Jerry, you’re not helping!… Are you seriously telling me there’s nothing we can do except wait it out? What about when she starts college in the fall? What about my business?”
Some amount of time passed. The Powerpuff Girls stopped saving the world, and the Scooby-Doo crew started solving mysteries. My mother came into the living room and clicked off the TV. She moved aside a fuzzy monster prototype that my dad had brought home from work so she could sit on the couch next to me. “Do you even understand how serious this whole situation is?” she asked.
I blinked at her. “Yes?” How much more serious could this possibly be?
“Yet you’re just going to sit there and watch TV all day?”
“What should I be doing?” I asked. “What else can I do?”
“Do something productive. Try to show people that you’re a good girl, that this was all a big misunderstanding.”
“I wrote an apology, Mom. I explained myself. I tried.”
“Keep trying. Do some volunteer work. Donate money to the ACLU.”
“Sure,” I said listlessly. It’s not like these were bad ideas. But they wouldn’t be enough. Nothing would be enough, nothing, nothing, so there wasn’t much point in trying anything.
“Do you understand what your actions have done to the family?” Mom asked.
I didn’t say anything, just stared at the blank television screen, trusting that she would tell me exactly what I had done to the family.
“You’ve made me look like a fraud,” she said. “You’ve made me look untrustworthy. My publicist says I need to release some sort of statement, and right now, frankly, I don’t even know what to say.”
My mom is neither a fraud nor untrustworthy. In fact, if there were some kind of mom contest, she would probably win it. She’s, like, a professional mother. For a few years, starting right after Emerson was born, she was a mommy blogger, which is the vaguely demeaning term applied to mothers who write online about being mothers.
My mom’s blog was called Turn Them Toward the Sun, and it became a really popular parenting site. She’d originally intended to go back to her job after having me—she’d been a strategy analyst for a health-care company—but then she discovered that, one, she loved writing about parenting and, two, thousands of other people loved reading what she wrote. When I was four years old, she published her first parenting book. The back cover said, If you want to teach your child to sleep through the night or eat his veggies, this is not the book for you. But if you want to teach your child to be extraordinary, then read on! Since then she’s published five more books of parenting advice and has established a career as a parenting consultant, which means that she gives inspirational speeches on how anyone, with the right love, commitment, and strategy, can raise extraordinary children.
And now here we were.
“Maybe people won’t know that I’m your daughter,” I suggested, grabbing the monster prototype and hugging it to my chest. She had kept her maiden last name, after all—surely that would help.
“They figure these things out,” she said. “It’s not that hard to put together the pieces, and nothing is a secret on the internet if you’re looking for it.”
“But it’s not your fault,” I tried. “It was me. You didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“How are they supposed to know that? People always blame the parents.” She sighed deeply. “Please help me understand. Why did you post that comment?”
“It was stupid,” I said. “I shouldn’t have done it.”
“So why did you?” she asked again.
“Because … well, it’s true that the Bee is almost never won by an African American speller. So it surprises people when it happens. I didn’t mean that I think that’s fair or right.”
Mom shook her head. “I understand what you meant by the comment. That’s not what I’m asking. I’m asking, why did you put it up on the internet?”
And this was the humiliating part. Because there was no good reason for it. “I just hoped people might think it was funny,” I mumbled.
“I cannot understand it,” she said. “I don’t understand your generation’s impulse to share everything you think or do the instant it happens. Where does that come from?”
I shrugged. I didn’t know. And was that only my generation? Or was it everyone who understood how the internet worked (i.e., everyone except my mother)?
Mom pulled me in for a hug, and I breathed in the lemony scent of her shampoo as I buried my face in her shoulder. “I wish everyone in the world could just see the Winter who I see,” she murmured. “A caring, beautiful young woman who would never purposely hurt anybody.”
I wished that, too. I didn’t want to cause any problems for Turn Them Toward the Sun, which had been so important to my mom—to my whole family—for my entire life. I’d been an anxious little kid, and one of the big things that used to worry me was that I would let down my mom’s business by not being sufficiently extraordinary. Emerson was, probably from the minute she was born, though obviously I wasn’t present for her birth so I can’t say for sure. But pretty much from the time she could talk, she could sing, in this expressive, weirdly husky voice that sounded out of place on a child but totally mesmerizing. And she had no stage fright, no fright of anything, as far as I could tell. She was recruited to play every kid role at the community theater—they were desperate to have her.
And that was, in part, why I was so relieved when I discovered that I had a knack for words. Emerson was a fine speller and a serviceable writer, but she was busy with other things that seemed more important to her. She hadn’t claimed words yet. So I claimed them instead, because I could. I made them my own. All of them. Every word I could find.
After my spelling bee victory, there had been a big article about my mother in The Pacific. It was called “Darlene Kaplan: The Inventor of Modern Parenting?” (That question mark was key, and the reporter’s answer seemed pretty clearly to be “no.”) Most of the article focused on my mom, of course: the reporter sat in on some of her seminars and counseling sessions and described how the Turn Them Toward the Sun approach functioned. But she also came over to the house briefly to meet me, Emerson, and Dad.
Usually Mom kept us out of any media about her. Even on her blog she had just referred to us as W, E, and The Dad. This was both because she didn’t want us to get kidnapped and because part of the Turn Them Toward the Sun approach was encouraging your kids to pursue activities for the sheer love of them and not for any external reward. Therefore you weren’t supposed to pay your kids for good grades, or give them a medal if they participated in an athletic event, or give them name recognition if they did something cute. But Mom let the Pacific reporter meet and write a little about us, I think because the woman was suspicious of my mother’s parenting techniques and Mom wanted to prove that they really did work, and we were proof.
The reporter’s name was Lisa Rushall. I remember thinking she looked surprisingly schlumpy—not in a bad way, just not how I’d imagined a big-deal reporter would be. Her hair hung in a loose ponytail, and she wore an oversize flannel shirt over the rest of her outfit. She talked to me about winning the spelling bee, and I told her that in the months before my victory, I’d been studying words for thirty hours a week. “How do you find time to do your homework?” she’d asked, and my mom frowned and said, “Homework always comes first in this house.” Then the reporter asked me to spell a few words, like idiosyncratic and chicanery, which I was used to at that point: as soon as you qualify for the National Spelling Bee, it seems like the only thing adults can think of to ask you is whether you know how to spell different things.
Then she talked to Emerson about how she had started dance classes before most kids could even stand, and began method acting classes when she was eight, and had the starring role in the high school play as a mere freshman, and all that. Emerson told her she was Broadway-bound in a calm, almost patronizing tone that left no room for debate. There aren’t many fourteen-year-olds who can be patronizing to adults they don’t even know, but Emerson was one of them. “Would you girls say that Turn Them Toward the Sun has worked for you?” Lisa Rushall asked.
“Definitely,” Emerson said.
“I wouldn’t be national champion without it,” I said.
All of which was completely true—I stood by it then and I stand by it today—but the reason we said it wasn’t that it was true, but that we knew Mom wanted us to. She needed us to make her legitimate, and so we did.
And now I’d gone and ruined it all.