Growing Girls Page 11

  So wrote Judith Warner, author of Perfect Madness, excerpted in that Newsweek issue. It was stunning. To read about yourself so explicitly and perfectly is to be jolted into a kind of awareness that you exist outside of your own daily slogging from here to there. You are part of a greater whole. One of those fish in a school offish that goes on swimming until one of you turns so you all turn; here you thought you had choices but it turns out the whole lot of you functions as one organism going with the flow of a time and a place and a set of influences and a history simply living itself out.

  It makes me mad that when I was younger, busily delaying motherhood, that I wasn’t stronger, wasn’t the great killer whale I thought myself to be. That young woman I was in grad school, trying to become perfect, running up the hill in Frick Park one hour each day, eating nothing all day but an apple and a piece of toast, writing stories and rewriting them and rewriting them, hiding from the world until I got myself perfect—I was special! I was a uniquely neurotic young thing terrified of love, too engaged with life to bother signing up for the tired grown-up world of marriage and babies. Special!

  No. It turns out, no. That’s not who I was. I was a product of a trend toward “muscle-bound, tightly wound, uber-achieving, all-encompassing, never-failing self-control that passed, in the 1980s, for female empowerment.” A cliché. I may as well have been a character in a movie, Jennifer Beals in Flashdance, a welder/would-be ballerina sweating bullets to a pop tune. She’s a maniac, a maniac on the floor/And she’s dancing like she’s never danced before.

  But what of my suffering? What of the anxiety that forced me to run up steeper and steeper hills until I blew out my knees, the refusal to eat, the ups and the downs I never really could drown in wine, the rage against my church, the angry letters to the therapists who, if they could have just helped me pinpoint the problem, I’m sure I could have fixed it. What was the problem?

  Come to think of it, I got my hair permed like Jennifer Beals in 1983. I lived in Pittsburgh, where the movie was set, and where I embraced the whole rusty steel vibe, like she did, and I even started riding my bike over the massive steel bridges that spanned the rivers, just like she did. All of us started wearing our sweatshirts off the shoulder that year, and suddenly we discovered leg warmers. We were all in our twenties, in our prime baby-making years, and yet none of us ever spoke about having babies, if we ever even allowed ourselves to think about it at all.

  Didn’t I see this then? Didn’t I know I was a cliché?

  Of course, clichés get a bad rap. There is nothing so sinful about being one. It’s all in the recognition. Right now I am a tidy-fat-girl cliché. I am a mother at school with a substandard Valentine’s Day box. Those other mothers are setting impossible standards. I lie awake at night worrying that I’ll never measure up. In fact, worry has become my entire motherhood theme. Lately, I sit around worrying about how much I worry. One day I decide it’s too much and then the next it’s not enough. It’s probably too much. One little cough and I think it’s time to rush the kid to the emergency room. One time I was giving Anna some liquid Advil and I turned around to get something and Anna knocked the bottle over and it spilled all over the counter but I couldn’t be 100 percent certain that she hadn’t actually drunk a good portion of the bottle so I called Poison Control and they told me to call 911 so pretty soon the ambulance was pulling up and the EMT guys came in and we all stood there talking about whether or not to pump my two-year-old’s stomach. (We didn’t.)

  Alex says I worry too much and I know he’s right. I think about that dinosaur and I don’t think her worrying ended up doing her any good. I think about the image of that fossil and why it haunts me and the only thing that helps is to think of the alternative. Imagine all those thirty-four Chihuahua-sized babies crowded together with their legs tucked underneath them and their heads raised, and imagine no mother in the picture, no protector for them to huddle toward as the darkness came.

  That’s a picture of tragedy. The other is a picture of love.

  If I wake up tonight worrying about all the baby dinosaurs that died without their mothers there to protect them, I’m really going to start worrying about myself.

  “Perseverate” is a word I grew up using because my sister Claire was often said to be “perseverating again.” She would get stuck on whether or not the cat was eating enough and if my mother was off somewhere getting sucked up by a tornado. Then when she hit her twenties and sank into a temporary but severe depression, her worry blossomed into a full-blown obsessive-compulsive disorder. She was off being Jennifer Beals in Boston while I was being her in Pittsburgh. She was trying to become a perfect physical therapist with all the advanced degrees and she got so advanced there was nowhere left to go but medical school so that’s what she did.

  We’d be home for Christmas and we’d be at a party and she’d turn to me and say we had to go home because she couldn’t remember if she turned the curling iron off. Before we’d leave the house, she had to check the stove many, many times because she wasn’t able to fully convince herself that it was turned off. Fortunately, even in her depression, she had a good humor about this and we could make it into a game.

  Having babies was the one giant act that cured Claire’s depression and all its attendant wacky behaviors. Sometimes denied fulfillment is just denied fulfillment. This isn’t to say that she is not now a mother who worries, and quite a lot. She will always be a worrier. But the crazy person she turned into, the young woman obsessively washing her hands, that person went away when the babies came. Just: went away.

  Claire needed to be a mom. She would whine about it during those childless years when her despair was so acute. She would wail and moan. It was hard to imagine the whole mess could be solved magically with a quick fix of any kind. It was hard to believe that the one solution she was offering up was anything but wishful thinking. But apparently she’d had it right all along. She needed to be a mom.

  I did, too. I just never talked about it. And I didn’t have obvious weird behaviors popping out. I mean, it was acceptable to be a runner who could run the steepest hills. It was acceptable to be too skinny, as long as you didn’t go too far overboard. My suffering was internal. I hid inside my perfect little house and worked at making myself perfect and I ate one apple and one piece of toast per day and I washed away the noise in my head with cheap chablis.

  I needed to be a mom. In every agonizing way. In a way approaching madness. I would have traded my life to become a fossil preserved for all time in the act of supreme mothering. I would have traded it in a second. In a way approaching madness.

  Claire and I were exactly the same in those ways, as are probably a lot of ex-Jennifer Bealses now obsessing over Valentine’s Day boxes. I don’t know if the women with the better boxes are doing better, or doing worse.

  Should my daughters know that their simple existence was the thing that healed me? Should I tell them this? Would it be a compliment? I suspect it would only be a burden.

  They have enough to worry about. Last night Anna got her first loose tooth. It sent her into a panic. I explained and explained about teeth falling out, and of course about the tooth fairy, all to no avail. She cried herself to sleep with a cup balanced under her chin, to catch that crazy tooth.

  holy mary, mother of god

  I was having trouble breathing. I was trying to … catch up. Here it was, the single most important announcement to hit our family since, well, forever, and he forgot to tell me?

  “Well, when did you find out?” I asked him.

  “A few days ago,” he said, calmly smearing butter on his potatoes. We were having a late dinner. The kids were already in bed. He chose this as the moment to fork over the news: when he was dropping Anna off at kindergarten one morning, the teacher informed him that Anna had been selected to play Mary in the school Christmas pageant.

  “Mary!” I said. “Oh my God, does Anna know this?”

  “Well, she was standing right there when Mrs. Gag
ich told me,” he said.

  And she didn’t tell me either? “What is the matter with you people?”! said.

  “Us?” he said.

  I was hyperventilating. Mary! My soul was pulsating with spasms of joy. I was being transported to an exalted state—the Mother of God!—while Mr. Mashed Potatoes over there was staring blankly. “Honey,” I said, “Mary?”

  “Yeah,” he brayed.

  I reached inward and found something resembling forgiveness. “You didn’t grow up in Christmas pageant culture,” I said, referring to the fact that he is Jewish. “You don’t understand how big this is.”

  “Mary,” he said, “was Jewish.”

  Oh, this was no time for smarty-pants talk. “Our daughter is going to be the star of the show!” I said.

  “I thought Jesus was the star,” he said.

  I reiterated my smarty-pants line. I asked him to please help me figure out just how it was they chose our child for this role. Her beauty? Intelligence? Some obvious grace? Perhaps it was the work of the Holy Spirit!

  “I figured they gave it to her because it’s the one part that doesn’t have any lines,” he said, referring to Anna’s famously shy demeanor. “It’s probably the only way they could be sure she would participate.”

  I hung my head, held on to the bridge of my nose as if for dear sanity. I did not know where to begin. Sheep, okay, sheep have no lines. Donkeys have no lines. The North Star guiding the shepherds (who hardly have any lines) may have attitude—but no lines. You could stuff that manger full of any number of kindergartners with no lines. But there was only one Mary. The Mary.

  “Mary!”I said. I had to make some calls. I had to spread the word. I had to find out who was in charge of wardrobe. I needed to talk to the casting director and compliment him or her on the divine elegance of the decision to put my child in this role.

  I did quick calculations in my head, figuring how many other potential Marys she beat out. Three kindergarten classes of twenty kids, and about half of the total were girls, so thirty! Wow! What’s a stage mother to do? How would I talk to the other mothers whose children were cast as mere angels? And what was I going to wear to the big show? I would need a mink stole, some boots with high heels, a long, thin cigarette holder. I would insist on no more photos, please!

  The next morning I greeted Anna with a smile. “Mary!” I said gleefully. “Why didn’t you tell me?” She did not immediately understand the reference. “Honey, Mary?” She smiled, finally. She said, “Anthony is going to be Joseph and we have to wear sandals.”

  “Aren’t you excited? I mean … Mary!”

  “I got picked to be the helper last Friday, too,” she said. Right. The person in charge of juice. Why was she telling me this? What, exactly, is the matter with my family? Was this how Mama Rose felt when Gypsy was just getting started?

  Mary! I had no patience for my family. I had to start wooing reviewers; I had to think about what I would do about all the agents who would surely call; I had to think about changing our phone number and I had to start both my kids wearing big hats and sunglasses.

  I called every friend I could think of to tell them the news. Wendy, bless her heart, was particularly thrilled. She told me that Melanie, her daughter who attends a different kindergarten, was going to be a sheep in her pageant. I told her that was sweet and suppressed all feelings of superiority. We compared dates and it became apparent that Melanie had been cast in the church pageant—the big one, with grown-ups—whereas Anna’s pageant was limited to her school.

  Now, I love Wendy. I love Melanie. And yet I could tell right then and there that I was acquiring fangs. In my mind I weighed Mary-in-a-school-pageant versus a-sheep-in-a-church-pageant, and although I could not figure out which one won, I knew one thing: I now had to find the hideous strength to tell Wendy ours was not a whole school pageant, but just a kindergarten one.

  I didn’t, in the end, do it. I just went obnoxiously on and on about Mary. How often in my life am I going to get to do this, I reasoned, and when Wendy asked me how she might purchase tickets to the big show (tickets?), I told her that I thought it was sold out but I could check. (Help!)

  a day at the mall

  On the spur of a hot Saturday moment when we were killing time in the mall, flipping and flopping in our flip-flops and enjoying all that air conditioning, I stopped in to see if there were any available appointments at the Pedicure Junction nail salon. The girls were old enough for beauty treatments, I reasoned, and I knew the idea would sit well with my friend BK, who was due to join us, and whom I’d been more or less babysitting ever since she started her chemo. Actually, the babysitting started shortly after the diagnosis, a small “invasive ductal carcinoma” in BK’s left breast that sent her spiraling.

  We didn’t have any prescribed mall plans so I figured after some food-court pizza we could all sit in a row and giggle together while the ladies painted our nails lipstick red and we all gossiped about underpants. To a four-year-old and a six-year-old, there is nothing funnier than the word “underpants.”

  I walked into Pedicure Junction and all the manicurists were young Asian women, and so naturally they beamed when they saw Anna and Sasha, throwing smiles to one another and chattering in Chinese. I was pretty sure it was Chinese, as opposed to perhaps Korean or Vietnamese, or maybe this was just wishful thinking. Every time I meet a woman of obvious Asian descent and find out she’s from China, I feel happy and connected. We are long-lost sisters. We grew up on the same street. We fought in the same war. We share some anonymous link.

  One of the women approached and opened the little gate leading back to the long aisle of manicurists. “Three of you?” she said with a wide smile. “Come pick your colors.”

  “There’s another,” I said, holding up four fingers. “My friend is coming.”

  “Sit, sit, sit,” she said.

  “Actually, I just want to make an appointment for a little later,” I said. “When my friend gets here.”

  “What color?” she said.

  “No, I need to wait for my friend,” I said, pointing to my watch to suggest another time.

  “We paint you now, your friend later.”

  “Um, I’d like to schedule us all together.”

  But she took me by the hand and already the girls were sitting with another woman who was dazzling them with her display of glitter polish, and in no time I found that I was sitting in a big white leatherette lounge chair with a shiatsu massage mechanism working my lumbar region and my feet were soaking in a pool of invigorating bubbles. Did I say I wanted a pedicure? Did I even indicate that desire?

  Oh my God, China, I thought. I forgot all about this. But this was exactly how it was in China. You never walked into a shop and simply browsed. There was no time for browsing! Sit, sit, sit. And here, let me take your children off your hands, here’s a yoyo for them to play with, and here’s my aunt she loves babies, she will play with them, sit, sit, sit, do you like this? What kind of pearls do you like? You would look good in jade. You should try on jade. Here. This one. You take this one for you and how about buy your daughter something for when she gets married someday, you should get her something just like yours. Sit, sit, sit. This is pretty. This is nice. Do you like this? I will wrap it up.

  In China I never got the sense I was getting snookered, exactly. The exchange was simply pragmatic. It’s a crowded country. It’s a busy place. There’s not a lot of time for folderol. You’re here for a reason, you want to buy something, so let’s just get to it so we can all move on to what’s next.

  I called BK on my cell phone. “You want a manicure?” I said. “We’re at the nail place outside Sears.”

  “Oh,” she said. “That sounds good.”

  “You better hurry,” I said. “And be thinking about what color you want.”

  “Huh?” she said.

  “Just … hurry!”

  Then I hung up so I could concentrate on my calves, which were experiencing a deep-tissue massage
by a woman with a wide brow and skimpy jeans and little high heels. She was sitting at my feet, hovered over the shallow bath of bubbling water, and a pudgy American in the chair next to me was having the same thing done to her and she was smiling at me as if to say, “Isn’t this positively heavenly?”

  It was. And maybe if the woman doing the massaging weren’t from China, but, say, from Peru or Poland or Idaho or some other place, I wouldn’t have been having quite the allegiance problem I was having, but then again maybe I would. I think you have to be heavily into the “services” circuit—a person who regularly gets massages and facials and other treatments—before you can successfully block out the notion that you are a spoiled brat with enough cash to pay for this nonsense, while the person kneeling at your feet and scrubbing off your calluses and not complaining is figuring out any way she can just to get by.

  “Mom, she’s from China!” Anna yelled over to me about the woman applying blue sparkle polish to her nails.

  “I China too!” Sasha chimed in.

  This was exciting. It gave us all something to talk about. Well, it would have.

  “Ni hao!” I said, over and over again, the Mandarin expression for “Hello,” and the only word I could seem to pull up from our Chinese lessons at the community college.

  “Ni hao!” Anna mimicked.

  “They speak Chinese?” one of the women said, motioning to the girls.

  “Oh, Anna can count to one hundred in Chinese!” I said to them, then to Anna, “Honey, do your counting!”