When did i get like this.., p.15
When Did I Get Like This?, page 15
I was not quite like this when my two boys were babies. I obsessed over their fat little baby feet just as much, and I heard they were cute when we strolled through the park too, but their adorability wasn’t something I worked at. I mean, there wasn’t that much to be excited about dressing them in. Only about 15 percent of the average baby clothing store is dedicated to outfits for baby boys. On that one, lower-level shelf, there is usually a serious overestimation of the average mother’s penchant for camouflage, burnt umber and orange combos, and overalls so stiff you could correct scoliosis simply by wearing them regularly. I do remember one baby outfit of Connor’s, sailboat overalls with knee socks and weensy saddle shoes, that was quite fetching. And once Seamus was born, I dressed both boys in coordinating mini-man ensembles for special occasions. But what they wear each day is not something I have tended to spend an excess of time, money, or brain cells upon.
Nor do I tell them, a hundred times a day, how handsome they are. I tell them what will please them: they’re hard workers, they’re good at coloring, they’re super-fast. Their appearance only rarely enters into it—in their Halloween costumes, perhaps, or dressed in matching suits for my sister’s wedding. (That merited a chorus of “You look so handsome!” from our relatives, which the boys accepted with good humor only because—like my lacquering of their cowlicks with my hair-spray—it happens so rarely.) On an ordinary morning, when they stand at our front door dressed for school in their beloved Gap sweatshirts, I say, “You look so cool.” To myself I think: How cute. How handsome. But I don’t say it out loud. That would annoy them to no end. Their cuteness is not something my boys want pointed out to them.
But I do tell Maggie she is pretty. Many times a day. And she loves to hear it. Of course, she does not need to hear it, because Maggie is certain she looks gorgeous no matter what she is wearing: her brother’s Yankees hat, her other brother’s swim goggles, her beloved and pilly hand-me-down froggy pajamas. My daughter can truly make anything work. But when I tell her she is pretty, over and over, am I creating the desire in her to hear that even more? To prize beauty above all else? Doubtless I should be telling her other things: that she is intelligent and powerful, fierce and kind. All of which she is. And once she is old enough to appreciate those things’ worth, I fully intend to tell her so. But when she looks at herself in my closet’s full-length mirror, resplendent in the wooden bead necklace Connor made me for Valentine’s Day, I know what it is she wants me to say. And I cannot help myself.
I don’t remember my mother telling me how pretty I was very often, although that may be because at a certain age, anything my mother said became an annoyance of the highest order. Just a few short years after my peak interest in My Friend Mandy, I asked my dad to take my picture for a modeling contest sponsored by Young Miss magazine. (Lacking a Pageant Mom of my own, I guess I took matters into my own hands.) Perched on our flowered sofa in the parlor, the “good room” where all our special occasion photos were taken, I am smiling tightly in this photo without showing teeth, bony in a teal velour long-sleeved polo, my permed hair a trapezoid, bangs hanging low enough to compromise my vision. I am the very model of seventh-grade gawkiness, even by 1980s standards, and I can’t believe my mother let me walk around like that.
I was not chosen to be the new Young Miss of Young Miss. I was only a little disappointed. I did not really think I was as pretty as the real Young Miss teen models, who tossed their bouncy long hair as they skipped, laughing, down collegiate staircases in their plaid kilts with giant gold safety pins. I had sent in my picture because I wanted so desperately to be like them and understand what they had: something ineffable. Something I did not know how to get. They were pretty and they knew it. They were pretty because they knew it.
I wasn’t bad. Okay, my perm was bad. But I thought my face, if one looked closely at it, was all right. It had potential. I just didn’t know how to be self-confident like the girls at Pia Perino’s lunch table in the cafeteria. Those were the girls at St. Paul School who had their act together. Clearly, some of them had a lot to offer, like Melissa “Ton o’ Tits” Tarowitz, who told me that Craig Harpin told her that he thought I was okay-looking except that I was flat as a two-by-four. I could not deny that this was the case. But it was also confusing, because Pia Perino was flat-chested too, and she was considered the prettiest girl in our class. Some of Pia’s friends were neither particularly attractive nor well-endowed, actually, but they sat at her lunch table, and they were brazen enough to walk right up to boys and talk to them, and that made them, by group assent, the pretty ones.
I still think that being pretty is mostly about thinking you are. So how could it be a bad thing for me to tell Maggie how pretty she is every day? What if she could always see herself as I see her now: heartbreakingly beautiful, asleep or awake, in pajamas or pinafore? Would that not help her be at peace with herself through the rough patches ahead? Might those patches be a little smoother for it? All too soon Maggie will be in seventh grade herself, and heaven knows my opinion will no longer hold much sway with her. Certainly I will have lost the privilege of dressing her each morning. Already Maggie has begun tainting my daily wardrobe choices for her by insisting that every outfit be completed with her grimy hot-pink sneakers. I let her wear them because I want an independent-thinking daughter, and I am rational enough to see that no one but me cares that her sneakers don’t match her dress. But I can also see that this is just the beginning, and that the ensembles Maggie chooses for herself may well become the source of our most fervent disagreements. Soon Maggie will get to decide how she looks, what image she projects to the world, whether to let the world see her as “pretty” or not. When that time comes, will anything I say help Maggie believe, deep down, that she really is beautiful, inside and out? Will she be able to see her reflection in her father’s eyes, in mine?
When Maggie is grown, will I have been a worse mother for having told her she’s pretty a hundred times a day, or having stopped telling her, so she won’t think that is all girls have to offer? These days, we are told to praise our children, but not too much—that will make them unable to handle criticism. Buy them toys, but not too many; that will spoil them. Love them, but don’t smother them. From all that, I can only conclude I should tell Maggie she’s pretty, but not too often, lest she get the message that being attractive is her chief means of being of value. I shouldn’t be the one to bring her looks into it. Maybe it’s foolish to think I can make her awkward stage any less awkward. Maybe there is no seventh grader who looks in the mirror and doesn’t think she is hopelessly unattractive. Even Pia Perino. It will be hard for me to stand back and watch Maggie be uncertain, even disappointed, in herself. But it also may be that an awkward stage is a useful part of growing up.
Maggie’s favorite doll, at this writing, is not exactly as beautiful as My Friend Mandy was. “Baby” is bald, usually naked, not all that cute, and, since her left buttock indicates that she was mass-produced in China, Baby has probably been off-gassing toxic fumes around our house ever since Maggie received her last December from the Santa at the mall. But Maggie loves Baby, and to her, Baby is absolutely gorgeous. I sit on the old recliner in the toy room and fold a load of laundry, watching Maggie smother Baby with her nascent maternal instinct. “Baby need sock ons,” she commands, and I dress Baby in a graying pair of Connor’s I was about to fold together. Maggie swoons with delight. “Peh-ee Baby!” she says, nearly breathless. And I think, how can it be wrong to feel that way about your baby? And how can it be wrong to tell her so? I scoop Maggie up. “You’re my pretty baby,” I tell her, covering her chubby palm with kisses, savoring this reckless moment, heedless of loving her too well.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Mommy and Me
For the last four years or so—as long as my younger son has had the gift of speech—my two boys have assumed opposing viewpoints on everything imaginable. They are the most contentious siblings since the Miser Brothers (Heat and Snow). But just in the last few months, as my daughter has acquired her own gift of gab, Connor and Seamus have at last found common ground, something they can both enjoy ad infinitum: mentally torturing their little sister. Doubtless this will continue for many years to come; I have the sense they are just getting started. It’s not like it’s hard. Any time Seamus wants to get a rise out of Maggie at dinnertime, all he has to say is
SEAMUS: Maggie. Guess what. Mommy’s weal name? Is not Mommy. It’s Amy.
And Maggie, every single time, will go ape.
MAGGIE: No! Not—dat! No not “Amy”! No my! Mommy!
In her rage, she pounds her little fists on her high-chair tray. Her two older brothers fall about. I laugh too, in spite of myself, at her insistence (in the face of evidence to the contrary) that I belong exclusively to her. She will hear no talk of this “Amy,” this alleged part of me that is someone besides her mother.
I suppose every one-year-old feels this way, but in Maggie’s case, it’s a little unexpected, because as the third child, Maggie has never really called the shots. While she has two older brothers to make her every waking moment a festival of lights, and while my mothering skills have probably improved and mellowed with experience, Maggie has never had me to herself. She and I never experienced the supremely dyadic, Chang and Eng life that my first baby and I knew: the world of Mommy and Me.
When Connor was very small, we were together—and alone—almost all the time. Being his mother was all I thought about, all I cared to do with my time. The days were ours, and before his second birthday, I took Connor to no less than eight different Mommy and Me classes. Each day these small-fry seminars take place by the hundreds, wherever the population concentration allows, offering babies instruction in everything from yoga to cooking, composition to theatrical dance. New York City boasts perhaps the world’s greatest selection of Mommy and Me classes, and for this first-time parent, the thrilling array of choices was only somewhat marred by guilt that we were not taking advantage of each and every one.
No matter what education these classes claim to offer, no matter what dusty church basement they commandeer as classroom, they all have one thing in common: they are never called “Your Baby and You” classes, nor even “Mommy and Baby,” but always “Mommy and Me.” This choice of names is not coincidental: it reflects the reordering of a mother’s universe once her baby is born. The Mommy becomes a mere planet, a comet, even, a bit of dirty ice, hurtling around a newborn Me that exerts its enormous pull on her soul from the outside. Mommy is on Me’s schedule, and since Me tends to dawn early, by 8:00 A.M. Mommy and her wee Me are both desperate to get out of the house. Mommy and Me classes offer, to the isolated new mother, both panacea and prescription: baby first, baby second, baby only.
If the name itself is not a sufficient lesson in proper maternal self-abnegation, further indoctrination awaits once class begins. Every Mommy and Me class, even “Li’l Tough Guy Sports Time with Mommy and Me,” begins with a cheerful song of personalized welcome, going around the circle and acknowledging each little Me by name. “Hello, Heathcliff! It’s good to see you! Hello, Abacus! It’s good to see you too!” In this way, everyone learns all of the babies’ names by week three, and the grown-ups’ names, never. Why muddy one’s head with such useless information? If the instructor needs to address one of the adults in the room, he or she can do it thusly:
INSTRUCTOR: Preston’s mommy, would you mind opening that window right there a tiny bit?
PRESTON’S MOMMY: Um, sure.
INSTRUCTOR: Thanks, Preston’s mommy!
Most of the time, though, the instructors act as if the grown-ups aren’t even there. At “Broadway Babies: Mommy and Me,” Connor’s teacher would chirp, “Look at Connor doing such a good job clapping!”—tacitly ignoring that he was not old enough to sit up unassisted, let alone to rhythmically strike the palms of his hands together. But the rules of Mommy and Me dictated that we all pretend he could, and that I, as a mother, would stay behind the scenes, enabling the experience for my infant while not really being there myself at all.
Truthfully, I did not mind this. As a first-time mother, I enjoyed any construct furthering the notion that my baby really was the center of the universe, the most extraordinary patty-caker, splasher, and drooler that anyone had ever seen. Our Mommy and Me teachers were glad to support these delusions, and if they wanted to call me “Connor’s mommy,” that was fine with me: it was a hard-won title, and I was delighted to wear it, glad to have lost myself along the way. Without these classes, Connor and I would have had nowhere to go on a Tuesday morning. But a 10:00 A.M. “Run and Wiggle, Paint and Giggle (with Mommy and Me)” class at Kiddie Towne offered rough scaffolding for an entire day: getting ready to go, walking there, taking the class, maybe stopping for lunch with another mom and baby afterward, and doing an errand or two on the way home. By that time Connor would be thrilled to see his crib, and by the time he got up, it would only be three hours till Daddy got home.
There was only one fissure in this blissful, brainwashed time, one moment I sensed something was amiss. When Connor was about nine months old, he and I signed up for “Hands On! A Musical Experience! For Mommy and Me.” The teacher of this class, a young woman with dreams of an operetta career, would have us rock our babies from side to side while she played the ukulele and prettily sang:
The more we get together,
Together, together,
The more we get together,
The happier we’ll be!
That sounded good enough. But then she got to this part:
’Cause my friends are your friends!
And your friends are my friends!
The more we get together,
The happier we’ll be!
I’d look around the circle, at the babies Connor knew well and the mothers and babysitters I didn’t know at all, and think, God, that is true. Connor’s “friends” are my friends, and my “friends” are Connor’s friends, and none of these “friends,” the only grown-ups I ever encounter, have any idea who I am. Suddenly, I was not so sure if, the more we got together at “Hands On! A Musical Experience,” the happier I would be. But then the teacher would hand out maracas so we could “shake our sillies out,” and Connor loved that part, and I’d forget all about being freaked out—at least until the next time I heard that song.
Our Mommy and Me pace slowed not a bit when Connor’s little brother arrived, when Connor was a year and a half. Seamus napped in the stroller during Connor’s “Afro-Cuban Percussion” class and on the gym mats during Connor’s “Mommy and Me Big Muscle Workout.” He had to fold himself into the busy schedule of his older brother, and he was, as second children are, exceedingly agreeable about it. It was Mommy who had a problem with it: by the time Seamus was six months old, my self-reproach that he had never been the “Me” in “Mommy and Me” became more than I could bear. I signed Seamus and me up for “Mommy Takes Me to the Water” class, also known as “Swimming,” and immediately regretted this choice, since we both had to change out of our wet bathing suits in the locker room afterward, and there was nowhere to set my baby down while I changed, except upon the moist, fungal floor. By this time, I had also begun rolling my eyes at the twee hello songs, at the hovering, neurotic new parents. I just wanted the class over with; I had shit to do at home. But then I’d hear one of the other mothers mention some new class she and her baby were enjoying, like “Shake, Rattle, and Roll Over with Mommy and Me,” and I’d feel ashamed. How could I have Seamus just in swimming? It was completely unfair to him! While I now had the suspicion there would be no lasting benefit to the two of us playing tambourine to a Laurie Berkner CD in the local temple’s multipurpose room, I still felt bad that we were not doing it, that Seamus was getting, by any standard of measurement, less of me just for himself.
Two and a half years later, Maggie came along, and she didn’t even get to go to swimming. Once the boys were in preschool every morning, Maggie and I would go right back home; any time I had “only” one kid in my care was a time to get stuff done. Mommy spent her mornings multitasking while Maggie/Me had rather excessive amounts of solo time lying on her Busy Bee play mat. After school pickup at 3:00 P.M., Maggie joined me as satellite around the elder suns, strapped to me in the sling as we made our daily orbit. If I had any remorse about this, it was that in a moment of third-trimester nesting extravagance, I had signed us up for an eight-week postnatal Mommy and Me yoga class. Five months later, Maggie and I had never gone. It was only the imminent expiration date of those eight classes, and $245 with it, that motivated me one February morning to put Maggie in the sling and jump on the crosstown bus.
When we arrived, I rolled out one of the blue yoga mats and lay Maggie down on it, next to my wallet and keys. Two other mothers showed up next. They chatted as they set up camp on either side of me: Marimekko quilts, multiple jangly toys, unscented baby wipes in on-the-go containers, graham crackers in Ziploc bags, monogrammed burp cloths. They lay their smiling babies amidst these small civilizations of attentive motherhood, then looked askance at Maggie, lying on the questionably hygienic yoga mat, chewing on my iPhone.
In lieu of a song, the yoga instructor had us begin by breathing with our babies, then introducing ourselves. “This is Desmond,” the mother on my left said. “This is Samson,” the mother on my right said. The mothers’ names, as per usual, were not important (and who could top “Desmond” and “Samson”?). Quiet and respectful throughout our yoga practice, they restarted their conversation across my yoga mat as soon as we were finished:
