Susan Salter Reynolds

Ayelet Waldman expresses blunt views that have caused controversy among mothers. (Photo: Robert Durell, LA Times)

Bad Mother? Good Writer!

Motherhood is all about fear — warding it off, facing it, explaining it away, dealing with it in the middle of the night (yours, theirs, everyone’s). “Bad Mother,” Ayelet Waldman’s latest book, is about facing your fears, your mistakes, your shortcomings, openly and honestly — in that wonderful way that describing a nightmare can make it dissolve.

Waldman and her husband, the author Michael Chabon, and their four childrenm — Sophie, 14; Zeke, 12; Rosie, 8; and Abraham, 6 — live in a gorgeous Craftsman house. Waldman rushes in from belly dancing class, offers the homemade cornmeal cranberry muffins that her children refuse to eat and some chocolate-covered sunflower seeds that go down surprisingly well. Sitting around her kitchen table, surrounded by her children’s drawings and books and all that sunlight, you’d swear this was the San Francisco Bay Area version of the Cleaver household.

But in “Bad Mother,” Waldman admits to a head-spinning number of shortcomings. She tried juggling lawyering and motherhood (“I even accepted collect calls from my clients in lockup while pumping”) but left her job when Sophie was still a baby.

She was jealous of Chabon, a stay-at-home writer who got to “spend his days with her, and I was jealous of my daughter, who spent her days with him.”

After a week at home, she began to lose her mind. She started writing a series of mystery novels. A veteran blogger, she wrote articles on mothering for various online and print publications. But when an essay she wrote for a collection called “Because I Said So: 33 Mothers Write About Children, Sex, Men, Aging, Faith, Race and Themselves” was reprinted by The New York Times in 2005 under the title “Truly, Madly, Guiltily,” the mommy police came out in force. In the essay, Waldman admitted that she could survive the loss of a child but not the loss of her husband; that, yes, she loved her husband more than her children. Waldman was stopped by sanctimonious mothers all over the country, and was called to defend herself on “Oprah.”

Here’s what you do, she counsels, about mothers who criticize your parenting in public: “Go passive-aggressive. I would stop the car in the middle of the intersection, get out and say, ‘I am so sorry. So very, very sorry. I am a bad mother.’ ”

This is sort of what Waldman has done in “Bad Mother” (though there’s an enormous amount of wisdom and thoughtfulness in the book.) With her children’s permission, she has written about her fears for each of them. That Sophie, who prefers the “sexy witch” costumes at Halloween to the toaster or chocolate-chip cookie get-ups, will make the same mistakes Waldman did — sleeping around at a young age and losing her virginity to a thoughtless Israeli soldier. Her fears that Zeke’s attention deficit hyperactivity disorder will limit his choices in life. Waldman also admits to her disappointment upon hearing about Zeke’s learning disability. She has written about her suspicion that Zeke may be gay. She worries about Rosie’s “decoding problem.”

Waldman writes about her own depression, being diagnosed as bipolar, about taking antidepressants and learning that she was pregnant with her youngest child, Abe. Abe was born with a palate that made breast-feeding difficult, and he almost starved before anyone noticed he wasn’t getting sufficient nutrition.

But perhaps the most affecting chapter in the book is about the fetus, nicknamed Rocketship, that the couple aborted after amniocentesis revealed genetic abnormalities. Waldman writes boldly and honestly about their decision: “Aborting my baby is the most serious of the many maternal crimes I tally in my head when I am at my lowest, when the Bad Mother label seems to fit best,” she writes. “Rocketship was my baby. And I killed him.”

“When we choose to have an abortion,” she writes, “we must do so understanding the full ramifications of what we are doing. Anything less feels to me to be hypocritical, a selfish abnegation of reality and responsibility.” But, she says: “I don’t think of myself as the Nazi who says kill all the mentally retarded people.”

Waldman is living proof that we are in the age of no clear role models. “We are the transitional generation — raised to think we could do anything.”

Waldman, 44, writes about the pressures her own mother, a liberal intellectual who stayed in a bad marriage for 45 years, put on her to put career first.

“I wish she’d had a different life,” she says of her mother.

Los Angeles Times

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