Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace (24 page)

But part of the story we’re teaching our own children is that things like that don’t happen anymore. America is different. And it’s not entirely a lie.
Their
America
is
different. Berkeley isn’t Ridgewood, or Indiana, or even Columbia. They go to schools that not only celebrate diversity but actually embody it. One of Zeke’s best friends is a kid whose parents between the two of them encompass four ethnic identities: Jewish, Greek, African American, and white. His other buddy came to Oakland as a refugee from Mississippi after Katrina. Together the three of them look like a Benetton ad.

In my children’s world the girl adopted from China by two Jewish lesbians is no more unusual than the kid whose parents hail from the Iowa cornfields. Less, probably. In the year 2000, the first in which the census permitted people to check a box to describe themselves as mixed-race, nearly 5 percent of Californians
chose that option. One in nineteen children in the United States is of mixed race, and in California that number is closer to one in ten.

Things
do
look better for my children, and perhaps because of that I have very recently started to wonder if the tales we’ve been teaching them about the victory of the civil rights movement and the power of diversity might not be the truth, after all.

Not long ago, I was reading the
New York Times
, and was stopped short by a full-page ad for an exclusive real estate agency—a photograph of a family in their lavish, high-ceilinged kitchen, complete with Sub-Zero fridge, expensive wood paneling, and a European cappuccino maker. What was striking about the ad was not that the man and woman were far too young, thin, and fresh faced to really be the parents of the four gorgeous children, but that the “father” was white and the “mother” was black. The family being used to sell a vision of American achievement and luxury was biracial.

I was in Columbia, South Carolina, during the Democratic primary, volunteering for Barack Obama. The night of the election I was standing in a crowd of hundreds waiting for our candidate to take the stage. While they waited, people amused themselves by watching the news on the JumboTron, batting beach balls over their heads, and taking up various chants.

Bill Clinton’s face appeared five feet tall on the television screen, a replay of his now-notorious reference to Jesse Jackson having also won the South Carolina primary, with its implication that this year’s black candidate’s victory would be as fleeting and ultimately irrelevant. In response, a group of black college students took up the chant “Race doesn’t matter, race doesn’t matter.” Within moments the cry spread throughout the room.

There we were, a crowd divided roughly in half between white people and people of color, most of whom were black, in a city where the Confederate flag still flies and where there still stands a statue of Governor Benjamin Tillman, famous for boasting of his murder of blacks who dared to vote: “We shot them. We are not ashamed of it.” And we were all shouting, “Race doesn’t matter.”

Now, of course, race matters. America is still a country where nearly a quarter of African Americans live in poverty and more African American men are in prison than in college. Sixteen years ago, when I was living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and dating a black fellow law student, race sure as hell mattered. Even in the birthplace of the abolitionist movement people stared at us. Cabs refused to pick us up. People avoided sitting next to us in movie theaters or on the bus.

But now there’s that ad in the paper. There are those students in the crowd. There is Barack Obama himself, who doesn’t so much espouse the rhetoric of equality and the end of racism as embody it. And there’s Matt, boogying down in Amman and in Tel Aviv. And there is the evidence of my four white children, who count among their friends children of any number of races and permutations of racial identity. My kids no longer see the world in black and white. The other day Abe was describing two people. One, he said, was bald, with pink skin. The other wore a red shirt and had black hair and brown skin. Skin was something that could be described by color, like hair, but that’s all it was. No race, no politics. Just color.

I’m not naive. I know that soon enough Abe will learn how racial differences and distinctions continue to preoccupy American society. But he’s growing up in a world where an advertiser’s ideal family is multihued, and where young people can lead a
chant that embodies not only the feeling of a moment but the hope for our country’s future.

He and his siblings are growing up in the America of our stories, and I can’t quite believe it. Maybe all along, like a Good Mother, I’ve been telling the truth about that good country, America. And maybe it’s time for us to get that Stars and Stripes, after all.

A
t every parents’ night I’ve ever attended—and with four children I’ve been to more than my share—I have waited for the inevitable question. After we have studied the self-portraits and birthday charts that decorate the walls, after we’ve signed up (or not) to chaperone the field trips, after the teacher has presented the year’s curriculum and the parent-teacher conference schedule, one of the parents always raises his or her hand, a little too high and a little too eagerly.

“What accommodation,” he or she says, “do you make for the exceptionally gifted child?”

All the other parents look to find out who the lucky speaker is; who is the parent of this future Bobby Fischer, this Stephen Hawking of the second grade?

For the vast majority of us, the question serves only to make us feel bad. We’ve all wished at one time or another to be the parents of the gifted kid. Our kitchen drawers are brimming over with abandoned flash cards, Baby Einstein DVDs gather dust in our television cabinets, and our children’s toy chests are littered at their lowest levels with the polygon rubble of black-and-white-striped Stim Mobiles, mini baseball gloves, and broken violin bows. I should know. Michael and I still swear to this day that Sophie said the word “duck” when she was only six months old.

It was Sophie who began for us what became a long lesson in the folly of expectations. When she was in preschool, I began buying
her First Readers, convinced that it was only a matter of months before she’d be whipping through
The Chronicles of Narnia
. When she was still painstakingly sounding out words at age seven, I called my mother, completely distraught. “She’s only reading at a first-grade level!” I wailed.

There was silence on the other end of the line.

Finally my mother said, “Honey, she’s
in
first grade.”

More hysteria. “But Michael was reading by age four! And I was such an early reader!”

“What are you talking about?” my mother said. “You took forever to learn to read. You were the last in your class.”

What?

Still, even knowing of my own average kindergarten abilities didn’t prevent me from being disappointed that my daughter didn’t excel. Why is it no longer enough for us that our children do well? They must, instead, be prodigies. Top of the class doesn’t cut it. They have to be taken from the class and enrolled in a special program for future Nobel laureates.

When Sophie was five years old, she began playing the violin. Or, rather, I
made
her begin playing the violin. It was because of Max. Max was a boy Michael’s brother used to babysit for, a boy who, at Sophie’s age, played angelic Bach cantatas on a quarter-sized cello. I was sure, or rather I surely hoped, that Sophie had a natural ear, and she looked so cute with her quarter-sized violin.

By the time of her uncle’s wedding, Sophie had been studying nearly a year, the last month of which was spent preparing a Russian dance from her Suzuki violin book.

Sophie mounted the stage in her lavender taffeta-and-tulle gown, a circlet of roses in her hair (her first duty of the day had been as flower girl). The crowd hushed as she lifted her violin into position and raised her bow. Every guest in the audience sat a little
straighter, wondering just how stunning the prodigy would be when she launched into her flawless Mozart minuet, or perhaps one of Paganini’s more simple Capriccios. I knew better, of course, and yet when her bow hit the strings, I sat with my heart in my mouth, full of pride and expectation. You see, my capacity for expectation was forever distorted by Hollywood and that rotten little Max, and part of me was sure that her rendition of this little Russian dance would be the most beautiful, transporting performance of that supremely minor bit of violin music that any of us would ever have heard. This even though I had been listening to her for months; I knew that Sophie playing the violin sounded exactly like a violin rolling itself halfheartedly down the stairs. I knew that her clearest note was in the same exact pitch as my teakettle. After all, I was the one who kept rushing into the kitchen during her lessons to turn off the unlit burner. And yet when the performance began, and the cats in the neighborhood yowled back, recognizing her squall, I was as shocked as anyone in that audience.

The pictures came out great, though! Sophie looks adorable, her curls bouncing beneath their crown of flowers. For all you can tell, she might be playing the allemande from Bach’s Partita no. 2 for solo violin.

Why is it that when our children fail to meet our unrealistically high expectations—when they behave, instead, like normal, average kids—we end up disappointed? We send them to after-school cram programs that have terrorized generations of Japanese schoolchildren into higher test scores and mental collapse, we hire pitching coaches and gymnastics tutors, we enroll them in chess camp.

We contemporary parents are convinced, just like the fictional population of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, that all of our children are above average. But here’s the thing: intelligence, like most accomplishment,
is a bell curve. There’s a large group in the middle, and only a very few outliers on either end. Thus, most of our children rest comfortably in the fat part of that curve. The only thing worse than having low expectations of your children is setting the bar so high that they cannot hope to succeed. And the only thing worse than that is allowing yourself to be crushed when they fail. I know; I’ve been there. I have seen what happens when the children of whom you have such unrealistically high expectations not only don’t excel, but lag behind.

After his horrible year in fourth grade, when we sent Zeke to be evaluated, I think I expected the neuropsychologist to say something like “This child is so brilliant and sophisticated that sometimes his frustration with the low level of work in the classroom makes him act out.” I can hear you laughing. At least those of you whose children have gone through the rigamarole of testing and diagnosis. I’ll bet there are others who are thinking, “That sounds about right. Poor Dylan/Parker/Jayden/Storey is just not getting the stimulation he needs.”

I went into the meeting confident that my child’s genius would be confirmed. This was the boy, after all, who could recite the planets in order from the sun when he was fifteen months old. Of course he could also recite the names of TV’s Arthur and all his classmates, and there didn’t actually seem to be much of a difference in how he’d learned both. He’s got a great
long-term
memory. The last thing I was expecting was a diagnosis of ADHD and of the other series of challenges my older son faces. The doctor spent over two hours with us that morning, going over every page of his thick pile of test results. I started crying almost immediately, something fairly typical, I suppose, if the boxes of tissues placed strategically around the office were anything to gauge by.

When I recall it now, it was almost as though, in the days and
weeks that followed, I went through a version of Kübler-Ross’s stages of grief. First came denial. There was nothing wrong with my son, I insisted. To a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and to a neuropsychologist every behavior looks like a learning disability. The tests were wrong, administered poorly, graded incorrectly. My boy wasn’t hyperactive; he didn’t run frantically from place to place, jumping off furniture and breaking dishes. He didn’t have attention problems; he could sit for two hours perfecting a Flair-pen drawing of Mothra battling Godzilla.
Zeke
was fine, the problem was
school
. His teachers didn’t understand him; they couldn’t see past his (admittedly crappy) attitude to the sensitive brilliance that lay beneath. Moreover, the whole academic enterprise was structured for girls, not for boys. Show me any ten-year-old boy who could sit still for an hour multiplying decimals. It can’t be true, I said. ADHD is one of those fad diagnoses, a way to pathologize the behavior of normal boys. The medical and educational establishment wants to drug our children into dull compliance.

Although I’ve moved beyond the stage of denial, I still think there was some truth to my initial flood of defensiveness. Schools
are
organized to cater to more sedentary, well-behaved children, to the kinds of kids who can concentrate for hours at a time, even without periodic recess breaks spent crashing madly around a playground. It was also true that Zeke is not hyperactive in the way that laymen think of the disorder; you rarely see him bouncing off the walls.

But even as I was ranting and remonstrating, I knew that I was being unreasonable. While he might not tear a room apart (he’s a neat boy), Zeke does have “impulse control” issues. That phrase rang true the moment the neuropsychologist first uttered it. I thought of the impulses Zeke had failed to control: the impulse to use his new pocketknife to shred the seat of his desk chair and the
upholstery in the back of the minivan (how does one balance the cost of having to replace leather car upholstery against the pleasure of being able to say to one’s husband, “I told you a knife was no gift for a child”?); the impulse to tackle a mean kid who was teasing him; the impulse to knock down his younger siblings’ elaborate “setup” (a family term that means a panorama made of small toys, like Playmobils or Legos, or the beloved Hamtaros, tiny plastic hamsters based on the Japanese anime TV series).