Because I Said So (15 page)

For Easter, we rented a documentary about Amish teenagers who are allowed out into “the world” when they hit sixteen.
The
Devil’s Playground,
it’s called. Amish tradition and religion hold that a kid has to be allowed to experience mainstream American life before making the choice to “join the church” of his or her childhood. Some of the kids go to a dozen raves, then return home to start their adult lives. A few embark on promising futures outside the church; they learn to drive, go to college.

Others become meth dealers in southern Florida.

I wonder if
this
is what’s going on right now. Does my girl-woman have to check out mainstream America—complete with mother-hating values and homophobia—in order to find her own way? I wonder if it is more or less embarrassing to have me for a mother or to have a couple of long-haired parents who dress like pilgrims and take a horse and buggy into town. I wonder what future my girl-woman will choose. Will she become a meth dealer in southern Florida? Weirder things have happened. Will she ever come back to our church? What is our church? The church of the little red car?

Safety in motion. I don’t want to wait for her to make up her mind. I want to kidnap her myself. We could drive to the coast. We could get all the way to New Orleans or Mexico City. We could follow winding roads up into the wilderness. If a mother acts a fool but there’s no one unrelated there to see her, is she still a fool?

In the car, I know where my girl-woman is. In the car, she has
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almost no choice but to listen to me. In the car, I imagine I can protect her, imagine I am in control, imagine we can outrun the devil at our heels.

Here’s the irony: most days, my girl-woman doesn’t dislike me. She doesn’t wish me dead, gone, or disappeared. And perhaps that’s part of the problem. If she hated me, maybe she wouldn’t care so much if THEY liked me. Who are THEY? The teasers, the bullies. “The Stupid People,” she calls them.

“Why do you care what The Stupid People think?”

“God, Mom.”

“No. Really. I want to know. Why don’t you just tell The Stupid People to grow up and get a life?”

“But, Mom! No one will talk
to
me if The Stupid People are talking
about
me.”

Oh, right
. I brace myself as old familiar mother guilt rushes in. What was I thinking, bringing a precious baby girl into a world I knew was run by The Stupid People?

“Being embarrassed by your parents, that’s something everyone has to go through,” my daughter wrote in a recent essay. So she knows—
intellectually
, anyway—that she’s not alone. That it’s not just me.

And I know, too—
intellectually
, anyway—that this new shame is nothing personal. It’s developmental. It’s a right of passage. It’s the way things are supposed to be. My girl-child spent years looking up to me like I was the queen of cool. She strained her neck. I taught her my values, my fashion sense, my politics. I published a ’zine called
Hip Mama
; she published a ’zine called
Love and Death in Fifth Grade
. I took her to protests; she led the Radical Women’s contingent of the Dyke March in San Francisco.

She loved me irrationally. Now that we see eye to eye, she sees through me. I’m just a dorky human mama-woman, it turns out; I’m the bumbling wizard behind the curtain.

My power has been a farce.

What she doesn’t know is that The Stupid People’s power is an even bigger farce. I try to warn her, but she just rolls her eyes.

“God, Mom.”

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A r i e l G o r e

I might be telling her the truth, but why should she believe me? I lied about Santa Claus. I lied about the Easter Bunny. And I lied when I pretended she was right to think I was “all that.”

I want to be able to step back now, let my girl-woman out into the devil’s playground, if that’s where she might find her own values, her own fashion sense, her own politics. But this whole letting-go thing is bumming me out.

Please God
, I pray,
keep her safe out there
.

I’m not the mother-of-a-teenager I meant to be. When I thought forward to these years, I saw myself so well adjusted: easy to talk to, the owner of the “safe” house where all the kids would hang out. At the very least, I imagined I’d be quiet and knowing, calm and rational. But most days I’m flailing around, flawed, clueless, irrational. No wonder she’s embarrassed. I have to bite my tongue to keep from saying the most inane things.

Some days I don’t bite fast enough. The things that go through my head! The things I actually come out with! “I work my ass off so you can dress like a rich girl, and this is how you think you can behave!?” I actually said that.

I’ve always hated those dads in the movies who come out with shit like that. Shit like: “Not as long as you live under
my
roof, young lady!”

I never thought I’d catch myself dead feeling the same way, morphing into some authoritarian freak. For one thing, that’s a
dad’s
job. Mom is just supposed to sit home and worry, which I do plenty of, but it’s this other set of emotions that’s caught me off guard.

I’m angry. I’m bitter. I overreact and underreact at seemingly random intervals. I’m hurt when she thinks I’m a loser. I take the teenage angst personally. I have made a life out of speaking my truth about motherhood and have, at the same time, insisted that I would never define myself
only
as a mother. Now I have to admit that motherhood has gotten the better of me.

The night I woke up at three A.M. and—like Miss Clavel in the
Madeline
books—turned on the light and said “something is not right,” I went rushing down the hall to her room and found
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her . . .
gone
. Every CNN-nurtured maternal fear I’d ever had swelled and burned in me until—after I got off the phone with 911 and every friend of hers I knew—I collapsed onto the floor and had to admit that along with all my fears for her safety there was this:
If anything happens to her, my life is meaningless
. All my feminist talk about being a woman first and a mother second has been nice, but it’s been a lie. A nice lie. Because when it comes down to it, I would take a bullet for her in a heartbeat. And if I didn’t jump fast enough, I would consider myself a failure. Not a failure at motherhood, but a failure at life. I wish it weren’t so, I hope I’ll grow out of it or make peace with it, but somewhere in me I believe that her survival is my sole life’s mission. Maybe it’s just biological. An irrepressible instinct to ensure the continuation of the species. But it’s too much to carry. And it’s too much to put on a kid. When she finally got home—six A.M. in the back of a cop car—I was so relieved to see her, I banshee-raged at her like she herself had kidnapped my baby. Which, come to think of it, I guess she had. But just when she needs me to be stable and rational, I’m falling into my most dreaded stereotypes: the over-protective mother, the under-responsive mother, the mood-swing mother. Worst of all, because my girl-child is so humiliated by me that I have limited contact with her friends and her friends’ mothers, I am convinced that I am the only mother in history to be pushed over the edge by early adolescence.

Most of my friends don’t have teenagers yet. Or their kids are entirely theoretical. “I would never raise a child in America,” they tell me. Or, “That’s why it’s so important to have open communication.”

Gee, thank you.

Sure, I read books. I talk to mom friends who live far away now. I’ve done my research. I know—
intellectually
, anyway—that this is the way it goes. But that knowledge doesn’t change the way I feel: Alone, afraid, overwhelmed, pissed-off, self-absorbed, and guilty for being so damn self-absorbed.

Your kid needs you now
, I mutter like some stupid daily affirmation.
Get over yourself and be the grown-up.

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A r i e l G o r e

Some days it works. Some days I have it all together or I pull it all together. Some days I’m calm and collected. But some days I am one seriously messed-up, whacked-out, control-freak mother, and the only solution I can think of is to pack ten sandwiches and my baby girl into our little red car—and drive.

Boys! Give Me Boys!

J e n n i f e r A l l e n

Sunday—husband’s working,
sitter’s off. It’s you, all alone with the three of them, your three young sons, running you ragged in a burning barefoot marathon on a treadmill set on HIGH-SPEED PANIC. Its hot rubber mat jerks you back so fast you fall flat on your face. You feel like a cartoon character, flattened out into one dimension, as you are dragged—feet, legs, belly, chest, neck, head—backward, through this machine that sucks you in and spits you out all day long. You may wonder aloud,
Hey, how do you stop this crazy thing?
Wonder all you want, no one is listening—they’re all boys, remember? You talk to yourself from a second-person stance, but you cannot help it, can you?

Because when you are the mom of three little boys, who has time for me, myself, or I?

Certainly not you, not now. Right now, you have a six-year-old in a Tae Kwon Do uniform wiggling his top tooth loose with his tongue. You have a three-year-old in an inflatable Hulk costume making farting sounds. You have a six-month-old in a swollen diaper standing in the stroller and chewing on the straps of what was once your favorite and finest Italian silk bra. You have all of them all around you: the sole, freak female in the house, sitting on the potty, pleading, “Can I please, please, have some privacy, please?”

Your boys, these sons, think they have a right to your body
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J e n n i f e r A l l e n

morning, noon, and night. If you lock them out of the bathroom, they will panic, shriek, shrill, and cry—as if you have locked them out of your very heart. They will kick the door, thrust themselves against it, and then rattle the doorknob, yelling, “Mommy, Mommy, Mom!” You mean mommy, you, how dare you try to insert a tampon all by your lonesome self on the potty at dawn when one of them needs you to pull the tooth from his mouth, another needs his Hulk costume zipped up, and the other needs his back rubbed NOW! “Did you hear us, Mom? Mom, Mommy, NOW!”

You tell them you hear them. You tell them, “I’m sorry, I can’t right now,” and the two older ones reply, “I’m sorry, I can’t right now.” And when you ask them, “Are you mocking me?” they yell (so loud the baby yelps), “Are you mocking me? Are you mocking me? Are you mocking me?” So you do what you must—and quickly. You insert, wipe, and wash. You apply peach-blossom lip gloss to ward off that pale post-partum menstrual look you have when you are passing clots the size of your liver, and when coffee and Advil and an occasional free-floating handstand cannot keep your cheeks rosy and glowing and girlish looking all day long.

You open the door, check on the tooth, you zip up the Hulk, you give the baby a big peach-blossom kiss on the nog, and off you go, out of the bathroom and into the hall.

Each one grabs hold of the sides of the stroller, which is moving so slowly and awkwardly across the sticky carpet that you accidentally bang the baby’s head on the door heading into the bedroom and he cries. He’s got a big welt near your lipstick kiss.

You tear off your sleep shirt and then your nursing bra and hand it to him, and he is immediately contented, calmed, chewing on Mommy’s all-night-long-night-sweats smell. You then undress entirely because you refuse to be a mom who is still wearing pajamas in the yard in the bright morning suburban California sun.

They close in around you and gawk and gasp and gape as you slip off your night drawers. There you are—naked, nude, undone.

And there they are—staring at your dicklessness. You try to change the scenery by swiftly slipping into your rather stylish and mentally uplifting boy-short undies and matching halter bra, and
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saying, “Isn’t this a pretty color?” But no amount of pastel can distract them from the fact that you are clearly, physically, not one of them.

You are certain the baby is eyeing this new halter bra and thinking, “Why has she kept that one from me?” The other two remain in pure boyhood shock, with their hands down their pants and that ten-thousand-mile-away stare you’ve seen thousands of times on boys and grown men alike. “Do you have to go to the bathroom?” you ask, and they quickly remove their hands from their pants. Sure, they see you like this nearly every day, but today they ask you, “What is
that
?”

So you must come up with an answer, a word, a name. “It’s a ki-ki,” you say, and it actually sounds logical because “ki-ki”

rhymes with “pee-pee.” Then you immediately regret this coinage for such a significant item of future personal exchange. Because you know that you have dreams of taking them all to Hawaii one day, and you already dread sitting in a restaurant and hearing the commentary when they read the menu and the list of things that begin with “kiki”—kiki burgers, kiki dogs, kiki pie. “Ki-ki?” they say, and you say nothing because what more is there to say?

Enough has already been seen, revealed, in you, the first female vision they have ever laid eyes on.

And now your own questions begin: Are my breasts big enough? Are my thighs thick enough? Surely my waist is narrow enough? Am I, in total, womanly enough to be the standard bearer of sexuality for all their long lives ahead of them? Thankfully, your self-conscious and overly psychological questions become completely inane when they both scream and squeeze their penises and say, “A ki-ki, ew, ew, I don’t want one of those!” And then, and only then, will they leave you. They will charge out of the house and onto the grassy front yard for a quick Hulk/Tae Kwon Do wrestling match, while loudly informing the entire neighborhood—jogging by, walking dogs, trimming lawns—“Mommy has a ki-ki! Mommy has a ki-ki! Mommy has a ki-ki!”