Because I Said So (2 page)

I n t r o d u c t i o n

and her children seemed so independent and grown up. Then adolescence struck, and she felt again like the mother of toddlers, who needed physical closeness, support, and guidance in a way she’d thought was past.

Motherhood and time had challenged our lives, and the lives of our friends and contributors, in ways enormous and even unimaginable. Our parenting experiences were colored by war, terrorism, and increasing environmental havoc. Amid the moments of personal glory and professional success we had all experienced, there were also cancer and divorce, and cancer and divorce narrowly averted. There were pregnancies lost, and families uprooted or scarred by violence or financial disaster; there were mothers who had left their children. There were mothers losing sleep over their decision to go back to work, and mothers losing sleep over their decision to stay home. There were antide-pressants, against-better-judgment PTA presidencies, playground infatuations, and full-fledged affairs. There were mothers scorned by their once-adoring daughters, and sprouting chin hair along with their adolescent sons. As we tumbled over the Niagara of our lives, we wondered why no one who had survived the drop had sent back word about the perils that lay ahead of us.

The world had shifted drastically—for our children and for us—since our last book, published in the final months of the twentieth century. As one of our contributors discovered, those five years spawned an acronym for the growing phenomenon of childhood innocence lost: KGOY—kids growing older younger.

Mouseketeer turned “virgin” sex tease Britney Spears—now married to a man who shortly before fathered a second child with another woman—has matured into the young woman we least want our daughters to become. Lindsey Lohan, the freckled star of the heartwarming Disney remakes of
The Parent Trap
and
Freaky Friday
, has had her coming-of-age party in the form of a lip-licking
Rolling Stone
cover that read, “Hot, Ready, and Legal!”

Boys are finding it harder to be boys without also being labeled ADD or ADHD, or saddled with some other psychiatric diagnosis that requires that they be fed drugs daily by the school nurse. With
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little room to run—literally and figuratively—and with sports heroes and other role models tarnished by charges of rape and drug use, perhaps it was inevitable that boys would come to idolize rappers, with their defiant, open glorification of machismo and violence. Even preschool boys are sagging their pants, no easy feat when your jeans still have an elastic waistband, while little girls jig-gle their skirts down to better show their underwear.

Every school day—as we have done since our kids started kindergarten—we trace each others’ paths during commutes across town from our homes on opposite ends of our city, unsettled by a deepening sense of the world encroaching ominously on our children’s lives even as we shepherd them safely to school.

One of our teenage sons wants to listen to hip-hop in the morning to get psyched for his classes; the other begs his mother to turn off NPR because he “can’t start his day” listening to the relentlessly bleak, bloody news. And who can blame him? Childhood asthma, obesity, diabetes, and autism are on the rise, a function of the deteriorating environment, corporate avarice, or both. In four years, the U.S. budget surplus of $230 billion became a stunning deficit of $422 billion, a debt that will be shouldered by our children and their children. As we write this, just after the 2004 pres-idential election, welfare programs, other federally funded assistance for families, and assault weapon bans have been all but scrapped; health care is a mess; American education is falling farther and farther behind. One public school teacher in our over-educated community asked each of the assembled parents on Back-to-School Night to donate the price of a chair so that all of their children could have a seat in history class.

In fact, all of us seem to be living in the shadow of something lost, an innocence shaped like two towers. In the introduction to our book
Mothers Who Think
, we pay tribute to the origins of Mother’s Day, envisioned by Julia Ward Howe in the aftermath of the American Civil War as a day for mothers to unite for peace and strategize how to make the world a better place for all children. We could not have imagined then that the good will that would unite Americans with each other and with the world in the
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days after 9/11 would evaporate in four short years, leaving much of the world alienated from America and the nation torn apart from within.

As the recent election made clear, politically and socially America is a nation of deep divisions: urban versus rural, liberal versus conservative, single women versus married women, white versus black, women versus men, red states versus blue states. In the United States as we know it now, the one-size-fits-all how-tos still being recycled in the parenting literature are not only useless, they are laughable, even irresponsible, as the subjects of some of the stories in this book make clear. What’s a black mother to do when people assume she’s the hired nanny of her biracial child?

What’s a modern Muslim mother to do when her American mosque tries to banish her for having a child but no husband?

What’s a widow to do when her son asks why his father was killed by terrorists? What’s a husband to do in the waiting room while his wife’s eggs are being transferred to the uterus of the woman who may carry their child to term?

Certainly, the profound issues that affect our children are as important to fathers as they are to mothers. As journalists, our husbands have been fighting to keep an independent voice alive in the arena of American politics, something vital to them not just as citizens but as parents. Yet how mothers and fathers view political and social issues often differs. Discounting “security moms”

as a new, influential voting bloc—they turned out to be staunch Bush supporters whose votes were never really in question—

American women still vote more consistently than men against guns and war, and in favor of increased spending on education, childcare, and social services. Given the complex and jumbled-up nature of mothers’ lives, it seems that the political continually spills over into the personal, and vice versa. You aren’t likely to hear men at the playground discussing the evils of high-fructose corn syrup or how the broadcast of a political event conflicts with piano practice—but you’ll likely hear this from mothers.

As many of these stories also reflect, even as profoundly important issues preoccupy our thoughts and change our lives,
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mothers are still by and large responsible for keeping the domestic trains running on time—in the words of one contributor, providing our children with hope, strength, and dinner. Under the headline “Things You Knew But Could Never Prove,” the
New York
Times
recently ran the results of a survey confirming that the average working mother still spends twice as much time on household chores and the care of children compared to the average working father. It seems fittingly ironic that this moment in time saw the ignoble downfall of domestic dictator Martha Stewart and her endlessly variable recipe for complicating our lives and making us feel inadequate, alongside the rise of clean-lined
Real Simple
magazine, whose promise that we can streamline our Martha-fied lives is so alluring it has managed to hoodwink some of us into taking on more tasks in order to simplify.

While childhood may have become more sexualized, parenthood hasn’t. American magazines have been flooded in the last few years with articles about sexless marriages. Allison Pearson’s novel
I Don’t Know How She Does It
begins with working mother Kate Reddy up late “distressing” mince pies for the school Christmas party so she can avoid sex with her husband and therefore skip a morning shower, a ruse that might give her a chance to catch up on her e-mails. In a recent British survey, a majority of fathers said they did not wake up when their babies cried during the night, and more than half admitted to sleeping on, or pretending to, even after their wives got up to tend to the child. Not surprisingly, the majority of mothers who said they preferred sleep over sex—75 percent—was precisely the same as that of fathers who preferred sleep over tending to a bawling infant. (Any mother knows that once sex goes from being recreational to procreational, it’s never the same, and sleep, as one of our contributors once quipped, is very sexy.) Our contributors’ admissions about sex may come as a surprise to the curious man who opens this book. Mothers love sex as much as the next guy; it’s just that our idea of what makes good foreplay has changed, and any man who wants to find the right key to that door would do well to read further.

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What has continued to surprise and amaze
us
is our children, with their resilience, their compassion, and their optimism even as the world seems to be chipping away at the safety and innocence of their childhoods. Forced to be more attuned to the multimedia onslaught of politics, spin, cynicism, and extreme everything, our children critique the statements of politicians and toss their pennies to wish for peace. Growing up in more diverse communities and more knowledgeable of world culture and religion, they are accepting of—even blasé about, as one of our contributors found—the many different kinds of families they encounter, despite the heated public debate over gay marriage. “If I get gay-married, I’m going to marry Miranda,” said Kate’s third-grade daughter recently, “and if I get regular-married, I’ll marry Vikram.”

A sense of this resilience and tenderness—the best of our imperfect selves reflected back to us—came up again and again as we lived and wrote and read these stories. While Camille was recovering from chemotherapy, her two boys lined her bedroom with photographs of bald-headed Sinead O’Connor, Grace Jones, and Demi Moore, to provide her with solidarity, company, and strength. One of our contributors’ teenage sons complimented her on the “buff” arms that she had developed cleaning and painting houses after losing her home, her business, and her self-esteem to the plummeting economy. Another contributor’s grown daughter wrote to praise her mother for working, even when it meant having to juggle her children’s needs against her own—an example that inspired her daughter’s career.

We chose to title this book
from a position of maternal strength.
Because I Said So—
the very words conjure images of fierce mothers in aprons, hands planted on their hips, imposing boundaries that will not be breached. And these four words also evoke the emphatic telling of mothers’ truths, so deeply understood and felt that their explanations are self-evident.

The stories in
Because I Said So
reflect real motherhood just after the turn of a new century, as we find ourselves living, like
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Julia Ward Howe, in the shadow of many battles. A reminder that motherhood is a lifelong experience, the book welcomes back eight of the contributors to
Mothers Who Think,
and features twenty-five new contributors wrestling with the personal and the political, the minutiae that occupies their days and the larger concerns that keep them awake at night, and their sense of themselves as it evolves and deepens. Some of these mothers are well known for their fiction, poetry, and journalism; others are appearing in print for the first time. None of them fails to hold to the light the jewel-like, shifting facets of astonishment, bliss, humor, and ferocious love that having children has brought to their lives, or the darker shimmer of anxiety over the endlessly conflicting decisions they are forced to make as mothers. To put it another way, motherhood, as one of our contributors once observed, is like a
mille-feuille
pastry: countless flaky layers—

both buttery and sweet, crunchy and delicious—and there, deep at the creamy center, is guilt. Yet as we brush the flaky remains from our laps, we are inspired and humbled by these stories’

reminder that no role is more powerful in the shaping of the future than is motherhood. It is this profound, daily responsibility to the next generation—our future teachers and soldiers and artists and presidents—that keeps giving mothers more to think about, not less.

Are we doing this right yet? Or are we forever like the mother whose child has a bean up her nose? We don’t know. We do know that the two mothers who blithely stumbled through the zoo seven years ago searching for nonfat lattes and sure that they could do this motherhood thing better could never have predicted the intensity and the range of stories that fill this book. Whether you read these essays while breastfeeding, sleepless during a teenager’s late-night joyride in the family car, or waiting for a prune-skinned child to allow her removal from an ice-cold bathtub, we hope they will draft you instantly into a dream mother’s group of warm, sharp, lively women whose shared and vastly different experiences unite us to one another, and to mothers through time. Quirky, tender, funny, and harrowing—filled with true shock and awe—these stories helped us reconnect to something vital that has not changed: our belief, as mothers, that it is essential to look squarely at the dark and the light. As different as our stories are as mothers, we believe that all of them are part of our own story. To paraphrase another smart contributor, to share them makes us all better.

Camille Peri and Kate Moses

San Francisco

November 2004

The Scarlet Letter
Z

A s r a Q . N o m a n i

Ugly whispers about me
began long before I found myself, in the summer of 2004, standing before a massive green door that led into the mosque in the town that I have known as my home since I was a girl of ten. The door stood in front of me like an entryway into my own personal hell.