Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace Read Online Free PDF Page A

neither, really, do I. Born in 1925, he is no more nor less than a man of his time. It never occurred to him that his wife’s career should have or could have been taken as seriously as his own. If asked, he would probably say that it was merely a function of earning capacity. He made more money than my mother, thus his job was more important. As strapped as they always were, it would have been foolishness to behave otherwise. If he was offered a better position two hundred miles away, then they had to move, whether or not she was working at the one job she ever really loved.
    Like most men his age, my father is inept at managing the most basic details of their domestic life. He doesn’t clean—I’m pretty sure he lumps toilet brushes and mops into the same “feminine products” category as tampons and vaginal deodorant—and he cannot cook. The only time I remember him preparing supper wasduring a week my mother spent in the hospital after surgery, and he served us salami and eggs every single night. Sometimes when he was feeling particularly cheerful, he would pack our school lunches for us, but as neither my younger brother nor I could gag down his peanut butter and butter sandwiches, we learned soon enough how to fend for ourselves. Left to his own devices, my father would subsist on a diet of Fudge Stripe cookies and orange juice mixed with Coca-Cola, in a room stuffed with teetering piles of ancient newspapers and dusty old books. The telephone would be buried in the cracks of the sprung sofa, next to the long-lost remote, but he would have noticed the absence of neither, because he would no longer be wearing his hearing aids.
    “Do not marry a man like your father,” my mother instructed. And, having been a witness to her frustration and their discord, and though I love my father dearly, I was eager to comply.
    Men unlike my father abounded at Wesleyan University. They sat next to me in women’s studies classes, playing with their long, stringy ponytails and wiggling the toes that peeped from beneath the straps of their Birkenstocks. They linked hands with me at silent vigils in front of fraternity houses that had committed the thought crime of showing porn movies during pledge week. They toted around the collected poems of Marge Piercy and well-thumbed copies of
Gyn/ecology
by Mary Daly. They wore T-shirts that proclaimed their opposition to apartheid and their membership in PETA, and they spoke with authority about Hélène Cixous and the feminist post-structuralist critique of phallogocentrism. These were precisely the kinds of men my mother had instructed me to marry (although whether they actually planned to practice the domestic equality they proponed was anyone’s guess).
    Unfortunately, over and over I failed to muster up any attractionfor those earnest men in their huaraches and drawstring pants. I tried to sleep with them, to survive their passive, tentative, and overly deferential lovemaking. But they were so
boring
.
    So I took a page out of the book of bossy women everywhere. I found myself a weak-willed man to push around, a man like the husband in my favorite Jewish joke. A boy comes home from school one day and says to his mother, “Mama, Mama, I got a part in the play!” “I’m so proud of you, darling,” she says. “What part did you get?” The son puffs up his chest and says, proudly, “I’m the Jewish husband!” “The Jewish husband?” the mother says, aghast. “You just march back to school and demand that they give you a
speaking
role!”
    Cast in the role of silent husband was my first serious boy friend, a kindhearted and weak-willed Israeli I’ll call Elan. * Elan deferred to me in all things. When we first started dating, I promised to move to Israel, but when I grew disenchanted with this idea, he obligingly followed me to Cambridge. While I was in law school, he got a job in a moving company, the default occupation of those Israeli immigrants who are not interested in