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

the electronics business. We both knew that he’d never earn much of an income, so our plan—my plan—was that I would support us as an attorney, and he would take care of the children. It was the kind of plan my mother would approve of. (Or so you would have thought. It turned out, however, that a kibbutznik with no apparent aspirations beyond his high-school diploma was not what she wanted for me. Jewish motherhood, it turns out, trumps feminism.)
    The plan was laid, the plan should have succeeded, but in the end the very thing that made it possible, Elan’s tractability and lack of personal ambition, doomed it. It turned out that while the role of bossy wife came naturally to me, it didn’t make me happy.
He
didn’t make me happy, and I made him miserable, too. In law school, for the first time, I found myself surrounded by different kinds of men. If they wore huaraches, it was because they had spent the year of their Fulbright fellowship in Oaxaca organizing farmworkers. They’d trimmed their ponytails when they’d gone to work as legislative aides to Barney Frank and Tom Harkin. I met men like Barack Obama, one of my classmates, whose brilliant future seemed assured even then. Harvard Law School was replete with men who harbored the not-so-secret ambition to be president, each of whom had the confidence of a Heisman Trophy winner considering his future in the NFL.
    That ambition, that confidence, turned out to be much more alluring than a placid willingness to defer to your wife. I broke up with Elan and turned my attentions to those ambitious men, and to my own career. And then, one day, after being dumped by a religious Catholic who doubted, quite wisely, that I would allow our children to be raised in the Church, my roommate’s best friend suggested that I go on a blind date with a buddy of his from high school. I had just finished retelling, with great drama and a few tears, the tale of my rejection at the hands of the observant Catholic. Jon smiled sympathetically and said, “I know a Jewish guy who’ll date you.”
    When Jon called Michael to tell him about me, Michael was suspicious of the whole enterprise.
    “A blind date?” he said. “I don’t think so.”
    Jon said only, “Your loss,” and changed the subject. Michael says now that it was the very casualness of Jon’s reply that sparkedhis curiosity. Jon says what sparked Michael’s curiosity was that Jon told him I had a nice rack.
    (How well I remember that rack! Those perky breasts that hovered just below my chin. Those pert nipples. That swelling cleavage. After four children and a full seventy-two months of breast-feeding, the last six of which were spent with my nipples clamped in the death vise of a breast pump, it is only by dint of foundation garments designed by teams of MIT professors who otherwise spend their days drawing up plans for the world’s longest suspension bridges that my breasts achieve a shape even approximating round. When I undue the clasps, buckles, straps, and hoists of these miraculous feats of engineering, my boobs tumble to the ground like boulders falling off a cliff. I could polish my shoes with my nipples.)
    I consulted with my girlfriends about attire. Casual but sexy was the consensus. One friend lent me her perfect jeans, the ones that cinched tight at the waist and showed off her ass (this was 1992, long before we began wearing our jeans slung low on our hips). Another had the perfect black leather belt. I bought a new crisp white cotton blouse, polished my lucky black boots, and then was confronted with the most important sartorial dilemma of all. The rack about which Jon had raved had to be shown off to full advantage. That called for a new bra. White, lacy, and with enough push-up power to confirm his assessment.
    The night of the date I tamed my unruly hair into submission, applied the right amount of makeup, and squirted myself with just a hint of scent. And I waited. And waited some more. And waited