BOOKS: BAD MOTHER by Ayelet Waldman

"I LOVE this woman..."

BAD MOTHER:
A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities,
and Occasional Moments of Grace
by Ayelet Waldman
(Doubleday, 2009)

[Hardcover, 208 pages, $24.95 U.S. - on sale at Amazon.com!]

I can't help myself: I love this woman. It would be creepy to want to BE Ayelet Waldman -- which I don't -- but I'm totally considering the move from Atlanta to Berkeley just to be closer. Maybe I could be her new best friend: a kindred spirit, a like-minded woman, a fellow Bad Mother.

I wrote a long, gushing review about Ayelet Waldman more than three years ago, for her wonderful novel: LOVE & OTHER IMPOSSIBLE PURSUITS.

At the time, she was bruised and battered from public response and backlash (whiplash) to an essay she had written for a "Modern Love" collection, in which she "confessed" to loving her husband more than her children -- which is totally understandable, and the way it should be, if you think about it (since those kids are eventually going to leave you, if you do everything RIGHT, and, hopefully, the husband isn't!). The essay was blown out of proportion -- way, way, way out of proportion.

BAD MOTHER: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace is, in no small way, Waldman's response to her critics: "As a kind of f&%k you to the insane Urban-Baby type moms who, after my New York Times piece on loving my husband more than my kids, sent me letters saying my children should be taken away from me and/or my husband would leave me for another woman."
[Not a chance, if you read his comments in my previous review.]

In Bad Mother, Waldman tackles the hubby-love issue and so much more in 18 essays covering the storms and controversies of her very personal and very public life. She's a ballsy redhead and a heck of a writer: clear, intelligent, funny, realistic, self-deprecating and above-all, honest.

In some ways, as a wife and mother, she explains me better than I can myself (see pages 37^* & 50^**, in particular) -- I read those parts out loud to my husband, and he got it, too.

For the record, from an interview with Ayelet Waldman on Writing BAD MOTHER:

"What is your definition of a good mother?
"A Good Mother remembers to serve fruit at breakfast, is always cheerful and never yells, manages not to project her own neuroses and inadequacies onto her children, is an active and beloved community volunteer. She remembers to make play dates, her children's clothes fit, she does art projects with them and enjoys all their games. And she is never too tired for sex."

"Okay, so what do you consider a responsible, attainable ideal of a modern mother?
"One who loves her kids and does her level best not to damage them in any permanent way. A good mother doesn't let herself be overcome by guilt when she screws up."

Waldman is a Mom, just like me and any reality-based, modern-day mother who reads this book: Doing the best she can under often-difficult circumstances and usually with outrageous, super-human expectations. Turns out, the BAD MOTHER is a very Good Mother, after all.

AYELET WALDMAN is the author of Daughter's Keeper and Love and Other Impossible Pursuits (the latter of which is being made into a feature film starring Natalie Portman). Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Salon, New York, Elle, Vogue and other publications. She and her husband, the novelist Michael Chabon, live in Berkeley, California with their four children.

^* page 37:
"I wasn't prepared for how ill suited and poorly trained I was for the job of full-time mother. I was not accustomed to performing poorly...I had not, before I became a mother, had much truck with failure."

^** page 50:
"...I had left my job and was staying home full-time. I was bored and depressed, and had lost the sense of self that had kept me company over the last thirty years. I wasn't who I had once been, and I wasn't sure that I wanted to be who I was. Because I felt lost, I also felt ugly. Or at least unattractive...Becoming a parent had not changed Michael's sense of himself, it had not destroyed his confidence, it had not made him feel lost. He definitely developed a new conception of his role in the world, but not one that was negative."

Comments

[Forever Grand Vacations]

Your mothers are your real supporters as they don't care what you are and who yo are and just go caring for you.