Living Out Loud (15 page)

Yet it is having children that can smooth the relationship, too. Mother and daughter are now equals. That is hard to imagine, even harder to accept, for among other things, it means realizing that your own mother felt this way, too—unsure of herself, weak in the knees, terrified about what in the world to do with you. It means accepting that she was tired, inept, sometimes stupid; that she, too, sat in the dark at 2:00
A
.
M
. with a child shrieking across the hall and no clue to the child’s trouble.

Most of this has little to do with the specific women involved. In my case that is certainly true. This firestorm is not about one sweet, gentle mother, perhaps tough and demanding inside, and one tough, demanding daughter, now sweet and
gentle with her own children. It has to do with Mother with a capital M: someone we are afraid to be and afraid that we can never be. It has to do with a torch being passed, with finding it too hot to hold, with looking up at the person who has given it to you and accepting that, without it, she is no Valkyrie, just a woman muddling through, much like me, much like you.

   RAISING   
          A           
CHILD

I
have returned from the birthday-party wars. My side lost. Balloons were broken, jelly sandwiches fell jelly-side down on wall-to-wall carpets, the wine for the adults ran out. Two of the same dinosaurs were received as gifts. (They were stegosauruses.) There were whistles as party favors in violation of decent human standards. All around us the battle raged. This is why the birth process is roughly commensurate to participating in a triathalon in hell: to prepare parents for the birthday parties. In the thick of one celebration I took a cleansing breath and then panted. It did not help. I realized the following:

—Piñatas are the only things in life that are truly unbreakable. You can knock them, you can hit them, you can beat them with a stick, yet they continue to swing through the air: ruffled crepe paper, papier-mâché, and a smile. Dumb donkey. Kids are not half as discombobulated by this as adults, who understand that the fun is not supposed
to be in the hitting but in the breaking. Dumb adults. Finally the fathers move in to tear the thing limb from limb.

—No matter how much you pay a clown to entertain, it could never be enough. Just as you are finally ready to shut all the little guests in the laundry room—“Look, here’s a game—fold the towels!”—he has managed to set up his equipment. You have an hour to eat, to breathe, to discover that someone put the bag of malted-milk balls in the dishwasher and then turned it to the pots-and-pans cycle.

—The most important thing to remember about the spacing of your children is not contained in any book. It is that the older one should have a birthday before the younger one. Otherwise you will hear the sentence “But when is it
my
birthday?” spoken in a whine for three or four months on end.

—Everything positive you have ever taught your child will evaporate when the gifts are opened. And I’m not talking about when they are opened at his own party, when he will only remove clothing from the box and toss it over his shoulder. All year long you have been talking about sharing, about waiting your turn, and about not going berserk in public, and suddenly, at another person’s birthday party, the child is confronted by an enormous pile of presents, none of which are for him. A chain of ganglia within his little slicked-down head fire off, and he shrieks, “I want them ALL.” He is carried into another room, where he is promised gifts on his own birthday if he calms down. No way.

I would like to blame my mother for not teaching me these things, but she did not know them. When she was raising five children there were no piñatas, no clowns. Birthday parties were easy. If your child’s birthday fell during the school year, you packed two dozen cupcakes in a box and took them to school, where the child was serenaded with the kid version of “Happy Birthday” at recess. “You look like a monkey/And you smell like one too,” everyone sang, breathless with the hilarity
of the lyrics; then they ate the icing off the cupcakes and went back to fractions. If your child’s birthday fell during the summer, you had a family barbeque at which the only permissible gifts were underwear, socks, or a new missal. My birthday happens to be in July; I always had a sparkler in my cake instead of candles, which was considered the height of sophistication at that time.

Now those wonderful folks who brought you designer sneakers, baby vegetables, and insider trading are giving children’s birthday parties, and no one gives missals as gifts. One clown told me, his face grim beneath his painted-on happy face, that he had performed at a party at which the children booed his balloon animals. (I hope all such children will someday be tried as adults rather than juveniles, and given life without parole in the fifth grade.) My own children have not gone to enough parties to get uppity over even the most pathetic balloon animals, but the elder one is pushing it. He wants dinosaurs on his cake. “Not brontosauruses,” he says, knowing that I’ll opt for the easy outline. “Styracasauruses.” Last year he wanted helicopters. At midnight my husband found me leaning over an unmarked expanse of white icing with a tube of blue goo in one hand and an old copy of
Newsweek
with a fairly clear helicopter photograph propped up against a mixing bowl. “I think you’re losing it,” he said. What did he know? No one ever told his analyst that his father never made him a birthday cake. All he has to do is beat the piñata into submission.

I’m in charge of the cake. It was chocolate. It had Nestlé’s Quik in it. (There’s a confession for you.) It had buttercream icing. I always make the cake. I feel like it puts me in touch with the elemental aspects of motherhood: that is, I get to lick the bowl. All my childhood, all I ever thought on the day before my birthday was “Someday I will be old enough to make my own cakes and to lick the bowl all by myself.” Of course, what I really meant was “Someday I will be old enough to make my
own cakes and eat all the batter instead of pouring it into the pan.” Unfortunately I reckoned without the children. The older child helped me make the cake for the younger one. At one point, in violation of decent human standards, I found myself wrestling with him over who would lick the spoon. I lost. I will make his cake in the dead of night, while visions of styracasaurus dance in his head, and I will get the spoon and the mixer blades. We are losing the birthday-party wars, but I will win some small battles. Next year, enough wine.

M
y elder boy admits to having a girlfriend. I am sure it is Rebecca. No? What about Alexia? No again. Sonia? Jo-Ann? Sarah? No. No. No.

“Miss King,” he says impatiently, amazed that I could be so dim.

Miss King is his preschool teacher this year. She overcame unbelievable odds to win his heart. The unbelievable odds were the much beloved Mrs. Frank. She was last year’s passion. Now she has faded into the glow of fond remembrance.

“What do you like best about Miss King?”

“I can’t tell you.”

And so his secret life begins.

I remember the first stirrings of my own, when I squirreled away contraband in my desk at school, safe from my mother’s eyes (except for the sanitized view offered on parents’ night). The power of that secret life, contained as it was in a cheap powder-blue Leatherette diary with a tin key, and the exhilaration: the feeling of being on
my own, of hating my bag lunches because they represented a connection, however tenuous, to adults back home. I lobbed the hard-boiled egg on which my mother had painted a picture of a princess into the trash, and bought packaged cupcakes instead.

All over America we children sauntered home at 3:00
P
.
M
. with the same answer to the same question: What did you do in school today? Nothing. The houses that were havens slowly turned into massive invasions of privacy except for the room at the end of the hall with the single bed, the yellow flowered curtains, the bulletin board and the books. My bedroom door had a sign: Keep Out. This Means You! The “i” was dotted with a daisy.