Ayelet Waldman: Happy ‘Bad Mother’ Day

“Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace” by Ayelet Waldman (Broadway Books, 224 pp., $24.95, hardcover)

Washington Post

BERKELEY, Calif. — The morning after Ayelet Waldman’s infamous essay was published, she got a call from a friend who warned: Don’t watch “The View.”

Waldman never watched the ABC chatfest anyway. But so what? Why shouldn’t she?

“Because Star Jones is ripping you to shreds.”

Another friend called from Chicago.

“Ayelet, what the [expletive] have you done?” Waldman recalls her whispering. “I’m sitting at a Starbucks and the women at the next table are just tearing you to shreds.”

Time to fire up the computer and see what was going on.

“I’ve never seen so many e-mails in an inbox,” she says.

And all because she’d admitted — no, asserted! publicly! in the New York Times! — that there was someone more important in her life than her four beloved kids.

“If a good mother is one who loves her child more than anyone else in the world, I am not a good mother,” Waldman wrote in a March 27, 2005, Modern Love column. “I am in fact a bad mother. I love my husband more than I love my children.”

The e-mail onslaught was scary.

“People were telling me that they were going to report me to the Department of Social Services, that my children should be taken away,” Waldman says.

Inevitably, she went on “The Oprah Winfrey Show.” While getting made up, she heard “a kind of shrieking” in the background. “What is that?” she asked. Turned out it was the studio audience.

“Most of them hate you,” she recalls the producer telling her cheerfully, “but you were a criminal defense attorney, you’re used to hostile juries, you’ll be fine.”

A couple of years later, Waldman still hadn’t gotten over the fury. One day she was venting to friend Daniel Handler, aka Lemony Snicket, when he said, “Why don’t you just shut up and write a book?”

‘Bad Mother’

The book takes off from what Waldman calls the “Bad Mother perp walk” from her “I love my husband more” heresy. It explores the intense cultural anxiety on the subject of motherhood as well as Waldman’s personal history, touching on topics from ridiculous homework assignments to how motherhood turned her into a writer, then changed the nature of what she wrote.

The title carries a double meaning, at least when applied to Waldman. She intends “bad” to mean “incompetent” or “neglectful,” though she doesn’t really think she’s either. But “formidable, not to be messed with” fits as well.

Her husband, novelist Michael Chabon, tells a story that proves it.

One time when the couple was driving in Los Angeles, they saw a man who seemed to be threatening a woman by the side of the road. “Ayelet shouted, ‘Stop the car!’” Chabon recalls, which he did, although he worried they’d get shot for interfering. Then he watched his wife jump out, yell “Get your hands off her!” and offer the grateful woman a ride.

The scene gains drama if you know that Waldman is 5 feet tall.

Double standard

Waldman is in her kitchen, talking about “Bad Mother” and her new novel “Red Hook Road,” due out next year. The kids — ages 14, 11, 7 and 6 — are at school, and it’s unusually quiet.

Suddenly, it’s not.

“Omigod! You forgot Ida-Rose!” Waldman yells to Chabon, just back from running an errand.

“Yes, I forgot Rosie,” he says calmly, and heads back out to retrieve the 7-year-old.

“Omigod! You’re going to write what horrible parents we are!”

Well, no. Besides, wasn’t this dad’s mistake? Why don’t more men join the multitudes of women who agonize about parenting issues?

Because there’s a double standard.

“The bar is so low for men,” Waldman explains, that all they have to do is “show up” and Good Father medals will be pinned on their chests. “Therein lies the failure of the feminist movement my mother and her friends began.”

She’s a feminist herself but doesn’t blame individual men: It’s hard for them to buck the system alone, and the price of balancing work and parenthood remains high. And she certainly doesn’t blame Chabon, who told her within an hour of their meeting that “because he was a writer and worked at night, he intended to spend his days taking care of his children, so his wife could pursue her career.”

She proposed three weeks later.

A career is born

Waldman, 44, grew up in New Jersey and studied law at Harvard. “I always say that I’m the only person in the class of ’91 who wasn’t Barack Obama’s best friend.”

She met Chabon while working at a New York law firm. By the time daughter Sophie was born, she was a federal public defender in LA.

Then she quit. Never mind that she loved her work and had the perfect husband to support it. She was jealous of the time he and Sophie got to spend together.

Waldman’s mother was appalled. She’d given up her own dreams to marry a man with four children and came to look back on her decision with frustration, Waldman says. And, she raised her daughter not to make a similar mistake.

Waldman found full-time motherhood came with huge helpings of anxiety and boredom. “I would just sit there at the playground pushing the kid on the swing and every once in a while I would say to one of these moms, ‘Omigod, isn’t this the worst thing you’ve ever done?’ And they’d be like: ‘What? What? I love making homemade Play-Doh.’”

One day, she started writing.

“I was looking around and I look at my husband, who’s got this great life, right?” Waldman says. As she describes it, Chabon wakes at 11 and “plays with the baby all day. Then he goes into his office, works for four hours and has this amazing, successful career.” “I’m, like, well, I can’t do what he does. But I can write a murder mystery.”

In 2000, she published the first book in her “Mommy-Track Mysteries” series about a former public defender who quits to stay home with her children but is “awash in ambivalence” about the move.