Jack was the first married man I ever dated. I believe that women who date married men are cruel and irresponsible, and that they betray their sisters. Worse, I believe that they are fools. If they think that the married men whom they are seducing will be faithful to them, then they are deluding themselves. A man who cheats on one wife will surely cheat on another. Fidelity is a personality trait; it is not case specific. It is a matter of character, not of circumstance.
The commencement of my relationship with Jack was the most typical of stories. I was a young associate at the law firm where he is a partner. He was my boss. We first kissed on a business trip, outside the door of my hotel room, on the third floor of the Claremont Hotel in Oakland, California. The first time we made love was, as I’ve said before, in his office. I was thirty years old when we first began seeing each other; he was struggling to come to terms with his impending fortieth birthday. I am Jack’s red Porsche.
It’s all very trite and seedy, sordid and humiliating, except that I love him. I love him so much that while I know other people feel this kind of love, I cannot imagine that it is possible that they continue with their daily lives without stopping strangers on the street and declaring the magnificence of their lovers. I love him so much that I am in a state of constant terror that something will happen to him — I want to wrap him in cotton batting and put him in my pocket where I know he will be safe. I only feel totally secure with him before my eyes, in no danger of dying in a plane crash, or getting hit by a taxicab, or having a bowling ball fall from the roof of a building to crush his skull. I love him so much that I want to swallow him, to start with his curled pinkie toes and work my way up to the whorls of his small and high-set ears.
I never knew that it was possible to feel this way. I thought I was in love before. There was an Israeli who worked for Moshe’s Moving whom I was convinced I ought to marry. There was a guy in my orientation group in law school whom I probably would have married but for his conviction that marrying a white woman would ruin his chances of being elected to public office (he and his mocha-colored wife just moved to Washington, D.C., representatives of the Nineteenth Congressional District of New York). There were others, so many that nowadays, when sluttiness has come back into fashion, I am a veritable trendsetter. But I never before felt anything remotely akin to what I have felt for Jack from the moment I first saw him. I loved him for two years before he noticed me, and for another year before he allowed himself to touch me.
I saw Jack on my very first day at Friedman, Taft, Mayberry and Stein. I was being led down the hall by the recruitment coordinator, on my way to the office I was to share with another first-year associate, a languid, heavy-lidded young graduate of Yale who gave the impression of not caring very much about his work at the firm, who took long lunches and left early, but who would become the youngest person ever to make partner, after structuring a series of telecommunications acquisition deals that left opposing counsel reeling at his unexpected avarice and mendacity. I followed the recruitment coordinator, staring at her heels, which bulged over the back of her mules. Her shoes were too small, and she snapped them against her feet when she walked. I was doing my best to seem bright-eyed and eager, not to appear ungrateful for my job with its six-figure income. I did not want to let on just how depressed this place made me, the gracious wood-paneled lobby, the grim-faced cheer of the receptionists, the long hallways, a crossword puzzle of square offices just barely larger than a cubicle, all with the doors propped open to better permit the sleek-suited attorneys to exhibit their industry to their falsely benevolent taskmasters.
I had formulated no clear plan about my future when I started law school, and even as the three years drew to a close my ambitions grew no less muddled. To this day I am not sure why I became an attorney, other than because my father is one, although that might as soon have given me reason to avoid the law as drawn me to it. It is not that my father has ever expressed dissatisfaction with his career. On the contrary, he is absolutely content with his professional life. He practices real estate law in New Jersey, near the town where I grew up, in a firm with offices right off Route 17. My father was once the president of the New Jersey Bar Association. It is not any discontentment on his part that might have repelled me, but rather the fact that when I was a child the only thing guaranteed to lay my insomniac brain to rest was a discussion with my father about one of his deals. Further motivation for choosing another career is the fact that my sister, Allison, is an attorney in the appellate division of Legal Aid in Manhattan. They say she will soon be appointed to the judiciary. They, meaning Allison and my father.
I did not go to law school immediately after graduating from college, as did both Allison and my father. After a few years of travel and the sort of vaguely artistic jobs that college graduates with little ambition and less talent find when they first move to New York City, I took the LSAT. I took it on a lark, I suppose, or perhaps because I was sick of living in an apartment where I could turn on the coffeemaker in the kitchen without rising from the pullout sofa in the living room where I slept. To be honest, I don’t really remember why I took the LSAT. But I did very well — better than Allison — and after that law school seemed inevitable. I started out with the vague purpose of doing public interest law, but criminal law was the only thing that interested me in the slightest and I was afraid of following in the aggressively competent footsteps of my older sister. In the fall of my third year at law school, when I was interviewing for jobs, I decided that if my work was doomed to be monotonous, it might as well be lucrative. Thus I found myself at Friedman Taft, following the swishing behind of the recruiting coordinator in the ill-fitting shoes.
She lost her mule outside Jack’s office. I’m not sure how it happened, but somehow she kicked it off, and then tripped over it. I was walking too close behind her and when she stumbled I nearly came down on top of her. I righted myself by grabbing onto the pedestal of a carved wooden sculpture of a naked woman that was displayed in the hallway. The sculpture rocked back and forth, and for a moment I was worried that we would both, the wooden woman and I, come crashing down on top of the recruiting coordinator. We didn’t. The sculpture held fast to its plinth, and I found my balance and stayed on my feet. I was immediately sorry that I had. A handsome man was crouched beside the recruiting coordinator, her foot in his hands.
“Does it hurt when I squeeze?” he said. The muscles of his back strained against the soft white fabric of his shirt. I could see them flex as he lifted her foot gently in the palm of his hand. I felt a nearly insurmountable urge to kneel down behind him and press my body against his, cleave my breasts and belly to his back, slide my fingers around his waist.
“Ooh,” the recruiting coordinator murmured, wincing. The faker.
“I think it’s probably sprained,” he said.
He laid her foot tenderly on the floor, blew his forelock out of his eyes — he was going through a floppy-hair phase back then — and reached around her waist. He hoisted her to her feet and half led, half carried her into his office. “Marilyn,” he called out. “Will you see what you can do about finding some ice?”
His secretary, whose desk was in the hallway outside his office, got to her feet.
She turned to me. “Was Frances taking you somewhere before the tragic loss of her shoe?” She didn’t seem in a particular hurry to get the ice.
“Yes. She was showing me to my new office.”
“I think you’ll be on your own for a while. What’s your name?”
“Emilia Greenleaf. I’m a new associate.”
“What number office are you in?”
I looked down at the folder in my hand. On the page with my code number and my telephone extension and e-mail address was an office number. “Eighteen eighteen,” I said.
“Double life,” she said.
“Excuse me?”
“The numbers. That’s what they mean.” She looked at me appraisingly. “You are Jewish, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“I’m Marilyn Nudelman.”
“I’m not religious or anything.”
She shrugged her shoulders. “Come, I’ll show you to your office.”
Marilyn is still Jack’s secretary, and while she danced the hora at my wedding, while she is satisfied that at least I am more Jewish than Carolyn Soule, twelfth-generation descendant of the Mayflower, still she does not consider me Jewish enough. This is clear from the presents she sends me — a Hebrew calendar every year before Rosh Hashanah, a box of fruit jells at Passover, a little mesh bag of gold coins at Hanukkah. Each gift is accompanied by a little explanatory note, as if she really believes I do not understand the significance of gelt or wheat-free candy. There is something passive-aggressive about all this gift giving, but I am certainly up to the challenge. I buy lavish presents for Jack to give to Marilyn — cashmere sweaters from Saks, a Coach briefcase and matching purse, gift certificates for a day of beauty treatments at Elizabeth Arden. Then I insist that he give them to her on Christmas Eve.
This gentle battle will likely continue forever, or certainly until Marilyn retires. It began on the evening Jack first succumbed to the signals I had been sending him for three years, ever since he failed to notice that I was standing behind shoeless Frances Defarge in the hallway in front of his office.
It was late in the afternoon, around six o’clock. I had prepared a brief for Jack in support of a motion to recuse a Texas judge who had not once but twice referred to Jack as his client’s “Jew York lawyer.” This was not the first assignment Jack had given me in the three years I had worked at Friedman Taft. There had been a few minor research projects over the past year, memos a first-year associate might well have been assigned, but I had leaped at the chance to work with Jack. This brief was finally an opportunity for me to show off a little. I was good at briefs. I had learned while still in law school that style, though it could not entirely substitute for adequate research and a sophisticated grasp of the law, could make the difference between a winning argument and one that put the judges to sleep. This brief was not meant to persuade the Texas judge. The man probably had a hard time every morning deciding which robe to wear, his black or his white, and to him I, too, would be just another shyster from Jew York. I wrote the brief for the appellate court, and I wrote it for Jack. It was lucid, it was incisive, it sliced and diced the bigoted judge and left him bleeding and burning on a cross of relevant precedent. And it was funny.
I sat in a chair in front of Jack’s desk and watched him read. At first his face was blank, but as he kept reading a small smile played on the corner of his lips. Jack’s lips are very red, he looks like he’s wearing plum-colored lipstick, except in the height of winter, when they get chapped from skiing and are covered in flakes of white peeling skin. His upper lip is curled at the edges, and his smile begins on the right-hand side. His lip fluttered in a half smile, once, then again. By the time he’d reached the end he was laughing.
“This is very good,” he said.
“Thanks.”
“Judge Gibbs is going to burst a blood vessel when he reads this.”
I have very pale, freckled skin and I blush easily, but not prettily. I mottle. Knowing that I am blushing makes me self-conscious about how bad I look, and so I grow ever redder until, often, someone asks if I am in need of medical attention. Jack watched his words of praise have their effect on me. His eyes flicked to the V of my shirt. I had on a white cotton blouse that day, its collar starched into stiff wings on either side of my neck. This left my throat bare, an effect which that morning had struck me as demurely sexy. Now it served as a wide-open canvas for the most startling pyrotechnics of my cardiovascular system.
“I mean that in the best possible way,” Jack said.
“I know,” I said.
He studied my throat, and something about his face shifted; it was as if he began to glow. Now I know that he was blushing, too, but in those days, I was not well versed enough in the topography of his skin to understand what the variations of color and tone meant. He has his mother’s olive complexion, and when he blushes he does not turn red like I do. Instead, his face takes on a subcutaneous, burnished, coppery hue. It is a subtle change, and at first one senses only that he has become even more beautiful, more alive, more vibrant. Jack shines when he is embarrassed or ashamed.
“I have just a few notes,” he said.
Jack spread the pages of the brief out on the black credenza against the far wall of his office. The credenza is ever so slightly too low for comfort, and when I went to look at his notes, I ended up bent over a bit at the waist. The tabletop was wood, varnished to a high shine, and as we stood side by side our reflections were clear, almost as if we were looking into a mirror. I could see inside my shirt. One of my breasts had fallen forward and swelled outside of the molded cup of my bra, bared almost to the nipple. Jack stood to my left and a little behind me, his left hand pushing the pages aside, one by one, his right shoved into his pocket. I know now, because he told me, that he was doing his best to camoflage his erection.
I was wearing a black miniskirt, not so short that it was unseemly, but neither so long that it would pass the scrutiny of the headmistress of a Catholic school. Underneath I wore stockings and a garter belt. Had it been July or August, I might have claimed that I wore this outmoded style of lingerie because it was hot, and because wearing panty hose in the summer in New York is an invitation to a yeast infection. This was, in fact, the reason that I owned the garter belt. But it was March. The first crocuses were just beginning to peek through the remains of the last snowfall. I wore a garter belt and stockings because I had fantasized about seducing Jack. I had dressed for the fantasy, but had not planned for it. I had not imagined I would work up the nerve.
I bent low over the table and reworked a sentence he had marked. While I agreed that my phrasing had been awkward, I thought his correction even more so. I leaned my cheek on my left hand, scribbled a better sentence than the one he had written, and crossed out a line in the next paragraph that now seemed redundant. At that point, I realized that my skirt had ridden up, that the black straps of my garter belt were surely visible, cutting into the flesh on the backs of my thighs, that the tops of my stockings were sagging just enough to leave bare an few inches of soft, white skin. I paused, the pen hovering over the paper. I could hear the hiss of Jack’s breath coming from his nose. Before I could stop myself, before I could even think through the ramifications of what I was doing, I stepped one foot ever so slightly away from the other, parting my legs, and then I leaned gently backward, until I felt the wool of his trouser leg brush against my thigh.
Jack pressed back. It was like junior high school, like a Friday night dance, bumping and grinding against the hopeless boner of a pimple-faced boy who knows with a desperate certainly that he will never, not in a million years, get laid. Except that there was no bumping and grinding, just soft, insistent pressure. And except that I would have fucked Jack in a second, right there, with the door open for everyone to see.
I turned to the hallway and standing in the doorway, her hand on the doorknob, was Marilyn. Our eyes met, and then she shut the door with a firm click of the latch.
I felt a gut-wrenching stab of guilt. I felt like I had pursued Jack, tracked him, shot him, and heaved him over my shoulder, with no thought at all for his wife and child. But that’s not true. I thought about them. I thought about them all the time. I felt guilty and miserable, and I hated myself for wanting so wildly and urgently to take him away from them, not just because I knew it was a bad thing to pursue a married man but because I knew precisely how Carolyn and William felt. I knew what it meant to have the man around whom you have built your life betray you, discard you, and find a younger, more appetizing object of his desire.
When my sister Lucy informed me of my father’s many infidelities, she was revealing nothing I did not already know. In fact, there are secrets about my father that would bring my sister to her knees with horror if she knew them. I was the one who held my mother’s hair back from her face while she vomited her despair into the pale blue toilet of the master bathroom in the house where I grew up. I sat in the waiting room of my mother’s gynecologist — the same doctor who had, ten years earlier, given me a prescription for Zovirax, along with a lecture about sexual responsibility — while my mother lay on his examining table and tried to explain, without crying, why a fifty-three-year-old woman who had only slept with one man in her entire life needed an HIV test. Only I — not my sisters, not my parents’ friends, not my grandmother, not, I presume, my father’s law partners — know that my father did not leave my mother. She threw him out after discovering that he had been spending as much as $50,000 a year supporting a Russian stripper. No one knows but me, and my father has no idea that I know. I have kept my knowledge a secret from him, and revealed his secret to no one, not even Jack, to whom I have told everything else. My father’s secret has been safe with me despite what it has cost me. Every time I see my husband and my father together, I feel soiled, as if my father’s filth has been rubbed off on me by my complicit silence. I don’t know why I haven’t told Jack. I don’t know if it’s because I am afraid he will be disgusted with me and with my father, or if I am more afraid that he will not be, that the behavior that I find so horrifying will strike my beloved as normal.
I worry that this is something men do. Maybe there is a vast secret underworld about which the wives and daughters know nothing. Maybe the men are all there, in the clip joints of New Jersey, watching as some girl barely out of her teens, a faint blush of acne staining her buttocks pale pink, spreads wide her spindly thighs clad in nothing but a poorly laundered polyester G-string. Maybe all men sit in dark rooms, fingers itching to explore the plump bodies of girls younger than their daughters. Maybe it’s perfectly normal to slip hundred-dollar bills into the fists of fat pimps with gold chains digging into the flesh of their necks and then check into third-rate hotel rooms for an hour or two, paying extra to leave the condom in its wrapper, paying even more to do things the wives and daughters could never even imagine.
Or maybe my father is just a fucking psycho. I vote for that. It helps me to keep from hating him, thinking he’s crazy. It helps me to have some kind of relationship with him, after he left my mother wretched and alone in a five-bedroom, mock-Tudor house, crying into a wine spritzer, asking me if I thought he would have been faithful if she had not gained so much weight over the years. It helps me to love my husband to think that only men suffering from my father’s mental illness — sexual compulsion, sexual obsession, surely there is some heading in the DSM-IV under which to file my father — would engage in this kind of behavior.
So, yes, I’ve seen betrayal and its cost. When I stood, bent over Jack’s credenza, his erection pushing against my ass, even before I saw my self-loathing reflected in Marilyn’s eyes, some part of me felt miserable and sorry for what I was doing to Carolyn and William. Mostly, though, I was just so happy, so filled with joy at the palpable evidence of Jack’s fervor, that I pushed away the idea of the devastation I wrought on his wife and child. I was the atom bomb of desire, and they were Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I could not spare time for mercy. I had a war to win.
Copyright © 2006 by Ayelet Waldman. From the book “Love and Other Impossible Pursuits,” by Ayelet Waldman to be published by Doubleday, a division of Random House Inc. Used with permission.
There’s nothing I find quite as annoying as the phrase “I told you so.” But, well, I told you so. Five years ago, after I read Armistead Maupin’s “The Night Listener,” a novel based on his experience with a literary hoaxster, I started insisting that the real JT Leroy was most likely a 50-year-old Midwestern woman. Turns out I was off by a decade or so.
As everyone by now knows, JT Leroy does not exist. He is a literary hoax. New York magazine outed him three months ago, and Monday the New York Times came through with the rest of the story. The public face of JT Leroy is Savannah Knoop, the sister of Jeffrey Knoop, one of the authors of the fraud, and JT’s books and stories were most likely written by Knoop’s wife, Laura Albert, singer for their band Thistle, an entity nearly as contrived as JT himself.
Even after I’d decided that JT was not who he claimed, I kept talking to him on the phone. At first when he called he was interested in speaking to my husband, but Michael couldn’t stand the guy. After their first interaction — an aborted interview of Michael by Leroy for the magazine Bomb back when JT was known as “Terminator” — Michael refused to have anything to do with him. But I let myself be sucked in.
There was something strangely seductive about that breathy voice on the phone. He was fun to talk to; the sheer magnitude of his self-absorption was entertaining. And there was the whole celebrity thing. He was like a breathing version of Us Magazine. He’d just hung up with Julianne Moore, Courtney Love was telling him a story, Gus Van Sant was giving him a hard time about his script.
I went along with it happily, once even listening for an hour or so as he played taped portions of his sessions with his therapist, Dr. Terrence Owens. I never really understood why JT wanted me to hear these unbelievably boring sessions. I assumed back then that it was because we had talked a lot about mental illness and he wanted me to understand the depth of his experience. In retrospect, knowing that JT does not exist, I think those tapes are a marvel. Someone actually went to the trouble of producing elaborate two-person recordings. And for what? What was the point? They were clearly meant to provide evidence of authenticity, and perhaps playing them for me was a dress rehearsal for a bigger, more important audience.
It will probably be hard for people who think of JT as a street kid turning tricks at truck stops to imagine this, but mostly JT and I talked about our kids. Maybe this was the reason JT called me, someone who wasn’t famous or a literary celebrity, someone who couldn’t help his career in any way, someone whose name it did no good to drop. JT Leroy just wanted to talk to another mom. He said he co-parented his kid — a young boy — with Speedy and Astor, the people I now understand are Laura Albert and Geoffrey Knoop. It seems likely that the person I was talking to on the phone was Laura Albert. We had long, meandering conversations about the challenges of combining work with parenting, about what kids are like at different ages, about the dilemma of private vs. public schools.
It was during one of these conversations that I came to my conclusion that JT was, in fact, a fraud. At some point, apropos of nothing, he told me that since we’d last spoken he had gone ahead and had that sex-change operation he’d been thinking about.
I don’t remember the dialogue exactly, but it went something like this:
“Really?” I asked. “I thought they made you go through some elaborate hormonal process before they let you have the final surgery.”
“Nah,” he said. “I’d done so much damage to my penis, hacking away at it. It was no big deal just to take off the stump.”
My first thought was, Jesus Christ, ouch. My second was, bullshit. I mean, come on. Hacking away at it? The stump? Not even I was gullible enough to buy that.
It was after the stump incident that I began asking friends if they thought JT was a real person. Of course, they’d say, they had met him. Well, sure, I’d met him, too. We’d hung out together in Rome in the summer of 2002 when both he and Michael were invited to appear at a literary festival. I met him again at some local readings. Whenever I saw him, he was usually accompanied by Speedy, the woman he described as having saved him from the streets. I didn’t pay much attention to her — she was quiet and not particularly interesting. I might have had I known that she was the person with whom I’d been comparing SSRIs.
The real question is why, even after I became so suspicious of the mythological creature known as JT Leroy, I still talked to him on the phone. After all, it was clear that this person, whoever he was, was playing me. It was also clear why. JT Leroy’s creators were interested in using their association with literary figures to burnish his literary reputation. And I was married to one of the figures they wanted to be associated with. I knew this, and still I talked to him. Over the last six years we’ve probably had no more than half a dozen or so conversations, but I certainly talked to him for longer at a stretch than I do with most of my real friends. I indulged him and myself. So did lots of other people. All those rock stars and movie stars who supported him and spent their time talking to him even though it was obvious he was just manipulating them. Why did they bother? What was his magic?
I can’t, of course, speak for Madonna or Winona Ryder, but I was snookered by something JT inspired me to feel about myself. Sure, there was the general entertainment value of listening to stories about the train wreck that was his life. Even as pure fiction they were fascinating. But more than that, talking to JT made me feel good about myself. It might have been because he gave me the opportunity to feel completely sane and secure. It might have been because I was flattered that the same person who whiled away hours with Margaret Cho also seemed to enjoy talking to me. But mostly it was because whoever he was, he seemed so genuinely in need of advice and assistance. It feels awfully good to be needed. It feels good to think of myself as someone so generous with my time that I was willing to devote hours of it to a fucked-up near stranger. That’s why I can’t possibly be angry at having been taken in. I got as much out of it as he did.
The larger question, one that Maupin expressed so eloquently in his marvelous book, and one that people have been batting back and forth all week, is the morality of courting people’s sympathies, including mine, by exploiting the issues of AIDS, homelessness, teenage castaways and transgenderism. Wasn’t Albert and Knoop’s assumption of these victim identities in order to achieve fame and fortune immoral, even evil? Doesn’t it belittle the experience of everyone who has really suffered as they only pretended to?
Yes, of course. And yet somehow I’m not as troubled by this particular thing. It probably did little harm, except to the egos of those of us who were fooled, and it probably did some good, if the books themselves found an audience among the very people JT was pretending to be. I’m much more troubled by James Frey’s actions in perpetrating a similar fraud. I view him as far more venal, more absurdly self-aggrandizing, and dangerous. Because Frey actually tried to convince people that his “recovery” could inspire them in a specific way. If they acted as he did, if they followed his lead, they too could be saved. JT Leroy’s creators presented a model of redemption, not a prescription for it.
The larger questions of the hoax of JT Leroy and the unmasking of James Frey will probably consume cultural critics for some time. What JT Leroy’s creators were selling was not just the books and stories, some of which were fine and moving in their own right. What they were selling was an imprimatur of authenticity based on their supposed author’s biography. This is why the tales of the traumatized waif’s life got so much attention — because it was supposedly real. Still, I am not convinced, as some are, that the hoax says something deeply disturbing about the way the reading public values the artist over the art, the biography over the work. Is that a surprise, and does it really matter?
When my son Zeke was in preschool he came home every day and headed straight for the couch. He pulled me down next to him and cleaved his plump body to my own less adorably rotund one. He pressed his soft lips to my neck, nuzzling under my chin, breathing deep as if he wanted to inhale every molecule of the fragrance he had missed in the four hours of our separation. He placed his palms on my cheeks and kissed me on the lips, languidly yet gravely, like a very small, round-cheeked lover.
I can’t say that while he was gone I missed him as much as he missed me; after all, I did not prove my devotion by spending our time apart dripping tears onto the sand table and rocking in misery on the cushions of the book nook. I was too busy reveling in my time alone, getting my work done, going for solitary walks, reintroducing myself to my husband. But when Zeke returned I leapt onto the couch with as much eagerness as he did. Holding his fleshy, silky body was the most satisfying tactile experience I have ever had in my life. The flawlessness of an infant’s skin is a trite metaphor, but his baby skin was even more buttery than most. And I’m not a child-aggrandizing mother blinded by love. I have four children, and this boy’s skin was different. It felt like the freshest heavy cream tastes: smooth and round, fat and thick on the tongue. His body, too, was different. It’s a wonder how what can inspire such disgust on an adult can be so delectable on an infant. Zeke is 7 years old now, as thin and wiry as a half-starved whippet, but when I close my eyes, I can still feel the give of his plump baby flesh under my fingers.
Once, a few years ago, while we were driving over the hill leading to our house, we passed the bright purple house that had always been his older sister’s favorite.
“That’s where we’ll live when I grow up,” Zeke said.
“Who? You and the person you marry?” Note that I didn’t say “wife.” Those of us who raise our families in Berkeley would never make assumptions about our children’s sexual orientation.
“No. You and me.”
“Aren’t you going to get married and have children?” I asked, hearing to my horror a hint of the whine of my foremothers. You can take the babushka off the Jewish mother and dress her up in a pair of Seven jeans and Marc Jacobs sling-backs, but she’s still going to expect a passel of grandkids.
“My wife will sleep on the first floor with daddy. You and I will live on the top floor. Together.”
It’s possible that a psychologically sound mother, a mother whose role model isn’t the floating maternal head in Woody Allen’s Oedipus Wrecks, would not have been quite so pleased. Certainly a better mother would not have congratulated her son on such a fine plan and offered to cover half the mortgage.
Even now, although Zeke’s pride does not allow him to linger in my arms for much longer than a minute or so, he still calls for me to lie with him at night, he still gives me “movie kisses” kisses that last for a little longer than usual and involve a lot of twisting of the head and moaning. He still cuddles up to me, pressing his needle chin and knobby knees into me before spinning off to pick up his skateboard or go to the computer. And he still plans to exile his wife to the far reaches of the lower floors of the purple house.
I do not envy this phantom daughter-in-law of mine. I pity the young woman who will attempt to insinuate herself between my mama’s boy and me. I sympathize with the monumental nature of her task. It will take a crowbar, two bulldozers and half a dozen Molotov cocktails to pry my Oedipus and me loose from one another. She’d be better off turning her attention to decorating that downstairs in-law unit.
I sympathize with how much work she faces, but not with her. In fact, the very thought of this person, imaginary though she is, sends me into paroxysms of a kind of envy that is uncomfortable to admit. I make jokes about how I hope Zeke is gay so that he will bring home a lovely young man, rather than a nubile young girl who will cast a disparaging and dismissive eye on my crow’s feet and thick waist. This young man would be my friend. My ally even. In the more likely but far less appealing scenario, Zeke and his wife will screen their calls and roll their eyes as I leave increasingly frantic voice-mail messages. She will perfect an impression of me, complete with nasal whine and pinched lips, while he winces at the droll accuracy and drags her off to the bedroom while my forlorn voice begs to the empty air, “Please, darling, give your mother a call, just so that I know you’re all right.”
You’d think this obsessive love my son and I share would give me sympathy for my own mother-in-law. My mother-in-law and I are, in many ways, perfectly matched. Like me, she is an attorney. Like her, I am an eclectic and voracious reader. Both my mother-in-law and I are far too attracted to stories of personal and medical misfortune, and we enjoy recounting them with exquisite detail. We share the rather unattractive qualities of being both nosy and snoopy. These are not identical traits — the first indicates that we’re interested in other people’s doings and the second that we are not above making inquiries, subtle or not. A nosy person listens closely to a friend’s confidences about her husband’s sexual dysfunction, and maybe asks a prying question or two. A snoopy person combs through a friend’s medicine cabinet looking for Viagra.
We should have gotten along famously, from the very first moment. And in a sense, we did. We could kill an hour with relative ease. My husband’s eyes would glaze over early on in the conversation, but I was always willing to egg her on.
“Was it more like an orange or a grapefruit? Did they get it all?”
“Can’t he get his wages garnished for that?”
“How did she even know to get herself tested for chlamydia?”
We share these similarities and I should have had empathy for her. After all, she had experienced what I knew I would eventually: being the first love of your son and then watching helplessly as that devotion shifts.
But I found myself without compassion for her. On the contrary, I couldn’t help feeling that my job was to step between her and her son. I cannot trace my attitude to any flaw in my mother-in-law. She is not domineering or overbearing, nor does she treat my husband as a prince around whom she flutters in constant and obsequious attendance. She is a calm and pleasant woman, unassuming and benign. Our first meeting augured well. We spent an entire weekend, in a small hotel suite. My husband, then my boyfriend, brought me to Washington, D.C., where his mother was spending a month working, so that I could meet her. We slept on a pullout sofa, separated from her by the tissue-paper thin walls of the suite-hotel. We had not been together very long, my husband and I, only a couple of months, and we were in the throes of that first hysteria of sexual infatuation where your body is attuned to your lover’s every breath, and passing a night without proving that to each other is impossible to imagine.
My mother-in-law gamely ignored us. At meals, she kept her eyes on her menu while we snuggled on the other side of the table. She accompanied us on our visits to friends, walks through the city, nostalgic forays to the neighborhood where she had raised her son, the man I knew even then that I would marry, and never once behaved as I would have, if it had been Zeke canoodling with his girlfriend in the back seat of the car while I tried to point out how big the trees had grown in the yard of our old house. My mother-in-law not only tolerated what can only have been highly irritating behavior, but she actually seemed to enjoy our company.
Despite her fondness for gossip, my husband’s mother is a reserved, quiet woman, the polar opposite of me in this regard. If, as my husband is fond of saying, my autobiography would be titled “Me and My Big Mouth,” hers would be called “Quiet, I’m Reading.” She is as restrained physically as she is verbally.
The next time we saw each other, at her house, she put her hand on my shoulder while placing a bowl of broccoli on the table. That instant of contact had my husband waxing rhapsodic for hours.
“She’s never just spontaneously embraced one of my girlfriends like that,” he said, his voice hushed with awe.
“Embraced?” I replied, genuinely confused. “When did she embrace me?”
“At the table. She hugged you at the table.”
“You mean that time she sort of bumped into me?”
She’s a little looser nowadays, and we hug and kiss easily when we meet after an absence, but she is by no means physically effusive. I have never seen her bump into someone she does not know very well. What felt to me like cool friendliness at the time was warmth to her; what felt to me like an accidental brush of her arm was to her a sign of something special.
None of which explains why, not long after that meal, when my then fianci and I moved to within half an hour’s drive of my mother-in-law, I began to feel an intense sense of competition. The idea to move to San Francisco was mine; I had a new job that took us there, but something about the proximity made me anxious. It brought forth a jealousy that might otherwise have simmered barely noticed, under the surface. I fear that I generated this, entirely within my own head. My mother-in-law had, after all, been through this once before; I am my husband’s second wife, and the last in a long line of girlfriends. She must have been resigned to her fate as perennially second in his heart.
From early on, I felt deeply territorial about my husband and approached our relationship with a kind of ravenous intensity. When we first met, my husband and I told each other about our previous relationships. We traded details, laughed over them, shared inside jokes with one another. I think I felt that only if I could insert myself into his history, consume it, if you will, could I assert the primacy of our relationship over all those prior ones. If I knew as much as he did about those women, especially his ex-wife, I could be secure.
My husband also told me about his childhood, as much as he remembered. I think much of my jealousy of my mother-in-law sprang from my belief that there were long years of his life that belonged exclusively to her, that lived only in her own memory. Those were years, I imagined, when she was the sun around which his little boy self revolved. I could never own those years the way I tried to own the other epochs and loves in his history.
In thinking about my husband’s relationship with his mother, I wonder if the very thing that should have given me the most peace of mind was what caused me the most consternation. There was none of the Sturm und Drang I was used to from my own family. They seemed genuinely to enjoy each other’s company, but not to be overly involved with one another. There was no bickering, no unrealistic demands, no slammed phones, no waves of passion and rage. They were easy with one another — mild even. They were the very opposite of Woody Allen and his mother’s floating head. I was confused by it. It was so unlike anything I understood a maternal-child bond to be. I, who called my mother three times a day, just didn’t get that my husband and his mother could love each other without being overly entangled.
At the same time, I failed to be comforted by the fact that he made a deliberate choice to be with a woman whose temperament, unlike his mother’s placidity, runs to extremes of passion and mood. You’d think these very differences would have made me more confident in my primary place in my husband’s heart. You’d be wrong.
This tug of war between a mother and daughter-in-law over a man is an age-old phenomenon, the stuff of sitcom jokes and Greek tragedy. Two women, decades apart, vying for the favors of a man who most often doesn’t even know a battle is being fought. It’s easy to imagine why women who define themselves through the status of the men in their lives and the attention those men pay to them would end up in competition. But neither my mother-in-law nor I are women like that. We are both women who pride ourselves on our independence, our careers. Even in the absence of an overbearing and territorial counterpart, I slipped into the combative role easily, as if it was an inevitable part of being a woman marrying a man. It was as though the need to be the one, the only, in his life overcame even the most common of sense.
My campaign was subtle, and at the time I didn’t even realize I was waging war. I insinuated myself between them delicately but decisively. I began complaining to my husband about my mother-in-law, and my primary target was her reserve. “How can you stand such diffidence?” I kept asking. “Doesn’t it drive you crazy?” Through cues as understated as holding his hand when we were with her, I tried to make my primacy known. My husband and I were planning and paying for our own wedding, and we limited the guest list to our families and our own friends, effectively making my mother-in-law — and, by necessity of fairness, my own parents — mere invited guests at their own children’s wedding.
When my husband and I spent time with my mother-in-law, I found myself using the first-person plural, an exclusionary tense if ever there was on. “We loved that movie,” I would say. Or, “That’s our very favorite restaurant; we’ll take you next time we go.” All this by way of showing her that he and I were a unit, a couple. The couple.
I even resented the weekly lunch date my husband and his mother shared. I had the grace to be ashamed of this resentment and tried to hide it, but I must have failed dismally, because over the course of our first few months together those lunches gradually ceased. Then I thought she barely noticed that they no longer lunched together, or didn’t care, but in retrospect I think she just kept her feelings to herself.
My mother-in-law’s style is much more subtle than my own. Because of her natural reserve she would never have mentioned our rivalry, and it’s even possible that she didn’t feel it. Or at least wouldn’t acknowledge the feeling. But it was there, lurking under the surface of even our most positive of interactions.
My husband, like husbands in so many of this most stereotypical of domestic dramas, did his best to keep everyone happy, but I think the primary emotion he experienced was confusion. After all, it was clear to him I was his beloved. She was his mother. Two relationships entirely different from each other.
I think he probably wished I’d just give it a rest.
And so this undercurrent of tension remained, with me grudging the time we spent with my mother-in-law, suggesting, for example, that he and I have a private Thanksgiving dinner in a beautiful lodge in the mountains, instead of with his family.
Then we had children, and something began to change. It was a gradual shift, one that took me a while to notice. But when I became the mother I began, almost imperceptibly at first, to relax. Suddenly there could be no question that we, my children and I, were the primary family unit in my husband’s life. It was as if once it became obvious that the competition was over, I could take my mother-in-law into my heart with all the grace of a good winner. Somehow, effortlessly, all the antagonism of our relationship began to evaporate. Once I was absolutely sure of my ascension and her usurpation, I could give in and become her friend.
A couple of years ago I invited my mother-in-law on our yearly family vacation. The invitation was a selfish one. With four children, the hotel would not allow us to cram into a single bungalow, and if we didn’t bring a third adult, my husband and I would be forced to spend our vacation in separate rooms. I invited her as a glorified nanny. Within hours it became clear that she was much more than a third pair of hands.
Travel with four small children had always been gratifying in its way, but so too it had been a special kind of misery, with anxiety, squabbling and lots of vomit. This time, while one child threw up in my lap, another ran down the airplane aisle to the bathroom, and two more catapulted out of their seats in a shrieking wrestling match, my mother-in-law kept her cool. She always keeps her cool. That’s who she is. She can sometimes be stern, but she never loses control. What was miraculous was that when she was there, neither did I.
I went from resenting my mother-in-law to accepting her, finally to appreciating her. What appeared to be her diffidence when I was first married, I now value as serenity. The capacity for extravagant emotion that my husband finds so attractive in me can be exhausting, especially to a child. My moods are mercurial, and this can be terrifying. I know, because I was a daughter of a mother with a changeable temperament. My mother-in-law’s mood is always consistent. She is the opposite of capricious. She is the most reliably steady person I have ever known.
Once, I chafed at any hour my husband spent with his mother, somehow viewing it as time stolen from me. Now they take our oldest daughter to musicals, an entertainment I find tedious in the extreme, or my husband takes all four of the kids to his mother’s house for dinner when I am out of town. But my mother-in-law and I are far more likely to go out just the two of us. We go shopping, we go to the movies. I enjoy spending time with her. She’s a good companion, part friend, part mother. When my husband is out of town, she comes over for dinner, and having her in the house eases all of us.
Last February, in Hawaii, we sat side by side under a tree on matching lounge chairs. My husband was in the water with the older children and the babies were playing in the sand next to us. We had each just finished the novel we were reading and had swapped, something I can rarely do with my husband, because he is a slow and methodical reader and because he is most often immersed in something like a 1,300-page annotated volume of Sherlock Holmes short stories or Gnome Press’ “The Porcelain Magician” by Frank Owen. My mother-in-law can be relied upon to have the new Philip Roth or Lorrie Moore. I remember looking out at my husband diving smoothly under the waves, and at the sun-kissed faces of my two youngest towheads as they dumped sand on their grandmother’s feet. In the moment of quiet before the baby walloped his older sister on the head with his shovel and she kicked him over in the sand, I thought to myself, “This is nice.” Then pandemonium broke out, and there were tears to dry and egos to soothe.
After we had finally managed to calm things down, my mother-in-law held my young daughter on her lap, and I held my infant son. He snuggled against me, his velvet cheek rubbing my chest. He smelled deliciously of coconut sunscreen and the strawberries he’d eaten for breakfast. He was just under a year old and had only two words reliably in his vocabulary, but one of them was “mama.” When he said my name I kissed him, rubbing my lips against his soft, rubbery mouth and tickling his sun-warmed belly. I looked over at my mother-in-law. She returned my gaze with a complicated one of her own. I could tell that the sight of her baby grandson lolling on his mother’s lap under a palm tree in the dappled Hawaiian shade pleased her. I wonder, though, if something else wasn’t giving her just the tiniest bit of satisfaction. The prospect that one day I was going to do battle with this boy’s wife, just as I had done battle with her. And I was going to lose.
From the anthology “I Married My Mother-in-Law: And Other Tales of In-Laws We Can’t Live With — and Can’t Live Without,” edited by Ilena Silverman and published this month by Riverhead Books.
The glorious cooks who invited my family to share their Thanksgiving this year used four pounds of butter preparing the dinner. And that’s just the butter. I couldn’t begin to weigh the lard, the bacon grease, the cream and all the other delectable fats. Our hostess is from Kentucky and our host is from New Orleans and between the two of them they made a dinner to die for. There was the turkey (smoked), there were the usual yams and potatoes and collard greens and buttered green beans. There was stuffing. And then there was the oyster dressing, the smoked brisket with barbecue sauce, the fresh crab cakes, the duck, the smoked salmon, the corn bread, the yam-pecan muffins, the dirty rice (sausage, chicken livers, ground pork. Divine), and the nine pies.
I gorged myself and was sorry there was no trough in which I could imitate the Roman Caesars between courses. I ate so much I had to surreptitiously inch down the zipper of my skirt. I ate so much I was sick for days.
But then, of course, I was depressed. Because as amazing as dinner was, as delightful the meal and the company, I inevitably greet all culinary excess with panic and despair. The worst season is the one that begins with buttered yams, works through latkes and Chanukah donuts, and ends up in a gluttony of Christmas cookies and chocolate. Thanksgiving dinner was amazing, one of the highlights of my year, but all that pleasure is destroyed by the possibility that I might have gained a pound.
Yesterday I turned 41, and if I were to calculate the amount of time I have spent over the course of these four decades obsessing about my weight, it would surely clock in as more hours than I’ve spent eating, writing, exercising and having sex. Combined. In fact, the only thing I can think of that consumes more of my day than fat-phobic freakouts is reading.
What a colossal and ridiculous waste of time.
At least I’m not alone. Most every woman I know is totally nuts when it comes to her weight. This phenomenon is no longer limited merely to the privileged and the white. According to the recent Newsweek article recently discussed in Broadsheet, there is now more diversity in anorexia sufferers. Doctors are reporting more patients of color, more low-income patients, younger and older patients. We are finally achieving some equality of race and class, but only in regards to misery. There are no barriers to wretched body image.
Why are we wasting our precious hours on this time-consuming unhappiness? Why do we waste our energy on such harsh self-judgment? Is it that despite ourselves we cannot help assimilating the skeletal image of perfection idealized by our culture and our media? Is it the fault of this “tyranny of slenderness,” as Kim Chernin writes in her 1980s classic “The Obsession”? Is it a question of power and control, linked to the subjugation of women? Did Susie Orbach get it right? Is fat a feminist issue?
Whatever its causes, in a world where 90 million children are “severely food deprived,” according to Unicef, we should be ashamed of ourselves both for our gluttony and our remorse. And I am. If only shame were a reliable engine for behavior modification. All it does is make me feel bad, which inspires me to bust open a bag of cheese popcorn, which then makes me feel crappy about my weight. And so the seasons, they go round and round.
I have two daughters and I have done everything in my power to prevent them from assimilating, even being aware of, my idiocy about my weight. In front of them I never talk about how fat I feel, I never criticize my thighs, I never gaze wistfully at the size 2 Nicole Miller cocktail dress I can’t bring myself to throw out, despite the fact that it’s 15 years old and I could only fit into it because I hadn’t yet had four children. For my daughters’ sake I wish I could accept that my body is supposed to age and change. I wish I could view the belly that oozes over the top of my pants as a badge of maternal honor. I do try. I make sure that the women whose looks I admire all have sufficient fat reserves to survive a famine, and I make a lot of snide comments about the skeletal likes of Lara Flynn Boyle and Paris Hilton. My fantasy is that I will so foster my daughters’ sense of self-esteem that they will not waste their time the way I have wasted mine.
So far it seems to be working, but the oldest is only 11, and while she seems completely unimpressed by thinness, I am terrified that she will end up like one of the children described in Newsweek. The girls about whom reporter Peg Tyre writes are my daughter’s age and younger; some anorexia treatment centers now have patients as young as 8. According to Tyre, doctors are beginning to believe that anorexia is like depression and alcoholism, a disease whose origin is some combination of environment and genetic predisposition. Or, as the article put it, “potentially fatal diseases that may be set off by environmental factors such as stress or trauma, but have their roots in a complex combination of genes and brain chemistry.”
Because I’m always ready to assume the worst about the genetic legacy I’ve handed down to my children, I worry that my lifetime of eating obsession may end up achieving a horrible next stage in one of my daughters. I used to refer to myself as a “theoretical anorexic,” just as crazy when it came to body image, but saved by a lack of self-discipline. My daughters do everything better than I do — they’re smarter, more beautiful, happier. What if they end up better at anorexia, too?
A couple of years ago, I was doing research on pro-anorexia online communities for my novel “Murder Plays House.” These are Web sites devoted to supporting anorexics, not in overcoming their disease but rather in cultivating it. On the sites girls exhort each other to maintain 50-calorie-a-day fasts, share “trigger photos” of emaciated actresses and models like Calista Flockhart, have goal weights that never seem to rise above 80 pounds, and trade tips on maximizing weight loss while avoiding hospitalization. Being immersed in this seriously creepy side of the anorexia tragedy made me vow to stop thinking about my weight ever again.
Alas, so much for resolutions.
It’s always the toughest kids who surprise you. The loud ones, the ones dancing on the balls of their feet, strutting their stuff to impress the others. This girl was tiny, wiry, with muscled arms and narrow, broomstick wrists. Her ears were crumpled up against her head, no more than tufts of cartilage and skin. And though she’d tried to tug down a few of her matted dreadlocks to cover this defect, most of her hair grew every which way. She would not shut up.
Not that the other girls in the Juvenile Hall classroom were particularly quiet. There were a few girls so sunk in their misery that they could not even be bothered to lob insults across the aisle. But the loud ones made enough noise for everyone. Still, considering everything, they were remarkably restrained, even respectful of the nervous white lady standing up in front of the class, holding a copy of her book and trying to get them excited about doing some “writing exercises.”
Except for that one girl. The only thing that worked with her was lying.
I borrowed an exercise from “What If? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers,” by Anne Bernays and Pamela Painter, and told the girls three stories. “Two of these stories are lies,” I told them. “One of them is true. My job is to make all three so convincing that you can’t tell the difference. Your job is to figure it out.”
I told them a story of sashaying down the street in a new dress, thinking I was the bomb, and only figuring out when I got into my car and burned myself on the baking leather seat that I’d tucked my skirt up into my panties and walked three blocks with my rear end hanging out for everyone to see. The second story was about pushing my son over speed bumps in his stroller, and accidentally sending him crashing onto the asphalt, where he broke one of his perfect lower teeth. The third story was more their style. It described a night at Au Bar in New York, when I danced the night away with Heavy D.
The girls in Juvie loved those stories. It cracked them up to imagine my big butt hanging out there in the wind. They were disgusted to hear I had compromised my child’s safety. The only story they didn’t believe was the one about Heavy D, the one story that was true.
Now it was their turn. Some of their stories were incredibly sweet — one girl told us how her brother spent his own money to buy her SpongeBob bedsheets. Others had a quality of longing — another girl described a trip she took to visit her mother in Las Vegas and meeting an Elvis impersonator. Others were frightening — a number of girls wrote with intense vividness about gang fights.
Instead of writing just a sentence or two, as I’d asked, the girl who had been the loudest filled two pages with dense, cramped script. She wrote about her childhood as a “good girl” before she began smoking weed and stealing. When she read her piece out loud, the other girls began to jeer and laugh. They couldn’t believe that this girl had ever done well in school, had ever been obedient and tractable. After a few moments she crumpled her paper into a ball and tossed it into the trash. “Yeah, that’s a lie,” she said. “That’s just a lie.” But I knew it wasn’t.
Even in the grim San Francisco Juvenile Hall it was remarkably easy to catch these girls’ attention, to give them a tool to access something other than their bravado. They are so raw, but so ready to talk — and even to listen.
Some studies place the recidivism rate for youth offenders in California as high as 91 percent. Why are my home state’s rates so much higher than, for example, Texas’? Because even in red state Texas they offer treatment to their youthful offenders. But not in California, a state with one of the largest populations of incarcerated youth.
There are some small exceptions. San Francisco’s City Youth Now provides resources and programs for incarcerated kids, including internships, funds for emergency clothing and author visits like the one I participated in. But by and large the California Youth Authority, the agency responsible for all juvenile offenders, is like many in the rest of the country: woefully underfunded, and much more interested in punishment than rehabilitation.
This despite the fact that studies show treatment works with kids. Texas’ Capital Offenders Group, an intensive treatment program designed for serious offenders, has a recidivism rate dramatically lower than that of the CYA. Only 10 percent of kids who go through the COG have committed a violent crime within 36 months of their release.
John Hubner, an editor at the San Jose Mercury News, spent nine months at the Giddings State School, in Giddings, Texas, where the Texas Youth Commission places its worst offenders, and where its flagship COG program is based. His book “Last Chance in Texas: The Redemption of Criminal Youth” should be required reading for all legislators, politicians, judges and prison officials. When Hubner went to Giddings, he found something entirely unexpected. “What I saw was a highly spiritual practice, the pursuit of redemption, in the most secular of all places,” he says. “It’s unique in that sense.”
Giddings State School looks like a college campus. The grounds are pretty, the kids are called students, the guards are unarmed. By contrast, the girls I met in San Francisco spend their day in and out of lockup, in a miserable jail. And most of them are there for crimes like drug possession and prostitution, far less serious offenses than those of the kids about whom Hubner writes, who did things like firing shotguns at police officers at point-blank range, raping 5-year-olds, and dousing people with gasoline and setting them on fire.
So how did youthful offenders get so lucky in Texas, of all places?
Because of two men, a judge and the superintendent of a youth facility. In the 1970s, the Texas Youth Commission was sued in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas. The case was brought on behalf of a young girl named Alicia Morales who had been incarcerated not for committing a crime, but for being “incorrigible,” which in her case meant that she asked her alcoholic father for money for school books and clothes for herself and her seven siblings. The conditions Morales brought to light in her case, a depressing warehouse of a facility with no services, caused Judge William Wayne Justice to order an investigation into the TYC.
The brutality and abuse he uncovered was horrific. But there was one facility where children were doing beautifully. It was run by superintendent Ron Jackson, who had himself been raised in an orphanage. Jackson believed that his job was to provide treatment for the children in his care. The legislature promptly put him in charge of the entire agency, and he stayed there until George Bush became governor.
The treatment-based system Jackson put in place has survived, despite attacks on its perceived leniency by individuals including then-Gov. George Bush. In his book, Hubner quotes Stan DeGerolami, a former state school superintendent, who says, “Giddings looks nice on the outside. Inside, it is the toughest prison in Texas. Kids do hard time here. They have to face themselves. They have to deal with the events that put them here. They have to examine what they did and take responsibility for it. Kids who go through that do not go out and reoffend. That needs to be screamed out loud: They do not reoffend.”
The thing about youthful offenders is that no one seems to care about them. Most people don’t like adolescents — even the good ones can be snarky and unpleasant. Combine the antipathy we feel toward the average teenager with the fear inspired by youth violence, and you have a population that no one wants to deal with.
But we cannot afford not to think about these children. Despite the fact that in America we incarcerate more juveniles for life terms than in any other country in the world, the truth is that the vast majority of youth offenders will one day be released. The question is simple and stark. Do we want to help them change or do we want to help them become even more violent and dangerous?
Even if you couldn’t care less about the future of the kid who shot the cop, who did the methamphetamine deal, who tied up the old lady and choked her to death, if you had to bump into that same kid on the street, on a dark night, would you rather it be after he’d served 10 years in the custody of the California Youth Authority? Or after he graduated from Texas’ Capital Offender Group?
Seems like a no-brainer, to me.
It was the night we wove an Iroquois cradle board out of natural fibrous materials that drove me over the edge. It was 9 p.m., an hour after bedtime, when Sophie suddenly remembered that in addition to a written report, her Native American history assignment required a visual presentation.
“It’s OK, I can do it,” she said. “I just need some hemp.”
Frankly, so did I.
I hate homework. I hate it more now than I did when I was the one lugging textbooks and binders back and forth from school. The hour my children are seated at the kitchen table, their books spread out before them, the crumbs of their after-school snack littering the table, is without a doubt the worst hour of my day. If my son Zeke’s teacher, a delightful and intelligent woman, were to walk through my kitchen door between 3:30 and 4:30 p.m. on a weekday, I could not guarantee her safety.
Eight-year-old Zeke routinely has an hour of homework a night. He’s an interesting kid, one who’s described as having a lot of “personality.” He’s the kind of kid who, left to his own devices, thinks it’s funny to write “a Rottweiler” as the answer to every question on the homework page, even the math problems. Especially the math problems.
Accordingly, either my husband or I have to sit next to him and insist that he read the directions in his homework packet, instead of riffing on the crazy soundtrack that runs in his head.
School for Zeke is work, and by the end of a seven-hour workday, he’s exhausted. But like a worker on a double shift, he has to keep going. When, halfway through kindergarten, we had to break it to him that this wasn’t a one-year gig, that in fact he was looking at, conservatively, 17 more years of school, the expression on his face was one of deep, existential despair. That evening he calculated that the next time he could count on being really, truly happy was in 60 years, when he retires. His sister, however, is one of those cheerful Pollyanna types who finish their summer reading list before Memorial Day, and at 11 is already counting on getting at least one graduate degree. But even she hates homework.
When I sent out a feeler to mothers of other elementary-school students asking for their experiences with homework my in box was immediately flooded with replies, some furious, some rueful. “We had to set up an interview with someone in the community, transport the children, supervise the interview, take notes, take photos, print the photos, assist the students in making note cards for a speech, and help the kids make a poster about the community member,” said Martha, the mother of twins in the Bay Area. Sounds like a nice project, doesn’t it? It might have been — for a 10-year-old. But Martha’s boys are in second grade.
Six-year-old Katie Williams of Maryland spent days trolling newspapers looking for “io” and “ou” configurations in order to begin her “Rainbow Words” assignment. “Do you know how many thousands of words we had to read to come up with enough to satisfy that assignment?” asks her mother, Carlie. Once she found the words, Katie had to write each one over and over again, using every color of the rainbow. Get it? Rainbow words. What ever happened to using a No. 2 pencil?
Another mother described the weekly timed math tests mandated by her kids’ teacher. “Sixty problems correctly answered in four minutes. We parents are supposed to stand over our kids with stopwatches. My children are very different from each other, but they have this in common — they have both been in tears due to their fear of failing these inane tests. Mind you, these children are 7 years old.”
But my favorite is Carlie Williams’ nephew. Assigned to construct a relief map of one of the 50 states out of plaster of Paris, the boy chose Nebraska. He made a flat rectangle. As his aunt said, “You’ve got to love a kid who puts into the assignment exactly the effort it’s worth.”
How would we be spending our time if we didn’t have to slave over these piles of mind-numbing make-work? Maybe some kids would be vegging out in front of the television or exercising their thumbs on their Gameboys, but I would guess that’s not what would be going on in my house, or in most others. Instead, we’d do the things we rarely have time for during the week, like go for bike rides or shoot hoops. My kids might even occasionally enjoy the opportunity to be bored. You remember boredom, don’t you? That state where the imagination is forced to take over and create entertainment?
Harris M. Cooper, the director of the Program in Education at Duke University and author of “The Battle Over Homework: Common Ground for Administrators, Teachers, and Parents,” tells me that the homework load for most students has actually remained steady for the past 50 years, except for the group in which I did my very unscientific survey — middle- to upper-middle-class students in the lowest grades. Cooper says that it’s probably because educators of the children of the middle and upper classes feel a great deal of pressure to maintain test scores that they up the homework ante.
I also learned from professor Cooper — aka the homework guru — that there is no correlation between how much homework young children do and how well they comprehend material or perform on tests. Why? For a number of reasons. Because their attention spans are just too short — they can’t tune out external stimuli to focus on material. Second, younger children cannot tell the difference between the hard stuff and the easy stuff. They’ll spend 15 minutes beating their heads against a difficult problem, and leave themselves no time to copy their spelling words. Finally, young children do not know how to self-test. They haven’t the faintest idea when they’re making mistakes, so in the end they don’t actually learn the correct answers. It isn’t until middle school and high school that the relationship between homework and school achievement becomes apparent.
So why the hell do Zeke and I have to spend every afternoon gnashing our teeth over the communicative and associative properties of numbers when we could be playing catch?
The reasons, Cooper says, extend beyond Zeke’s achievement in this particular grade. Apparently, by slaving over homework with my son, I am expressing to him how important school is. (Of course, this rationale assumes that I’m not also expressing rage, or muttering curses about the authors of Zeke’s math textbook.) When younger kids are given homework, Cooper says, it can also help them understand that all environments are learning ones, not just the classroom. For example, by helping calculate the cost of items on a trip to the grocery store, they can learn about math. The problem is, none of my children’s assignments have this real-world, enjoyable feel to them. My children have never been assigned Cooper’s favorite reading task — the back of the Rice Krispies box. Instead, we’re up all night weaving hemp.
The final, and perhaps most important, reason to assign homework to young children, says Cooper, is to help them develop study habits and time management skills that they’ll need to succeed later on in their academic careers. If you wait until middle school to teach them these skills, they’ll be behind. I suppose this makes sense. Spending their afternoons slaving over trigonometry and physics will come as no surprise to my kids. By the time they’re in seventh grade they won’t even remember what it’s like to spend an idle afternoon.
According to Cooper all three of these rationales are based on the idea of keeping homework simple and short, and gradually building on its amount and complexity. The guideline educators typically use is the 10-minute rule. Children should be assigned 10 minutes of homework per grade per night, starting in first grade. So how about kindergarten? Well, Cooper’s a circumspect kind of guy, so he wouldn’t condemn it outright, but he did say this: “At this age, kids should not be expected to do much on their own.”
And what about those long-term homework projects that involve a lot of “integration of skills” — that favorite phrase I’ve heard again and again in all my children’s classrooms? When used in younger grades the lesson those projects often teach is, “When the going gets tough, Mom gets going,” says Cooper. “Complex projects should probably not happen in the lower grades, and when they do, there should be clear expectations about parental involvement.” Amen to that, I say, because otherwise the only skills being integrated are those of procrastination and panic, and those are plenty finely honed around our house by now.
Take heart, parents, and bring the quotes from the homework guru to your children’s teachers. I did. When I e-mailed Zeke’s teacher to say he was too loaded down with busywork, she agreed and said he shouldn’t do more than half an hour of homework every night. She instructed me to draw a line at the bottom of the page once we’ve both had enough, no matter where he is on the assignment.
Last night was the first of the new regimen. After soccer practice we set out the homework on the kitchen table. A page of spelling, two of math, a sheet of cursive. We got through the math OK, with me trying to hide the fact that I had to count on my fingers to check his work. He labored over the cursive, making rows of perfect “u’s” and “w’s,” the tips of his fingers white on the pencil, his tongue sticking out the side of his mouth. Then it was on to spelling. We made it almost to the end of the page, to the paragraph full of errors to correct. He made his proofreading marks, and as he got ready to copy out the corrected paragraph I looked up at the clock. It had been 40 minutes.
“That’s enough, buddy,” I said. “You did a great job.” And I drew a line.
