The Flawed-Mom Memoir My Kid Might Write
There is a scene in the 2003 movie Casa de los Babys—about a group of American women who travel to an unnamed Latin American country to adopt children—in which two of the moms-to-be wonder out loud about the fate of whichever child lands with Marcia Gay Harden’s character, who is a hardcore Karen before such a word existed.
Lili Taylor’s character, a book editor, says something like, “I read a lot of memoirs. Half of them are about fucked up mothers.”
Casa de los Babys, which hit me hard more than a decade before my partner and I adopted children ourselves, is a movie about the randomness of fate. Although there are global economic forces at work, causing some children to beg in the streets and some to land in cushy homes abroad—including cushy, terrible homes—there is no way to choose which life you will be born into.
I read a lot of memoirs too. According to my Goodreads shelf, I read thirty just this year, if I count graphic memoirs, which I do. A lot of them are about childhood, which is to say they are about the narrator’s relationship with their parents, which is to say fucked up mothers. Reading them creates a kind of mental bridge between childhood and adulthood, helping me understand the ways my choices might land in my kids’ lives.
There are some subgenres within the fucked-up-parents subgenre. This year, I read three fantastic books about parents whose abilities fell short of their professed progressive values. Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy, is the son of a professor who does her best to mold him into a poster child for “Black abundance.” She showers him with writing assignments and Black pride mantras. She also beats him, berates him, and struggles with a gambling addiction. Being fat and vulnerable become radical acts for Kiese.
In Hollywood Park, Mikel Jollett has a feminist drug counselor for a mom. But she semi-abandons him and his brother in the Synanon cult’s orphanage for the first few years of their lives. When she eventually pulls them out (she likes to remind them of her heroism), she tells them they are happy, whether they think they are or not, and that it’s a son’s job to take care of his mother. Mikel spends much of his childhood slaughtering rabbits so the family can eat.
In How to Say Babylon, author Safiya Sinclair grows up with a strict Rastafarian father (I didn’t know that “strict” could accompany “Rastafarian” until I read the memoir) who espouses the evils of “Babylon,” aka white colonialist hegemony. A frustrated musician, he tries to make up for his own oppression by controlling the women in his life. In her attempt to escape his grip, Safiya spends more time in Babylon, eventually discovering that her father, for all his failings, is also right about the ways of the world. This, along with slow but important steps by her father, allows her to have empathy for him.
That, to me, is the miracle of love and literature. Empathy for flawed characters is a prerequisite for good writing, so I suppose this is a self-selecting sample. Adults who are consumed by rage at their parents are probably not writing anything publishable. (I imagine that many first and second and third drafts of memoirs are angry, self-centered journal entries.) Forgiveness is a complicated concept. Is it for the forgiver or the perpetrator? Does it mean continued contact? Is it a validation of acts that shouldn’t be validated? What I like about memoirs, as opposed to self-help books or social media screeds, is that they don’t need to answer all of these questions. Forgiveness is not the point, but empathy is mandatory.
I also read plenty of memoirs about mothers who are more objectively bad: Jennette McCurdy’s abusive, eating-disorder-promoting stage mom in I’m Glad My Mom Died; Biff Ward’s paranoid schizophrenic mother, who may have killed Ward’s older sibling, in In My Mother’s Hands.
Mostly, parents reel from their own trauma and do their best. See Tessa Hulls’ mother in the gorgeous graphic memoir Feeding Ghosts, and Susan Kiyo Ito’s hot-and-cold birth mother in I Would Meet You Anywhere.
Not surprisingly, people rarely write memoirs about purely happy childhoods. (My own childhood was pretty good, if fraught with neuroses, and so the memoir I wrote covered my shit-show early thirties.) But there are some very-good-if-imperfect moms who play important roles in stories of other adversities, like Emma Bolden’s mother in The Tiger and the Cage: A Memoir of a Body in Crisis, who struggles to care for her chronically ill daughter, but is clearly an ally and advocate. Susan Kiyo Ito’s adoptive mother intrinsically understands why her daughter wants to seek out her birth family and encourages her search. Safiya Sinclair’s mother protects her from her father and introduces her to the life-saving power of poetry.
Of course, I know which type of mom I would like to be if either of my sons writes a memoir. Joey, who is two and a half, definitely thinks I’m the best, unless I tell him it’s not time for a bottle right now. Dash loves YouTube more than any book he’s ever encountered, but maybe he will talk about me on YouTube someday. These days, he loves and hates me and loves me again and hates me again, sometimes all within the space of an hour.
Sometimes I can almost see the words typed on a page. I can imagine the Bad Mom Memoir and the Good Mom Memoir.
*
My Bad Mom
By Imagined Adult Dash
When Wolf, the baby who almost became my brother, went home to his birth parents, my mom’s Crying Years began. Cheryl was always talking to pregnant ladies, always worrying if they didn’t text back. We visited one of them, April, a bunch of times in the hotel room where she was living. It was full of stuff for her baby, and then it was full of stuff for her mom and her mom’s two big dogs. I liked dogs but I was also afraid of them and would cross the street to avoid our neighbor’s deep-voiced German shepherd.
Then we stopped visiting April and Cheryl cried some more. Not just on the day we found out that April had her baby and wasn’t going to let us adopt her, but after that, and sometimes for no reason at all, as far as I could tell. I started watching her face to see if her eyebrows pulled close together. Once I heard her gasping for breath in another room. C.C. and I ran in to see if she was crying, but she was doing sit-ups.
Whenever I worried about something, like getting locked in a bathroom or stuck in an elevator, Cheryl listened to me and told me I was safe, and that together we could solve most problems. In those moments, I believed her. But when she cried, or murmured her own worries to C.C.—about adoption and cancer and money and getting COVID-19 and eventually about Joey, the baby who stayed—she didn’t sound like someone who took her own advice. I hated how jittery and uncertain she seemed, this person who was supposed to be standing between me and the world.
When I got a little older, and I wanted something and she said no, I started taunting her. Are you scared? I knew she probably wasn’t scared to take me to Chuck E. Cheese, not actually, but she was scared, generally. It made me want to hit her, or tear apart her flabby body.
She was always hunched over her phone. She tended to Joey, talking brightly to him (“Yes! That’s Mommy’s red car!”) while to me she said, “Dash. I’ve asked you to brush your teeth three times. Could you please do it?” She swore she wasn’t yelling, but I could hear in her voice how she was tired of me, and wasn’t that the same?
One night when I was nine, C.C. didn’t come home from work when she said she would.
Where’s Mama? You said she’d be home by now, I said.
Cheryl’s voice was her about-to-cry voice. I don’t know. I’m sure she’s just finishing up work, and maybe her phone died. She’s not answering my texts. I wish she was home too.
I started crying before Cheryl could. I knew that if I did, she would pull it together. I needed her to sound strong and sure.
She filled the tub for me and my salty tears mixed with the bathwater.
Do you ever feel, she said, like when you don’t hear from someone for a little while, like maybe they’re never coming back?
Yes, I said.
*
My Good Mom
By Imagined Adult Dash
C.C. was the mom who played catch with me and watched the World Series with me and ordered pho when I had a cold. Cheryl took me to doctor appointments and made sure I brushed my teeth and mixed grape-flavored Sudafed with juice when I had a cold. But when I got into the Mighty Ducks movies, it was Cheryl who took me ice skating, because C.C. hated ice skating.
The rink was loud and cold and smelled just a little bit like feet. Cheryl helped me lace up my skates, and we made our way to the ice, both taller than we had been when we walked in. I held onto the wall at first. How did the Ducks make it look so easy?
You’re doing great. Keep leaning forward, she said. She couldn’t skate like the Ducks or like the girls doing spins and leaps in the middle of the rink, the ones she loved to watch, but she was steady. She held my hand when I let go of the wall, and it was a steady hand. Medium-sized and practical, with unpainted nails and big knuckles. They were hands that made turkey sandwiches for my lunches and detangled my brother’s hair in the tub without making him cry.
When my Nino took me to do things, he was always trying to get me to do more: hike higher, hit harder, wade deeper. On the ice, Cheryl let me go as fast or as slow as I wanted. We picked up speed. I skated a few feet by myself, the cold air pushing my hair back. I let go of her hand and glided toward the wall, which I hit with a soft thud. We did it again and again: skate, hold, glide, thud. And when I was ready to go home, she said that was fine, and she got me barbecue chips from the vending machine even though she’d said we weren’t going to get anything from the vending machine because we brought our own Cheez-Its.
At night I asked Cheryl all my questions. If I’d been mad at her that day, she acted as if the mad part never happened. I wanted to know about everything that came before me: the land we lived on, the Native Americans, whether I was one of them, what had happened between my birth mom and my birth dad. Had Cheryl and C.C. been lonely and wanted a baby? And was I that baby who made them so, so happy? I was the hero of the story. When she wrapped me in a towel after the bath, she hugged me and pointed us toward the steamed-up mirror and said what she’d said since I was a baby and she had to lift me up to see myself. Look, it’s Dash and the Mommy who loves him.
Sometimes we’d go on drives late at night along the arroyo, expensive homes on one side and the dark dry riverbed on the other. She played whatever music I wanted: “The Scientist” by the Glee cast or “Dynamite“ by BTS, and I rested my head on the pillow I’d grabbed from my bed. Once we saw two coyotes. They were like quick, magical dogs crossing the street on fast feet. We agreed: it was so special that we’d seen them.
I was funny and loud and brash. I liked prank videos and playing military officer, barking orders at my imaginary troops. But I was also afraid of things: big dogs and the dentist and mean kids at school and getting on a stage in the auditorium with everyone looking at me. Cheryl never said don’t be scared or don’t cry, even though sometimes she made me do things anyway, like go to the dentist. We always got McDonald’s or a toy afterward, because she said that if you had to do something unfun, it was only fair to follow it up with something fun.
*
I—the mom in these hypothetical stories that may be nothing like what Dash actually thinks of me—write about parenting because I fought so long and hard to become a mom; I had a chance to consider it from so many angles. Or because I have deep-rooted issues related to my attachment with my own very good mother. Or because parenting is the only thing I do outside of my day job. With more time or grant money, maybe I would write about circus performers or the birds of New Zealand.
I’ve only encountered a couple of reader comments that question whether or how I should be writing about my children. (Maybe it’s because my readership is small, but I prefer to think it’s because I’m an excellent writer and mother, and my readers are excellent readers.) I know there are many people who think the endeavor is inherently exploitative. My possibly unpopular take on this stance is that parenting is inherently harmful. The act of being in someone else’s life, especially if the balance of power is unequal, is inherently harmful. Parents don’t like to think about this.
Of course we should try to avoid harm. But of course we will fail.
Okay, says my imagined debate partner, maybe no parent is perfect. Maybe every parent yells occasionally or transmits their personal stress or fails to intervene when they should. Isn’t that all the more reason not to add to the mix by making your poor kids the subject of an essay?
Writing about parenting has helped me look at my children with curiosity and wonder; it has allowed me to be reflective and self-critical, but also gentle with myself. After all, if I’m writing for other parents, and I don’t think they’re doing a shitty job, I can’t say that I am, at least not all the time.
But I won’t pretend that I write about parenting solely to become a better parent. I write about it because I’m a writer who happens to be a parent. I hope that I could live without writing if I had to, just as I hope I could live without a leg or a lung. But it is not my preference. And happy parents who do things that are important to them tend to be better than miserable, perpetually thwarted parents.
Recently, I asked Dash for the first time if he was okay with me writing about an incident that seemed like it might feel overly personal to him.
“You know how you and I have been talking about the N word, and about some of the other words you hear at school?” I said. “Would it be okay if I wrote about that?”
“Yeah,” he said, “just don’t say anything about [completely unrelated small medical procedure that he had in first grade].” I agreed.
After the election, there was an uproar in his fourth grade class as kids worried about their parents getting deported, and about Trump’s anti-LGBT agenda. It dovetailed with separate but related fears that Dash and I harbored. I wrote an essay about it, and then asked him if I could publish an essay about it.
“No,” he said.
“I was writing about how–”
“What? You already wrote it? Delete it!” he demanded.
I assured him that it was buried deep in my Google docs, protected by a password, and that seemed to satisfy him. I pouted a little bit. C.C., who has put up with being written about a lot, cheered him on a little too happily. I didn’t bring it up again.
My goal as a parent is to create a space where my kids can become full human beings–where they will feel safe and loved, where they can stretch and imagine and rage and break down and build themselves back up. Eventually, maybe whatever wisdom and empathy they are developing will help them see me as a full human being too. Reading memoirs by people raised by all-too-human moms gives me hope for all of us.
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