The Bad Moms Club

I know a lot of bad moms. They have nannies when they don’t have jobs, they get sitters to go shopping, they go to spas for the weekends with their girlfriends. Most of them have housekeepers and painstakingly highlighted hair. I don’t use a sitter and my hair is frighteningly D.I.Y. My floors are encrusted with Cheerios, and each drawer in my house is stuffed like a Rubik’s Cube, where moving one item requires moving another, and so on.

Of course I envy these women. My son goes to preschool four days a week, minus when he’s sick (40 percent of the time) and for Teachers’ Institute Days (27 a year); conferences; winter, spring and summer breaks; and major and minor holidays, including Presidents’ Day and Casmir Pulaski Day, a special Chicago-only holiday. (In L.A. they have Jean Carruther’s Day, named for the woman who invented Botox.)

This leaves me two and a half hours a day, four times a week, to myself—hours that pass like lightning. (Greased, oiled, and otherwise speed-enhanced lightning.) Dropping off Ian takes 15 minutes. Then I zip through 30 minutes of housework—just enough to keep the house from being declared a Hazmat site, but not enough for it to be actually considered clean. This leaves me something like an hour and a half before I have to pick up Ian. Generally, I write or make stuff. Jewelry, soup, whatever.

One day recently my husband stayed home sick, and I wondered when he was going to notice how I passed my time. It happened to be a day I had to finish some jewelry for the school auction, so I sat hunched over my work the whole time Ian was at school, ear buds in place, coffee mug in hand. He did complain, after a while, but only because I used his sick self to watch Ian, so I could have even more time to myself.

Because there’s the rub. No matter how productively those two hours pass, it’s not enough. I can’t write a book, or learn my craft the way I really want to. I can’t take a class or go to yoga. (The times don’t fit the schedule). I can’t get on the train and meet a friend downtown for lunch, because what if I didn’t get back on time, and Ian was left on the school playground with a disgruntled teacher? What I can accomplish is to post a new blog about twice a month. I make a few new pieces of jewelry a week, and the other day, I even washed the floors. (I had to. The crunching noise was getting on my nerves.)

It’s not that I love my son less than I did before he was born. I loved him the instant the doctor laid him on my chest. Earlier, really, when I felt him lurching around in my belly, hiccupping, his heels pressing against my skin. But it’s hard to see your old life passing you by. I’ve forgotten how to use software I used to use on a daily basis. I no longer have a “city” wardrobe that fits or is close to being in style. And the things I try to accomplish and which give me some sense of self—outside of being a mother and wife—are never given enough time to do well or fully. I don’t even feel that I’m that good of a mom anymore. And that’s the really sad part.

The first two years of Ian’s life were a cakewalk for me. Sure, I was stressed out about all the newness. How scary the first bath was. Figuring out the changing table at Target. Carrying those damn car seats back and forth to the chiropractor. It was easy to be a good mom, though. I would always ask myself what the “right” thing to do was. If I suspected Ian needed a diaper change, I would check him. If I thought he had a fever, I would take his temperature. In the mornings—and I am not a morning person—I would lie awake waiting for him to wake up.

My son and I had something childcare experts call “goodness of fit,” which basically means we liked each other immediately. We had the same goals: to sleep, breastfeed or be breastfed, and gaze adoringly into each other’s eyes. We’re so strongly bonded that—two and a half years after I stopped nursing him—he sticks his hand down my shirt for comfort the way some kids suck their thumbs. (After he sticks his hand down my shirt, he holds his hand to his face and sucks in my scent, like Dennis Hopper and his oxygen mask in Blue Velvet. Only cuter.)

Novelist Ayelet Waldman caused a furor a while back proclaiming that she loved her husband, fellow novelist Michael Chabon, more than her children. (Hell, I love Michael Chabon more than her children. His grocery list could win a Pulitzer.) I’m the other kind of mom, the one who falls so deeply in love with her child she has to be reminded that she has a husband. That she needs to treat her man as respectfully and lovingly as she treats her child. It’s the way I’m wired.

But my son is growing up. His needs differ from mine. He wants to run and jump and play Transformers, and I still want to snuggle. He wants to ride his bike and build snow-robots, and I want to read the New Yorker and nap. In addition to being good with babies, I’m wired to be, well, selfish. The good mothers I know tend to fall in two camps: superachievers and martyrs. The superachievers outsource a lot, and the martyrs give up everything for their kids. Showering, working, having friends over the age of six. The latter group doesn’t seem very happy, but they’re patient as saints. Picture them with a toddler at each end of the rack, cranking the wheel tighter and tighter, until they’re so stretched out, even their high-waisted mom jeans don’t fit anymore. And all they would say is, “Honey, make sure you let your sister have a turn.”

The middle-of-the-road moms, like me, feel like we do everything half-assed. We don’t give enough to our kids, and we don’t have enough left for ourselves. Not to mention our husbands. (Sex? Please. As in, please get off me.) We lose our keys and our debit cards, the cat box is always dirty, and the five-second rule becomes the “if I didn’t see it, he didn’t eat it” rule.

I got an e-mail from an old friend recently who blew me off the couch with a litany of all the activity in her life. No less than three books going, conferences, music, nature, freelance work. As I remember it, she’s also a good cook and a master gardener. Hell, even her kids are published poets! I wanted to crawl in a virtual hole and hide. Since it was e-mail, I should have just lied. “Oh yeah, I’m meeting my agent in New York next week,” blah blah blah. But she’d probably Google me and find out I’m full of shit. So I fessed up to being a loser and quietly excused myself, vowing to rewrite my bio on Facebook with a lot less attention to the truth.

The truth is, I need a little life to myself to be a good mom. I need Ian to watch Scooby Doo sometimes so I can write. Or read. Or talk on the phone to my mom for an hour. Because my mom showed me that a whole person makes me a better parent. In fact, a good one.

(Thanks, Mom.)