-Michele
I Am a Woman Telling the Truth
By Joan Borysenko, Ph.D.
The kids are grown up now and moved into
homes of their own.
But Our Lady of Perpetual Guilt still lives with me,
an uninvited guest
without manners enough to pack up and move on.
Find a rich husband, my stay-at-home mother taught.
You’ve got the stuff. You’re pretty and smart.
But no, I wanted to live a different life,
a liberated life for a new kind of woman.
Liberated not to be Mother in her 1950s apron,
turning the flour-caked pages of Betty Crocker’s cookbook.
Even a mundane meal becomes special with
home-baked biscuits, it said.
Mother made great biscuits and killer chocolate cake
while her lifeblood stagnated as she
swallowed those mother’s little helpers that kept the grief
of dying dreams and ungrateful children
from exploding like a grenade in her heart.
How could she possibly want that for me?
I wanted more. I wanted it all.
A brilliant career in a fascinating field,
a loving husband with whom I had perpetual Great Sex,
musically gifted children born spouting equations
and speaking fluent French
who would grow up to get advanced degrees in astrophysics from Princeton
or become celebrated brain surgeons from Yale.
A chance to save the earth, all the while getting enlightened
in this very lifetime while cooking
gourmet meals made from scratch,
cultivating buns of steel, practicing yoga, decorating my
designer-eccentric Dream Home, and ensuring world peace.
The reality was slightly different.
The children didn’t enlist in Quality Time.
They just wanted time. Any time. Period.
They would gladly have traded a room full of toys for a morning
of watching me read the newspaper in an egg-stained nightgown.
They screamed as if about to be abducted by aliens
when I left them at Dreaded Daycare,
clinging desperately to my legs and begging for mercy,
fat hot tears running down those angelic cheeks.
As my heart broke, I hoped that daycare might
build character and give them resilience.
It gave me heartburn, muscle tension, and guilt.
It also gave me runs in my pantyhose and those sticky little
handprints forged out of squashed banana that decorate the
working wardrobe of so many liberated moms.
I vowed to do better. Right after I got some sleep.
Say, sometime in the next century.
My husband suggested that sex might be nice.
Sure, just give me a few minutes to finish up here.
Let me check the mental list. Put kids to bed.
Listen to their fears, encourage their dreams.
Read mind-enriching stories. Teach them to meditate. Pray.
Sing Justin to sleep. Rub Andrei’s back ’til he falls asleep.
Do laundry. Clean toilet before Board of Health comes.
Pick cat poop up off laundry room floor. AGAIN.
Damn cat! Pray for low-flying hawk to swoop down in the
night and eat cuddly family pet. Stop. That’s definitely not nice.
Make note. Gotta brush cat tomorrow. Out of hairball
medicine. Make appointment for camp physicals.
Call mother NOW. Call mother YESTERDAY!
She starts the conversation with a long pause.
It lasts for years. “Oh, is that you? I thought you were dead.”
“Maybe that’s the only way to get some rest around here,” I retort.
Apparently I’m not funny. She must have thought I was lazing around
the spa, not calling her because I was eating grapes, getting
massaged, and waiting for my nails to dry.
Time for bed now. Set alarm for 5 a.m. sharp.
Gotta jog before the kids get up.
Gotta stay in shape so that my husband will find me attractive.
If he can find me at all. He’s asleep, thank God.
At least that solves the Sex Problem for tonight.
Morning comes quickly.
I run three miles before it’s light, wake the kids,
give them breakfast, pack a healthful organic lunch
that makes them wail with indignation.
They beg for Twinkies and Wonder Bread like their friends eat.
The ones with Real Mothers who know better than
to bake dense brown bread with soy flour and wheat germ.
Then it’s on to the Daily Daycare Double.
Will Mom be able to run for it and make a clean getaway
while the kids are distracted? That’s one point for her.
Or will it be another leg-clenching, heart-wrenching morning?
That’s two points for Our Lady of Perpetual Guilt,
a fierce composite of criticism real and imagined
from all perfect mothers who have ever lived.
She soon racks up enough points that I decide we must hire
a nanny even if I have to sell pencils on the street to finance it.
The come-to-the-house nanny with the expensive
Harvard Child-Development Degree
whose take-home pay is practically more than mine
turns out to be certifiably loony and in need of serious help.
Every night when I return from work, I have to do at least
30 minutes of intensive psychotherapy to keep her
from fulfilling her latent potential as a guest on the Jerry Springer Show.
I wonder who is working for whom.
I’m dying to fire her, but she’s better than Daycare. Isn’t she?
I’m relieved when she quits, but I cry anyway.
I miss work for soccer games and school plays, saxophone recitals
and wrestling meets, track meets and doctors’ appointments.
Time off is time stolen and returned with usurer’s interest.
I pay for those hours with the marrow of my bones,
working to make them up at midnight or on weekends,
those Special Days of Rest when you get to do a week’s
worth of errands, cleaning, cooking, and outings with the kids.
Weekends are filled with precious moments on your knees
picking up dust bunnies that harbor generations of spider mites.
Most of this women’s work goes unseen and unsung.
“Are you a workaholic or something?” whines my husband, sipping a
beer in his trusty Speedo and pruning his bonsai collection.
Flashes of homicide, or at least visions of him in a French maid’s
costume, employed by an obsessive-compulsive little man with
waxed moustaches, a pointed goatee, and a long list
pass through my formerly compassionate heart.
I take a deep breath and smile, “No, just a working mother.”
No one told me it would be like this.
No one knew. Or at least very few.
Then no one would admit it.
To do so was politically incorrect.
We were liberated and loving it, weren’t we?
The health and corporate gurus just kept talking about
Living a Balanced Life.
I guess that means not letting the whole
House of Cards tumble over and knock you flat.
Although, in a pinch, fainting in action is good for a rest.
Meanwhile, life goes on, and you do the best you can.
When hard at work as Dr. Science when the boys are small,
I’m just one of the guys. A guy with ovaries. A guy with PMS
who gets pregnant once in a while. But that’s all invisible or at
least beside the point. Which is to Do Science, Get Grants, Compete
Expand the Lab, Conquer the Field, Shine at the Annual Meetings,
Teach Medical Students, and do my part with other exciting
cutting-edge assignments like the library committee
of which, I am told by an endearingly patronizing little
professor with a blue gravy-stained bow tie and a shy, but lustful grin,
I am The Most Decorative Member.
I’m back to work six days after my first-born Justin arrives.
Can’t show any weakness or ask for any favors.
They would think of me as Second String, a minor player.
And that’s definitely not what I spent six years of graduate and
postgraduate education preparing for.
My mother hires a nurse to care for Justin for the first month.
I feel like I’ve given him up for adoption.
Nurse Ratchet will hardly let me peek at the baby when I get home.
I might disturb him. Breast-feed? Ridiculous. I work.
He’s fed formula, sealing my maternal uselessness.
I don’t know any better. I don’t any other woman who has done this.
In the lab, I retire to the darkroom to print electron micrographs
and cry in the privacy of that swampy, chemical-scented night.
Justin’s Dee, the teddy bear that he cannot live without,
is consigned to the trash by the iron will of a maternal stand-in
who’s fed up with his bathing it in her toilet and then bursting
into tears because Beloved Dee is wet and smelly.
I’m not there to protect him when the garbage is picked up.
Andrei’s first baby tooth falls out on foreign carpet.
I think the babysitter’s dog ate it.
All this will require years of therapy for them to process.
The Look I get from the Real Mothers, the stay-at-home kind,
when I do get to soccer after taking a half day off from work
could curdle milk.
Our Lady of Perpetual Guilt whispers
from behind the gossamer curtains of consciousness,
“Just who do you think you are, anyway, to change a system
that’s been in place since the dawn of time?
Eve and the apple are nothing compared to you,
Ruiner of Children and Destroyer of the Human Race.”
At school conferences, I expect a firing squad.
My offenses are enumerated. Andrei’s vocabulary skills are deficient.
Not enough time with those flash cards, apparently.
Justin is cutting classes. Do I think he may be smoking pot,
drinking beer, having afternoon delight in the bushes?
Is it time for the Sex Talk already? Are the kids running a
bordello in the basement while Jezebel is At Work?
Oh, God. What can I do?
In my 50s now, I can laugh. Well, sort of.
We’re all still alive, and I have enough material
for a vaudeville show, should they come back into style.
The kids grew up, and I divorced the husband,
whom a pithy girlfriend dubbed The Wasband.
It’s hard to keep love’s fire burning when there’s
No One Home to tend it.
Even now I have the occasional dream where
the Wasband and I are young lovers, walking hand-in-hand
toward a distant horizon filled with sweet possibility.
But even in the dream world I’m not spared the final reality.
We who grew up together will not grow old together.
We have parted. Our family is one more postmodern statistic.
“It wasn’t supposed to turn out like this,” I say to him,
and wake up with tears on my pillow.
Somewhere along the line, busyness became a way of life.
At the very least, it’s a bulwark that keeps an ocean of grief
from washing over me and sweeping me away.
Somehow I’m busier than ever now,
even though there’s only me and three doggies to care for.
Plus, I have Help.
I finally make enough money to have hired
the Wife that every working woman longs for.
But the world seems to have entered Warp Speed,
and my surrogate wife isn’t enough to stem the tides.
My e-mail bulges with ads telling me how I can make spare cash
while vacuuming, improving my skin, enlarging my penis,
and learning Italian all at the same time.
The penis enlarger sounds interesting, but not in this lifetime.
I’ll pass on the other offers, too. No time.
I don’t know how I did it all in The Mother Years.
It seems to take all day now just to brush my teeth.
So, how did the kids turn out?
They’re beautiful young men, and I’m proud of them.
They have shining strengths, serious but not mortal wounds.
They have joys and sorrows, but which of us is exempt?
They know they’re loved, and they’re old enough to
appreciate how I kept it all together and made a life for us all.
They’re old enough to say thank you and mean it.
They make me cry and shiver with delight.
It was all worthwhile; I love them so fiercely.
The boys are the most important work that I ever did.
Now they wonder about how they will live and parent.
They don’t want to participate in the Daily Daycare Double.
They do want to participate in raising their children.
But they’re confronted with Big Choices.
Buy a house and pay for it with overtime?
Get two jobs and invite Our Lady of Perpetual Guilt over for dinner?
Buy a new car and pay with your heart, or your bones or your marriage?
Buy the Toys That Everyone Who Is Anyone Needs
and pay with the 3:00 a.m. willies every night?
How much is enough? What’s important? How shall we live?
They’re old enough to know that some choices are difficult
and right. Some are wrong in spite of the best intentions.
Perhaps the most important thing they learned
watching me wrestle with choices that their grandmothers never had
is that time is the most precious gift you can give to your family.
My generation of women hacked through dense jungles with machetes.
The result may not have been elegant, but it created enough light
for new generations of women—and our sons—to see their way.
The world is in flux, in that tender and painful place of becoming new.
Betty Crocker is dead now. My mother is gone, too.
I, once young, am moving into the back row of family photos,
the matriarch of a new kind of family, spread out and spread thin.
But I’m not dead yet. I’m watching my children, and hope to see
my children’s children reinventing the world.
It’s going to take time, and it’s going to take women with
powerful hearts and strong minds.
In the meantime, we have to learn how to make a life for ourselves,
as well as how to make a living in a world that never sleeps.
That’s why I decided to write this book.
It’s not a how-to book.
If I knew the secret to ending the modern time famine,2
the magic words that make it easy to Have It All,
if I even knew what Having It All really was
I’d be rich and famous, drying my nails at the spa,
or meditating in the forest, waiting for enlightenment.
I haven’t yet decided which road I would actually take.
Probably neither, since although I complain heartily about being
too busy, I chose this life and keep choosing it day by day.
But I know that I have a choice,
something that generations of women past didn’t have.
That’s so precious.
The New World of Women is a work in progress.
I don’t know where it will go,
but I do know that it would be good to arrive in one piece.
To do that means staying intact when the centrifugal force
of a world spinning so fast threatens to pull us to pieces.
An arm here.
A leg there.
A heart who knows where.
It’s good to know how to come back home to yourself after
years of walking in the desert, parched and lost.
It’s good to acknowledge how women do hidden work
even more vital than scrubbing the toilet bowl while pulling up our pantyhose.
We weave the web that holds the world together.
And if women forget how to do that, All is Lost.
That’s what I want to share with you in these pages.
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