Here I am — late, stuck in the omnipresent west side street construction, wondering whether there will be time after guitar lessons and homework to make supper before an evening meeting, contemplating how much more scruffy the entire family will become before we manage to squeeze in haircuts — when I am blindsided by my former friend and supportive ally, National Public Radio.
Susan Page is interviewing journalist Allison Pearson. Pearson is describing the opening scene from her new novel, I Don’t Know How She Does It, in which harried mom Kate Reddy “distresses” store-bought mince pies in order to pass them off as her own work at the school’s holiday concert.
“Ha ha!” I laugh. “She’s talking about me!”
But no.
Kate, you see, has a good excuse. She is a working mom. She manages a hedge fund. She’s the heroine of this story, and the villain is…oh, no.
Kate calls them “The Muffia.” These are the moms who know the names of all the teachers, volunteer at school, drive the carpool and clean the house. These are the “proper mothers, self-sacrificing bakers of apple pies and well-scrubbed invigilators of the washtub.” These are the smug, perfect moms who, by their very existence, make Kate feel guilty about her choices. Professional journalist Pearson and professional broadcaster Page cackle conspiratorily over the apt moniker.
The concrete truck in front of me stops to unload and the construction worker holding out her orange flag shrugs apologetically as I grip my steering wheel and weep. I am forced to pretend to adjust the radio while I rearrange my stricken expression. Just because two working women on the radio are derogating my aspirations does not mean I need to make my sister on the road crew feel guilty for inconveniencing the carpool mom.
A few beats too late, it seems to dawn on Pearson that the very women who are the object of this merry hoot may well be the only ones able to steal time at the end of the day to read her book. But she botches the save when she selects the only cliché attached to stay-at-home moms that is more abrasive than the one she’s already used: they’re heroes, of course, these self-sacrificing women. She’s not sure that she’d be able to handle that job herself.
Well, good for us.
Pearson prattles on about an especially hilarious working-mom episode involving her interview with Tom Hanks and a blazer stained with mashed banana, and I am left to wonder what Pearson and her tribe would make of me, and other women I know who are at home full time and yet still don’t manage to bake the pies or get the laundry done. We may aspire to it, we may have had that organized life in mind when we made this choice, we may even have role models among us who outwardly appear to have approached some level of professionalism in their at-home mothering. If Pearson, as a spokeswoman for working mothers, despises the high-achieving mothers of the Muffia, what kind of pathetic creature would she find me, with my dusty blinds and my frozen fish sticks? I picture her raising her arm in its banana-stained sleeve to form the letter “L” on her forehead with a manicured thumb and forefinger.
Oh, enough, I think as I switch the radio off. Who cares what anyone else thinks? It’s what my kids think that counts.
A few days later, I am packing library books, fixing toast and trying to at least half-listen to my kindergartner as she prattles on about her homework assignment, which is “to pack a snack for a picnic” (in November?), when my seven-year-old happens to call me “Bad Mommy.” My divided attention is suddenly in laser-beam focus.
“What do you mean, `Bad Mommy’? What exactly is your idea of a good mommy?”
“One who bakes pie. You said at the beginning of the year that you would bake us snacks once a week, and instead we’re having toast.”
Within seconds, the oven is preheating and the counter that was already strewn with three-weeks-worth of spelling lists is also strewn with all-purpose flour. The dog and the seven-year old are eating the spilled chocolate chips off the floor, and I am stirring a bowlful of dough with one hand and taking down picnic ware from a cabinet with another.
“May I pack pickles for our cookie picnic, Mama? And milk?”
Of course, of course, my daughter. If I’m going to do this, by gosh, I’m going to be good at it. We will have pickles and warm cookies from scratch and milk and I will review the spelling words and we will return the library books, and I will be the best damn Muffy any one ever saw.
I turn away from the oven just in time to see one quart of milk being poured directly into the open pickle jar while the remainder of the gallon streams across the table toward the stack of library books and onto the floor, floating a parcel of cursive writing worksheets along on the tide.
You know, come to think of it, I might have more in common with Kate Reddy than I thought. I don’t know how I do it either.