Domestic Affairs Read online

  Domestic Affairs

  Enduring the Pleasures of Motherhood and Family Life

  Joyce Maynard

  For my mother, Fredelle Maynard, who inspired me with a longing to raise children, because it was so clear she loved doing it

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  CUT FROM THE SAME CLOTH

  A Visit with My Grandmother

  Pie Crust

  Thinking about My Father

  The Yellow Door House

  OTHER CALLINGS

  Babysitter Problems

  Tuning in to Ozzie and Harriet

  Getting Off the Plane

  Death of the Full-Time Mother

  Mother of Nine

  BABY LOVE

  The Ninth Month

  Baby Longing

  The Six A.M. Report

  The End of Diapers

  DAY IN, DAY OUT

  Mess

  The La-Z-Boy Lounger

  Counting Heads

  Swamped

  FAMILY EXPANSION

  Audrey Gets a Brother

  The Third Child

  Willy Walks

  Night at the Ramada Inn

  UPWARD MOBILITY

  My Kids and Money

  The Going-Out-of-Business Sale

  The Ice Show Comes to Town

  Chance of a Lifetime

  Buying the Tent

  TALK OF THE TOWN

  Softball Season

  Ursula Leaves Town

  Marlon Brando’s Phone Number

  The Norton Fund

  School Play

  Travelers Pass Through

  More Babysitter Problems

  CELEBRATIONS

  Cutting Down the Tree

  Shopping at Three in the Morning

  Barbie’s Shoe

  Charlie’s Birthday

  YEARNINGS

  Oklahoma Friend

  Visitor at the Mental Hospital

  The Lure of the Roller Rink

  Greg and Kate’s Wedding

  The Love Boat

  On the Sidelines

  Stranger in the Night

  END OF ENDURANCE

  Dressed for Snow

  Tomato Sauce

  Mom’s Problems

  Flipping Out

  Five-Mile Road Race

  TERRORS

  Car Pool

  Reported for Child Neglect

  Perilous Journey

  Christa

  CUTTING THE CORD

  Audrey Turns One

  I Want You

  Lost Purse

  My Daughter Gets Dressed

  The Dollhouse

  My Children Move On

  Sailing Boats

  GROWING OLDER

  Sixteen

  Joan Baez Concert

  The Baby Stroller

  Selling Our Land

  Greg and Kate Have a Baby

  MARRIAGE—MINE AND OTHERS

  How I Married Steve

  AJ’s Divorce

  Argument at the Muffler Shop

  Christian Marriage

  House Hunting

  The Knives

  POSTSCRIPT

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A BIOGRAPHY OF JOYCE MAYNARD

  INTRODUCTION

  SOMETIMES THE SUN RISES first. More often, it’s my two-year-old, Willy, who does. And that’s when my day begins.

  I roll out of bed and put on water for coffee, and Willy opens the cupboard to choose his cereal. (Maybe a combination of Kix, Honey Nut Cheerios, and Rice Krispies. Maybe oat flakes, Shredded Wheat, and Raisin Bran, with sliced banana, because that’s what they show on the front of the cereal box. Or he wants the toy pictured on the back, that you have to send away for. Or he may put in a bid for his Halloween candy, in which case, when I tell him no, he’ll cry and swear that if he can have just one, he’ll be good forever.)

  He wants to pour the milk, and I always let him, and he always spills it. We turn on Sesame Street. He wants to carry his bowl into the living room himself. He spills cereal on his pajamas and demands a fresh pair. I say, reasonably, that once we’re changing him anyway, we might as well put on his shirt and overalls. But my son is two years old: This kind of logic does not apply. He wants different pajamas—for the ten minutes that remain before daybreak. He wants his Superman pair that are in the wash. And he wants to put them on himself. Which (after I retrieve them from the dirty clothes) he does, with two feet in one leg hole, and inside out.

  Now my son is angry, indignant. And because just about everything in his life right now is involved with me, his current problem is all my fault. He cries. He says he doesn’t like me anymore. He hates this cereal. He wants to put the peel back on the banana. He wants cartoons, and the fact that this isn’t Saturday is immaterial, because (once again) I should be able to conjure up a few Smurfs if I really try. “No cartoons today,” I say, in a calm, level voice—though I am in fact nearing the breaking point. And now Willy’s wailing has roused my son Charlie, who thumps down the stairs, with his bear in his hand and his thumb in his mouth, requesting oatmeal with maple syrup and raisins to look like a face, while from her bed my daughter Audrey is weeping that I let her sleep in too late and now she’s missed everything.

  It’s five minutes to seven. The coffee water has just come to a boil.

  I make the peanut butter sandwiches for Audrey’s lunch and get to work braiding Audrey’s hair while my husband Steve attempts to round up the right number of shoes, socks, hair clips, mittens, and little boxes of juice. Steve warms up the car, Audrey searches frantically for her piano book. Willy insists on putting his own boots on. Charlie wants help with his. Mr. Rogers is just placing his suit coat on a hanger and lacing up his sneakers as I zip up the last pair of snow pants. My coffee sits on the counter, cold.

  At times, in the middle of the chaotic morning rites of getting everybody up and dressed (some out the door, some not) my mind flashes to an image of the old Donna Reed Show that I used to watch when I was my daughter’s age: Donna Reed, in her immaculate starched apron and her perfect hairdo, standing at the door of her tidy home, handing out the lunch bags and kissing her husband and children goodbye as they head out to face the day. Her husband forgets to kiss her, and Donna looks vaguely distressed, but in the end he always comes back and gives her a peck on the cheek. Then she smiles contentedly and gets on with her day. Which is what I try to do also, although sometimes, by eight A.M. I feel more like taking a two-hour nap. I might have been climbing a mountain or competing in a triathlon, but in fact all I’ve been doing is arbitrating disputes over mittens, pouring out cereal, and sponging off counters. Some adventure.

  I was a newspaper reporter in New York City once, and I wrote about fires and elevator operators’ strikes and dog shows and murders. It was a pretty exciting line of work for a young single woman who’d grown up in a small New Hampshire town. I loved having a job that allowed me to earn my living doing what I like best anyway, which is observing life and asking questions. But I knew from the first that it was no life for a married woman with young children, and so when I met the man I wanted to marry and with whom I wanted to raise children, I quit my job and left the city. We moved back to my home state of New Hampshire, to this two-hundred-year-old farmhouse at the end of a dirt road with no neighbors in sight, five miles outside of a small town with no stop light or movie theater, no elevator operators’ strikes or, for that matter, elevators. Steve, my husband, is a painter, who sometimes paints canvases and sometimes houses. He built himself a studio; I got pregnant. At first it was enough simply to be together in our new home, and having a baby.

  But when, after the first idyllic months up here, the reality began to hit us that we’d both have to do something about e
arning a living, I fell into despair. Truthfully, I guess I also missed the excitement and adventure of my former career in this new life of mine, in which the big news of the day might be the ripening of our first tomato or a trip to the town dump. I was a reporter without a story—and where once I could always hop on the subway and find one, now I was seven months pregnant, with the snow piled so high I couldn’t see out my kitchen windows and our only car buried deep in the drifts.

  I made bold plans that as soon as our baby was born I’d get right back to business as usual, and from a tip I’d picked up I even got myself an assignment to do a story about houses of prostitution in midtown Manhattan. Six weeks after her birth, I strapped Audrey into the infant seat beside me and drove to New York to conduct my research. I made phone calls to an underworld character who could be reached only between three and four A.M. I even made it to one East Side town house, whose shades were all drawn—where, I was told, there was a woman who would talk to me round about the same hour of night, if I’d meet her at a certain corner.

  Only Audrey didn’t cooperate: She needed to be nursed when I was supposed to be taking notes. She cried in the background while I attempted to carry on my interview with the underworld character. The problem wasn’t confined to Audrey, either. I realized, once I left my hearth and home, that by my hearth, in my home, was really where I wanted to be with this new child of mine. By day two of work on my assignment I knew the whole thing was impossible. Not simply this particular project, but also the notion that having a baby would change nothing in my life but the number of exemptions on our income tax return. Walking down a particularly fashionable section of downtown the day before returning home, with my empty notebook and Audrey strapped on my chest in her corduroy front pack, I saw a chic-looking woman stare at us, stop, and then do a double take. “Oh,” she said, seeing that I’d observed her. “I was just surprised to see you had a real baby in there. At first I thought it was just an accessory.”

  I had a real baby all right. And I had learned something from my ridiculous, impossible attempt at combining investigative reporting with mothering a newborn. Having a child changes everything. If I was still going to write, I’d do better to acknowledge and adapt to my child’s existence than to pretend she wasn’t there.

  So I made my child and my home my new beat. I set up my typewriter on my kitchen table and I began reporting on my own life and the little dramas that happened in the sandbox and the supermarket, and discovered that there was in fact plenty of action to be found without having to venture past the end of our driveway. Over the years there have been more characters added to the scene (Audrey’s two brothers, plenty of friends, and strangers passing through). A few summers back, Steve built a little house for me to work in, out behind our own bigger one and his studio, so I no longer work surrounded, as I used to, by the smells of dinner cooking and the sight of laundry in need of sorting. But my situation remains in many ways the same: My mind is always on the home front. I could get on a plane to New York City, by myself, and write about the goings-on of the big world beyond our little town a little more easily these days than I could have nine years ago. But the fact is, the adventure that occupies me now is making a home, making a marriage work, trying to have a career. And central among them all: the difficult, exhausting, humbling, and endlessly gratifying business of raising children, of ensuring the health of both body and soul.

  For nine years now, I have been reporting on and ruminating about domestic affairs. This book is the result: nine years’ worth of stories and reflections on the things I care about and think about, the things that move my heart. Finally, though, this is not a book about me or about my children. Because the reason for telling these stories, I have come to believe, is not that they’re so rare and amazing—headline material—but that they’re not. In my newspaper days I wrote chiefly about isolated events and extraordinary phenomena. Now I document ordinary daily life. And I think one of the chief pleasures in doing that comes from the knowledge that what’s going on here is not unique or rare. What I went through this morning to get my son’s sneakers on and my daughter’s hair braided was probably the same thing a million other mothers were going through at exactly the same moment. And while it’s often said that parenthood—motherhood, anyway—is a pretty isolating experience (and it’s true, I have never felt so lonely as I used to sometimes, home alone with a new baby), the opposite can also be said. Having children is one way of feeling a connection with the human race, and all the other inhabitants of this planet, who—however else their lives may differ from your own—are doing precisely the same thing you are.

  I was in New York with Audrey a while back, and we were riding a crowded bus. Audrey (eight years old now) was carrying the turquoise purse she takes with her everywhere, that contains all of her greatest treasures. A mother and a little girl who looked just about Audrey’s age got on the bus and sat down next to us in the only two vacant seats. The little girl was also carrying a scaled-down shoulder bag, although hers was purple.

  We had fifty blocks to travel. Audrey unzipped her bag, then (partly, I think, as a way of establishing silent communication with the child beside her) began taking items out to examine them. A handful of jelly bracelets, a couple of ribbon barrettes, a miniature Cabbage Patch doll, a bottle of pink sparkly nail polish. Her birthstone (amethyst), her address book, featuring the names of several dozen pen pals. Scissors, hair bows, glue, a Chinese fan, an eraser in the shape of a banana.

  And then an interesting thing happened. The girl opened her bag, and without saying anything, began to do the same thing Audrey had been doing. It turned out she had a handful of jelly bracelets and a couple of fancy barrettes too. She also had nail polish and a little plastic figure, and a notepad, and a shell, and an eraser in the shape of a watermelon slice. The two girls (still feeling no need to converse) began to giggle. I found myself catching the eye of the other child’s mother, knowing the two of us had the same impulse: To see if we resembled one another as closely as our daughters did. And what I felt, observing the similarities between us, was not the kind of panic I can remember (when you discover someone else bought the same prom gown you did, in the same color), but a reassuring sense of kinship. We never spoke, that other mother and I—we didn’t have to. I knew some things about her life. She knew about mine. We are both adventurers in the same mysterious territory of parenthood.

  I seldom feel like much of an adventurer—standing in this kitchen, pour cereal into bowls, refilling them, handing out paper towels when the inevitable cry comes: “Uh-oh. I spilled.” But sometimes at night the thought will strike me: There are three small people here, breathing sweetly in their beds, whose lives are for the moment in our hands. I might as well be at the controls of a moon shot, the mission is so grave and vast.

  CUT FROM THE SAME CLOTH

  A Visit with My Grandmother

  Pie Crust

  Thinking about My Father

  The Yellow Door House

  THERE IS NO WAY to be somebody’s mother without having been, first, someone’s child; and the kind of mother I am is all wrapped up with the kind of mother I had. Some of what my mother did is precisely what I’ve chosen not to do. Some of what she did is imprinted on me so strongly that now and then I’ll hear myself saying to my children the very words that were once said to me. (Of cookies on a plate: “What you touch you take.” Or, to a child wailing over being sent to bed: “That just shows me you’re overtired.”) Some of those lines probably go back a generation or two before me, and probably one or two will survive, through my children, into the twenty-first century I think it wasn’t until I had children myself that I understood the power of inheritance and the meaning of heritage.

  Of course I’ve rejected, railed against, and even cursed parts of my heritage, as most daughters have. But in the end, I guess I never for a moment questioned the essential belief my mother possessed (and possesses still): that there could be nothing more worthwhile and challeng
ing than having and raising children. Fashions in raising of children dictate, now, that women leave their little girls more free to choose or reject childbearing. But my mother raised me to be a mother, and (though I’m always quick to say not “when you have children,” but only “if”) the truth is I am probably passing on a good deal of the same pattern to my children too. Patterns are hard to break. If I had to name one occasion on which I learned that, it would be this one. The year was 1979. Audrey had just turned one. I was twenty-five, my mother fifty-seven, my grandmother eighty-six. One day there were four generations. The next day there were only three.

  My mother called to tell me that my grandmother was dying. She had refused an operation that would postpone, but not prevent, her death from pancreatic cancer. She could no longer eat, she had been hemorrhaging, and she had severe jaundice. “I always prided myself on being different,” she told my mother. “Now I am different. I’m yellow.”

  My mother, telling me this news, began to cry. So I became the mother for a moment, reminding her, reasonably, that my grandmother was eighty-six, she’d had a full life, she had all her faculties, and no one who knew her could wish that she live long enough to lose them. In the last year or so my mother had begun finding notes in my grandmother’s drawers at the nursing home, reminding her, “Joyce’s husband’s name is Steve. Their daughter is named Audrey.” She rarely saw her children anymore, had no strength to cook or garden. Just the other week she had said of her longtime passion, Harry Belafonte, “I gave him up.” She told my mother that she’d had enough living.

  My grandmother’s name was Rona Bruser. She was born in Russia, in 1892, the eldest daughter of a large and comfortable Jewish family. But the comfort didn’t last. She used to tell stories of the pogroms and the Cossacks who raped her when she was twelve. Soon after that her family emigrated to Canada.

  My mother has shown me photographs of my grandmother in the old days. Today a woman like her would be constantly dieting, but back then her stout, corseted figure was the ideal. She had a long black braid and the sort of strong-jawed beauty that would never be described as fragile. She was pursued by many men, but most ardently by Boris Bruser, also an immigrant from Russia, who came from a much poorer country family and courted her through the mail, in letters filled with his watercolor illustrations and rich, romantic prose. “Precious Rona!” his letters begin. “If only my arms were around you.” “Your loving friend,” they end (as little as one week before the wedding), “B. Bruser.”