The Monstrous-Enough Mother

Spending the weekend parenting and reading Claire Dederer's Monsters

Yesterday I started keeping a note on my phone for thoughts or ideas—concise little phrases, because that’s how I’ve trained my brain to think—that as recently as a month ago I might’ve tweeted. But suddenly we don’t really do that anymore. Twitter is broken and breaking and no one’s there, why put my dear thoughts out into the cold vacuum like that? (Why was I ever doing that is an entirely valid question.) So I had a thought, put it in a note, put my phone back in my pocket, and kept going with the day.

The day was Sunday, and the thought was the latest flavor of my weekend angst, the base of which is what I want to be able to do things on the weekend, but instead I have to parent. It’s not even parenting, not so active, but I have to be home because Miles is home, have to be present because he’s there, but he doesn’t want to interact with me, we’re not that present, he wants to play with cars and wants me to play with them, too. And so every weekend that we find ourselves there, my soul dies a little.

Yes of course: when we leave the house and do things it’s a thousand times better. But Saturday was smoky and Sunday was rainy and so there we were. And you may be saying: this is his way of trying to connect! Look. I know when he’s trying to connect. It’s when we play bunnies on the couch, or read together, or talk to each other. The car thing is he wants to be moving a car around on the carpet and me moving another car around on the carpet.

So Saturday I listened to a Dr. Becky podcast episode called “It’s Okay If You Don’t Like to Play” (while, honestly, I did housework almost all day and Tanner and Miles played with legos), and then Sunday I stayed up hours past my bedtime to finish Claire Dederer’s Monsters, because about halfway through the book it became about trying to be an artist and a mother, like she’d known the note I put in my phone at some point Sunday morning.

The note was about the stupid finitude of time, the zero sum equation: If I needed or wanted to steal (steal!) a couple of hours on Sunday to catch up on work, to get ahead, god forbid to write, then that’s necessarily a couple of hours of worse time for Tanner, a couple hours closer to exhaustion or burnout. And, as I wrote in the note, “It sucks.”

Dederer: “I’m aware of my own failings as a writer … but a little part of me has to ask: If I were more selfish, would my work be better? Should I aspire to greater selfishness? … Does one identity [writer/mother] fatally interrupt the other? Is your work making you a less-good mom? That’s the question you ask yourself all the time. But also: is your motherhood making you a less good writer? That question is a little more uncomfortable.”

Dederer writes having teenage kids, so maybe as the mother of a four-year-old I’m less squeamish, because not only will I dive into this question without even testing the water temperature first, I’ll extend it: Is your motherhood making you a less good person? Not good as in moral, good as in complete, as in okay, as in living your own life. I didn’t want to steal two hours Sunday to make art, I wanted to steal two hours to clean up interview transcriptions, to do work. Saturday I stole hours (traded them for Tanner’s looming lego burnout) to fold laundry and clean out the fridge, not for housewife brownie points but to quiet a couple of the voices in my head, All the tupperwares are in the fridge holding rotten things!!! Not anymore, so shh.

Monsters isn’t about motherhood, it’s about “what are we to do with the art of monstrous men,” but Dederer is a memoirist while she is a critic. At first the personal is her love of Polanski’s movies, her personal approach to the critical stance. But she’s an artist just like her subjects, and she eventually asks, “Am I a monster?” And motherhood is the territory where this question lives for her.

What else is in my notes app from the weekend—two thoughts from in the midst of reading. (I wasn’t a total social media ascetic, I did instagram a few pictures of the book, pages from that same chapter on motherhood.) First: “Realizing you’re going to finish the whole book tonight with the same inevitability as locking eyes with someone and knowing that hours from now you’ll end the night kissing them on the sidewalk out in front of the bar.” Then: “Fitting: because I stayed up so late reading, I didn’t go upstairs before Miles rolled over and knocked clamorously out of bed some of the several medium-sized toy tricks he’d fallen asleep with.” But he didn’t wake himself up, he was fine, so maybe that’s some sort of moral.