Kira Cochrane 

Ayelet Waldman: Motherhood has become an Olympic sport

Maternal ambivalence has long been a central theme of Ayelet Waldman's work – she tells Kira Cochrane that parenting is now ultra competitive
  
  

Novelist Ayelet Waldman with husband Michael Chabon and kids
Ayelet Waldman with her husband Michael Chabon and their children Photograph: PR

One day in spring 2005, Ayelet Waldman opened her inbox to discover 1,000 new messages. Must be a mistake, she thought. In fact, it was the start of a deluge that would include venomous online comment threads, angry notes left on her front gate, an appearance before a furious Oprah Winfrey Show audience, and calls for her children to be removed by social services.

The root of all this was an essay she had written for an anthology on motherhood, which she expected to be little-read. But it was picked up by the New York Times and, one Sunday, millions of people learned over breakfast that she loved her husband "more than I love my children". She often engaged in a pastime she called "God Forbid" she added, in which she imagined what would happen if she lost a family member. "I imagine myself consumed, destroyed by the pain. And yet, in these imaginings, there is always a future beyond the child's death ... But my imagination simply fails me when I try to picture a future beyond my husband's death. Of course, I would have to live. I have four children, a mortgage, work to do. But I can imagine no joy without my husband."

It launched Waldman into the public eye with a thunderclap she says was horrifying. She speaks to me from her home in California, where she lives with her three youngest children and much-loved husband, Pulitzer prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon. Maternal ambivalence has long been a central theme of her writing – "I thought I was going to be the Philip Roth of maternal ambivalence," she says, "I thought I was going to write about the same thing until I died or decided to quit writing" – and if her critics have focused on the ambivalence side of the equation, it's clear she's consumed by family life.

The wit and dexterity with which she discusses her family recalls her career as a public defence lawyer, which she gave up when her oldest children were young. Waldman has just published two books in the UK. There's an ambitious, perceptive novel, Love and Treasure – which takes in the Holocaust, feminism and psychoanalysis – and Bad Mother, a collection of essays.

Bad Mother initially came out in the US in 2009, but she was told there was no need for it in the UK, that the policing of mothers and motherhood wasn't an issue here. She laughs dryly. Over the course of 18 essays, Waldman writes about the monotony of caring for a baby, the malignancy of guilt, and her decision to end a pregnancy, when an amniocentesis at four months revealed "a triple chromosome where there should have been only two". She writes, always, with unusual frankness, reflecting her philosophy that, "mothers should tell the truth, even – no, especially – when the truth is difficult".

The essays address the guilt and shame many mothers feel, the fear that they are failing and messing up their kids. It reflects an interesting moment, a halfway point in the feminist revolution. On the one hand, many women are forging brilliant careers outside the home – on the other, there is extreme cultural pressure to be the perfect mother. "I don't think it's a coincidence," says Waldman, "that just at the moment we have recognised that we want some professional fulfilment outside the confines of the home, motherhood has become an Olympic sport. I don't know about your mother, but mine would basically open the door and say, 'See you at dinner.' Parenting was not a verb back when I was a girl. And now the stakes are so high, the way the game is played is such madness that how could we possibly do it all? The guilt and shame seems inevitable. How did we come to a point where not baking is a political act?"

If there is any theme to the essays, she says, it's "let's give each other a break". In the book, she discusses the idea that the policing of mothers is patriarchal and political, but concludes that "in this area at least, we women are the primary authors of our own subjugation". She recounts a day when she was standing in a queue, feeding her youngest child from a bottle, and a woman leaned forward to comment, "Breast is best."

"I was feeding purple-hued breast milk to my son that I had pumped at 4am," she says, "because, God forbid, this boy, who could not actually breastfeed, should ever have formula pass his lips. Every memory I have from the first six months of his life is misery. It's just so tragic. I've gone from the woman who breastfed one son until he was nearly three, to the one who says to every new mother, 'There's nothing wrong with formula!'"

Waldman was born in Israel, to parents from Montreal. In the late 1960s, when she was two, her mother insisted the family move back to Canada. "She drew the line in the sand, and said, 'I can't live in this country any more. There's just too much war. It's too frightening.'"

Raised as an atheist and Zionist, she grew up reading one Holocaust memoir after another, she says. She lost her faith in Zionism at 21, and it took two decades as a writer to feel she could address the Holocaust in her fiction, terrified of writing "Holocaust kitsch". Love and Treasure follows a peacock pendant on its path from Salzburg in 1945 to present-day Budapest and Israel, then back to 1913 Budapest. The first part focuses on the Hungarian Gold Train, run by the Nazis, which carried the belongings of Hungarian Jews towards Berlin, before being seized by US forces.

Did researching and writing the book change her feelings about her Jewish identity? "Well, yeah. I keep asking this question: what is it? If it's not a religious belief, and it isn't the kind of Zionism I was raised with, what is the source of my Jewish identity – which is deep and profound. Is it merely a theoretical sense of previous persecution? Because I've never been persecuted. I've really, objectively, had a charmed life ... I don't believe in God, I don't engage in Jewish practice – although my children have been barmitzvahed and we had these lovely services for them. So what's left?"

She began her career writing a genre series called the Mommy-Track Mysteries, and has said in the past that she and Chabon, who share a study, and write television pilot shows together, have never felt competitive. I ask if that's changed with this, her fourth literary novel, which has been receiving brilliant reviews. "A teeny tiny bit, for the first time," she says. "Well, not competitive so much, but, for example, somebody in a review today called part of this novel a romance, and Michael and I raged about this idea because in every one of his novels there's a love story, but no one would ever call it a romance."

Does she feel the same way about Chabon as she did when she wrote that essay that launched her into the public eye? "Even more so," she says.

"I just sent my eldest off to university, and my husband and I wept and wept for a month. We kept breaking down, the whole family. At one point, we were at a restaurant, and my younger son had his head down on the table, crying, and my husband and I were both crying, and finally Michael said, 'You know, she's not dead, people. We need to calm down. She'll be back in a month for vacation.'

"But what I realised is that we've launched her on her life and we've done a good job of it – and so she's no longer focused on us, and that's as it should be. Once that happens with the last one – he just turned 11 yesterday, so we still have a way to go – what's left? If you've focused all your time and energy on these children, to the exclusion of your partner, what's left when they're gone?

"I don't want to be one of those mothers, desperately calling their children, leaving ever increasingly frantic messages that they will then upload to become Twitter memes."

She puts on the voice of a mother on the brink. "'Darling, just call your mother! Just call her once! Just tell her how you are!'"

 

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