A Mom

A black and white cutout of a mother and child under a flowering tree

There’s a photograph that High Country News published when Charles Bowden died of Bowden talking to Edward Abbey, author of Desert Solitaire and the reason so many of us fell in love with the West, and Dave Foreman, one of the founders of Earth First!. There they are: three men of the West, champions of its wild spaces and untamed, unknown, untrammeled (in the lovely word from the Wilderness Act) places through their writing and their activism. Those three are in the foreground, named. But there are three other people in the picture, though you won’t see them unless you take a long glance down Abbey’s porch from the place where the three men are standing, a long glance all the way down to the end, where a woman sits on a porch swing with a baby in her lap and a toddler next to her in a stroller. The unnamed woman is Clarke Cartwright, Abbey’s fifth and final wife, and the baby and the toddler are their children, children who won’t grow up to know their father very well, for he is old already in this photo and doesn’t have many more years of his hard living life left to live. One Life at a Time, Please, one of his books is titled, but he tried to cram fifty into one.

The last time I was in Moab I saw Clarke Cartwright listed in the phone book, and when I saw the piece on Bowden and this photo, I almost looked her up and called to ask what she thought, but I didn’t, because I figure she must get nothing but phone calls about Abbey. I was surprised to see she was even in the phone book, but then everyone I have ever looked up in the phone book in Moab has been there, and I’ve never called any of them. It’s that kind of place.

A year or so later I tried to do an interview with a man who had written a book about searching for Abbey’s grave. I never did anything with it because I wasn’t happy with how it went. I asked why he hadn’t talked to any women, and he said (as I recall) that he’d talked to everyone he could find who would talk to him. That made sense and yet I was still pissed off, and I couldn’t figure out why, and because I couldn’t work out what I was angry about, I just shoved the interview transcript aside and never did anything more with it, and I started trying to write about the picture of Abbey and Bowden and Foreman and Clarke Cartwright instead.

* * *

The other day (or night—I don’t really sleep anymore) a local acquaintance posted to ask if anyone wanted to start a book club for working moms about advancing their careers. Right after that—or right before it—she posted yet another link to that book about why women my age can’t sleep, and I wanted to ask if this book club for working moms would be meeting at 3 am when we all can’ sleep because of fucking perimenopause, or whatever pop psychology reasons lie behind the idea that somehow women of my generation are the first in history to have trouble sleeping at night.

That same day a local friend said his Facebook was all Bernie and he wanted some other perspectives, and could anyone offer any? It was late at night, but I typed this up on my phone:

Okay, here’s the deal. I love Bernie. But some days I wonder if Bernie has ever had to find a babysitter. I often reflect on a time when I was having a meeting with you and another friend and I had to go to make daycare pickup and you guys both said “oh, we’d better go so our wives don’t get mad at us.” And I thought of what a different life that would be if I could be marginally irresponsible and the consequence would just be a spouse being mad at me versus my whole good standing in society.

That was just one day, and I don’t want to act like I think it’s every day of your lives. But I think it is every day in the lives of male politicians, and thus as much as I dislike identity politics, hearing Elizabeth Warren talk about having to potty train her daughter in five days so she could go to law school reminds me so much of what my mom had to do (find not just childcare but overnight childcare every fourth night for months running) to go to medical school. (And we are all of us privileged white women—and it’s still hard.)

I’ll still take Bernie over Klobuchar because I agree with him far more. But it’s not as enthusiastic a take as it was four years ago.

The result was exactly the sort of argument that makes me never want to write anything or post anything on the internet (even though I’ve been doing so publicly under my own name for twenty-one years), the sort of argument that makes me want to apologize to everyone, delete everything I’ve ever posted, and hide under my bed—or run away to Utah—until everyone has forgotten who I am or that I ever lived. But of course I can’t run away to Utah, because I am a mom.

I hate being a mom.

I hate that someone posted a “Valentine’s candy for moms” meme today and lots of people liked it and shared it, and all the candy hearts said things like “put your socks on.” I hate that I am for some reason part of a group called BAD MOMS where (get this) I was once called a bad mom. I hate Mothers Day, even when people nobly try to reclaim it for the anti-war movement (a lost cause if there ever was one), and I hate all the nouns acting as adjectives that have been applied to the word mom. Soccer mom. Helicopter mom. Tiger mom.

I want to be in the foreground in that picture, not the background. I want my name in the bold face type. I want to have (as an old Scott Carrier monologue put it) no interest in taking part in the market economy or the democratic process.

But I can’t. And I’m afraid even to type the whole sentence here that I had planned for fear of what readers may think of me and the choices I’ve made, but I will: But I can’t, because I’m a mom.

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