I’m a Better Mother Than My Mother
And I’m proud of that.
I arrived in our family in 1972, adopted a year after I was born. My brother was four years older than me, so he’d been around a while. In I came, just beginning to walk on wobbly legs, unsure of myself but exploring the world around me with a speed unlike most newcomers to a family. Here I was, not a little ball of unmoving, gurgling bliss, but a mobile mass of one-year-old energy.
It was January, and therefore mid-school year. My mother was a high school teacher. I’m not sure, since I’ve never been told, if she took any leave. I don’t think she did, because in the seventies no employer was progressive enough to think of adoption as legitimate maternity. Maybe a day or two? I’m not really clear on that, but what I do know is that within a few days at most, she was back in her high school classroom teaching American Literature to tenth graders, not missing her stride.
I was then in the care of a day-nanny, and would be for the foreseeable future. My parents were not wealthy, mind you. And it was the seventies. Working mothers were a novelty, not the norm. But as my mother repeated many times throughout my upbringing,
“I was a much better mother because I worked. I needed those few hours to be an adult.”
