Read Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace for Free Online Page B

football and take off for some downtime in his office. (In retrospect, perhaps I should have examined more closely the source of his early evening desperation.) After not seeing me all day, the baby wanted to play, she wanted to show me things, she wanted me to get down on the floor and roll around with her. This was not a baby who was interested in cuddling. She didn’t want to snuggle up in her mother’s arms. She wanted to
move
. But all I was capable of doing after my long day at work was lying there, virtually inert.
    One night, in desperation, I turned on a videotape of
The Lion King
. To my surprise, Sophie scrambled up on the couch next to me, cuddled up, and sat, rapt and still, for the next eighty-seven minutes.
    When I got home from work the next evening, she glanced at the television with a cocked eyebrow. Then she roared.
    “Do you want to watch
The Lion King
?” I asked hopefully.
    She roared again.
    For the next month, every night after work Sophie would roar like a lion cub, I would pop in the video, and we would veg out in front of the television in a state of mutual, trancelike bliss. Until, finally, one day, the music came on and I began singing, and found that I was able, from memory, to recite the entire movie. All of it. Every song, every line of dialogue, from the first “
Nants ingonyama bagithi baba”
(“Here comes a lion, Father,” for those of you who don’t speak Swahili or are, perhaps, better parents than I) to the final “Circle of life, circle of life.” I knew it all by heart. And Sophie, who otherwise possessed no more than the vocabulary one would expect of a precocious toddler, was right there with me.
    I quit work the next day. My boss, one of the best lawyers I’d ever met, a woman with two children, a woman who had not allowed her babies to interfere with her career, a woman who had not betrayed her feminist mother, smiled at me and said, “Why don’t you take a leave of absence?”
    “No,” I insisted. “I’m quitting. I want to stay home with my kid. I want to go to Gymboree and take her to the zoo. I want to put her down for her nap and be there when she wakes up. I want to be a full-time, stay-at-home mom.”
    “See you in a few weeks,” she said.
    I packed up my office, leaving nothing behind this time. I had no intention of returning.
    I did not have the courage to break the news to my mother. Instead, I found a job teaching a class at Loyola Law School, a few hours once a week for about what I would have earned at Star bucks, and informed my mother that I was merely in the process of switching careers.
    My mother was not pleased. She began a campaign to bring meback to my senses, her initial concern swiftly turning into anger. What was I
doing
? Did I not understand that I was throwing it all away? I was going to regret it. I was going to be miserable. This would be the worst mistake I ever made. Did I not remember what had happened to her?
    I dug in my heels. This was
my
decision, I told her. I had an obligation to my baby. I wanted to be there for Sophie (with the implication, of course, that she, my mother, who had gone back to work when I was a baby, had not been there for me). This was the right thing to do for my family, and nothing she said could dissuade me.
    I never let her know that within a week of quitting my job at the federal public defender, I had already begun to lose my mind. There was no way I would admit to her that the sheer monotony of caring for a baby was killing me. It turns out that entertaining someone with a two-minute attention span for fourteen hours is infinitely harder than trying to convince a jury of Orange County Republicans that your illegal immigrant client had no idea that the cardboard box he was carrying contained eight kilos of cocaine. Negotiating with a prosecutor over a plea agreement had nothing on trying to convince a two-year-old to go down for a nap. And cross-examining a scumbag confidential informant was a whole