In the Judith Warner age you are a mother who buys cookies for a school event or bakes them or bakes them with some degree of irony. You either "interact" with your infant as she watches the "Baby Einstein" video, as the box tells you to, or you pop it in and go take a shower. You either wear overalls and a ponytail proudly or you apologize for dressing like a 6-year-old. You read "The Runaway Bunny" and are either horrified by the oppressive mother bunny or think she's not protecting her little bunny enough. You drive to three different soccer leagues or make your kids play in the yard for once.
Whoever you are, you conduct your daily routine of dress, feed, get off to school, feed again, bathe, tuck in with a new degree of self-consciousness. One Washington woman spent the night before Valentine's Day baking cupcakes with her two sons. She woke up the next morning to read Warner's New York Times op-ed piece on how we now celebrate the holiday for our children instead of our husbands. "Is our national romance with our children sucking the emotional life out of our marriages?" Warner asked. The woman dumped the cupcakes in the garbage and declared herself a failure.
Judith Warner signs copies of her book at Washington's private Sheridan School. Many of the women she interviewed live in Washington's upscale neighborhoods.
(Photos Michael Robinson-chavez -- The Washington Post)
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One woman came up to Warner at a book signing and declared she was firing her occupational therapist -- one of those experts familiar to upper-class parents who cure your child of low muscle tone or lagging gross motor skills. A group of mothers in a preschool hallway discuss the afternoon schedule, make fun of themselves for perfectly fitting the stereotype. "I'm 'driving to soccer' today. What are you doing?" drawing quotation marks in the air.
"Oh, 'tennis lessons.' And then 'ballet.' "
One Murch mom bristles at the tragic poetry of this sentence by Warner: "I put my elder daughter in a D.C. public school and watched the light in her eyes go dim." Oh, she's too good for our school. (Warner says she liked Murch, but it was just not right for her daughter.) Lisa Terry, another Murch mom, is the mom in the book who falls down a Metro escalator and has to be rushed to the hospital, and whose only thought is how she can get her son the Yu-Gi-Oh! cards she promised him. "She's so right," she says about Warner. "It's insane, all the scrambling that we do. We try so hard to be perfect moms."
Other women read the anonymous quotes in the book and recoil.
"I don't want to be associated with women who panic over playground politics because that's not me and I think it sounds self-indulgent and precious," says Betsy Cavendish, former legal director for the abortion rights group NARAL Pro-Choice America.
Ultimately the women divide between those who agree with Warner that there must be an Answer -- that if only we had enough paid maternity leave and decent child care and progressive taxation we could get out of "this Mess," as she calls it -- and those such as Cavendish who think this conflict can't be wished away, that on days we work late or take a kid-free vacation we should accept guilt as the price of our satisfaction.
On this day interrupted by snow, Warner is scrambling like many of the women she writes about. She's just dropped her two daughters, 4 and 7, off at school, which opened two hours late. She sneaks in a little shoveling, then tucks the shovel discreetly behind a tree. Then she sits down, for these few hours of childless peace, to do her interviews.
Warner and her journalist husband live in an upper Northwest house decorated in a tight French style, with formal sofas and toile patterns and fresh flowers. Except for one doll left behind in the sunroom, the mess of her kids -- drawings, lunchboxes, letters from school -- is confined to the kitchen. One of the ironies of the book's success is her new role as a Guru of Chill because, she readily admits, "I'm the least relaxed person on Earth."
In her book Warner intentionally tells stories that put her on the high end of neurotic obsessive. "I didn't want to be the highly cultured writer looking down on your silly little lives," she says. "Pretty much all the criticism I direct outward could be directed at me."
Warner describes spending night after night arranging toys by color and size in the basement. She tells how she became paralyzed trying to decide whether to order the basic or deluxe Hello Kitty birthday package for her soon-to-be 3-year-old's party.
She writes about turning into a human TV set trying to constantly entertain her new infant.
Warner's intentional vulnerability opens her up to psychoanalysis by her readers. (Hoping perhaps that if she's dark, or troubled, or prone to high drama, the flaw is in her and not them). Women who've read the book wonder whether she suffered from eating disorders (she did, from age 12 to 23). Several people interviewed for this story pointed to something Warner wrote earlier, something in retrospect she supplies the adjective for:
