The Bitch in the House

26 Women Tell the Truth About Sex, Solitude, Work, Motherhood, and Marriage

Cathi Hanauer

• Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780060936464
• eBook ISBN:
  9780062276186
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Literary Essays
• Index: Social Sciences

Virginia Woolf introduced us to the "Angel in the House", now prepare to meet... The Bitch In the House.

This e-book includes an exclusive excerpt from The Bitch is Back: Older, Wiser, and Getting Happier, a second collection of essays from nine of the contributors featured in The Bitch in the House and from sixteen captivating new voices.

Women today have more choices than at any time in history, yet many smart, ambitious, contemporary women are finding themselves angry, dissatisfied, stressed out. Why are they dissatisfied? And what do they really want? These questions form the premise of this passionate, provocative, funny, searingly honest collection of original essays in which twenty-six women writers—ranging in age from twenty-four to sixty-five, single and childless or married with children or four times divorced—invite readers into their lives, minds, and bedrooms to talk about the choices they've made, what's working, and what's not.

With wit and humor, in prose as poetic and powerful as it is blunt and dead-on, these intriguing women offer details of their lives that they've never publicly revealed before, candidly sounding off on:

• The difficult decisions and compromises of living with lovers, marrying, staying single and having children

• The perpetual tug of war between love and work, family and career

• The struggle to simultaneously care for ailing parents and a young family

• The myth of co-parenting

• Dealing with helpless mates and needy toddlers

• The constrictions of traditional women's roles as well as the cliches of feminism

• Anger at laid-back live-in lovers content to live off a hardworking woman's checkbook

• Anger at being criticized for one's weight

• Anger directed at their mothers, right and wrong

• And—well—more anger...

"This book was born out of anger," begins Cathi Hanauer, but the end result is an intimate sharing of experience that will move, amuse, and enlighten. The Bitch in the House is a perfect companion for your students as they plot a course through the many voices of modern feminism. This is the sound of the collective voice of successful women today-in all their anger, grace, and glory.

From The Bitch In the House:

"I believed myself to be a feminist, and I vowed never to fall into the same trap of domestic boredom and servitude that I saw my mother as being fully entrenched in; never to settle for a life that was, as I saw it, lacking independence, authority, and respect." —E.S. Maduro, page 5

"Here are a few things people have said about me at the office: 'You're unflappable.' 'Are you ever in a bad mood?' Here are things people—okay, the members of my family—have said about me at home: ''Mommy is always grumpy.' 'Why are you so tense?' 'You're too mean to live in this house and I want you to go back to work for the rest of your life!'" —Kristin van Ogtrop, page 161

"I didn't want to be a bad mother I wanted to be my mother-safe, protective, rational, calm-without giving up all my anger, because my anger fueled me." — Elissa Schappell, page 195

PART III

Mommy Maddest

One of the reasons it’s hard to express satisfaction with your life when you have children is that everywhere, every day there is anger . . . the quick summer storm kind of anger, the slow burn of anger, the underground anger that sometimes affects what you do or say without your even knowing that it was there. There are the terrible twos when a child asserting independence refuses to wear mittens on a freezing cold day and for a moment your frustration turns you into a wild thing. There’s the other kind of anger that comes when you need sleep and the child wakes or you need to soak in the bath and the child wants you to see his block tower. . . . Anger is everywhere in the rough-and-tumble of child rearing as you find out what you can’t tolerate, what kind of a demon witch you really are, what causes you to flare, to stifle fury or to stuff it back down the throat, to let it out all of a sudden. . . . None of this is simple. Domestic squalor is dark and serious. It leaves behind guilt or sadness. Anger bestows on you a portrait of your soul. It is often followed by guilt. The portrait is more detailed if you have children.

—Anne Roiphe, Fruitful: A Real Mother in the Modern World

My Mother’s Ring

CAUGHT BETWEEN TWO FAMILIES

Helen Schulman

MY MOTHER WAS starving the day she got married. Before the wedding, she says, she was locked away by herself in a little room so that my father wouldn’t see her—bad luck and all that. He was out on the floor, eating and drinking, greeting their guests. After the ceremony, no one thought to save her a plate of food; there was so much hobnobbing to do, so many people to talk to. So when it was all over and they were finally on their own, my parents got into their car and went out for pizza. They were wearing their wedding rings, of course—identical rings, silver and black and wide, with blocky silver letters on them that spell out in Hebrew “I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine.” At the restaurant my mother went into the ladies’ room to wash her hands. She took off the ring and left it on the sink. The night she got married my mother lost her wedding ring in some pizza parlor bathroom. You don’t have to be a Freudian psychiatrist to get the significance, but that is exactly what my father was, a Freudian psychiatrist.

That’s the first story I want to tell you about those rings. The second starts here: Three years ago—forty-two years after my parents’ wedding night—I was scheduled, along with my husband and kids, to leave for California the next morning to visit my mother-in-law for Christmas. Here was my life: thirty-eight years old, married, mother of two children, ages three and one; teaching graduate-level fiction writing in New York, where I lived with my family and where my parents also lived, across town. So that night, before I left town, I went to visit my parents. My mother and I were in their living room when we heard my father politely call her name from the bedroom. “Gloria,” he said. We somehow both knew something was wrong. We ran in and found him on the floor, shaken but not hurt. It took both of us to lift him back onto the bed. It was the first time I carried the man who had carried me so many times.

So I found it very hard to leave my parents and my city that next day. But my husband and my kids were counting on spending Christmas with his family, so we went. Once I was across the country I proceeded to call my parents morning and night. It seemed that with every phone call, my father was getting worse: his memory was diminishing, his sense of balance was off, there was an undiagnosed stiffness in his limbs. The doctors were thinking Parkinson’s. Each time my mother answered I felt as if I had sent her a life preserver. The day we were coming home, I called them from California before we left and then again when we arrived in New York that night. I asked to speak to my father, but my mother said he was too tired. He was lying next to her in the bed, but he just liked to hear her talking to me.

About five hours later the phone rang once more. “Daddy fell again,” said my mother. But this was a different kind of fall. “He’s having brain surgery right now.” He’d needed to go to the bathroom, she told me. He hadn’t wanted to wake her. At the hospital, the emergency room doctor—a Jewish girl, said my mother—had asked him who was president and what his own name was and he’d said to my mother, “I’m sorry, Glor,” because he couldn’t answer the questions. Then he went into a coma.

It was the middle of the night. “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes,” I said. But I took a shower. Without that shower, I don’t think I could have faced it. We had been traveling all day; once we’d gotten the kids home and unpacked and gone through the mail and gone out to buy milk and combed through the phone messages and I had spoken with my parents, I’d just collapsed into bed. By the time my mother called, I could smell myself. After I got out of the shower, I told my husband what had happened, and what needed to be done with the children in the morning. I knew they would be very upset to wake up and not find me home. They’d never woken up to not find me home before. But I went to the hospital to be with my parents.

My daughter loves my father; he had been an active, doting grandfather until his health began to deteriorate. Now that he had fallen and there had been such terrible damage to his brain, the situation was devastating. If he survived, none of us knew what kind of shape he would be in—would he continue to resemble Karen Ann Quinlan? Would he ever walk and talk again? Would he ever be able to play with my children in his same thoughtful and loving manner? How was I to discuss the situation with a three-year-old child? I needed help.

After my father fell, I made an appointment with the social worker at my daughter’s nursery school; the twelve-thousand-dollar tuition has its benefits. So I sat on the social worker’s couch in my daughter’s school and explained as much as I could about my father and my daughter, and as I was explaining I began to cry. “Look,” said this woman, “if you are lucky enough to live this long and have children of your own and feel as attached to a parent as you are to yours, then you are a fortunate person.” But at that moment, I didn’t feel fortunate. I felt angry and scared and devastated and overwhelmed and utterly torn. I listened to her words, but I couldn’t hear them properly, couldn’t take them in. Right then, lucky was not how I would have characterized myself.

Months later, when my father had made a recovery of a fluctuating, roller-coastery nature, I took my children to a playground and met my parents there for a picnic. My father was in a wheelchair but, being my father, wanted to try to walk. My mother was playing with my daughter on the jungle gym. I was guiding my father back to his wheelchair when I looked up and saw my son hanging precipitously off a climbing apparatus. Where was King Solomon when I needed him? If I let go of my father, who wavered like a feather in the air, he would have no choice but to fall. If I didn’t run to my son, he would surely topple and hit the playground’s cement hardtop.

What would you have done?

My son fell to the ground, scraping both his palms.

I held on to my father.

Sometimes, when he was still in the hospital, I would spend the entire morning by my father’s side. My mother came every day, but the mornings seemed especially hard for her. She couldn’t sleep at night, and then there were a million phone calls—friends and colleagues, relatives, private nurses to employ, the nightmare labyrinth of health insurance companies to navigate, her own fear. I thought she appreciated my early arrival. I would call her and tell her what to expect when she finally came in, disheveled and shaky, lipstickless, still determined to protect her husband. So the morning was my time.

When he was awake, I had to tell him over and over again what had happened to him. Remember that movie Groundhog Day? Each time I told him the story—you fell, you had two brain surgeries, you had a seizure, you are in the hospital—the story was fresh for him. Each time I told him the story he was devastated all over again. But for me, the story took on a rote sameness. I told him that story ten times a day. Sometimes I varied the details to entertain myself. Usually, after I told him the story he would pass out. He was passed out this particular morning and I was waiting for a doctor to come and evaluate him for the hospital’s rehabilitation unit. If they did not accept him, we would be forced to move him to whatever nursing home in the five boroughs became available next. My father could not sit up, he could not eat, some days he did not achieve consciousness. He was hardly a candidate for rehab, but in a nursing home he would die. I needed to find this doctor and convince him to find a bed for my father in rehab. Finally, the nurse told me the doctor would come in twenty minutes. I decided to run out and get a cup of coffee.

On the way back, I saw an old woman hyperventilating in the lobby of the hospital. She looked about to faint. It was my mother. Very distraught. What should I do, help her and miss my chance with the doctor? I guided her over to a marble bench. I laid her down. I said, “Don’t you fall, too,” and gave her my cup of coffee. Then I left her there, alone on the cold marble, and I returned to my father.

There are no stories from this time about me and my husband.

What happens to a person when she suddenly finds herself more powerful than the most powerful people in her life? My parents, who after all gave me life, shepherded me through a childhood that surprisingly seemed to extend itself way into adulthood, gave me love and advice, lent me money, cared for me when I was sick, baby-sat my kids so my husband and I could go to the movies . . . my parents were suddenly both weak, vulnerable, small. As a middle child in a family of strong personalities, I had often felt overwhelmed, too sensitive, too dependent. Once, when I’d published my first book and I was looking for even more ego stroking, I’d asked my father what he’d thought I would be when I grew up. He said, “You were like a little flower. I thought someone would take care of you.” But now I was taking charge, now I was taking care of everyone. It was a stunning role for me. My father had required six pints of blood during his surgery. One afternoon, as a break from sitting by his side, I decided to return the favor and went to the hospital blood lab. As I watched my blood flow out of my body and into that little plastic sack, I thought, Now you need me, you even need my blood for your survival, and the very thought was more dizzying than the blood loss. It made me feel very strong. And like everything else that was so conflicting and complicated during that time, it also made me feel very, very lost.

The bitch in the house? I was the bitch in the hospital. My mother talked to the nurses, the social workers, the doctors, told them about how my father had worked in that very hospital for forty years, about how, when he was a resident on call, she’d sneak into one of the residents’ rooms at night and sleep with him, how twice a week they would have dinner together in the cafeteria. She tried to engage them, to warm them up to us. Not me. I was cold and animal. Each time the nurse brought my father medication I asked what it was and why they were giving it to him. I begged the physical therapist to come and see him, even though he couldn’t walk or talk or sit up or even lift his arm, because if someone didn’t keep him moving his pneumonia would worsen and kill him. I yelled at the little speech therapist with the curly hair who wouldn’t give him any liquids because she was afraid he’d aspirate them, but who wouldn’t give him an aspiration test because she was too busy. I shouted at the intake worker that my father gave forty years of his life to this hospital and goddamnit they better find a bed for him in rehab. I begged, reasoned, yelled. I never gave up. I exercised his limbs while he was unconscious, and when he was conscious I begged him to take a sip of thickened juice and prattled on for hours about my kids, who were back home without me. I poured every drop of myself into the big black hole that took up so shockingly little of his hospital bed. And when, after ten hours of that, I slogged back home to my family, my mother would call and say, “Daddy woke up and wondered why you haven’t come to see him today.”

I had two children and I had two parents. Oh, and I was supposed to be working. I had a job. That semester, I was supposed to be writing a movie, about a schizophrenic who pushed an innocent young woman to her death. So at night, after I’d bathed and fed the children and put them to bed, after I did the laundry and the bills, after I’d ignored the phone messages from my friends and made dinner for my husband—elaborate gourmetish things like risottos and fish in parchment, just to remind him that he had a wife—I read trial transcripts and autopsy reports and everything I could about schizophrenia, until I passed out, dirty clothes still on my body, reference books in hand.

My mother-in-law came to New York to visit, and my husband and I went out to dinner with her and a couple of her girlfriends. One of them asked me about the kids, and then she asked me about my work, and then she asked me about my parents. “You know what you are?” she said, after I’d answered all her questions. “You’re part of the sandwich generation.”

What did she mean by that? She meant if we hadn’t had children so late in life, if we’d had children at the normal age—say, twenty-five, twenty-eight—our parents could have helped us when the kids were little, and only staggered their way downhill toward helplessness after the children were grown. I was thirty-five, my husband thirty-eight, when our first child was born; I had my career, I’d already published four books, I kicked in my part of the family income. I hadn’t planned to wait so long to have kids, but that was beside the point now. Now I was a victim of my own arrogance and biology, taking care of both of my families, the first one and this one, at the same time. And didn’t I resent that? asked the friend. After all, I’d waited so long, this was my time to enjoy my children. I thought, Resentment is the wrong word. But what was the right one? I didn’t know where to be, who to go to, who needed me more. One evening, when I came home from the hospital, I started to sob in the kitchen. “Why are you crying, Mommy?” my daughter asked. “Because your grandpa is so sick,” I said. My daughter took a napkin from the table, which was set with a dinner I had not made for her, and used it to wipe my eyes. Then she said, “Drink a little bit of water.” So I obeyed her and drank from her sippy cup. Then she said, “Now don’t talk about it anymore.”

“Those are my genes,” my rather reserved Waspy husband said proudly. I was almost startled by his voice. I hadn’t even noticed him there in the room, hadn’t noticed him for so long.

That year, the only time I felt free of either set of my familial obligations was the few times I got to a yoga class and the teacher said, “You have to practice the art of nonattachment.” And so I did. I practiced the art of nonattachment with my head on the ground and my feet in the air, and I floated off the planet in my mind, untethered by the very people who make me feel most tethered to the earth.

My father came home from rehab after six weeks, brain-damaged but doing better. He could eat, he could walk a little, he could talk, although he often couldn’t find the right words to express what he wanted to say, and he had a great deal of trouble following or sustaining a conversation. As the weeks and months passed, this situation changed and did not change. Sometimes my father could walk, sometimes he couldn’t. Sometimes he could carry on a conversation, sometimes not. Sometimes he possessed all the wisdom and humanity of his being, and other times I looked in his eyes and it felt like he wasn’t there. On those days he looked terrified to me. Several months of this seesawing later, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer.

It was decided that I would accompany her to the hospital for her mastectomy while my brother, my partner in all things terrible and hard, stayed at home with my father. The morning of the surgery, as I was rushing out of the apartment, my two-year-old son got his fingers stuck in a closet door. For a few long horrible seconds, my husband and I didn’t know how to get them out; if we moved the door in either direction it would pinch harder. You never heard such screams. Finally, I just closed my eyes and said to my husband, “Just do it.” Whatever my husband did—I don’t know, I had my eyes closed—the kid’s fingers came out of the door. They were red and flat and my son cried his heart out in my arms. But I had to get to the hospital, the same hospital my father had been discharged from just months before, the hospital where my mother was now being operated on. I had to leave my kid to go help my mother. I made the choice. I disengaged my son’s arms from around my neck, handed him over to my husband, and walked out the door.

Here’s the end of the second story about my parents’ weddin...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Prologue
• I. Me, Myself, and I
• II. For Better and Worse
• III. Mommy Maddest
• IV. Look at Me Now
• Copyright Notices
• Afterword
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Excerpts from The Bitch Is Back
• About the Author
• Back Ad
• Praise
• Other Books by
• Copyright
• About the Publisher