By admin 
What they had in mind was not complicated. Falling in love had been a snap, an act of faith in gravity. Other basic laws of nature, surely, would apply along the way. Details would resolve themselves. They would live in the city or a suburb, wherever they pleased. They would make room for two children, maybe three—unblemished surfaces upon which they would imprint their best selves. Somebody, a “nurturing” woman with no threatening presumptions, would look after the kids each day while Mom and Dad worked at their important jobs. Nights and weekends, Mom and Dad would divide the labor fifty-fifty. Dad would be a New Man, and Mom would be a Fulfilled Woman.
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What they hadn’t specifically foreseen: that the baby would start calling the sitter Mama; that the pipe would burst, the roof would leak, the train would stall; that the dry cleaner could never get out the spit-up stains; that indelible bags would materialize under the eyes; that the stay-at-home moms would invoke the No Nannies rule for play dates; that the Entenmann’s cake sent to school for the bake sale would become an object of brutal gossip; that the forty-five-minute session locked inside the conference room with the breast pump would end with everything spilled all over the final draft of the Armbruster agreement; that Dad’s secret motto would become “Thank God it’s Monday.”
Above all, they hadn’t precisely anticipated that maternal instinct was a dull double-edged knife, and that Mom would tire of having it lodged between her ribs. One evening, while talking on the portable phone with that weasel Peterson in Denver, she put the boys in the tub. The synchronicity—explaining to Peterson that his proposal implied multiple felonious breaches of securities law and hearing Nathaniel announce, not actually in time, that he needed to go potty—seemed, in retrospect, a gift from the cosmos. As she angled for the floater with her free hand and fantasized about FedExing it to Peterson, the fog magically lifted. She could quit. She would quit. She would be free at last. She would downsize, lateralize—call it anything you liked. She didn’t care. Finally, she would call all the shots, run her own outfit, answer to no one she didn’t feel like answering to.
•
When Sera quit, in 1990, at the age of thirty-three, she already had in place a highly evolved child-development-oversight system. Her training as an architect had given her the discipline to do “visual mapping inside my head.” She could see a path to her children’s future and engrave it in her brain. After her first baby, also named Sera, was born, in the spring of 1984, her maternity leave lasted three weeks. Sera and her husband, Tom, a publishing executive, then lived—and still do—a half hour from the city (in a town where I also happen to live). Each morning, she was on a train by seven-thirty, and on a good day she caught the five-thirty-nine or the six-oh-one coming home. While she was gone, the live-in Haitian nanny’s job was to remember to follow instructions and fill in the blanks. A new day meant a fresh eight-and-a-half-by-eleven sheet, with an hour-by-hour timeline on the vertical axis and, across the horizontal, five categories: “Intake,” “Sleep,” “Alert,” “B. Movmt.,” “Special Note.”
Little Sera was fifteen months old when her brother William arrived. Sera redesigned the gridwork so the nanny could track both babies on a single page. Several minutes a day, as ordered, the nanny directed each child’s attention to the prints of Matisse paper cutouts that hung on the walls outside their bedrooms. “I wanted them to study the hard edges of the cutouts, so they would focus their eyes,” Sera told me. Unless the children were sleeping, she wanted classical music wafting though the house. The regimen would change as the children grew older, when she would devise more elaborate charts and daily-activity requirements. For a toddler, the nanny followed a printed menu of activities that Sera had prescribed to stimulate visual, motor, and auditory progress: finger painting, crayoning, stencils, Colorforms, Legos, Bristle Blocks, puzzles, tools, Mr. Potato Head, alphabet tapes, farm toys that made animal sounds. Television was out of the question. (“TV is just like sex. The more you have it, the more you want it. And you don’t need it. There are better things to do.”)
To monitor the children’s diets, Sera itemized suitable foods from five groups. In her absence, the nanny was expected to record what they ate, using a customized shorthand. Spaghetti with meat sauce was “V-4, P-1, C-4” (tomatoes, vegetable group; ground beef, protein group; noodles, carbohydrate group). A yummy helping of spinach, kosher steer liver, and rice was “V-4, P-5, C-2,” and so on. Dessert was maybe a little F-4 (watermelon, fruit group) but not too much D-4 (dairy group, asterisked note: “Ice cream no more than once a week”).
Again, after William was born, Sera’s maternity leave lasted less than a month. Her boss congratulated her: “Now you’ve got two kids. You’ve got a daughter, you’ve got a son. You’re all done. Great. Welcome back to work.” This was during a boom cycle in commercial construction. The architectural firm that employed her had been around for almost ninety years, and she was the first woman ever to be designated a project manager: to oversee from A to Z, from schematic designs to final drawings, the planning of a major piece of work—in this case, a twenty-two-story office building on Fifth Avenue. (“Mom, didn’t you build a building in New York City?” “Yeah, I built more than one.” “Wow, that’s incredibly cool.”)
In the late summer of 1988, she delivered what is called a bid set. (“The instructions for how to build the building, complete documents, every single nail, screw, you name it.”) To finish this project on schedule, she worked several consecutive weekends, bringing little Sera, who was four, with her. Little Sera drew tiny pictures on Post-it notes and distributed them throughout the office, or she sat under a drafting table and played with her Barbies. Big Sera’s recollection of this passage in her life included a vivid memory of feeling sick. She was pregnant again. The choice to have a third child, she later grasped, was a subconscious acknowledgment that “something had to give”—and, indeed, her entire body conveyed this message emphatically; she was confined to bed during much of the pregnancy. A second daughter, Meta, was born in the spring of 1989, at which point Sera’s extended pregnancy leave became a permanent maternity leave. Late in 1990, she gave birth to her fourth, and final, child, a boy named Thaddeus.
Cathy: When she got a call asking her to organize the Girl Scout cookie sale, she said yes, both because of and despite certain aesthetic objections. Handling this administrative task was preferable to, say, camping in the woods with a bunch of little girls. The cookies, however, were inedible. Her daughter once left a couple of undelivered boxes of cookies in the pantry, where they might have remained forever if the dog hadn’t got to them.
Oven-fresh homemade cookies, on the other hand, had intrinsic value. She enjoyed baking with her children during Christmas vacations and delivering plates of cookies to the neighbors. This friendly gesture demonstrated that she was no mere erstwhile luminary of the banking-law department but also a mom who had what it took to mobilize an army of gingerbread soldiers.
In time, she began to bake with a vengeance—cakes for birthdays, but mainly cookies. The cookie jar was always full, and her children were perpetually grateful. The approach of Christmas each year meant raising the ante. She started weeks ahead of time with rum balls, which improved with age, and shortbreads and nut-butter balls that would last. She made decorated cutouts and shaped other cookies into wreaths and candy canes. She made maple-pecan cookies and spiralled chocolate-and-vanilla freezer cookies, peanut-butter cookies and cranberry-orange cookies—five dozen per batch, fifty dozen by the time she was done.
Her triumph was the annual cookie exchange, the holiday party to which a hundred or so women brought generous samples of their wares, drank wine, complimented each other on their craftsmanship, and then took home a box of whatever looked appealing. Unfortunately, the cookie exchange developed a competitive undercurrent, and some women panicked. What they brought to the party was conspicuously bakery-bought; the tipoff was a cookie that looked too perfect. Her cookies looked real—because they were—and everybody loved them. To be polite, she gathered an assortment of other people’s cookies and brought them home. When she set them on the kitchen counter, her children said, “Why didn’t you just bring home the ones you took with you?” There was no chance they would deign to feast on these. Which was where, once again, the dog came in handy.
The nebulous concept of “free time” presented itself to Sera. Years earlier, before children, she had belonged to the Junior League, but she had allowed her membership to lapse after discovering that “you don’t know some people until you get on a committee and they start ordering you around.” Now she decided to join the executive board of the local arts center, where she had once curated an exhibit on suburban-community development. A campaign to relocate and expand the town library was under way, and she was eager to donate her expertise. “I pass by that corner three times every day of my life,” she said, referring to the new site. “I’d hate to have to look at an ugly piece of architecture.”
Her child-care arrangements fluctuated (the Haitian nanny had gone off to have a baby of her own), but Sera didn’t mind. She felt like making up for lost time. She continued to draw up lists because keeping pace with her instincts and impulses required plotting and budgeting. “I’m a designer,” she said. “You have to design your children’s future to a certain point. You have to create the environment for them to flourish. Sometimes I wake up at night and have an anxiety attack—that I’ve forgotten about this or that part of my child’s brain.”
There was a daily list of rudiments (“Sera & William: 7:00-7:15 a.m.—Wake up, Shower—body lotion & powder—check finger & toe nails, Brush Teeth, Dressed . . . 7:45-8:30 a.m.—Breakfast (vitamins), Pack snack & lunch . . . Meta & Thad: 4:00-4:30 p.m.—Bath, Bath oil/lotion, Medicine for Thad, Check nails, Pajamas . . . 7:30-8:30 p.m.—Bed time, Reading, Prayers”) and there were also individualized charts that combined daily, biweekly, and weekly routines. When William was in second grade, for instance, his checklist consisted of thirteen items. Every day, he was expected to do his homework, practice the piano, practice the drums, make his bed, read aloud for thirty minutes, and tidy his room. Twice a week, he would work on a book report, read to his younger siblings, set the table, empty the dishwasher, play educational games. At least one day a week, he was either supposed to hone his computer skills or study Korean. The final item on his checklist was: “13. Observe stars.”
Carol: Even after you quit work, she knew, you carried your demons with you. When she no longer practiced law, what she missed—even more than knowing that her time was being billed at around two hundred and fifty dollars an hour—was the gamesmanship, the rituals of Type A personalities meticulously sharpening their knives. She had a habit of reading the preliminary school budget or the proposal for the new school-governance mandate the same way she used to vet a securities prospectus. Her self-anointed role, as she defined it, was that of fiduciary for every child in the school district. She would attend public hearings and, with insistent politeness, raise points and ask questions until she wore out her welcome.
There was a tenured second-grade teacher at her children’s school who, it seemed, had to go. The teacher intimidated children, belittled them, convinced them that they would never learn. Quietly, she helped organize a petition drive, soliciting the signatures of parents of first graders who didn’t want their children assigned to this teacher’s classroom. One day, after learning about a fresh insult that the teacher had inflicted upon her daughter, she lost it. She called the superintendent directly, and after that she called the principal and told him what she had done. Twenty minutes later, she got a phone call from the teacher, whose attempt at contrition did not get far. “Listen, I’m from the South,” she told the teacher. “My people have a long-standing tradition of horsewhipping people like you to run them out of town. Or else they’d shoot you. You should be grateful you’re living in this century.”
Six weeks later, the teacher was gone from the classroom.
Sera reflected upon her own childhood experiences: born in Korea; emigrated at twelve, after her mother married an American; adopted by her stepfather; schools in New Jersey and Virginia. She was an only child and a conspicuous achiever. She had become skeptical of the child-rearing philosophy her mother subscribed to, which stressed performance—recite this, show that, demonstrate your knowledge—too often at the expense of self-esteem. Her own children, she decided, would develop a wide range of skills (art, music, nature study, team sports), but the emphasis would be upon enhancing social development rather than proving individual superiority. With four children spread over six years, she needed a master plan with an overriding theme and focus. This she defined as “raising each child as an only child and a middle child.”
The summer when little Sera was four and William was almost three, they started taking swimming lessons and tennis lessons. For the next several years, they competed on the country-club swimming and tennis teams and brought home trophies. (The progress of William’s golf game was a casualty of a decision that Sera’s husband made a year ago: to de-activate their country-club membership. Sera regretted this, because “golf is something you can’t start too early.”) Little Sera enrolled in dancing school at three and began to specialize in jazz and tap at four. Around the same time, she started taking a eurhythmics class, which integrated music and full body movement, and William started a year later. From nursery school through first grade she attended gymnastics classes, and so did William. Both children were enrolled in drawing and ceramics classes at the arts center, but, because of scheduling conflicts, they dropped out when little Sera started second grade. To compensate, big Sera made private arrangements with an instructor from the arts center, who agreed to come to the house every couple of months to do projects with the children in an “art room” that had been carved out of the basement play area. Little Sera was five and William was four when they learned to play chess—an enthusiasm that seemed to flag after a couple of years. When William resumed playing, in second grade, Sera hired a private chess tutor, and he started winning tournaments.
After two seasons of Little League tee-ball and baseball, little Sera retired. This coming Little League season might or might not be William’s swan song as well. Little Sera also gave up basketball after fifth grade, which in hindsight could have caused her parents to question the wisdom of their investment in her sleep-away basketball camp. The two summers she spent at sailing camp, on the other hand, were a can’t-lose proposition. “You know how you can eat a banana and it gives you so much of what you need?” big Sera said. “That’s also true with sailing. It’s multidisciplinary—math, physical exercise, nature.” The sport that little Sera has stuck with longest is soccer; she has played on a girls’ travelling team for four years, and for three summers she attended one-week sessions at soccer camp. This coming summer, she’ll be attending soccer camp after she returns from a month in Europe at an international children’s camp. After that, she’ll head to Virginia for a week with her mother’s parents; big Sera wants her to use that time working on her Korean and learning to sew. At one point, big Sera was looking for a charm school for little Sera. Instead, she persuaded a friend who was a former model to come around for a few private sessions—one on clothes, one on poise, one on skin care. The former model also gave little Sera a copy of “Tiffany’s Table Manners for Teenagers.”
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As a child, big Sera was given daily private piano and violin lessons. One of her goals is to play trios with little Sera and William. Piano lessons for little Sera began in first grade. Until recently, the piano was in the kitchen, which enabled big Sera simultaneously to cook and observe little Sera as she practiced or worked with her teacher. “You have to be there with them to show your interest,” she told me. “You have to make it pleasant.” Little Sera took up the recorder, clarinet, and flute in the third grade, and by sixth grade she and the other members of her flute club had performed during a party at the White House. William, by third grade, had stopped playing the piano and the drums. When Sera persuaded him to concentrate next on the clarinet, her husband warned, “William’s not going to be in the marching band. He’s going to be on the playing field, in the game.”
The skating lessons that William began when he was three led to hockey at six. He now plays in a travelling hockey league that specializes in ice time at exotic hours in inconvenient locales—say, Sunday morning, six o’clock, at West Point. Every Tuesday, William takes supplemental power-skating lessons. Next summer, he will attend two weeks of hockey camp in New Hampshire, a week of puck-handling camp on Long Island, and a couple of weeks of defensemen’s camp in Connecticut. Sera hopes that William, like little Sera, will stick with the travelling soccer team he’s played on for the past two years. He has been one of the leading scorers, a fact that is possibly attributable to the one-on-one private soccer coaching Sera arranged for him. One of my sons plays on the same team. Often, I find, the pleasure and natural excitement of the game are enhanced by the suspense of wondering when the referee is going to warn our coach that if that mother on the sideline doesn’t stop hollering he’s going to award the opposition a penalty kick.
Carol: Fundamentally, she was happy. She was conditioned to believe she could accomplish whatever she wanted or adopt any persona she pleased, and after she stopped practicing law no one could pin an easy label on her. Once, a friend said, “If you’d told me ten years ago that I would become a housewife, I never would have believed you,” and she replied, “Who says you’re a housewife? I’m not!” She wasn’t a floor scrubber, a pillow puffer, or any version of Martha Stewart wannabe. She was proud that her daughters had witnessed the hollowness of her husband’s threat that, if the house wasn’t cleaned up, this year there wouldn’t be a Christmas tree. “Guess what,” she would remind the girls. “We got a tree anyway, didn’t we?”
Her own mother, who also disdained domesticity, used to pick her up after school every day and they would do stuff—cruise the countryside, pick corn, go fishing, visit a divertingly ditsy alcoholic aunt. Mainly, they drove. She enjoyed doing the same thing with her daughters, though with a bit more focus. Her favorite weekday afternoon was Wednesday, when she would climb behind the wheel of her Taurus wagon and emulate Cha Cha Muldowney.
The girls should learn to ride horses, she decided, so she arranged back-to-back half-hour lessons—with a particular teacher whose only available time slot was Wednesday from four o’clock to five. That her older daughter had a one-hour swim-team practice every Wednesday at four-thirty—as well as a Brownies meeting every other Wednesday at five-thirty—she regarded less as an inconvenience than as an amusing challenge. That Carol herself was also the Brownie troop leader provided a bonus hurdle.
The older girl wore her bathing suit under her riding clothes, and as soon as she got off the horse her mother bombed off to swim team—less than ten minutes in manageable traffic. She would double back in time to pick up the younger girl at the stables, then retrace her route in plenty of time for the end of swim practice. Every other week, she arranged for the older girl to catch a ride from swimming, because the drive home from the riding lesson usually left about forty-five seconds to spare before the Brownie troop members began to arrive. “Pay attention, I might be micro-managing your lives now and turning you into little axe murderers,” she told her daughters. “But trust me, you’ll be happy axe murderers.”
Sera and Tom live in the same house Tom grew up in and their children attend the same public schools he did. Last fall, little Sera started middle school. At the end of the first marking period, when she brought home a report card with all A’s, big Sera decided it was probably safe to take a break from her weekly hour and a half of private tutoring in math and English. The identity of the tutor, who has been on retainer since little Sera was in second grade, is proprietary information. “I don’t want to say who it is,” Sera told me. “But I have a very good source.” The tutor continues to meet every week with William—working on math, English, and study skills—and Sera is thinking of finding someone else to teach him Spanish.
Meta is now in first grade and soon, Sera thinks, she wants her to start working with the math-and-English tutor. Because Thad is still in nursery school, he’s not quite ready. Sera knew Thad would be a good skater when, soon after he learned to walk, he started motoring around the house in William’s Rollerblades, so she bought him a pair of his own. Both Meta and Thad participated in the same hockey clinic this winter. This spring will be Meta’s second season of tee-ball. A few months ago, she started piano lessons, and Sera says that Spanish and Korean are “in the wings.” Thad will probably begin recorder lessons this summer. William has been teaching him and Meta chess.
All four children attend catechism classes one morning a week. “And they read the Bible,” Sera told me. “You know, for each age there’s a different edition of the Bible they can read. But I’m not sure how much I like it, because it’s very violent.” The afterlife that Sera envisions for herself runs counter to Catholic dogma. What she looks forward to is really more a form of reincarnation. “In my next life, I’d like to be born a man,” she told me. “I wouldn’t have any emotional attachment to anybody. I’d just have fun making money. And have a wife who takes care of everything.”
Cathy: Always, she played by the rules. In school, she never once turned in an assignment late, and in business she operated the same way. Her firstborn, a daughter, was five months old and not yet weaned when she returned to work because an important deal suddenly had to close. It didn’t help that the closing was scheduled for immediately after Father’s Day weekend and that her husband also had to work. She had no choice but to bring the baby with her. She ended up in a room with ten men who spent their Father’s Day taking turns holding her daughter while she redrafted and shuffled the closing papers. Every couple of hours, she excused herself to nurse. It was a revelation: this was not how she intended to spend her time with her children.
After more than a year on the mommy track—which at her firm meant being at her desk every morning by seven o’clock to earn the right to leave at five-thirty, for three-quarters pay—she threw in the towel. But her sleeping habits never changed. By 5:30 a.m., she was alert, except in summer, when the sunrise woke her up even earlier. She did the laundry, emptied the dishwasher, made lunches and snacks, straightened the house, got the kids dressed and fed and off, and as soon as they were out the door she had a block of time that she was willing to give away.
To anyone who asked, it soon became evident that she could coördinate any local project and deliver on schedule. She joined the arts-center board, became a library trustee and recruited other library volunteers, served on the committee to screen school-board candidates, agreed to be president of both the Junior League and the PTA, typed the whole school directory and the whole annual literary magazine, and didn’t object when her husband volunteered them as co-commissioners of the soccer league, even though she correctly suspected it would become the family albatross. Beginning in spring, it fell upon her to process six hundred registration forms, deposit every check, account for every expenditure, assemble teams, draft coaches and assistants and team mothers and publicity managers, plot the availability of playing fields. In late summer, it actually got worse—fifty-hour weeks sorting T-shirts, printing and mailing rosters and schedules, packing balls and whistles and cones and goalie vests and goalie gloves and first-aid kits in equipment bags. She had the kids gathered around the dining-room table stuffing envelopes as they whined, “We want to go to the pool!” She accused herself of child neglect. She tried denying what the situation reminded her of, but, of course, she knew too well: this was exactly how she felt right before she realized that she would have to quit her job.
Friends of Sera’s gave a New Year’s Eve party and invited a Tarot card reader, a palm reader, and an astrologer. The palm reader told Sera that she had a tendency to get into traps, and she didn’t enjoy hearing that, because it implied that motherhood was a trap. The good news came when she gave the astrologer the dates and hours of her children’s births and was informed that many of the signs were auspicious. “Thad has, like, eight planets that are cardinal signs in the tenth house, which means he can’t help being famous,” she said. “When he’s twenty—it will be just the tip of the iceberg—he’s going to be incredible. And Meta’s child is going to be famous. So it’ll be my child and my grandchild. It’s on the map.”
As if she didn’t know what to make of her own fatalism, she went on, “The secret of this whole thing is there is no secret. Whether a mother works or doesn’t work probably makes no difference. I believe in supernatural power—inherent things that you have no control over. What I find hard in my life right now is being in a vacuum. I’m no longer in school, where I get a report card, or at work, where I would get a salary review. We don’t get grades, we don’t get paid, we don’t know until we die—actually, we don’t know until they die. There are no guarantees. This is the way I approach any project. I have children and I have to make sure that I do the best that I possibly can. How do I define ‘best’? When you go to bed totally exhausted and saying, ‘I couldn’t have done one more thing for them today.’ ”
One morning when it was snowing and sleeting and Sera’s kids were home—along with the plumbers, who were there because the main sewer line had backed up—I went over to her house to hang out. When I arrived, I found her in the living room, where there was a checkerboard-top table, a Calder lithograph above the family photographs on the mantel, a large fluorescent geometric painting brightening an adjacent wall, and, near a row of windows, two glass vases of dried flowers standing on a large round table that was draped with a floral-print cloth. Southeastern light streamed in, and, despite the weather, everything inside felt clear and cozy. A stereo piped a Handel flute sonata from the next room. Sera was curled up on an off-white sectional sofa with Meta, who first read aloud from a storybook and then recited sight words (“meadows,” “famous,” “cough,” “terrible,” “hungrier,” “cellar,” “calendar”) from index cards that Sera was holding. It was a deceptively serene moment.
Though the phrase “snow day” strikes terror in a lot of parents, Sera regarded this as an opportunity. She had a long list of tasks to accomplish: all kids finish writing Christmas thank-you notes; have William assemble table grandfather sent for Christmas; bake birthday cake for Tom; shop for Tom’s gift; work on summer-camp applications; organize den; go to bank; get rid of Christmas candy; return Christmas gifts; buy William personal organizer; buy colored index cards for Meta’s sight words; make about twenty phone calls (including clarinet teacher, insurance company, masonry contractor, soccer telephone tree).
When the sight-word exercise was done, Sera announced, “Meta, it’s time to write your letters.” She set a box of purple floral stationery on the checkerboard table, handed Meta a pen, and said, “O.K., Meta, now let’s make a list. Who do you have to write to? Grandpa—Dad’s father—gave you what? A hundred dollars. And Grandma—Dad’s mom—gave you the black pants and the Gap clothes that you like. And Grandma and Grandpa, my parents, gave you the handmade wooden chest. All right, Uncle Thaddeus and Michael gave you a bracelet and that tape and book—how do you say that—‘Jumanji’? You can just write it out the way it sounds. Who else? Patty? Patty gave you wonderful things. The candy and the colors and the book. And the Conroys gave you—O.K., the chocolate. And Uncle George gave you a Gap check—money you can spend. Now, who did we forget? What about Mommy and Daddy?”
“Daddy gave me the T-shirt and Mommy gave me . . .” Meta paused, momentarily stumped.
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“Meta,” Sera told her. “Mommy gave you everything.” ♦