Читать книгу Mommies Behaving Badly - Roz Bailey - Страница 8

“I can’t believe you thanked him for lunch,” Morgan said later as we recapped the contract debacle over the phone. I was plugged into the headset of my cell, edging the car home from the Long Island Railroad station amid the usual bumper-to-bumper flow of Queens traffic. Our little attached row house was less than a mile from the station, and yet it took fifteen minutes to get home amid the traffic, lights, pedestrians, and four-way stops that most New Yorkers took as a competitive signal to bear down and floor it.

Morgan was still at the office, thinking out strategies over a cup of orange-twist tea. “Oscar Stollen is a raving lunatic control freak, trying to make you his indentured servant,” she said, “and you thank him for a slab of suckling pig?”

“People just aren’t polite anymore,” I said. “Manners may be the only thing that separates us from other species in the animal kingdom. Thanking him was a show of my behavior, not his.” I had to remember that Morgan’s kids were older, in college. TJ was off at Penn majoring in biology, and Clare was studying at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan while working part time for a furniture designer and hating it—“but at least she’s working!” Morgan always said. Morgan didn’t need quiet mommy time anymore, hence our luncheon with Oscar was not a break but business as usual for her.

“Well, honey, I’m just sorry I didn’t see that one coming. I’ve always known Hearts and Flowers to ask for exclusives, but I never heard of them demanding them. Creating their own socialist publishing empire. It’s like those think tank deals where you sign away all your creative thoughts. Remember Penelope Glitzman?”

“Penelope…” She was a former romance editor who’d left the company to work for a book packager, a sort of book-idea think tank where a prerequisite to employment was to sign your brain away. The packager paid Penelope top dollar, but also demanded that she sign over her ideas in an agreement stating that all concepts generated while employed there were the creative property of the packager. The book packager banged out half a dozen bestselling series while Penelope was in its employ. When one spun off to a TV series, Penelope moved out to Los Angeles to become its executive producer. Until the book packager filed a law suit, claiming to own Penelope’s work on the series. Her ideas were their “creative properties.” Pretty appalling. My situation was a little different, of course, but close enough to scrape the paint off my toes.

“You’re right about this,” I told Morgan. “No question about it. I can’t sign my creative life away to Hearts and Flowers, no matter how big the advance is. I just got a little mesmerized back there by visions of dollar signs dancing in my head.”

“Those dollar signs are a very real concern for all of us.” Along with her share of woes, Morgan had a hefty mortgage on her Manhattan condo and some whopping credit card bills to pay down. Nine or ten years ago her husband, Jacob, a successful litigator, had flown to Chicago to ride with his biker buddies to a rally in South Dakota, never to return. Apparently Jacob, now Jocko to his biker buddies, was trying his hand at rustling cattle and taming a wild little redhead in Wyoming. When I met Morgan at a romance writers’ convention, talk of Jocko the Urban Cowboy was all the rage. Of course, I didn’t hear any of it, being out of the loop, more focused on my writing than on agent/editor scuttlebutt. So when I wrangled a meeting with Morgan and, by way of small talk, asked: “Are you married?” she laughed till there were tears in her eyes and told me I was refreshing.

Although he was the father of her kids, who were in junior high when their dad left, Morgan had never talked about Jocko much. She still didn’t mention him much, aside from the occasional shorthand barbs in e-mail, things like “What do I know, he always hated redheads.” and “Maybe there’s some Brokeback lawyer thing going on.” Along with the appropriate joke: “What do cowboy hats and hemorrhoids have in common? They’re both worn by assholes!”

Since Jacob’s desertion I’d seen Morgan through two minor surgeries. She’d eaten her way up to a size 14 then dieted down to a ten, given up smoking and thrown herself into her career, which had meant a boost for mine. She’d become a great agent and a better friend. She helped me maintain my sanity when the kids and husband tore it to shreds, I helped restrain her from hiring a hit man to go after Jocko.

So in light of our relationship, I knew it would kill us both to have that jumbo, megacontract snatched away.

“We both need the income,” I said, thinking aloud. “Not to be a downer, but even if Chocolate sells, I’ve got to keep writing romances.”

“Of course, of course, and why wouldn’t you? You’re so good at it, and it earns you a nice chunk of change. Don’t you worry about Oscar. We’ll get you a contract for more romances. Trust me, honey, trust me. This will work out over the next few months. If Oscar wants you that much, another publisher will want you more.”

“It would feel strange not to be writing for Hearts and Flowers, not to be working with Lindsay.”

“I know, I know. But in the meantime, you still owe them one romance, and you’ve got Chocolate to write.” We had already decided that Chocolate would be a stronger sell if Morgan could dangle the complete manuscript before the noses of a few editors, and so my work was cut out for me. “If I put my mind to it, I’ll bet I can get you a fat offer to ease your worries. Once Chocolate is a hit, Oscar will come crawling back to us, whimpering like a suckling pig.”

Christmas…ouch. Without a new contract, I’d have to think twice about getting Jack that new set of golf clubs he’d been dropping hints about. Of course, there’d be no cutting back on toys for the kids, or holiday trimmings, but I’d learned that the things that mattered most to the girls, like decorating cookies or reading Christmas stories under the tree, cost very little. In fact, without a new contract I’d have plenty of time to be the perfect Christmas mom. I’d delay delivery of my last book in the contract and spend my time decking the halls, organizing caroling parties, decorating cookies, building the gingerbread house the girls had been pining over…

“Of course, this is all the more reason to get Chocolate written, quick as the wind,” Morgan said, rattling my vision of an idyllic Christmas. “How fast can you get it finished? That would help me sell it, to have a complete manuscript.”

I tried to do a mental calculation of my calendar as I vacillated between turning right onto Northern Boulevard to pick up the girls from after school or heading straight home to the relative quiet of the house with just the sitter and Dylan. It was only four thirty and I could probably squeeze in another hour or so of work, but the December days were getting shorter and the sudden invasion of night in the afternoon always filled me with a haunting desperation to retrieve my children and see them safely tucked away at home. Funny, on a July night I could work until seven without guilt, but encroaching winter somehow tugged on my maternal instincts. I turned right, toward after-school care.

“Are you there?” Morgan asked. “Can you hear me?”

“Just dodging traffic.”

“So finish Chocolate ASAP. Put Oscar’s last book on the back burner, okay? We’ll talk tomorrow.”

“Got it. Bye!” As I hung up I realized that someone would have to tell my editor, Lindsay, our side of the story, and I wasn’t sure about sharing any of this with Jack until things got settled. We’d connected briefly after the big lunch. I’d stood ducking the wind in a storefront above the tracks of Penn Station to get cell phone service. But I’d downplayed the meeting with Oscar, and Jack seemed to forget all about it, caught up in the office politics at Corstar Headquarters, in Dallas where CJ and Hank and Desiree were bemoaning the fact that they’d been passed over for promotion and the big bosses had seen fit to recruit a division manager from outside the company, hiring a woman named Terry Anne, aka Tiger.

“What do you think about Tiger?” Jack had asked. “Sound like trouble to you?”

“Be glad you’re not part of the Dallas office,” I’d told him. “Where there’s a Tiger, there’s bound to be prey.”

Of course, I hadn’t met any of these people, though I enjoyed following their trials and victories vicariously through Jack, similar to reading a soap opera summary at the end of the week—all plot, no emotion. And for now, the Dallas drama would keep Jack distracted from my lack of a new contract. Despite my rising contribution to our household income, my husband had always worried that one day the bottom would drop out of my chosen career, and I didn’t want to give him any inkling that his worries might be coming true. Besides, things were tense at Corstar Corporation, where Jack had recently been given a promotion to management at the New York affiliate TV station, along with stock options that might, one day, knock us into the upper class if all went well. But getting kicked upstairs had given Jack an eyeful of the inner workings of Corstar, and firsthand knowledge of the sordid underbelly had been keeping him awake at night ever since. Promotion—good; underbelly—bad. I figured my news could wait until it turned into good news. That was me, the Can Do! Girl, Little Miss Silver Lining all the way.

“Hi, Ms. Nancy,” I said as the petite woman opened the door of her home.

“Becca doesn’t drink her milk,” she said glumly. “I don’t like to waste it. You tell her, next time, she drink it.”

How’s that for an end-of-day greeting? I thought as my smile froze on my face. “I don’t force her to drink it at home,” I said. “Maybe her tastes will change, but until then…”

“She need milk for strong bones and teeth,” Ms. Nancy said wisely. I wondered if her parents had forced her to drink milk when she was a kid. Wait, milk in China? No, but rice—she’d told me about that, how her parents had warned her that each grain of rice left in her dish would be a pockmark on the face of her future husband. Amazing the twisted way we raise our young.

“I didn’t ask for milk,” Becca said, looking up from the table as we swept into the kids’ playroom—a converted sunporch. Ms. Nancy ran a tight ship, the toys taken from their bins one at a time and all homework completed before play could commence. I loved her for that, for instituting the discipline that I never could seem to enforce in my own home. “Mom, you said I don’t have to eat something if it’s going to make me sick, and I said I didn’t want it.” That was my eldest daughter, eight going on eighteen.

I rubbed Becca’s shoulder. “You know I’m okay with that.”

But Ms. Nancy was shaking her head in disapproval. “All my children drink their milk.”

Not wanting to take on Ms. Nancy, who, I admit, sometimes frightened me, I asked about homework, and Becca assured me it was all done, except for her reading, which she insisted on doing with me every night. A child of ritual, Becca valued our reading time, and sometimes, as I dozed off to the sound of her mellifluous voice, I worried that she didn’t know how to read in her own head. Then again, Jack said I worried too much about Becca.

When she was born, Jack had been so smitten with her that he’d immediately wanted to get going on creating a second child so that Becca would never have to be alone. I worried that Becca subconsciously longed for those days when she was the only one—the object of all our affections. A first child leaves an indelible blueprint on a family, the entire pregnancy experience, when a mother is so hyperaware of movement inside her, careful and vigilant about diet, weight, exercise. I’d been taking prenatal vitamins before I even conceived Rebecca, though with the other two I remembered vitamins every other day or so. Jack came along to the doctor’s office for checkups, marveled at the little alien bouncing on the ultrasound monitor and even read the parenting magazines in the office. Jack left work early to attend Lamaze classes with me and we read each other the more inspired passages from What to Expect When You’re Expecting.

And then, the big-deal day, those first twinges of discomfort, similar to the onset of a menstrual period. The rudeness of the nurses when they learned I’d come to the hospital without being dilated enough, the walk back to the parking lot to get my coat, an interminable journey that took years off my life, I swear, as people looked on in horror, mothers pulling their children away when I had to lean against a cement pillar, and breathe with tears rolling down my cheeks.

“This sucks!” Jack said as he helped me back along the crosswalk to the hospital.

“Take me back upstairs,” I sobbed. “I think my water broke.”

A few contractions later, I was being eased into the dignified stage of labor and delivery, toted along on a gurney and an epidural of pain candy. Aaaah, the beauty of the epidural, the chance to give birth, to enjoy it and not hate the little dumpling whom you’ve been planning and prepping for so intently for nine months.

Our first daughter was born with a shriek of annoyance, a very clean baby, which she maintained through life, never drooling, rarely spitting up. I remember the smart set of her rosebud lips as the nurse placed her in my arms. Becca’s steely-gray eyes stared up at me, and although the childbirth info claimed that babies could not focus because of the silver nitrate drops put in their eyes, our Becca was quite focused, her stern gaze demanding answers. Who are you? she asked as she stared carefully at Jack and me. What am I doing here? How did I land with the two of you as parents? Do you really know what you’re doing?

Of course, we didn’t.

But we did our best to fake it. I will never forget the high anxiety in the car as Jack and I drove our first baby home. I kept turning to the back to check on her, sure that her silence meant she was sleeping, but Rebecca was awake and alert, eyes open as the world flew past her windows and the grill of a truck loomed in the back window, which she faced. “I can’t believe we’re taking a baby home,” I said to Jack.

He turned toward me, looking as if he’d never met me before. “What do you think is going through her head? I mean, what’s she thinking?”

“Rosy, warm thoughts, I’m sure,” I said. If I was correct, those rosy thoughts faded the minute Jack pulled into a parking spot across the street from our house. Becca started fussing and crying, her little head twitching and writhing in her car seat like an imprisoned nonagenarian. By the time we crossed the threshold, she was in a howling jag that didn’t stop for four months except for the occasional break to nurse or pass out from exhaustion.

“I read that the average newborn sleeps sixteen to eighteen hours a day,” Jack said. “Becca seems to be crying more than she sleeps. What’s up with that?”

“Is it colic?” my mother asked me one day when I was pacing the floor with the baby, reducing her bloody-murder shriek to a disappointed howl.

“The pediatrician said that colic only occurs in twenty percent of babies,” I answered. “Not that it would matter, as there’s no real treatment for colic, anyway.” Short of earplugs for the parents. And I mean those heavy-duty earphone types that you see the crew wearing at Monster Truck events. Although our baby Becca would nap in the morning and come alive with flirty eyes and cooing in the afternoon, she shriveled into a wailing wench by the dinner hour, crying and shrieking inconsolably until well after midnight.

“What’s her problem?” Jack asked me one night, genuinely concerned over our baby’s discomfort.

I just shrugged, feeling inadequate because I didn’t have an answer. I had researched the proper dimensions of crib bars and the most stimulating mobile colors for infant brain development (black and white), but I’d never anticipated having a baby who was less than content and blissed out. Jack signed us up for a newsletter that would teach us about the stages of development Becca was going through, and we studied it like budding behaviorists, sure that the answer to our inadequacies would be explained in the cheerful articles on gross motor skills and cognitive development. “Soon your baby will be grasping at things,” we were assured, even as another writer extolled the benefits of “tummy time for your baby.” Based on Jack’s reading we had Becca tested for gastroesophageal reflux, baby heartburn. Negative, of course. I knew it couldn’t be that easy.

By three months, Becca had taught us a few things. We learned that she didn’t like being too hot, that she hated being wrapped tight in a blanket, that she didn’t want to be cradled in our arms like a baby. I realized she cried less on days that she got out more than once, so I made it a habit to take her to the grocery store or the bank with me, to walk her in the stroller even on the coldest of days. But I still kept her out of restaurants during the witching hour—dinner-time. Jack was the first to figure out that Becca didn’t like staring up at the ceiling and devised a new baby hold that only he could manage, holding her face out with her bottom cupped in one hand, her back and neck supported by the other. Similar to the Popemobile or the Batmobile, Jack had devised the perfect touring vehicle for Becca, all in his hands.

By four months, the steady hours of shrieking faded away, and Jack was smitten by her all over again. Her googly eyes and generous smile had erased all memory of nights spent cringing from her howling cries, walking her around and around the living room, trying to dance her around to Hootie and the Blowfish. Becca became the light of his life, the reason to slip under the covers naked with me to try and make a sibling for her.

Recently I’d thought that the misery Becca had experienced those first few months had made her especially empathetic to other people. She tended to reach out to kids left out of the group and suffered when she saw news stories of famine in Africa or areas destroyed by natural disasters. When terrorists struck the World Trade Center, two of Becca’s classmates lost their fathers in the North Tower. One of the men didn’t even work in the building but was visiting for an early-morning conference. Devastation was all around us, but I couldn’t turn my focus from these little children, six years old. While other classmates had pulled away, Becca had wanted playdates and tried to organize games to distract the two.

That was when her insomnia began.

She worried that Jack would go to work and never come home, like Lydia and Andrew’s dads. She worried that one of Jack’s flights to Dallas would crash into a building. Mostly, I think, she was haunted by the knowledge that the world is not always a safe place, and as her mother, although I could promise that Jack and I would do everything to keep her safe, I couldn’t guarantee that bad things wouldn’t happen to her. In fact, I knew she’d have her share of heartbreak.

And so, we often lay together in her bed, Becca staring at the cracked plaster ceiling while I fought sleep, trying to save myself for a short conversation and a crime show with Jack.

“I’m just saying”—Ms. Nancy’s crisp voice brought me back to the milk crisis—“a girl your age need to drink her milk.”

“She eats lots of yogurt at home,” I said in Becca’s defense. “Plenty of calcium.” I moved over to Scout, whose head was bent intently over her pencil sketch. Her smooth, dark hair stuck out between the weave of her headband. “Hey, honey! I came to pick you up early,” I said in my most cheerful mom voice.

“But I’m not done.” Scout didn’t look up from her pencil sketch. “I can’t go yet. Mommy, can’t I stay for awhile?”

Nancy shrugged and gestured over the children—Raj building quietly with LEGOs in the corner, Tyanna working a puzzle. “All children love it here,” she said, as if she possessed a mysterious gift that eluded the rest of us. Ms. Nancy could be quite the salesman.

“You’ll be back tomorrow,” I told Scout. “Right now, we need to get home.”

“But I can’t,” my daughter said without looking up. “Ms. Nancy said that if I finish she’ll mail my list to Santa.”

“Everyone make a Christmas list today,” Nancy said proudly. “Your Rebecca has very small list. Only one thing she wants for Christmas.” She nodded approvingly at Becca.

I drew a blank. If it was one thing, it had to be big. “What’s on your list, sweetie?”

“Mom, you know.” Becca’s delicate brows pressed dimples into her forehead. “I want a puppy.”

Ugh! Not the dog thing again. The last thing I needed was another little baby to take care of, though I’d nearly caved last Christmas when Jack and I realized that having a puppy in the bed might bring Becca some comfort at night. “Santa doesn’t bring live animals,” I said quickly.

“I’ve seen him bring puppies in cartoons,” Scout said.

“And Alexa Vallone got a Bichon Frise for Christmas,” Becca added.

“Becca, you need to think of something realistic,” I said. “Santa doesn’t bring gifts that parents don’t approve of.” I had always warned my children that there would be no furry animals in our house anytime soon. With three children, one still in diapers, the last thing I needed was a fourth responsibility, especially one that shed and would never master its own bathroom skills.

“Scout, get your coat on. You can finish your list at home,” I said firmly, realizing that Scout was creating an illustrated list of toys she wanted from Santa. This task was right up her alley. In the past two years Scout had become intently focused on creating the perfect Christmas through compiling the perfect list that would lead to receiving a mountain of toys. Every year I felt anxiety at her potential disappointment, but each Christmas morning she seemed delighted with whatever display of toys and books and clothes I had concocted.

“If I take it home, Ms. Nancy won’t be able to send it to Santa,” Scout complained.

“I’ll send it to Santa,” I said with authority, feeling impatient. There was dinner to be made, e-mails and mail, laundry and bath time. Besides, I didn’t give up an hour of writing time to stand around at after-school care and watch my daughter draw.

“Come on, Scout.” Becca boosted her backpack on one shoulder, bundled in her jacket and ready to go. “You always do this. You always make us late.” Most days Scout can do nothing right enough for her older sister. I still remember coming home from the hospital with Scout bundled up in a receiving blanket and Becca snubbing us both, as if the wispy-haired infant was a rude visitor and I the traitor with the audacity to let her into the house. I still shudder when I remember the way she folded her arms and squinted up at me as if she didn’t recognize me at all. To this day, I don’t think Becca has gotten over the ruination of our quiet family of three.

“One minute,” Scout said insistently. “I just need to finish this rocket.”

I glanced down at the elaborate contraption she was drawing, a cartoonish aircraft with people in Santa caps riding on the wings.

“Don’t look!” she squealed, glaring up at me with a flash of silver eyes—her father’s eyes.

I folded my arms, turning away. “Getting in the Christmas spirit, I see. And I noticed today that you started decorating the house. Glued some pine cones onto my shoes, did you?”

“I told her not to,” Becca said.

“Am I in trouble?” Scout asked without looking up. “Or did you like it?”

“You’re not allowed to touch my clothes without permission, remember?” I spoke quickly, glancing over my shoulder to see if Nancy was listening. Sometimes I sensed that she didn’t approve of my system for disciplining the girls, loose though it may be, and it made me second-guess myself. Fortunately, she was off in the next room, setting up a video for Tyanna. “But we’ll talk about it later. At home. Let’s go, honey.”

“But I’m not done,” Scout whined, still drawing.

“We really do have to go, sweetie. Finish it at home.”

“Now you made me make a mistake.” She erased something in the corner of the page, then handed me the paper and scooted her chair back. “Hold it for me, but don’t look.”

I was already saddled with her backpack and my purse, my hands gripping car keys and Scout’s jacket. I snatched the paper, annoyed at my own impatience. “Fine. Jacket on. Got your backpack? Hats? Mittens? Come on, let’s go.”

Two blocks from home, I slowed the car and put the girls on the alert to holler if they spotted a place to park. Our modest, two-story row house did not come with a garage or driveway, and street parking was getting more and more difficult in a neighborhood where most households now had two or three cars: one for mom and the kids, one for dad and one for the teenaged driver. The upside to our location was that we were surrounded by lovely single-family houses with their own garages and driveways—ample room for their cars. The downside was that most Queens homeowners filled the garage with junk and parked in front of their house, despite the high rate of auto theft. In Queens, it seemed, you were safe in your house, but watch out if someone flags down your Jag. We’d even had a car stolen years ago—Jack’s old rust-bucket Honda from college—and though the car was recovered the day it was stolen, we weren’t enlightened until two weeks later, when we received a bill from a junk-yard charging us storage for those two weeks. Apparently, the city’s archaic system for recovering stolen autos allows the owner of the auto wrecking yard a chance to capitalize. When we went to claim the dented Honda with its shattered window, I felt angry and hoodwinked that we had to pay a storage fee although we didn’t even know the car was there, but Jack had shrugged it off. His head and heart were already vested in the sporty new Miata we’d bought as a replacement vehicle. So with congestion and theft, you’d think people would be happy to squirrel the car away in the garage. Instead, residents felt a sense of entitlement toward the parking spot directly in front of their house, a fact that I’d been reminded of by more than one neighbor.

“You gotta protect the spot in front of your house,” a dumplingesque woman whined at me in a shrill voice my first week in Bayside. We hadn’t even moved in yet; I was unloading a few plants and paper goods from my car when she waddled over and delivered the edict. She pointed to a wooden barricade blocking the street two doors down. “You need to save it or you’ll never get to park there.”

I blinked at the barricade. “I thought a construction crew was setting up there,” I told her. I resisted the temptation to suggest that the walk from her car might actually help chisel away a few pounds; I was new to the neighborhood and I didn’t want to tarnish my rep just yet.

“That’s my spot, in front of my house,” she said slowly, as if instructing a kindergarten class. “And welcome to the neighborhood,” she added. “I’m Bawb-rah.” That would be the Latin Barbara with a heavy Queens accent.

“Uh…thanks,” I told her, ducking inside to call my then-boyfriend Jack to report that we were moving into a lunatic neighborhood. Being a Queens boy, Jack was aware of the unwritten laws of parking. Being a rebel, he’d always defied them, even, as a teenager, going so far as to crash into neighbors’ garbage cans with his dented Chevy. Oh, that man I love! Sometimes I marvel that he never did time.

Jack and I decided not to buy into the parking-spot entitlement program, a decision that I occasionally questioned now that I had to circle for spots, double back, wedge my Honda in against someone else’s bumper, and lug groceries, baby and children down the block, holding hands and limping under the weight of a gallon of milk.

We arrived home to find Dylan asleep, a lump on the living room carpeting beneath his favorite red corduroy blanket. Despite his angelic smile, I felt a twinge of annoyance. A nap this late in the day would probably give him a bout of insomnia tonight, not to mention the fact that Dylan never napped when he was home alone with me. Why was that? Was I so overstimulating that my kid couldn’t doze off and give me an hour or so to work at the computer or tidy up the house?

Of course, the nap ended abruptly when Scout and Becca burst in and knelt over him, cooing and calling to him, touching his nose lightly and trying to make him twitch. Dylan uncurled himself, his face a mask of peace until it crumbled into the roar of a hibernating baby bear.

“Leave him alone,” I said, then turned to Kristen, an energetic college student who watched the baby in our home a few hours a day while the girls were in school so that I’d have a shot at getting some work done. Most days I was around to see her in action, making up games and activities, sitting on the floor with Dylan, meeting him on his level. Her major in school was early childhood education, and I was grateful to have a sitter who liked kids and didn’t sit around watching All My Children while the baby munched Cheerios. “How’d it go today?” I asked.

“Fine.” She closed her fat textbook and straightened from the couch, a marvel in cable-knit sweater and tight jeans that hugged her girlish hips. College…ah, the days of tight young butts and unlimited potential. “But the Dill-man’s not himself,” Kristen added. “We walked up to the playground, and he just about fell asleep on the swings. He didn’t eat much, either.”

“Ear infection,” I guessed.

My son was prone to them, and my mind raced ahead to the chance of catching the pediatrician and getting Dylan seen today, snagging a prescription and getting it filled, all while tending to the girls and dinner and my now-fledgling professional life.

Kristen slipped on her coat, a shiny black waist-length jacket, short enough to show off her outstanding denim form. “He tried to have fun, but he just passed out, head against his truck when we got home.”

“I wonder if I can get him an appointment.” I went into the kitchen and grabbed the phone. “Do you have plans tonight?”

“I’ve got a class.” She appeared in the doorway. “Sorry. Is Mr. Salerno still out of town?”

I nodded as I speed-dialed the pediatrician. “He’s back in two days. And thanks for everything. See you tomorrow?”

“Sure.” She said good-bye to the kids and let herself out. Just then someone answered the line and punched me on hold, which was still better than getting the answering machine. As I waited on the line, I ran through the new agenda for the evening. A visit to the doctor, if we were lucky, where I would lament to the doctor that they should give me one of those ear telescopes so that I could look inside Dylan’s ear, pronounce an infection and write him a prescription. I’d have to budget an extra half hour to circle the pharmacy since parking was so tight at that shopping center. I’d lug the three kids into the store, then I’d cave and stop at some fast-food place and stuff my children with fatty French fries and blissful crispy nuggets that came with a cheap plastic toy to boot. After that, I’d corral them into the dark house and try to move the bath-and-homework program along as quickly as possible so that I could fall into my chair in the corner of the dining room and, while talking on the phone with Jack, go over my e-mails.

The mail and laundry could wait until tomorrow.

As I locked in an appointment with the pediatrician that would have me whipping along the Cross Island Parkway to see a doctor before their office closed, I realized that this level of activity would keep me so busy that I wouldn’t have time to lament over the huge book contract I’d almost snagged this afternoon. No time to cry in my sherry, there were ear infections to cure, Christmas lists to illustrate, homework to finish. In a mommy’s world, all’s well that ends when your children pass out in bed.

Rushing to collect coats and shoes and kids and get them out the door, I passed the day’s untouched newspaper and grabbed a section to read in the doctor’s office. One headline caught my eye:

IS THE MOMMY TRACK A DEAD END?

Ha! Was this another writer telling me I couldn’t have my cake and eat it, too? Those naysayers drive me nuts, even if there is a grain of truth in their message of doom. In the big picture, I’d gotten everything I’d planned for: a fulfilling career, a thoughtful husband, a home in New York City and three adorable children. Bliss was right at my fingertips.

So why was I sponging up spilled juice, wiping my son’s nose and yelling at Scout to get her coat on?

The Mommy Track wasn’t a path at all. It was more like a tread-mill on the edge of a cliff teetering over suburbia.