In another chapter, Waldman expertly handles the expectations her mother had for her and how she measures up against her own expectations of herself and where she herself veered off course and also her own expectations for her children. I well remember holding my first child, a son, in my arms and wondering how I was going to mother him with so little to go on. And I also recall the first time I realized that I was no longer invested in my daughter’s successes or failures, and that if she messed up her piano piece at the recital it simply wasn’t my fault. Waldman, in a later chapter about the gifted child and the expectations we all have for our children hits those subjects right on the nose. “The most toxic thing parents can do is allow their delight and pride in their children to be spoiled by disappointment, by frustration when the children fail to live up to expectations formed before they were born, expectations that have nothing to do with them and everything to do with the parents’ own egos.”
Waldman has a hilarious chapter riffing on Marlo Thomas’s Free to Be You and Me record (which she takes to task for its bad grammar) – a shared childhood memory of both hers and her husband’s which shaped both of them as early feminists and seems to have helped their marriage work in ways many others don’t, including sharing household chores. Waldman is positive that that is the best way to happiness in the bedroom, a sentiment that is not new but one that many women with young children might be a little more honest about when speaking in terms of foreplay. She cites the usual statistics, which won’t come as a surprise to anyone who has read anything about who cleans the house, no matter who goes out to work or who doesn’t but it is the way that Waldman writes that bears repeating:
Most men I’ve talked to understand that the women in their lives are not interested in sex when they are feeling beleaguered and frustrated, but they don’t really get it. The average man can be angry and frustrated with his wife, but still be perfectly happy to fuck her. The anger might even be just the pinch of Spanish fly he needs. Your typical man uses sex to unwind, while the last thing typical woman wants when she’s wound up is to have sex. Women — or most women, or some women, or the women I’m talking about, or maybe just women like me — do not find resentment erotic. On the contrary. If I am angry with you, or even just irritated, then the last thing I want to do is give you pleasure. I’ll withhold it, even if it means I’m hurting myself, too.
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