And this is from a woman who was booed on the Oprah show for admitting in a New York Times' “Modern Love Piece” that she loves her husband more than her children. You gotta love a woman like this!
Waldman covers the gamut: from nursing to failure to nurse, from her pregnancies, to having the courage to abort a child that might have been born seriously defective. That particular chapter is hard to read, especially in its brutal and searing openness. But Waldman does not spare us. And that is why her readers should be grateful. She tells us about talking to her kids about sex, about realizing that they have overheard her fighting with her husband, and she is revealing in her own mental illness, her struggle with bi-polar disorder, a hereditary disease that has been passed down through her family like the eye color and hair color and noses and intelligence that she and her children have also inherited.
But the reality is that, in the end, Ayelet Waldman is no crazier, no saner, and no different than the rest of us mothers out there struggling to balance our kids and their needs with ourselves and our own needs. As much as we love those babies and want the world for them, we need to try and keep a little piece of it for ourselves.
Waldman, in her writing, in her truth-telling, in her soul-baring, helps us do that. As we attempt to keep all our many many balls in the air we acknowledge, along with Waldman, that they will drop and drop again and again. But, as she tells us, “When they fall, all you need to do is pick them up and throw them back up in the air.”
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