Motivated for motherhood

"I can't wait 'til I'm a mom," said my eight-year-old daughter Marie. Any assigned task brings out her philosophical side and she and her four-year-old sister Sally were in the middle of clearing the dinner table, one fork at a time. My wife Betsy had taken the baby into the living room to watch Jeopardy, Betsy's favorite TV show.

"Why so eager to have kids?" I asked Marie. "So I can answer their questions," she said, then added, "But not dumb questions like Sally's." (The day before, she'd heard Sally ask me whether feathers contain "flat meat.")

"Sally's questions are no dumber than yours were," I said routinely. Sally hadn't heard the insult. She was busy making a big show of lugging a one-ton container of milk toward the refrigerator, as if trying out for the role of a slave building the pyramids. The bowed back and shuffling steps were theatrical ploys, not signs of a humble spirit.

Sally also wants to be a mother, but not for the intellectual give-and-take. For her, it's a matter of power. She homes in on power the way heat-seeking missiles lock onto fiery jet exhaust. Milk stowed away, Sally asked," Daddy, can I have a cookie?" Ask Mommy; she's in charge of that," I said."

"What are YOU in charge of?" she asked with real curiosity. As a matter of fact, I'm in charge of lots of things, most importantly the family finances and the opening of tight jar lids. (The jars are my forte.) But I retorted, "I'm in charge of YOU." An impotent lie, transparent to anyone.

Sally imagines that her mother wields awesome power and pictures herself on the throne of a similar empire someday. Sally recently learned how to phone me at work and gets in touch every few hours, sometimes calling to pitch bedtime-story ideas, but just as often calling as my mother. In a firm but affectionate way she'll say: "Ricky, are you doing your work like a good boy?" or "I hope you didn't spill any food on your tie." (Sometimes my boss answers the phone, and unexpected contact with this clear-cut power center gives Sally a special thrill, although it doesn't do me a lot of good professionally.)

Although Betsy does reign over Sally, only Sally sees that as a glamorous job. Here's an oil painting of the queen lounging in her salon last Tuesday evening: Marie is demonstrating to her mother how to write the entire alphabet in cursive, drawing each letter in the air. Betsy, trying to watch Jeopardy, is underwhelmed by Marie's relentless exhibition of aerial penmanship. Besides, she has her lap full of our one-year-old who is thrusting her face into Betsy's face, babbling insistently in Martian.

"...And this is how I do an F," says Marie as if she has an audience. "Oh! I messed up," she says, wiping the air with her other hand, impressive as a talking mime. Sally, who has recently been hollered at for knocking over the baby, sulks behind the couch, emerging every two minutes to remind Betsy, "I'm still not talking to you!" Because I was at work while all this was going on, I've had to reconstruct it from my wife's testimony and a couple of indignant phoned-in bulletins from Sally.

On the few weekday evenings I'm home, I keep the bigger kids away from Betsy for a half-hour so she can enjoy the quiz show and shout her answers at the TV set. While they clear the table, we can hear their mother's intellect running rampant in the next room. "The Grapes of Wrath!" she'll yell. Or: "Mussolini!" Like Marie, Betsy likes to answer children's questions, but by dinnertime, she's had too much of a good thing and she needs the undemanding company of the TV set for a few minutes. Why a quiz show? No dumb questions, I guess. Or at least no questions that have no answers.

During a commercial, I asked Betsy why she had wanted to be a mother and her answers were so vague and lame ("I thought it'd be fun") that I was reminded of Biology 101. That's where I learned that all creatures, from germs on up, are mostly here to reproduce. An amoeba gets big, splits in two, and that's that. Simple as Frasier spinning off from Cheers. For humans, though, the development of viable offspring takes decades and requires the expenditure of huge amounts of effort, emotion, and money in order to produce someone who may or may not remember to phone on Mother's Day. It's biology, and maybe something a little fancier, that cause loving parents to deliberately have babies when their reasons wouldn't even be strong enough to support getting a dog. And once the children are born, they themselves become reason enough (dumb questions and all).