Love, Honor and Ayelet Waldman

Ayelet Waldman is the wife of Pultizer-Prize winning Michael Chabon and the author of the Mommy Track Mysteries and recently published an article in the New York Times that said, “I love my husband more than I love my children.”

From the discussions I’ve had with other Moms around the sandbox and what I’ve read on other blogs, this seems to be a polarizing issue. (Although people seem united in snickering at her description of Chabon’s face inspiring her with “paroxysms of infatuated devotion.” I must be missing out in life.)

Who am I to judge Ayelet Waldman? Clearly we are living in two separate universes. In hers you can have four children, an active sex life with your husband and still find time to write a few novels, a weekly column on Salon.com and drop in on Oprah. In mine you can only scratch your head in wonder at how the other half lives and then go back to cooking dinner, wiping snotty noses and peeling your son’s foot off of your daughter’s face.

Watching my kids can be really, really hard. I’m not saying that it is every day, but some days it is. And on those days when Miles throws his breakfast all over the floor because he wanted blueberries, not honeydew, and then rolls around when I’m changing his diaper so that both of us are covered in poop, when Mia cries for an hour for no apparent reason and shrieks whenever I try to put her down, when I have to strap them howling into the stroller so we can get out of the house before I hurt someone, when I’m pushing them down the street and they are both screaming and grinding their elbows into each other as hard as they can, when people in passing cars are slowing down to look -- I have to love them more than absolutely anything else on the face of this earth, because if I didn’t, I might just leave them there on the corner. I might just leave them there while I sashay down to 24th street where a latte and a yoga class and a mani/pedi and lots of cute boutiques where the clothing has tags that read DRY CLEAN ONLY await me.