WHY ANIMALS SLEEP SO CLOSE TO THE ROAD (AND OTHER LIES I TELL MY CHILDREN) BY SUSAN KONIG
ST. MARTIN’S PRESS, 224 PAGES, $24.95
LIKE many journalists who become full-time moms, Susan Konig wrote a book about it. Yet, unlike most of the recent onslaught of such titles, hers is unpretentious and even funny.
For the first time in more than a decade, more women are opting out of the workforce to stay home and raise kids: 5.4 million stayed home in 2003 – 850,000 more than in 1993, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Some say day care is too expensive. Others don’t want to pay strangers to raise their kids. Still more opt out of the corporate rat race to build new ‘mompreneur’ careers from home.
And here’s where the mommy camp splits apart. Konig’s book is about embracing the chaos that comes with motherhood, while other books, like Judith Warner’s “Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety,” are about women who seem both unprepared and overwhelmed by it.
Warner and others write about a loss of self and a lack of help from the government – blaming everyone but themselves. Warner’s moms are elite overprivileged freaks who speak like kids, eat like kids and even have childlike relations – i.e., nonsexual – with their husbands.
Instead, for Konig, motherhood is a joyous, messy struggle – and the mess, not the impossibly weird Sisyphean strive for perfection – is the joy. Suddenly, there’s not enough money, space or time. Konig accepts it all – and deals with it.
The family of four plus a cat lives in a “ridiculously small” two-bedroom on the Upper East Side. And with her still-single sidekick, Konig reminisces about living the ageless Manhattan single girl’s dream: cigarettes, “black clothes” and nights that begin at 11 pm.
But, as she explains between bites of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, “all party girls have to give it up sometime to make room for the new batch.” Pregnant again, the family is off to the ‘burbs.
Konig writes in rare moments when her kids are napping or out with their dad. And, as a new mom who is more than eight months pregnant, writing from home and thinking of story ledes in that blissful moment between my 16-month-old son’s bath, story time and bedtime – I can relate.
Many stay-at-home moms must also deal, at some point, with the outside perception that staying home is easier than working. It isn’t. Yet stay-at-homes can be just as wistful when it comes to remembering their working days.
“When I worked in an office, life was very relaxing,” writes Konig, who once penned a column for this newspaper. “I’d roll in with coffee and a muffin, maybe look at the newspaper, check in with coworkers . . . do a little typing . . . make a few phone calls, make lunch plans, open the mail, go freshen up in the ladies’ room, go out for a relaxing lunch, window-shop, do a little more work, order out for an afternoon cappuccino fix, make after-work plans and watch the clock until five.”
“It was good,” she writes. “Sure, occasionally I’d get fired, but that would just give me more time to have lunch, window-shop and sip cappuccino.”
Konig tells it like it is. Instead of complaining, she uses humor to retain her sanity and deal with the reality that each mother creates for herself.
“I figured I’d settle for working in short bursts until the kids were grown . . . But then,” she writes, “of course, I’d want to be filling sippy cups and playing Rodent’s Revenge and taking notes about it all in crayon on the back of an envelope.”
Jennifer Gould Keil is the author of “Vodka, Tears and Lenin’s Angel: A Journalist on the Road in the Former Soviet Union.”
