Part 37: Susan

The secret to getting Becca to go to bed at ten was telling her to go to bed at nine. That was the sort of trick you learned by the second kid. It was also the sort of knowledge that got passed along at those backyard gatherings of moms, which Susan always regarded as such a waste of time - shouldn’t they be discussing ideas? or literature? something that made them superior to the men? wasn’t that what she had been implicitly promised? - but did benefit from. As pathetic as it was, getting her nine-year-old to bed early without too much fighting was one of the bigger challenges of her daily life.

It was a trick, but it worked. This way, Becca got what she wanted, which wasn’t so much staying up for another stupid episode of some interchangeable show (but they were watching it together, they could bond over how predictable it was) as winning.

Did doing things like this make her just as bad as using a sticker chart? No, because she knew it was manipulative, she knew it was cheating, and she did it anyway. She didn’t pretend she had found the answer. She didn’t tell the other moms about it like it was a breakthrough; she confessed to it, the way they all confessed to watching bad TV and buying grocery store desserts.

David had disappeared promptly at nine, of course. As usual. He fled from the bedtime ritual, leaving her to face the battle alone (but he kept the cars and the furnace running.) It was just as well: he wouldn’t have understood her system. If she tried to explain it to him, he would have seemed to get it, but then, she was sure, he would make a fatal mistake. At some point in the negotiations, he would say something like, “Okay, fine, I just wanted you to go to bed by ten, anyway.” And then it would all be ruined.

He was too honest, that was his problem, too straightforward. He always tried to level with the kids, to talk to them as if they were rational beings rather than masses of passions and contradictions. Which wasn’t because they were kids, Susan insisted, remembering her Rousseau - but because they were people. Wasn’t she just the same, after all? Falling half in love with the idea of Xander Cross last night, and then this afternoon dreading the prospect of reading more about him, and then forcing herself to do it anyway (after another failed attempt with James) and loving it once again? How impossible to know what you would like, what you would hate. 

And more proof: Becca, having fought so hard to stay up, was falling asleep on the couch.