When Did I Get Like This? Amy Wilson on Manhattan Motherhood

It should tell you something about Amy Wilson that the original subtitle for her new book, When Did I Get Like This? The Screamer, the Worrier, the Dinosaur-Chicken-Nugget Buyer & Other Mothers I Swore I’d Never Be, was “Tales of a Former Perfectionist and Current Mother.”  Over a sandwich the other day, trim and bright-eyed with far fewer wrinkles than someone on the far side of 40 should have, Wilson looked more Ivory Girl than harried mother of three.  The book is only her latest project; Wilson is also the author and star of Mother Load, a one-woman show that opened to critical acclaim Off-Broadway in 2007, and has toured the country since then.  Motherhood may have modified her over-achieving impulses, but clearly it hasn’t eliminated them.

After graduation from Yale in 1991, Wilson wasted no time on self-doubt.  “I wanted to be an actress,” she says.  “That’s a preposterous thing to decide you want to do with your life, but I managed to do it.”  Roles on Broadway (The Last Night of Ballyhoo), in film (Kissing Jessica Stein), and on TV (Norm, Felicity, Law and Order) soon followed.  Her success, she believes, was due to her personality: “my drive, my focus, I’m methodical-it served me very well…until parenthood.”

Growing up in Scranton, PA as the eldest of six children and 25 grandchildren, Wilson had been the assistant mother in her Irish Catholic family since second grade.  The idea of starting a family didn’t faze her.  “I thought ‘oh, this is going to be easy,’” she remembers.  “And then I couldn’t get pregnant.  I think I would have been like this anyway, but that started me down the road of ‘parenting is going to take everything you have, all your attention and all your desire.’”

Being “like this,” in Wilson’s mind, means being acutely and uncomfortably aware of her maternal failings.  “I spend a large portion of my life as a mother falling short and then feeling bad about it,” she declares in the book’s first chapter.  “I have one overriding daily thought: I suck at this.”  Life with Connor, Seamus, and Maggie (ages seven, five, and two) has made her vulnerable to every sanctimonious baby-product advertisement and scolding pediatric health report-messages that she believes are aimed unfairly at mothers.  “For a perfectionist like me,” she writes, “there is no greener and more dangerous pasture than modern motherhood, a garden in which all my neuroses have grown to rank fruition.”

So who’s watching, and who’s judging?  “We’re watching ourselves, mostly,” Wilson concedes.  “But then I think, if my kid shows up with nothing for Sharing Day because I forgot, what will the teacher think?”  Some of the craziness, she believes, has to do with age and education level.  Before becoming a parent, Wilson worked in a halfway house with teenaged mothers, who shared a little perspective.  “They didn’t have time for the noise, or the money-they tuned that out, they had bigger things to worry about than ‘is the milk organic’?” she remembers.  “But I don’t think it’s just rich women with master’s degrees, either.  Anyone who has a moment of free time or an extra dollar to spend is going to spend it on their kids.”

In Wilson’s book, parenthood is mostly a mother’s project-husband David is Good-Time Charlie, to be counted on for weekend entertainment and riling the kids up when it’s time for bed.  The portrait she paints is not wholly complimentary.  “His reading this has changed our parenting relationship for the better,” Wilson notes.  “I think it gave him a real insight.  And I’ve heard that from other men who have read it-they’re like “OK, now I get it.”

New York presents extra pressures.  “I think being a mother in New York when you’re not from New York is that fish-out-of-water feeling,” Wilson says in regard to her urban peers.  “They all seem so much cooler, much more hip than me, so I have to do what they’re telling me to do.”  On the other hand, touring with Mother Load made it clear that things weren’t so different in, say, North Carolina.  During Q & A sessions after the show,  mothers all over the country told her she was singing their song-with the possible exception of her riff on the absurdities of the Manhattan nursery-school admissions process.

“New York turns it up to 11,” Wilson says of the city she’s called home for 15 years.  “That the kids are always exposed to so much can be a wonderful thing, or it can be another albatross.”  Now that two of her children are school-age, there are new challenges.  “I feel like if you’re going to stay here, if you don’t have a backyard or a toy room in the basement, then you have to take advantage of all these fantabulous things.  If your kids are just going to stay in the apartment every afternoon scratching each other’s eyes out, you might as well move.”  She smiles ruefully.  “That’s my new project and source of guilt, to get my kids out.  I bought tickets to the Tim Burton thing at the Museum of Modern Art, and then we didn’t go because somebody was sick, and now they’re sitting on my bulletin board, taunting me…”

Though she portrays herself as up to her neck in child-rearing, Wilson has turned her chief preoccupation into a mini-industry.  She has readings and radio interviews scheduled well into the summer, she posts regularly on her blog, and she is currently booking a new Mother Load tour for the fall.  Talking about motherhood is going to require a lot of time away from the kids.  “It’s hard on them, but I think they see how happy and alive it makes me, and I’m much happier as their mother when I’m home,” Wilson says.  She is also working on a TV pilot.  “Maybe I’d be in it, and maybe I wouldn’t,” Wilson muses.  “I’d much rather be in the writer’s room.  I love acting, but there’s not always a lot of creative control.  I felt so good writing every day last summer in this intense way, like I was training for a marathon-I felt great all the time, using that creative part of myself.”

Writer, actor, comedienne, and mother of three, Amy Wilson can’t really say “I’m just an average mom” with a straight face.  What she can say, and often does quite eloquently, is that raising children is the biggest challenge a self-acknowledged perfectionist can face, and she only hopes she’s up to it.  “Day after day, I do my best to achieve something that is, on its face, impossible,” she writes.  “This, I think, is motherhood itself.”

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