The School for Good Mothers

by Jessamine Chan

“Galaxies,” she whispers. It’s their favorite game, a promise they say at bedtime. I promise you the moon and stars. I love you more than galaxies. She says it when she tucks Harriet in, this girl with her same moon face, same double eyelids, same pensive mouth.

She’s stuck in the smallest city she’s ever lived in, a toy city where she has no support network and only a few acquaintances, no real friends of her own. And now, because of joint custody, she has to stay until Harriet turns eighteen.

What she can’t explain, what she doesn’t want to admit, what she’s not sure she remembers correctly: how she felt a sudden pleasure when she shut the door and got in the car that took her away from her mind and body and house and child.

The events of last night still feel like they happened to someone else. The judge will see that she’s not an alcoholic, not an addict, that she has no criminal record. She’s gainfully employed and a peaceful, committed co-parent. She has bachelor’s and master’s degrees in literature from Brown and Columbia, a 401(k) account, a college savings fund for Harriet. She wants to believe that Harriet is too young to remember. But there may be a faint, wounded feeling that could calcify as Harriet grows up. A sense memory of crying and receiving no answer.

She asks if they’ll be installing anything in her car, in her cubicle at work. They assure her that they’re only focusing on her home life, as if knowing that they’ll only watch her eat and sleep and breathe should make her feel better. When they have enough material, they say, they’ll use the footage to analyze her feelings. What does that mean? How is that possible? In the articles she found online, the CPS representative said the new program would eliminate human error. Decisions would be made more efficiently. They’d be able to correct for subjectivity or bias, implement a set of universal standards.

So it begins, Frida thinks. She is a bad mother among other bad mothers. She neglected and abandoned her child. She has no history, no other identity.

But she’ll never be able to tell anyone. The mothers had to sign nondisclosure agreements. They’re not allowed to talk about the school after they leave, can’t say anything about the program during the weekly calls. If they do, regardless of the outcome of their cases, their names will be added to a Negligent Parent Registry.

“Fix the home,” she says, “and fix society.”

“You’re the lucky ones,” she says. Only a few months ago, they would have been sent to parenting classes. They would have studied an outdated manual. But what good is learning about parenting in the abstract? Bad parents must be transformed from the inside out. The right instincts, the right feelings, the ability to make split-second, safe, nurturing, loving decisions.

“Now, repeat after me: I am a bad mother, but I am learning to be good.”

The work will be arduous, but the mothers must resist any thoughts of quitting. The state is investing in them. The fence, Ms. Knight notes, is electrified.

Their eyes turn moist, the longing of these women enough to power a small town.

“What did you do?” Frida asks. “To my kid?” “For work. Before this.”

“Aren’t they amazing?” These children—dolls, Ms. Russo calls them—represent the latest advances in robotics and artificial intelligence. They can move and speak and smell and feel like real children. They can hear. They can think. They are sentient beings with age-appropriate brain development, memory, and knowledge. In terms of size and abilities, they resemble a child of about eighteen to twenty months.

In addition to their role as proxy children, the dolls will collect data. They’ll gauge the mothers’ love. The mothers’ heart rates will be monitored to judge anger. Their blinking patterns and expressions will be monitored to detect stress, fear, ingratitude, deception, boredom, ambivalence, and a host of other feelings, including whether her happiness mirrors her doll’s. The doll will record where the mother’s hands are placed, will detect tension in her body, her temperature and posture, how often she makes eye contact, the quality and authenticity of her emotions.

The mothers must narrate everything, impart wisdom, give their undivided attention, maintain eye contact at all times. When the dolls ask why, why, why, as toddlers are wont to do, the mothers must provide answers. Curiosity must be rewarded. “The dolls have an off switch,” Ms. Khoury says. “You do not.”

A mother is always patient. A mother is always kind. A mother is always giving. A mother never falls apart. A mother is the buffer between her child and the cruel world.

Frida is thinking about money. Private school and summer camps. Music lessons and tutors. Trips abroad. Everything her parents gave her. The more she hears about deprivation, the more she wants to give Harriet luxury.

She wants to tell him that these buildings are composed of pheromones and regret. Hostility. Longing. That it’s possible to stop noticing sadness. That the sound of women crying now resembles white noise.

“A mother is a shark,” Ms. Russo says. “You’re always moving. Always learning. Always trying to better yourself.”

Arguments about rash cream so often spiraled into fights about love and faith and what kind of person Harriet would become. It shocks Frida to think she ever felt so passionately about consumer products.

Frida remembers staring at the ribbon, at Susanna’s fine, pale throat. How she wanted that sinister story to be true. To pull on the ribbon and make Susanna lose her head.

The instructors always tell them that motherhood is a marathon, not a sprint. Why, then, do they have to sprint?

The mothers can survive on so little. A hand on the cheek. A lingering glance. For most, nearness is enough.

Loneliness is a form of narcissism. A mother who is in harmony with her child, who understands her place in her child’s life and her role in society, is never lonely. Through caring for her child, all her needs are fulfilled.

There are rumors that the school is developing an evening seminar on loneliness. How to manage it. How to avoid it. Why it has no place here, or anywhere, in the life of a mother.

In this light, no one would be able to tell that they’re losing hope. That they’re dangerous women. Women who can’t control themselves. Who don’t know the right way to love.

The hardest part is staying cheerful and amazed. Speaking only in exclamations. Generating stories on the fly. Resisting boredom. Playing is harder than running. There’s no numbered sequence of steps, no specific play protocol. Play requires creativity. Each mother must tap into her inner child.

On Mother’s Day, phone privileges are canceled for everyone, a decision that’s only announced at breakfast. Between meals, the mothers must remain in their rooms and write in their atonement journals. They’re encouraged to reflect on their remaining shortcomings and their missing children, to remember last Mother’s Day and think about next year’s, as well as giving thanks to the women who raised them. “I am a bad mother because,” Frida writes. She quickly fills five pages.

Not everyone came to the school a violent woman, but now, heading into month seven, they all might stab someone.

Tucker cheerfully answers her questions about the father’s school: no cleaning crew, yes brain scans, counseling once a month, no talk circle, what’s talk circle, some hand jobs, but no real romances, not that he knows of. A bunch of fistfights, but no expulsions. Some malfunctions, but no dead dolls. They get to call home for an hour every Sunday. No one has ever lost phone privileges. The counselors think it’s important for them to stay in their children’s lives. For the most part, it’s been a supportive group.

Tucker turns red. “Do we have to talk about that? I am a father learning to be a better man.” “Seriously? That’s what they have you say? We have to say ‘I am a narcissist. I am a danger to my child.’

Frida shares what she learned about the fathers’ program. Her classmates shake their heads. They’re surprised, but not. They’re angriest about the phone privileges. The rumors that the fathers’ evaluations are easier. The rumors that the technical department handles all changes of blue liquid.

THE MOTHERS AREN’T SUPPOSED TO celebrate their birthdays. They can only talk about themselves in relation to their children.

The four of them look like a demented little family. Bad parents, false children. In the future, Frida thinks, there might be no other way.

What will he cost her? Had she never met the man who let his son fall out of a tree, her prognosis might still be fair.

Tucker said the fathers were never given talking points. Sunday calls were never canceled due to technical difficulties.

She needs to be patient. Soon, she’ll be free to have her own thoughts and feelings.

The school needs to see that she’s changed, but does survival count as progress? Harriet deserves more than a mother whose greatest achievement is keeping herself alive.

At the equipment room door, Emmanuelle looks back at Frida. She waves and shouts, “Love you, Mommy! Take care! Take care!”

It’s the first Tuesday in December, fifteen months since Harriet was taken away, fourteen months since Frida last held her, four months since their last phone call. They’re about to have their final visit. Yesterday, the judge terminated her parental rights. She hasn’t been added to the registry, doesn’t have to be if she has no child.

When Harriet is eighteen, she’ll be fifty-five. She doesn’t know where she’ll be living, if she’ll be able to survive until then. It feels wrong to be alive,

Susanna said, “Harriet asks about Frida all the time. She says things like, ‘Mommy come back. Mommy miss me.’ For us, it’s not a question of trust. I know Frida can do it. She’s a good person.”

She described her relationship with Emmanuelle as beautiful and rich. She learned from the doll as much as the doll learned from her. “We were a team,” she said.

Frida begins sobbing. This is her last chance to make requests, to share secrets, but what secret, what story, would explain her whole life to her daughter?

They talk about what saying goodbye today means, that goodbye today isn’t goodbye forever, that Harriet will grow tall and strong and smart and brave, and even if Mommy can’t visit, she’ll be thinking of Harriet all the time. Every day. Every second.

Frida hugs Harriet tight, trying to deliver every kind of hug—not varieties of affection, but an entire world.

She never thought of herself as living in a city full of children, but maybe every city and every neighborhood is full of children when you’ve lost your own.

She’s not sure if she’s willing to spend years in the basement, but what will the punishment matter if the alternative is nothing?

No matter what happens, there will be comfort and pleasure. A moment with her daughter where she makes the rules. A different ending.