What Do You Do All Day? by Amy Scheibe
St. Martin’s Press, 2005. 320pp. $21.95.
Reviewed by Patricia Payette (payettep@msu.edu)
10.24.06
Jennifer Bradey is the kind of woman we moms wish we had as a neighbor—engaging and smart and approachable, eager to offer a shoulder to cry on but just as quick with a witty remark and a story about her foibles as a mother. Underneath it all, however, Jennifer is trying hard to make sense of the competing demands of being a mother, wife, friend, and stay-at-home mom in her Manhanttan milieu. Jennifer is the fully-realized protagonist at the center of Amy Scheibe new novel What Do You Do All Day?, her hilarious and spot-on examination of the trials and tribulations one woman faces in her desire to “have it all” and look great while doing it.
In Jennifer, Scheibe has created an Everymom, a woman who is devoted to her husband and her two children and yet feels ambivalent about the choices that have landed her knee-deep in diapers and play dates. Jennifer is a stay-at-home mom while her husband Thom advances as buyer and seller of international antiquities, a profession in which she herself was once a rising star. Jennifer’s daughter Georgia attends kindergarten at a posh private school thanks to Jennifer’s status-conscious mother-in-law, and Jennifer (who comes from trailer trash roots) must deal with the heightened social expectations that surround birthday parties and play dates. Jennifer also spends her days cleaning up after her feisty 14-month-old, Max, who has not yet started to crawl, adding another worry to Jennifer’s daunting list.
But it is Jennifer’s friend Penny who really sends our protagonist into a maternal existential crises when she asks Jennifer, “What do you do all day?” This question—the half-serious title of Scheibe’s novel—pushes Jennifer’s button not only because it comes from an old friend who is a mother herself and knows perfectly well what Jennifer does all day, but also because it strikes a chord in Jennifer’s soul that she has been trying to listen to and understand. How does she make sense of the way her new life that has reshaped her life, her mind, her desires, her marriage, her body? Throughout the novel, Jennifer’s musings about her dissatisfactions are punctuated by questions and observations that will resonate with many of Scheibe’s female readers: “Is this,” Jennifer asks herself, “a biological mechanism that keeps me locked to the welfare of my children? If I hadn’t stopped working, would I be a better friend, go to more theater, weigh less? Do I choose the company of my kids so I don’t have to work so hard to care about others? The hard reality is that sometimes I just want them, and then I want them to be enough, and then they aren’t and I’m left with me. And though I do like me, I’m not my own best friend, either.”
The first half of the book focuses on Jennifer’s evolving, often complicated relationships with friends and family members. Their ongoing conversations with Jennifer become a mirror in which she attempts to see her own life choices reflected more clearly. Should I be working on the book I never finished, wonders Jennifer, or sit back and enjoy my seemingly charmed life? In the second half of the novel, Scheibe ramps up the drama in Jennifer’s life, but keeps the situations authentic, funny, and high stakes. Jennifer begins to suspect that globe-trotting Thom is having an affair, just as she is thrown for a loop by an enticing job offer. She attempts to keep her wits about her when an old flame shows up and propositions her over dinner while also dealing with the machinations of Thom’s unscrupulous and sexy boss. On top of all this, there is domestic drama in abundance at home and with her own parents who live upstate. To offer up more details would be to spoil the fun of watching Jennifer juggle the requirements of her many relationships with her wry, sarcastic wit at the ready and her abiding love for family and friends ultimately lighting her way.
In a publishing field crowded with books about modern motherhood that attempt to tell us what we can and cannot know about our children, ourselves, and our society, Scheibe has accomplished no small feat: she’s created a heroine whose ambivalence, imperfections, and difficult decisions illuminate the nuanced, complicated realities of motherhood while delivering a satisfying, highly entertaining novel about love, family and commitment.