Big Blonde

Big Blonde is the name the mother gives, always in her own thoughts, to the blonde mommy she keeps encountering at the library, at the edge of the playground, and texting furiously in the play space at the mall. She is the Ur-mommy, perfected and monumental, the living embodiment of the happy mommy the mother refuses to become. The epithet itself is a private act of defiance: a way of reducing an idealized figure of motherhood to a type, a category, an object of wary observation rather than a person to befriend or emulate.

Identity and the Ur-Mommy

The Big Blonde is introduced through her twins, Celeste and Aubergine, blonde, blabbering girls in coordinated jumpers embroidered adorably with deer and owls set against an enchanting woodland scene printed on each skirt, their silky tresses collected in pigtails tied with pink velvet bows. As they crawl around, one might glance at their yellow ruffled diaper covers peeking from beneath each skirt, the name of each child embroidered on the butt. The mother notes with bitter amusement that the Big Blonde has named one of her children eggplant, but French, and that she does not care—not even a moment of shame for the embarrassingly vegetal name as she smiles and laughs and chats and exchanges and hugs and feeds and generally joins in wherever joining in was possible. The Big Blonde is thus defined by a seamless, effortless performance of motherhood: she signs to one daughter, who signs to the other, who responds in kind, after which the Big Blonde collects them both in a big squeeze as they all succumb to a fit of giggles, then pulls from her diaper bag two red apples, which she hands to the little girls, who look on in absolute wonder and gum the succulent fruits.

The Encounter at the Library

The mother watches the Big Blonde from a safe distance, pasting on her face the best approximation she can of a friendly little smile while, on the inside, chanting, Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. The Big Blonde catches the bedraggled mother in her line of sight—that tired-looking mother over by the trains in the rumpled shirt, poor thing, always alone with her son (what a doll), and an odd look in her eyes, why doesn't she just come join the group?—then offers a tiny wave and, with a quick and cheerful word to the mother beside her, digs something from the depths of her diaper bag and rises to walk with intention toward the mother. This approach is the moment of maximum threat: the happy mommy world, embodied in the Big Blonde, reaches out to claim the mother, and the mother's internal chant reveals the depth of her resistance to being absorbed into that world.

The Conspiracy Theory

The Big Blonde becomes entangled in the mother's quietly forming theory that she violently pushes from her mind each time it manages to whisper itself inside her: that the golden retriever and Big Blonde—both immaculately groomed, both exhibiting the same vitality and excitement for life, both inexplicably smelling of strawberries—are one and the same. This paranoid fusion of dog and mommy is the novel's central image of the mother's predicament: the ideal mother and the ideal pet are interchangeable, both groomed, both vital, both eager to please, both smelling sweetly of strawberries. The theory is a conspiracy that actually winds up being true, in the way of the mother's expansive conspiracy theories about the system and capitalism and the patriarchy and then religion and gender roles and biology. The Big Blonde is thus not merely a rival but a symptom: she is what the mother would have to become to be happy, and the mother's refusal to become her is the refusal to be less of an animal.

The Gendered Slur and the Mother's Rage

The epithet Big Blonde belongs to the same family of naming as Nightbitch, the self-deprecating joke that turns out to be true. When the mother referred to herself as Nightbitch, she meant it as a good-natured self-deprecating joke—because that's the sort of lady she was, a good sport, able to poke fun at herself—but in the days following this new naming, she found the patch of coarse black hair sprouting from the base of her neck and was, like, What the fuck. The Big Blonde is the inverse: a name the mother gives to someone else, a way of seeing the happy mommy as a type rather than a person. Yet the mother's own reflection on the unfairness of gendered slurs—that such a slur didn't account for the fact she had made a boy with her own body, nurtured his multiplying cells for months and months to her own detriment, to her own fatness, to the decline of her youthful sex appeal—suggests that the Big Blonde, too, is trapped in a system designed to put a woman in her place and keep her there. The mother's sense that society, adulthood, marriage, motherhood, all these things, were somehow masterfully designed to put a woman in her place and keep her there had begun to weigh on her, and once she was stripped of all she had been, of her career, her comely figure, her ambition, her familiar hormones, an anti-feminist conspiracy seemed not only plausible but nearly inevitable. The Big Blonde is the visible proof of that conspiracy's success: a woman who has fully submerged herself in the mommy current, moving through her days and weeks according to library schedules and civic events, texting about splash pads and jungle gyms, sharing warnings about ticks, about pesticides on fruits and vegetables.

The Refusal to Join

The mother actively resists making friends in a mom context and objects to the sort of clapping and cooing that goes on in the library room, the floor play that would be mandatory, the group peekaboos and collective itsy-bitsy-spidering, the happiness and positivity that would also be mandatory. It is a veritable embrace of All Things Mommy, and the mother certainly does not want to embrace anything of the sort: she is indeed a mother, but she isn't that kind of mother, the sort that builds her entire life and being around her child. The Big Blonde is the chief among those happy mommies the mother sees through the windows framing the door, and her approach toward the mother is the approach of that entire world. The mother's internal chant—Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck—is her answer to the invitation she cannot bring herself to accept. The Big Blonde thus stands as the permanent alternative the mother rejects, the life she could have had if she had been willing to be less of an animal, and the measure of how far she will go—into the dog, into the night, into the pack—to avoid becoming her.