Hurray Anonymom! Saving us from 50 Shades Of Gray and other brain-clotting summer reads...

Here are Seven Summer Books that will make standing at the open freezer door and  eating ice cream out of the carton (while your kid sits on the floor using his tiny, fat fingers to pull out and eat the Flavor Blasted Goldfish crackers that slipped under the fridge) seem like not such a bad thing after all: 

NINE MONTHS by Paula Bomer.  This mom has sex with strangers while pregnant with her third child.  If you can’t handle that, then this book might not be for you.  I laughed out loud many times.

DRINKING CLOSER TO HOME by Jessica Anya Blau.  This mom “quits” her job as housewife and leaves the laundry, cooking, cleaning and childcare to a seven-year-old and ten-year-old while she smokes pot and hangs out at the nude beach.  There is sex, drugs, affairs, addictions and rebellion in this book.  Another laugh-out-loud read.

NIGHT SWIM by Jessica Keener.  This mom lets the maid prepare the meals while she visits with friends at the country club.  Her presence is everywhere and in everything her daughter does.  This book is a beautiful, engaging, musical trip into 1970 that makes you feel like you actually lived through it all with these characters.

UP FROM THE BLUE by Susan Henderson.  The mother in this book is both adorable, loveable and charming, and painfully horrifying.  There’s a big mystery and I don’t want to give anything away so just read it to find out more about this unique mother.  The story is touching, sad and gripping.

GIRLS IN TRUCKS by Katie Crouch.  All of womanhood is in this witty, charming novel: mothers and daughters, sisters, friends.  It’s not mother-centric the way the other novels on this list are but I adore our  faithful blog leader and want to include one of her fabulous books!

THE PRICE OF SALT by Patricia Highsmith.  There is a lesbian mom in this book written in the 1950s.  At the time of the book, this mother was considered villainous in New York society.  Now (hopefully) she’s no villain, still, she does run off with her lover and leave her only daughter behind. 

SULA by Toni Morrison.  If you didn’t read this in high school or college, read it now.  There are mothers and then there are Toni Morrison’s mothers who do things like reach their fingers up their child’s bottom to pull out a hard-to-push-out poop.  This book is brutal, poignant, and a bit unnerving. 

We need another Hallmark holiday like we need another reality show centered on an over-the-top subculture. (Hoarders, Shahs of Sunset: how about “Stepmoms of Suburbia”? Bravo execs, tweet me!)

I’ve never taken much stock in these types of “holidays.” That said, I wouldn’t dare let a Mother’s Day pass without sending my mom flowers. My husband knows I think Valentine’s Day is bogus. He also knows that if he overlooks it he is going to feel very lonely for the next twenty-four hours. (Okay, maybe forty-eight.)

Why is this? Why do we care so much about consumer holidays when we should be showering appreciation on our loved ones on ordinary days because we want to—not because we’re guilted into it by a synthetic rose bouquet at the CVS? Perhaps it’s the overwhelmingly public nature of these occasions. If we dismiss Father’s Day it feels like a slap in the face to dear old Dad, the one man on the block who didn’t receive a golf or grill themed card.

Ironically, though, it’s stepparents—the very people who don’t actually have an official day—who could, well, kind of use one. I’m not talking banners and balloons, but I sure would love a genuine “thank you” for the 7 am tennis games (on a Saturday!), the schlepping to and from Karate and basketball, the weeknight dinners cooked with everyone’s preferences and dislikes in mind, all in suburban New Jersey. A far cry from downtown Manhattan, where my single self was living before I fell in love and inherited a stepfamily.

We stepparents are the ones in dire need of appreciation. Yet all we usually get is, “Oh, hey.” That is the single hardest part about being a stepparent…I think. Ipour my heart and soul out to these children, I devote my mental and physical energy to making sure they are happy, healthy, and better adjusted than the psych books say kids of divorced parents can be, but I so rarely get the snuggles and hugs and sheer adoration my husband or his ex-wife do. 

To read the rest of Raina Wallens' very excellent essay, nip over to HuffPo....
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/raina-wallens/stepmom_b_1499741.html

*Anomymom is an amazing novelist who posts anonymously so her daughter won't kill her. We love her! OK!

At fifteen my daughter is not interested in cuddling or hanging out with me.  The most meaningful conversations we have are when we’re alone in the car (we have a no cell phone policy in the car, so talking to me is her only option).  So when she agreed to come watch the new and highly acclaimed HBO show GIRLS, I was thrilled.  We missed the show when it aired, so our only way to see it was on-demand on the TV in our bedroom.

The few seconds my husband spent clicking through the on-demand shows, finding what we wanted to watch, were blissful.  My daughter actually snuggled with me.  She was nestled between me and her father on the bed.  Our feet were overlapped, mine cold, hers deliciously warm.  And then my husband hit play.

The first show of GIRLS (not the pilot) opens with a twenty-something couple having sex.  It’s murky and they’re in a traditionally horizontal position.  

“Oh my god,” I said, “shut your eyes.”  She knows about sex, her friends have sex, her best friend left her birth control pills at our house this weekend. 

“Mom, I can deal with this,” she said.

“Well don’t look to carefully,” I said.

I thought it would be over any second.  The opening credits hadn’t even run yet—surely they had to cut to the credits sooner rather than later.

And then the guy started speaking—a narrative I couldn’t quite hear because I started nervously yammering over it.

Me: Okay, so maybe you shouldn’t watch this show, this is a little creepy for someone your age . . . 

Guy on show: (*Not direct quote, just an approximation of what I remember through my jabber.)Yeah, do you have to get on the school bus little girl? I like eleven-year-olds like you . . . 

ME: HOLY MOLY, is he pretending she’s ELEVEN?! That’s disgusting, don’t listen, maybe you should leave the room.

My Husband: Shouldn’t they be cutting to credits by now? Don’t listen to this, shut your eyes!

And then, just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, the guy pulled out of the woman, masturbated quickly over her breasts, ejaculated and said something along the lines of, “I’m going to **m all over your t*ts so you can go home to mommy and daddy with my **m on you.”

 I screamed.  My daughter screamed.  My husband was frantically hitting the buttons on the clicker.  He did stop the show but it was too late.  We had seen the image, we had heard the words.  My fifteen-year-old (okay, she’s turning 16 this summer) now knows that sex isn’t just love and kissing and touching and fumbling.  There is some sticky, stinky, imaginative and sometimes nasty shit out there.  And she’s been exposed to it much sooner than I would have liked.

My daughter ran out of the room and I ran with her.  We met up in her bedroom, on her bed.

Me: I’m really, really sorry.  Are you traumatized?  I think I’m traumatized.

Daughter: I’m fine, Mom, I swear, I’m fine.

My Husband (who had walked into the room): Is that the last time we ever convince you to watch TV with us?

Daughter: Yeah, probably.

Me: Oh, man, I’m just so sorry.  I’m so sorry you had to see that.

Daughter: Mom! I really don’t want to talk about it any more.  I’m fine.  I swear.

My husband left and the conversation with my daughter continued a bit longer.  I wanted to make our talk meaningful, to let this be a moment when she could ask me questions and I could explain things about real life and real relationships, and bad relationships, and good ones.  But she wasn’t in a mind to engage that way.  She had a notepad out, had started drawing; I was only making it worse.


Eventually I let my daughter be and my husband and I watched the rest of the show.  Post-credits it was fairly appropriate for a fifteen-year-old, in fact it would have been great if she had watched it.  The show dealt with condoms, safe sex, doing things with guys that you don’t really want to do just to make them happy.  These are lessons I want her to learn through things like movies, books and TV and not through bad dates with guys who want her to quash her desires and recreate her into their fetish or fantasy.  I don’t want my daughter to enter the world at twenty-something, like the girls in GIRLS, only to find that she doesn’t know how to navigate or avoid or deter some skinny dude who wants to jack off on her while pretending she’s eleven.

I feel horrible that my daughter had to sit through those 45 seconds with her parents.  But I hope she’ll sneak in our room when we’re gone and watch the whole episode on her own.

*Dear Readers: This essay appeared in a slightly different form in this month's 7x7 Magazine. 

It happened so slowly it was almost imperceptible. Perhaps it was when I moved out of that apartment with the chrome appliances my best friend and I shared to my own place in the Mission with no heat. Or when she married a handsome, good-natured banker while I continued to date impoverished writers. Or when I gave up a nice advertising job to become a full-time writer myself. Actually, I’ll never be able to pinpoint when it was that I stepped into a different class than Gretl*, but it has happened, and the divide is widening.

We have known each other a long time, Gretl and I. We have similar educations. We both love Patty Griffin and Tammy Taylor (Friday Night Lights) and the roast chicken at Zuni. We once seamlessly picked up a conversation we’d left off three months before on a ski lift. We also are both hopelessly in love with San Francisco, which is where the growing chasm gets truly painful, as one of us will be able to remain here with her family while the other, probably, will not.

I use the word class with great trepidation, but I can’t quite think of another word for it. Money quadrant? Spending pool? The bottom line is I can no longer afford the stuff my best friend can. This was something I ignored for a long time, particularly before I had a family. San Francisco is, after all, a city that embraces all things fun over those that are real. Why would I spend a weekend looking at my tax situation when I could run Bay to Breakers? Why balance my budget when I could go on a sunny hike followed by sunnier steins of beer? Gretl and her entourage are jolly, active folks who enjoy weekends in Tahoe and brunch at the latest restaurants. Hanging out with them is like stepping into a sitcom about hilarious thirty-somethings in the most beautiful city in the world. How could I not want to keep up with that? 

So I did, for a while. I cashed in retirement funds and opened new lines of credit. Yes, it was stupid, but I have never been good with money. During childhood, my family was nowhere near the 1%, but we went on yearly vacations and participated in a disgusting display of consumerism at Christmas. Growing up this way, coupled with no lessons in financial planning, is a dangerous thing. Maeve Brennan, the long-winded lady of the New Yorker, once wrote to William Maxwell: “I feel as though I am always waiting for some grown up to come take care of the bills.”  For years, this was my philosophy exactly.

All was well, until debt’s cold shadow curled his fingers around my $350 Frye boots. When you have $13,000 in debt, banks will no longer give you credit cards. And then one horrible night, during a particularly frivolous dinner party, a very large man knocked on the door to repossess my car.

You might ask why I found it necessary to partake in this lifestyle when it was clear I could not afford to do so. Why didn’t I stay in reading more? Or get poorer friends? My answer is: Have you been to San Francisco lately? The sirens are ever singing for one’s wallet. I am constantly bombarded with emails from Flavorpill and Yelp telling me about the hottest newest $12 deviled egg. (That’s one egg, thank you). 

Gretl is graceful and humorous about our changing situation, which, of course, is why I love her madly. “But your car is the best!” she says when I complain about the gnawing sound it makes as it climbs her hill. “Thrift is a sign of true intelligence!" I am always bolstered by these affirmations. It is green to sparingly drive an old low-emission car until it dies. Never mind the fact that when it does give out, my family will have to collect our groceries via dog-powered rickshaw until I sell another book.

All this is doable. Having little doesn’t bother me, now that I’ve paid off my bills.  Compared to the majority of people in this country, I’m rolling in it. I get that. I have food, and health care, and an education. I'm two paychecks from the street, the same as a lot of people. But I HAVE those two paychecks, so I'm grateful.

Still, the kids are where it gets tough. Gretl and I’s daughters love to play together.  They don’t care about money yet--just give then some rocks and a bowl, and they’re happy. But I’ve been a teenager, so I know they will care soon. And the other morning, when I tagged along with Gretl to drop off her daughter at preschool, the divide was glaringly visible. Inside, a live musician played the mandolin, while the fashionably-yet-organically clad munchkins frolicked with stimulating wood toys covered in soy ink. Now, I happen to adore the woman to runs my kid’s day care in Daly City. She’s amazing. Yet that afternoon at pick-up time, I must admit that the plastic blocks did look a little dingy under the fluorescent light.

I don’t know what the future holds for our family. We have this new financial planner who says we need to “change for the future”. Move to a cheaper suburb, or pick up more work. As my daughter gets older, we could be forced to leave altogether. After all, he says, if we lived in Des Moines we’d be rolling in it for real--or at least enough for the soy toys.  He’s smart, this guy. I have the documents to prove it. The problem is, there’s no Gretl in Des Moines. And no matter how much I stare at those incriminating numbers, for the moment, life without my best friend is a budget I just can’t handle.

* For purposes of privacy I have replaced my best friend’s real name with that of our favorite character in The Sound of Music. 

Hello readers. I realize the MomCage has been a bit silent. There is a reason, and it doesn’t have to do with deadlines, a house fire, a yoga injury, or other excuses. The truth is I was given a bit of a hard time for venting about motherhood, both by people in my life and some adjacent to it. It threw me for a loop, and honestly, it’s taken a while to get my MomCage back on.

I don’t have to write this blog. I don’t check the statistics to see how many people read it, but my guess is that it’s no PerezHilton. Yet somehow (often the case in my life, somehow) I managed to piss people off.

I don’t want to offend anyone by what I’m writing. It’s not my interest to be provocative. So, after a small blow up, I considered taking it down. But then, I didn’t. Why? Because the comments presented to me--that I was whining, that I was over sharing, that I was not in a cage, for God’s sake, that I had asked to be a mother, and now I was just annoying everyone with my thoughts--were not from mothers. It took me a few weeks to figure that out. And then I said, Oh, right.

Few people other than me know how annoying mothers can be. I did not have a child until I was thirty-six, which meant that much of my thirties was spent at my best friends’ baby showers. The teething! Oh, yay, Sophie, the giraffe!  “Hi, so good to see you. I only have 45 minutes before the next feeding! Oh God, am I leaking??” I would slink away from these “girl” dinners out, go home, pour myself a large glass of something, and choose the very most violent episode of the Wire just to eradicate the pain.

It’s even worse, I realize, if you happen to be single and you actually want children. Or perhaps you are having fertility problems. Or you’ve had a miscarriage. If so, my heart bleeds for you. Seriously, sister. I had a miscarriage myself, and a week later some women were talking a table next to mine about how hard it was to potty train. Oh, the little pee soaked blankets! Gross! I wanted to throw my eggs at them. How dare they be so ungrateful? I paid the bill, then went to my car and wept.

If any of the above is the case, I am so sorry. But my thought is, perhaps this is not the blog for you. You see, mothers, as lucky as we are, need a place to yawp and howl. A very wise friend said to me, hours after I gave birth,“Welcome to the other side of the membrane.” No other words have put it quite so clearly to me. It’s f*cking hard to mother a child, and there needs to be an outlet other than pink photo albums and cute video posts. At least for me, anyway.

So the blog is back. I will no longer be talking specifically about my partner, which was a specific request put forward after some  of the backlash. But I will be sharing. Probably over sharing too.

xoxo, Katie

*This is a repost from  Samantha Schoech's wonderful Babycenter blog.

There’s a story over on the Huffington Post called Women Perfectionists: You Don’t Need To Be Ashamed Of Doing This Anymore. In it, the author forgives herself for all the female “flaws” and “mistakes” she is supposed to feel bad about.

It got me thinking. What are mothers if not little guilt vessels? Unless we have modeled ourselves after Mrs. Walton, we are supposed to feel bad about almost every move we make. We are worse than the French, pale in comparisons to the Chinese, and we are raising brats, right?

Well, to hell with that. Here are 10 mommy “mistakes” no one can make me feel bad about.

1. Making macaroni and cheese from a box.
This absolutely kills my MIL. And, she’s right–it’s cheaper and healthier to make it from scratch. And guess what? I’m not going to do it.

2. Supplementing with formula.
When I was pregnant I was rabidly anti-formula. And then my twins were born and I just couldn’t keep up. So, I supplemented with formula. Yes, I nursed for a year. But I was no purist. And guess what? Everyone is just fine.

3. Not belonging to the PTA.
I volunteer at the school when I can. I give money to the school. But I just don’t have it in me to go to meetings and make signs and keep track of things. I’m glad other people do, though.

4. Allowing their room to get hideously messy.
I have a pretty low mess threshold, but when it comes to my kids’ room I just close the door. When you can’t see the floor, they have to pick up.

5. Drinking wine during play dates.
Look, I am not satisfied playing dress up and spies. I need a little more out of my play dates, like wine and gossip, and sometimes even pizza.

TO READ THE REST, CLICK HERE.

Friends, I know the blog has been lagging. What can I say. I’ve been mothering.

Ah, the ultimate excuse. I use it all the time, and I hope you do too. Deadlines, broken lunch dates, hiding from birthday parties of friends’ children.

“My kid is sick!” I text happily from bed, burrowed in a nest of books and coffee cups, as her father whisks the little human alibi off to the sitter’s house.

But actually, I have been grappling with a mothering issue. Not enough not to work, but still. The recent weird thing is, my kid has discovered my boob. Like, she grabs it, whenever she can, and squeezes it, hard enough for me to yelp.

She’s two, long ago weaned. (God, I hate that word. Weeeeeaned.)  I can only suppose that she’s punishing me on giving up on breastfeeding so early.

I could be smarter mommy! She’s telling me. If you hadn’t been so selfish and crowded by the rabid squirrel on your nipple, I would have gotten better brain juices! Hell, I’d be at Yale by now!

Or something like that. More disturbing is that she somehow picked up the word for it. “Mommy boobie!” She says, pulling my shirt down in restaurants and on the BART platform. “Boobie mommy!”

I’m left unsettled by this for two reasons. A. No one is bothering to look at my bare breast, even the teenage boys in the corner. HELLO! THERE’S A FREE SHOW ON, GUYS!

And, B: Where the hell did she learn the word boobie?

 I suppose it was a “School”, which is actually day care, which is actually a yellow room in a basement in Daly City. The women who run it are true geniuses with kids, I love them, the day Phoebe has to go to real school, I will cry. But what is going on? Are they having a peep show in the back or something? The kid can barely say the words “boat” an “dog”. Boobie? What?

“At least she’s not saying penis,” my friend said at a play date. (Otherwise known as, an excuse to get plastered at 4 p.m.)

At which point, my little Boo swiveled her head around, smiled and crowed, “PENIS! PENIS! PENIS!”

I think I’ll let her father take her somewhere on the BART this weekend. Hopefully, she’ll try to show off his wares, and they’ll both get arrested for a few hours. Then I can go back to my book nest and finally get some sleep.

On the way home from dropping my daughter at day care (even as I write it, the guilt seeps in), I happened to switch on my favorite radio show, Forum. Michael Krasny was interviewing Pamela Druckerman, the author of Bringing Up Bebe: One American Woman Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting.

Naturally, I was riveted. According to Druckerman, French women have the parenting answers. Everyone gets epidurals. (Hurray! Sanity!) Day care is state sponsored. The French government pays for nannies, strollers, even tummy tucks. Breastfeeding is frowned upon after three months, and in France you can drink wine throughout pregnancy and take baths in unpasteurized cheese. The French are much more pro-women, encouraging them to get their lives back as soon as possible. Happy mothers mean happy kids, and if that means the little darlings have to drink formula, the French say, so be it.

This book has gotten a lot of attention. The New York Times review was critical of the paltry research methods, and of course there are La Leche League gurus who have jumped all over it. Because I feel like Michael Krasny spelled out the highlights for me this morning, I don’t feel the need to rush out and buy the book. Still, the outlined concepts did give me pause.

Part of the Mom Cage concept is feeling trapped as a mother. But why do I feel trapped? I’ve largely been blaming the problem on American societal pressures. Yet as I listened to Druckerman talk, I felt myself bucking. We hover over our children too much, she said. We feel them Cheerios all day. We put too much pressure on their schooling. We don't let them cry themselves to sleep.

“But wait, Michael!” I said aloud, to the invisible Mr. Krasny who often rides in the passenger seat of my car. Who is this “We” she is talking so negatively about? Americans? Rich Americans? Mean Americans? After all, I don’t feed my kid Cheerios, I thought with a spike of pride. I’m French! Actually, that's not true. Really, I’m lazy and forgetful.  I never remember to put extra food in my bag, which means she's hungry all the time. French!

See, Michael, that’s thing about these parenting books. There are so many philosophies, you can find a source to back up any parenting weakness. Yes, I got a buzz on at eight months pregnant. It wasn’t because I was irresponsible and scared shitless--I was pretending to be in Paris! OK, I still sleep with my kid sometimes. It’s not neediness and my fear of dying alone, it’s Attachment Parenting! Oops, I ignored my kid for 25 minutes while she sobbed herself to sleep last week. No no, no a Downton Abbey Marathon…Ferber Method!

The bottom line is, parents are screwed up everywhere in the world. No one knows how to do this right, but in other countries, the grown-ups might have a bit more fun. If you didn't catch the radio show, go buy the book, take a load off, have a drink and maybe a cigarette while your baby plays near the open window. Let kids be kids! I just hope a Russian parenting book comes out soon. I might get pregnant again, I don’t particularly feel like giving up my vodka martinis this time.

She startled me the other day, walking down Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills: a middle-aged beauty with long, blown-out hair in a shade somewhere between butter and margarine, her body narrow and svelte but large-breasted. She perfectly hit a certain look: gently tanned face as smooth and puffy as the moon in a children’s book, a delicate shine to the skin. Nose small, lips pumped up. The space between arched eyebrows a smooth plateau. Her age could have been 40, but then again it could have been 60.

At the beginning of the millennium, this look was all over moneyed New York and the Westside of L.A. Then in 2005 arrived “The Real Housewives of Orange County” to take it downmarket, exaggerating its many details until it conveyed not carefree, extended youthfulness but rather a ferocious middle age, a grim determination to throw money at the problem of getting older, via regular trips to dermatologists’ offices, hair salons and cosmetic surgeons’ operating tables.

Then came the financial crisis, and even in the high-end ZIP codes the look began to fray. That day in Beverly Hills I realized I hadn’t seen a woman sporting this level of the look in quite a while. Granted, I’d moved to proudly unglamorous Pasadena. But still, I wondered, could the type be in its final iteration?

There are other versions of middle-aged beauty visible now: While the Housewives TV franchise was hauling its Botox needles and gallons of filler to more workaday places like Atlanta and New Jersey, the beauty industry — the beauty industry! — was broadening the range of middle-aged looks. By 2008 we had Diane “La-Di-Da” Keaton and Ellen DeGeneres as faces of L’Oréal and Cover Girl. Once a middle-aged woman could sell cosmetics only if she was an ex-model, an official Aging Beauty like Isabella Rossellini or Andie MacDowell, and even they were airbrushed liberally. But Ellen and Diane are both average-looking people who look their ages. In the ads their makeup looks nice, but what makes them beautiful is just that we love them.

For the rest, go to the New York Times...

*This was borrowed from my writer friend, Samantha Schoech. Check out her hilarious blog to read it all!

There are two ways in which you lose your body when you have kids. The first is during pregnancy when it is stretched and pulled into all sorts of uncomfortable shapes, and veins start popping out in weird places, and your skin tones changes, and your butt gets huge.

My body has never been especially trophy-worthy (except during high school) and “getting it back” wasn’t high on my priority list after giving birth to my twins. High on my priority list was sleeping, learning how to soothe two crying infants at the same time, and finding a pair of comfortable shoes that didn’t make me feel ugly.

I did lose the pregnancy weight, mostly. I also gained it back, lost it again, and gained it back again. At this point my “pregnancy weight” is just life weight and I’m pretty sure the sick way in which we keep returning to each others arms will continue until I die. Sigh.

To read the rest, go to Babycenter...

My daughter is almost two. Some time ago, she discovered mirrors. She daily gazes at herself with pride and, dare I say, a bit of vanity. The sight elicits a torpid bout of feelings for her mother, who spent her Southern childhood trying to morph into a better-looking being. Specifically, I wanted to look like Sarah Hamlin Cogswell, a girl in my grade school who was tall, blond, tan, and, as my mother would say, "well formed". Since, until sixteen, I greatly resembled a Raggedy Ann doll with braces, this was not a possibility, but it didn’t mean that I wasn’t going to spend some miserable years trying.

Virginia Nelson* was my best friend growing up, and she, also, was on this quest, though I think she was going for more of a Francis Lumpkin--a girl in our class with chestnut hair so shiny it actually glistened under the Day School’s fluorescent lights.  Virginia and I were a little funny looking. We fought often and had vastly different interests and sense of humor. But we were both class outcasts, which threw us together, just out of survival.

There was no other reason for our exile other than we both looked unquestionably odd. I was the taller than any girl, boy, or giraffe who ever wandered into our classroom, having sprouted to five-three in third grade, where I stayed until now. Virginia, on the other hand, was enviably blond, but her skin had an abnormal blue tone to it, and her head was too big for her spindly little body. Also, she panted, even if we were just sitting on the floor looking at magazines.

During the eighties, in my hometown of Charleston, South Carolina, beauty was taken seriously. To be a beautiful woman seemed, to Virginia and I, an enviable, respected profession, serious as law or neuroscience. We desperately wanted to be pretty. Not exotic pretty, but Charleston, straw-blond, coco-tan, lip gloss pretty.  Debutante-in-the-backseat kind of pretty. The very sort of pretty of I really hope my daughter doesn't turn out to be.

Virginia’s mother, bowing to Virginia’s repeated birthday and Christmas wishes, signed her up, at twelve, for a course at Millie Lewis Modeling Academy. Millie, legend had it, was a great model during the forties. I was incredibly jealous, but my mother squawked maddeningly when I made the request. Virginia, as my very best friend, dutifully shared what she learned at the class for the payment of several Snickers candy bars as well as a vial of Bonne Belle perfume. She also let me pore over her Millie Lewis Modeling School binder.

Millie could not “teach beauty”, according to her binder. But, “acting” pretty was ninety percent of the work! Be confident! Milly instructed. Know your cosmetics! Walk with your head high! 

Virginia practiced walking with a book on her head. She had her colors done. She was a “Spring” she said, which allowed her a lovely palette of pinks and blues. (I, being a “Fall”, was relegated to dung brown and burnt orange.) Under the advisement of her instructors, she had her hair cut and colored into a fluffy blond helmet-like bob, and wore thick pancake makeup to offset the blue tone. She missed the class on eye makeup due to a doctor’s appointment, so often the effect was of a mime, whose face and lips are heavily painted but whose eyes stare at you looking bloodshot next to the white paint.

In ninth grade, Virginia went up North to boarding school. When she came back the customs there had rubbed off on her, which helped her appearance. It was not "in" to be a tween wearing drag queen makeup in the wilds of Connecticut; up there it was all flannel shirts and freshly scrubbed cheeks.

She looked better. Much better. Still, one night when we were fifteen, out of something like nostalgia, we dressed up and took pictures of each other, pretending to be models. We made sexy faces into the camera. In one, Virginia has her leg propped up on a chair. She has her dressed raised, showing some thigh. I still have the pictures. We are just leaving our awkward stages behind forever; in the photos we have that gamine loveliness possessed only by fifteen-year-olds, that brief phase that hovers for a month or two, and moves on to the pod of girls below. She was unquestionably desirable and lovely. She had made it.

Virginia and I kept in touch lazily, but that was the last time we spent time together. College happened. She went to France for a year, got a boyfriend. I stopped getting postcards. One night when she was twenty, she went to a party and, saying she was tired, laid on a sofa and died. It turned out she was missing an aorta her whole life, which explained why she was always short of breath.

I know it’s not generous or appropriate, but sometimes now, when I try to think of how to herd my daughter towards wholesomeness, I become a little pissed off at Virginia.  She, after all, was the one who started me on this road to vanity, and then she went off somewhere different, somewhere I can’t follow. Now, crevices are forming in my face, garish as neon signs. In fact, I'm older than Virginia Nelson every imagined she'd be, probably even in her worst nightmares. Yet she gets to forever be the sexy girl in the picture, showing some fifteen-year-old leg, guessing, but not quite aware yet, of where such things can lead. 


*Out of respect and love, I’ve changed Virginia’s name. 

*This article was published under my byline on Salon.com. 

My boyfriend and I have fidelity issues. We haven’t strayed lately — at least, I think. But we both have a history of it. This was something we admitted to each other on our first date. The Greek chorus screeched so loudly when we decided to go out again, my ears still throbbed the next morning.

I want to feebly premise this by saying that we are both nice people. Ben especially (though Ben is not his real name). He spends much of his career helping others, and is adored by everyone he meets. I don’t know if this counts as much, but my hobby is chasing down lost pets and finding their homes. We both rabidly loved our wronged former partners, all of them. But that’s not the point, because it never is. Cheating is not about love.

The relationship proceeded in a cautious yet positive manner, despite our unsuccessful pasts. We are both writers, so we had enough to talk about. (Space breaks! Semicolons!) We fought well, which I always find important. I liked to watch him rearrange my books; I appreciated the scuff marks his boots left in the kitchen. The dog grew fond, after a mourning period. Ben just seemed to fit.

To read the rest of this article, kindly go to Salon.

*This is a guest post from Mary Maguire, a writer and art director from New York. 

“God is dead. He was shot in the head in Mexico.”

That’s what my 4-year old said to me inexplicably one peaceful afternoon, his statement shattering the repose like a sudden explosion.  I was speechless as I searched for some explanation. I scrubbed my recent memory — we didn’t go to church regularly (not overly devout), TV was banned in our house (mainstream violence a controlled substance) and how could an almost 4 year old know that there was a place called Mexico (he wouldn’t get an Atlas for a few more years)?

This was clearly a new disturbance I was mostly familiar with his outwardly challenging behavior. We were just entering the gates of early intervention programs as he was on the verge of being expelled from his second pre-school for behavorial problems. 

It was shortly after this stupefying statement about God’s demise that my son started talking about a place called June 7, he claimed that that was where he came from— a distant planet far far away— and so now I was beginning to wonder if he was even mine.

When I decided to have children it was with the idea that I would be a great mom—especially a boy mom. I loved being outdoors, fishing, hiking, biking, skiing, even skate-boarding. I’m not particularly squeamish and things like, snips and snails, and puppy dogs tails, were not off-putting—the ooier and gooier the better.

I was ready for skinned knees and building tree forts. I was not ready for things like dual diagnosis and building a working knowledge on ADHD. I was not ready for wellbutrin for 10 year old’s and the take no prisoner’s mentality when confronted by a school system not equipped to deal with behavioral disorders.

My notions of being a mother have now unraveled like a favorite knit sweater put through a shredder. to push the metaphor, it has become a heart-wrenching, frayed knot of what the fuck do I do now?

You adapt and embrace the unique needs of your child, that's what you do. After all, every child is unique—to us, to themselves and to the world at large. If in fact the mythical stork delivered children, we might get our operating instructions enclosed. But no. We squeeze them out of unnaturally small spaces which hurts like hell. After all that pain we love them with surprising intensity.  We go days and years without proper sleep and discover we can actually go one day more. Surprise! Surprise!

When it comes to being a Mom there are no rules there are only unique situations that we adapt too. The biggest surprise our huge capacity to love and make room for them and all their differences.

Recently, I gave an essay on Mom Cage issues to a friend in publishing. Someone who looks at my work a lot before I sent it out. A good friend, brilliant, liberal. You know...he’s in the trust tree. 

The piece was about gender roles and feeling trapped as a mother. The disproportionate amount of house work, work inequality, that kind thing.

He liked it. “It’s funny!” He said. “It’s smart. It’s just….”

“It’s just what?”

“Well, you had the kid. Didn’t you sort of ask for this?”

Naturally, my first reaction was to get pissed. Seriously pissed. How could this asshole, this man, tell me I had ASKED FOR THIS? But, as I have taught myself to do after a history of embarrassing, career-mutilating public meltdowns, I let it sit for a day and then thought about it again.

He had a point. I did have sex. I did get pregnant. I did decide to keep the baby. I did take classes (useless) and read Dr. Sears (crazy) in order to prepare for motherhood. And when they handed me my screaming raisin in the delivery room, I couldn’t look to anyone else. I was in hopelessly in love with my new kid, and it was my fault entirely.

But, there are a few things that we, as mothers, do not ask for. Things that seem to come with the package, like those gross croutons that are included with a buy-in-the-bag salad. Just to be clear, I’ve written up a few things I did not ask for, so that no a**hole will get confused again.

Things I Did Not Ask For When I Agreed To Be A Mother.

1. Sole Nighttime Custody. I am not sure how I got solo access to my awesome daughter from the hours of 1:00-7:00 a.m, but I am seriously willing to share. Especially when she has broccoli diarrhea. Hey, you, get the f*ck up! OK! Thank you!
2. The Extra Two Inches of Ass. This is not a societal pressure, but I thought I’d throw it in because I’m vain. I was happy to widen my hips to make way for the beauty of life. Welcome, daughter! But I did not have my baby out of my butt. So why the hell is it growing, too?
3. Exclusive Rights to Play Dates. I love playing, I love kids. I do not love awkward, social hours with mothers I don’t know. When we talk politely about sleep patterns how to cut up grapes, I can feel the precious minutes of my life slipping away. I can see it in their eyes, too. Unless there is booze. Which I do ask for, always!
4. The Career Stall. Ok, there is Sarah Palin, who gave birth on an airplane on the way to lead millions to the Dark Place. But other than that, I can’t think of any mother whose career didn’t stall a bit during the year after birth. Which can be extremely frustrating when the father of your screaming raisin gleefully garners promotions and raises. But at least you can ask for some of the run off. Loudly.

Naturally, receiving all of these things I did not ask for can be frustrating, as can the shrill tone of my voice when I complain about them. And that is the most terrible thing I've received that I did not ask for: My transformation from cute sassy thirty-something to tired, middle-aged shrew. So I will try to be positive, because I do not want to forever be the playground Kathy Bates. But please, do not tell me that I asked for these unfair aspects of being a woman. Or I may give you something you did not ask for that will clue you in on how just how painful birth can be. 

*Today's post is from ANONYMOM, a novelist who has chosen to remain anonymous so her daughter will not die from embarrassment and/or murder her. It's too bad I can't tell you who she is, because she's really a great writer. Luckily, she'll be posting more bloody tales from the Momfront soon.

My daughter, S., is fifteen.   It’s a threshold age—she’s teetering in the doorway of womanhood with at least one of her feet standing in childhood.  She still eats pasta with only butter, boxed macaroni and cheese and raisin snack boxes.  But she wears  sequined bras from Victoria’s Secret, has a boyfriend, and goes to parties where just about everyone drinks.  I’m trying to stay tuned in to her, connected so that I can feel what she feels, see things the way she’s seeing them and anticipate what she needs to safely navigate the oncoming terrain of sex, drugs, alcohol and, eventually, college applications.

A couple weeks ago, the mothers of her two best friends and I decided that we’d take all three girls out to lunch and have an open forum where the girls could tell us in a safe, non-judgmental space, what they were going through and what they were concerned with.  We in turn would tell them how to be safe, how to say no, and how to carry around a beer cup, take air-sips from it, and then dump it in the bathroom sink so that no one knows you’re the only kid at the party who isn’t drinking.

When we arrived at the subject of HIV and other STDs, one of the girls said, “But don’t you only get HIV from butt sex?”

One mother explained all the ways HIV can be transmitted, then added, “And by the way, I am a butt virgin and suggest that you remain butt virgins throughout life as well.”  The other mother added, “Yes, I’ve always said things can come out that hole but nothing should go in.”  I agreed with all this and told the girls the story about a woman I know who, when masturbating, shoved a small, plastic, toy banana up her ass and then lost it.  She went to the emergency room to have it removed and found that the most horrific part of the visit was not the excruciating pain of having her ass dilated so that forceps could enter and retrieve a plastic, toy, banana, rather it was listening to the doctors and nurses uproariously laughing at her on the other side of the emergency room curtain.

“The moral of this story,” I added, “is just don’t stick anything up your butt.”

The girls giggled and then one of them said, “So I guess we have to stop sticking things up S.’s butt.”

I looked at my daughter and said, “What are you letting them stick up your butt?”

S said, “They’re always trying to stick things up my butt!”

“Once we stuck a bicycle pump in her butt,” one girl said, “and then we pumped in air, and when we pulled it out and she farted out the air.”

There was a moment of silence where the other mothers and I stared at the three girls.  And then we all started laughing.

“Why?!” I asked.  “Why would you let them stick a bicycle pump up your butt?!”

“I dunno,” S. said, “they wanted to try it and I thought why not?”

We three mothers were quickly able to come up with many reasons that one should not put a bicycle pump in ones ass, and the girls promised that this, and other butt-scapades like it would never happen again.

Here’s the thing about motherhood that you just don’t know until you’re in the middle of it: these people who we think belong to us, they don’t belong to us.  We love them and they’re in our hearts and souls and stomachs and minds all the time.  But we can’t control them—what they think, what they desire, what they do.  They are who they are.  The best we can do is hold out our hands, hope that they grab on, and pray that they don’t grow up to shove irretrievable objects up their asses.

Though she later admitted that she didn’t originate the phrase herself, my hero, Gloria Steinem, once infamously quipped that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle. While, intellectually, I consider myself a die-hard Feminist, this is one landmark of the movement  that, try as I might, I can’t identify with. I need my partner very much. I need him to love me and to push me as a reader and a writer. I need him for sex. I also need him to fold the laundry, to help take out our child’s feces-covered diapers, and to do something about our disgusting kitchen floor.

Because now that I have my own kitchen, nothing is going right. I know it’s unreasonable, but I kind of blame Gloria for this. My mother managed to build a successful career against the odds, largely because of the Feminist Movement. She was busy empowering herself and forging her career, which is great! But she never showed me how to load a dishwasher. 

I put the wrong soap in the little compartment and, to the delight of my daughter, created a bubble typhoon. Greens wither in produce bags, apples deflate on the egg shelf. I poisoned us all by cooking a piece of grey chicken that had been refrozen four times.

Then there is laundry. No one ever showed me how to fold laundry. My parents had other things to worry about--curing blindness and university politics. Important stuff. But you know what else is sort of important? Not being naked.

After pulling clothes from the dryer, I shake them out and lump the items together by color. That works for one person, sort of, if you wear mostly cotton jersey. Now add a baby to the picture. My kid goes through more laundry than a summer camp cabin. I am usually lucid enough to put the clothes through in the washer and dryer, because if not, the stench wafts throughout the house. But then it would mound up, clean and unfolded. Then Peter adds his laundry to it. Then I add my clothes. We all wait for the magic laundry elf to come fold the baby’s pants, but the mountain by the dryer just gets bigger, until the dryer door won’t open.

The above are amusing examples. Nothing life and death, right? Sure, our apartment looks as if it’s been ransacked by Chechen rebels, but we’re getting along OK. We’re still in love in around here. But with the childcare, the dangerous battles have really started. Peter and I have exactly the same job: writing. We both put out books and have readings and publicity engagements. But for some reason it’s assumed that, unless otherwise arranged, I will: dress the baby, bathe the baby, feed the baby, and put the baby to bed. I’m not sure how it got this way. I just started doing most of it. I’m better at it, I find myself thinking. I’ll get it done faster, and then we’ll move on. I’ve fallen into a gender role I never even knew existed for myself.

Listen: I know I’m privileged. I get that. And obviously, I’m Feminist-seminar-and-book-club battered, because for every statement I make, an apology or excuse directly follows. But sometimes I think about how my mother’s Feminism effected me as a daughter. It seems that the life my mother fought so hard for me to have has distanced me from what it essentially means to be a woman. I was shocked at the brutal nature of childbirth; I was so removed from it I thought it would essentially be a yoga class. The responsibility of breastfeeding did not empower me; the expectations left me full of rage. And you know what? I’m still waiting for someone to come along and clean that f*cking  kitchen floor. 

Recently, my partner and I have been trying to figure out the TV thing. Yes, partner. I know, I know. My partner and I are co-parenting in California! Can you pass the kombucha? Namaste! 

But we’re not married, and when you have a kid together, you’re sort of past the “boyfriend-girlfriend" stage. (I hope.) Yet baby daddy sounds so hip, which we are not. At all. So partner it is.


Anyway. My PARTNER and I...We live in San Francisco, we've read the parenting tomes, and we're vaguely competitive with our Superparent friends. (Seriously. I have neighbors certified at the local Superparent chapter, which is right next to the Baby Formula Shoot-On-Sight Zone.)  This means that when I got knocked up, we promised ourselves that our precious kid would l never ever watch television. Hell, she would never SEE a television, we said to each other as she flipped about in my womb.

 After all, the statistics about babies and TV are grim. According to the University of Michigan Health System, children ages 2-5 spend 32 hours a week in front of a TV. 32 hours! Who were these horrible parents, we asked each other? How hard could it be to entertain the little cherubs with some eco-friendly play dough, a colorful book of African wildlife, or a bucket of kelp-based paint?

Cut to: a 10-month old cherub zoning out to Baby Einstein, while Mom (me) fixes dinner and listens to NPR on the ipod. What? It’s true! I TOTALLY USE TV TO PLACATE MY CHILD. You know why? Play dough sucks! It gets in the carpet and in her hair, and she either throws it at me or eats it, which makes her poop weird. And how am I supposed to cook mac and cheese and teach her about the Namibian tundra simultaneously? I can't! And I definitely can't do it and hold my wine tumbler at the same time!

My partner still enjoys being sanctimonious about the TV thing.  “How is she going to get into Yale?” he often bellows, then snaps the laptop shut, causing her to wail and imprint fright and hate onto her psyche forever. At this point he inevitably remembers an email he absolutely must send from the basement, which is mostly sound proof. 

What was that Gloria Steinem said about men and fish and bicycles? That men can be real asshats when it comes to childcare?

Anyhow. Mothers who entertain their boob monkeys using solely wooden toys, I salute you. You are stronger than I am, and that is awesome. If you feel like coming over for a glass of wine sometime, ring my doorbell. You deserve it! Just be sure to leave your media free genius at home. In my kitchen, Dora rules.