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Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

Give me a dick or give me death!
Today I am a femme with an inner soft butch, but as a child, I failed to meet the demands of either gender.
By Kera Bolonik
[09/23/99]

Shopping online -- for children
For children who have waited years for a family to adopt them, the Internet may be the last hope.
By Nell Bernstein
[09/22/99]

School's out for Eid
The battle over school closure for religious holidays heats up as Muslims and Hindus demand equal time off for their children.
By Michael Kress
[09/21/99]

The Borrowers
They're not looking for a lifetime commitment. They're just looking for a kid to come out and play with them.
By Eve Pell
[09/20/99]

Eric: Hold your breath, 1946
An excerpt from "Why She Left Us."
By Rahna Reiko Rizzuto
[09/17/99]

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This arrangement worked because there was an unwritten agreement between cool mom and me. She gave me a reasonable amount of freedom and respect, and in return I did my chores, got good grades and hid from her the stuff she didn't want to know about: my passion for Boone's Farm Strawberry Hill, the occasional joint, a boy named Mel who gave me beard-burns at keggers after football games. I knew what to hide from her by following the moves of Eddie Haskell, television's archetypical teenage suck-up.

"Leave It to Beaver's" Eddie, with his suspiciously tidy crew-cut and bland, ever-present grin, was the sidekick of Wally Cleaver, the Beav's older brother. Eddie was always admiring Mrs. Cleaver's nice drapes or pretty apron, then setting the school on fire. Eddie Haskell was hilarious, one of the only ongoing bits of irony on '60s TV, in part because we all instinctively knew that his was the best way to negotiate the parent-teenager relationship. In my house, I let my mom think I was more obedient than I was so that I would be worthy of what she called "the freedoms" -- to date, to talk on the phone, to call people and ask, "Do you have Prince Albert in a can? Better let him out!"

Now, 20 or so years later, I have a 13-year-old stepdaughter. Sarah was abandoned by her own mother when she was 5, so as far as we're both concerned, I'm it -- the buyer of bras, interpreter of male behavior (including that of her increasingly bewildered father), provider of appropriate CDs, books and glitter nail polish.

Unlike every other woman I know, I was perfectly happy to turn into my mother. I thought I could easily be cool mom for the '90s. For one thing, I had a head start; my mom was not cool in what I thought of then as real life: She was a housewife. As far as I could tell, her day revolved around going to the A&P, dusting the Danish modern and waiting for me to come home from school so she could grill me about my day. I'd become a writer. I got to travel to cool places -- Hawaii, the South Seas, Paris, Chile -- and interview cool people -- Winona Ryder, Picabo Street, Gus Van Sant. I imagined -- wrongly -- that this fact alone was good for a high rating on the cool mom-o-meter.

When Sarah turned 13, I threw a birthday slumber party. I bought her disposable cameras for party favors and pounds of peanut M&Ms. I bought her a Ouija board and a computer game especially for pre-teen girls called Let's Talk About ME.

She had six girls from her seventh-grade class over. I should have been concerned when they arrived and didn't bother to say hello; Eddie Haskell was forever making a fuss over Mrs. Cleaver when he made an entrance. The girls immediately holed up in Sarah's bedroom, where they yammered hysterically for several hours. The arrival of a pair of olive and cheese pizzas flushed them out. Before I could even get the cardboard lid open, several of the girls tore at the corners like hyenas stumbling unexpectedly upon a fresh zebra carcass. This should have been an intimation of things to come, but I thought they were merely demonstrating their high spirits, even though I knew Eddie Haskell would never, never have torn open a pizza box in front of Mrs. Cleaver.

When it was time to bring out the birthday cake, I expected that some natural sense of occasion, and the approach of something large and chocolate, would bring them around. After Sarah blew out the candles, I began to have the impression that I, along with the double-chocolate truffle cake with 14 hot pink candles (one to grow on), was imposing on these girls. I began to feel like kitchen help, or the exterminator come to rid the house of carpenter ants, or the furnace guy. I was invisible.

I passed out the plates, and just as I was about to set a piece of cake on the plate of a particularly lively girl named Amber, she said, loudly, looking past me to the other girls, "You know Amy and Josh? They're already 15 and I know they're fucking." She illustrated this announcement with the universal, index finger poking into the OK-sign gesture.

To Amber's credit, she did glance up at me like a dog who's about to get smacked with a newspaper for chewing up a shoe.

I did nothing, said nothing, just continued serving as if nothing had happened.

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