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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.
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I tried to make sense of it; I didn't think these girls were probably much different than any other 13-year-olds. I combed the culture for guilty suspects. Sappy suck-up Eddie Haskell has been replaced by Bart Simpson, whose main comic shtick is showing up his dad as a major dolt. Other TV role models are the gorgeous kids of "Party of Five," who always wear great clothes and get to have grown-up problems with no parents around to say I told you so. In some ways, my mom had it easy. She was a cool mom during the days when the American cult of youth hadn't oozed into every crack and cranny of our culture; before "Tommy Boy," Teen People and Let's Talk About ME, when being an adult was still, more or less, where it was at. Now even being 13, an age formerly thought to be one of the worst years of human existence, is still infinitely preferable to being grown-up. Cool mom has become an oxymoron.

Sarah and her friends had my number, and the numbers of all the 30ish to 40ish mothers I know. I could have jumped on Amber, could have put my face in hers and said, "We don't talk that way in this house!" which, besides being a lie (when the kids aren't around I use the F-word as liberally as the hero in anything written by David Mamet), would make me the one thing my mother was not. Uncool.

I read once that the only way to be loved is not to need it, and the same goes for being a cool mom. My mother could be cool because on some level she didn't need to be cool to know who she was. She was ipso facto cool simply because she could drive, buy beer, smoke cigarettes and control the telephone. She could shut down the party any time she felt like it. Once, in a fit of pique over something or other, I hurled the most hurtful accusation I could muster at her: "You are so out of it!" Her answer was to caw like she did when she thought something was really hysterical and say, "Of course I am. I'm the mother."

The baby boomers' Achilles' heel is that we need to be cool. We want to be mothers, but we don't want to be the mother, the one who says no. We want to go on "Saturday Night Live" and play our saxophone, trudge through world tours in which three generations of fans can groove to our long-in-the-tooth hits. We want to splurge for tattoos. Give us coolness or give us death. For most of us, the latter will come to pass before we'll ever admit to not possessing the former.

The fact that this bothered me to the degree that it did was a sure sign that I had already forfeited cool momness. I consulted a friend who has a 16-year-old. What should I have done? Said "Amy and Josh are such a cute couple! I hope they're, like, using protection!" (I am the mother, after all).

"There is nothing you can do," my friend said. "I had a dozen cheerleaders here last weekend, one of whom I had to help down from an acid trip, and according to my daughter, I'm still an embarrassment."

My mother died not long after I graduated from high school. She was terminally ill with brain cancer for several months. Once, as we drove together to her chemotherapy, she said, "Let's put 'Cool Mom' on my headstone. Would that be a hoot, or what?"

In the end my father and I settled for "Our Mom." Maybe that was the difference between her and me. She allowed my friends and me to misbehave under her watch because she liked the idea of being mom to us all. I don't have that desire. Having one teenager is plenty for me. Perhaps Sarah's friends sense this; they don't want much to do with me because I don't want much to do with them. Maybe one of the reasons Eddie Haskell acted the way he did around Mrs. Cleaver was because he could sense she genuinely liked him, and he didn't want to disappoint her.

I told my father about Sarah's party, about Amber; I asked him how my mom did it, how she coped. Were the times so different? It must have been easier. Back then, it was "Don't trust anyone over 30." Now it's "Don't trust anyone who isn't still living at home." My dad rolled his eyes and said, "Clearly you don't remember that song. It drove your mother nuts. That Beatles song you used to sing around the house when you were about 11. "Why Don't We Do It in the Road?"

Eeesh. Pass the martinis.
salon.com | Sept. 24, 1999

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