Six days a week I share my apartment with a girl who claims to be my offspring, but goes by the name “Posh Spice.” And on the seventh day, if the goddess does not intervene on my behalf, an assortment of other Spice club members invade my once-peaceful home. There is Maddi, age 9, aka “Sporty Spice”; Aurelia, 7, aka “Ginger Spice”; Tara, 7, aka “Baby Spice”; and Sinclaire, 8, who has been assigned the role of “Scary Spice.” (Some names have been changed to protect the mothers’ reputations.) When I hold my head in my hands, bemoaning my spiced fate, the entourage rushes in, singing, “Tell me what you want what you really, really want … I’ll tell you what I want what I really, really want …” Then my daughter screams, “Mama! You’re Old Spice!” And they all dance away, laughing hysterically.

These Spice Girls have been a mystery to me ever since they invaded our bland world last summer. The band is made up of five grown women who call themselves Sporty, Posh, Baby, Scary and Ginger (but who might as well be known as Dykey, Bitchy, Orally Fixated, Manic & Slutty). If you haven’t yet had the pleasure, imagine a female version of Menudo. Or five Jenny McCarthys co-opting riot grrrl slogans. Or simply consider the Spice Girls motto: “Strength, courage and Wonderbras!” aimed at a 4-to-14-year-old female audience.

Basically, the Spice Girls are the anti-Christ. But since they don’t have turntables anymore, I can’t play their albums backwards to prove it. But enough of my whining. Maybe I should appreciate the fact that even “Old Spice” was invited on the club’s first official outing: the long-awaited premiere of “Spice World,” the movie.

Maddi’s (Sporty’s) mother came too, so I wasn’t alone. The line stretched down the block — an average of five Spice children (wearing Adidas, skin-tight bell-bottoms and half-shirts) waited with mortified mothers for their chance to see what “Girl Power” had been reduced to. Perhaps some of the other kids in line could have explained it all to me, but none of the five girls in my daughter’s club were able to articulate exactly why they are so enamored with these British babes. When I asked “Sporty,” she said, “I dunno, I just like their music.” And when I asked my own daughter, she just gave me the signature “Posh” glare and said, “Go, Girl Power. Duh.” And then stumped me with a question of her own: “Why are you writing an article about them, anyway, Mom? You are, like, so retro you don’t even know how cool they are.”

But once we were inside, munching on the Starbursts that Maddi’s mom had smuggled into the theater, I think I finally caught a glimpse of the Spice Girls’ coolness. Don’t get me wrong, the movie truly sucked. The Spice Girls themselves are not cool. But the theater full of girls who had counted the days leading up to Jan. 23, girls who now danced, screamed and sang along like nothing I’d seen since “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” were having a blast.

The central message of the movie (“You can be anything you want to be as long as you wear a ton of makeup and dress like a Victoria’s Secret model”) is no worse than Barbie, and, as far as I’m concerned, better than either “Beauty and the Beast” or that damned mermaid. Because the message is not about boys. It’s not about Ken and “happily ever after.” Admittedly, it’s not about power, either. And the militant feminist in me is horrified that I am even considering a positive spin on the Spice Brats. But it’s silly, and it’s fun. It is five little girls who couldn’t care less what the boys think, and who will never, ever buy the line: “She was asking for it.” As one friend, a rockin’ mama who played in pre-riot grrrl punk bands in the ’80s, told me: “We would’ve died to have girl groupies back then. But it was all guys. The girls were dolling themselves up for Duran Duran.”

In a cinematic world where our heroines almost always end up dead or married, this mama can live with a little cleavage. So go, Girl Power. It could be worse.

In Oakland, Maia and I live mostly a quiet life. My hot pink hair and the fact that, at 27, I am at least a decade younger than most of the other moms at Maia’s school hint at a more exciting life than we actually lead. We hang out at Safeway. We feed the cat. I write while Maia is at school. I help her with her homework. She visits her dad. And when I planned to come to New York alone it had more to do with her not wanting to join me than any conscious desire to break away from being “mama.”

Tillie Olsen wrote that “more than in any other human relationship, overwhelmingly more, motherhood means being instantly interruptible, responsive, responsible.” Much has been said about the identity crisis we experience as new mothers. But what happens after we have grown accustomed to our Mamaness? Even comfortable with it? What happens after years of always being interruptible? After we’ve designed our lives and trained our senses to be always responsive and responsible, what happens when we suddenly land, alone, at JFK and realize that no one really cares how we get to Manhattan?

I end up in a taxi, and I am still a little queasy when I finally get to my friend’s apartment on the Lower East Side. I ring his doorbell once and then curl up in his doorway, using the Hello Kitty duffel bag I borrowed from my daughter as a pillow. I probably should have tried harder to wake him, but it’s been ages since I rested like this in a doorway, and for the first time in seven years, I can.

It is still early morning, and few people are out on the street. A woman approaches me cautiously and leans down to ask if I need a fix. “You OK?” she wants to know. “‘Cause we can go see my man Raul.” When I wake up I feel youth-sick, and oddly exhilarated. I ring my friend’s doorbell and when he hears I’ve been outside since sunrise he looks at me with a mixture of pity and concern. “Have you lost your mind?” I just laugh. I can’t say that I haven’t.

On this first day, I am cautious. My first book is being published in the spring and I have several business meetings and expense-account lunches to focus on. And although (according to my friend, Dave) I look like a cross between a rock star and a housewife, by my standards, I am dressed up. I amuse myself uttering simple sentences: “Sure, I’ll have another beer”; “If I don’t come back tonight, I’ll just see ya tomorrow”; and, my favorite, “No, I have no interest in going to see the Statue of Liberty.” (When I was here with Maia last year, we were poster children for New York tourism — $20 T-shirts and all.)

On the second day, I am giddy. I stop by an old boyfriend’s apartment at random hours to have sex — mostly for the thrill of not having to listen for the pitter-patter of little footsteps coming down the hall. He’s a guy I lived with in wilder days — when he was in high school and I was the mod party-girl dropout. Now when I scream in his bed I all but forget that he’s a Narcotics Anonymous convert and I’m on the PTA. I call Maia to check in, half-hoping that she will offer me something to feel guilty about, or at least some grounding thoughts. But she doesn’t. She hates the city. She is glad she didn’t have to come. It’s dark in New York, she says, and stinky. She is having a blast with her father, the tooth fairy brought her five bucks and she doesn’t need a thing from me.

This isn’t the first time in seven years that we’ve been apart, but I’ve always stayed in Oakland when Maia went off with her dad for weekend visits. And when I’m on home turf, the circle I travel in is, admittedly, a maternal ghetto. Most of my friends in Oakland have children, so even when I do not have my own baby sitter to relieve, I find myself rushing home from concerts as if my Honda is on the verge of turning into a pumpkin. I spend the days when she is gone catching up on work, and even when I go out to Club Red, I leave before last call. I only stop for one drink after a k.d. lang show. At home I remain in mama-mode: always prepared to respond to an urgent telephone call, checking my messages at least twice a day and rarely allowing my blood alcohol level to creep above the legal limit.

By Thursday, I begin to lose track of days and nights all together. I am often tipsy, but mostly I’m high on the uninterruptedness of it all. I am mesmerized by the flow of time and events — one thing leads to another and another and another — and even when I stop long enough to eat a piece of pizza, no paper airplane noses onto my plate to bring me back to reality. Skidding into adolescent oblivion, I get a CD-sized tattoo on my shoulder at a shop where they blare Violent Femmes like it’s 1985. I fall head-over-heels in love with a woman I barely know. A woman with henna in her hair. At a dinner party, someone asks if my daughter knows I will be coming home with the tattoo, and I remember that when I got my first one at 16, someone asked if my mother knew.

At 1 a.m. in New Jersey, after an Ani DiFranco show I hear that the trains have stopped running and it doesn’t even occur to me to worry about how I’m going to get back to Manhattan. Without a little kid whining about our predicament, without any baby sitter to relieve, I have time to wait for luck to kick in. I get back. Of course I get back. I hitch a ride with a busload of crazy Brits who came all the way to the East Coast to see Bob Dylan scratch out a few tunes after Ani left the stage. I stay up until 6 a.m. blaring music and smoking with a friend in her elegant apartment on the Upper West Side. I sleep until noon. I forget to eat.

One morning — I don’t know which one — as I am parting from a new friend after spending all night in her tiny East Village apartment talking about hair dye, Beth Lisick prose poems and bisexuality, I am filled with a strange feeling of deceitfulness when I realize that this new friend knows I was born under the sign of Cancer, knows that the subway signs in this town always make me think of Lawrence Ferlinghetti poems and knows that I prefer black licorice to red, but knows nothing of my daughter and the left front tooth she lost last week.

That afternoon, I confide my identity crisis to a woman at a bar on the Lower East Side who bears an uncanny resemblance to Nina Hagen. “You’re not regressing,” the woman assures me. “This is just life without kids.” “You mean, when people don’t have kids, they act like this all of the time?” I ask, certain that I’ve misunderstood. “And you don’t get tired?” I ask, incredulous. She smiles. “Well,” she begins slowly as she orders another drink, “you do get tired, but then you just sleep. And, of course, at some point there are health concerns. And if you’ve got a job or a career or something …” I just stare at her, trying to imagine what my life would be like without anyone to interrupt me, without having to be responsive, responsible. When I was 19 and pregnant, I used to joke that I was having a baby to keep myself out of trouble. And now I realize that it was true. Here I thought I’d grown up in seven years, and all I’d done was to find another use for my ability to function without sleep. I wonder what my life would be like without my daughter’s all-encompassing presence, and I am somewhat comforted to realize that without the grounding effect she has on me, I’d probably just go get myself knocked up.

I suppose the story begins seven years ago when, a week before my
college freshman orientation, I walked into the welfare office with my
daughter, Maia, then 6 months old, and applied for a cash grant. At the
time, applying for welfare seemed like an all-right thing to do: My mom had
been on the rolls for a few years when I was a pre-schooler. For the next
six years, I got an AFDC check almost every month and promptly signed it
over to my landlord. And I learned, slowly, that there were a whole hell of
a lot of Americans — from Newt Gingrich on down to the next door neighbor
who used to bang on my door screaming, “Whose responsibility is it to raise
your damn kid, anyway?” — for whom my income source was not the least bit
all right.

We never lived solely on that $500 check from the state. When they
don’t give a family enough to survive on at the beginning of the month and
that family is still alive at the end of the month — well, obviously
some fraud has taken place. My “fraud” was mostly legal; it consisted of a
few thousand dollars a year in student loans, the odd work-study job,
periodic checks begged from my grandmother and the Salvation Army, meals
from various soup kitchens, Christmas presents from the local fire station
giveaway, and about $30 a week I made by buying books and CDs at
garage sales and pawning them off on resale shops at a minimal profit. My
six years on welfare earned me quite a few premature gray hairs, but we got by.

Or maybe the story begins in late May of last year. I’d just finished
graduate school, hadn’t landed a job, and Hip Mama, the zine I’d been
publishing for two and a half years, was still showing a loss. My cutoff
notice from the welfare office was hanging on the wall next to my telephone
when it rang at 7 a.m. I was already up, on my way out the door to get to a
local morning radio show to talk about being a welfare mama on the chopping
block. Thinking it was my baby sitter calling, I answered the phone. A woman
with a thick New York accent who identified herself as my agent’s partner
told me matter-of-factly, “We just sold your book for $100,000.”

Silence. I wasn’t speechless about the book deal or the sum of money –
I was just trying to figure out who the crank caller was. “Hello?” the
woman with the New York accent said after a minute. “You’re kidding,
right?” I said softly. Granted, I’d written the proposal and prayed for the
money, but I don’t like being teased. When I was about 8 years old, my
big sister and her friend told me that if I laid perfectly still on my
stomach on top of the cab of the white pick-up truck that was parked in our
driveway, it would take off and fly me into outer space. I wasn’t about to
give this woman the same satisfaction my sister and her friend got when
they came outside two hours later, laughing hysterically at me lying
perfectly still on top of that damn truck.

On the radio show later that morning, I announced that I’d gotten the
deal to write “The Hip Mama Survival Guide,” but I didn’t mention the sum.
Perhaps I’d heard it wrong. It was nearly noon by the time I let the
reality of my new wealth sink in. And suddenly I felt like Cinderella. I
called everyone I knew and a few people I didn’t. I don’t remember what I
said to them. Probably something like, “And then, this dude showed up with
the glass slipper …” After six years on welfare, $100,000 minus the
agent’s cut and the illustrator’s fee sounded to me like millions. I’d
never be broke again. I could buy anything my heart desired. I could buy
Maia anything her heart desired. I could pay back all my debts and
live in the lap of luxury for eternity. The phrase “And they lived happily
ever after …” might have crossed my mind.

I started making lists of all the things I would buy when the check
arrived. I had never been a “responsible” poor person. I didn’t clip
coupons and, sometimes, we went out to dinner even as checks to the phone
company bounced. When I was on welfare, I spent all the money in my pockets
on whatever Maia or I wanted before I ever said “no.” But I was an even
less responsible rich person. When I had more money in my pockets, it
simply took me longer to get to “no.” For a year, I was a mama who only
said “yes” (“$100 worth of trinkets from the Statue of Liberty
gift shop? Why not?”). For a year, I was a friend who wouldn’t let anyone
she knew get evicted (“Three-day notice? I’m on my way”). For a year, I was
a writer-for-hire with a seriously snotty attitude (“Kiss my butt,” I told
an editor from a national magazine who had always annoyed me when he called
with a dollar-a-word assignment).

The sobering bank statement didn’t arrive until this summer: I was on
the verge of being totally broke again. The resale value of my couch and
car are negligible. And, so, the “reality” part of my story begins. Even
though the heroine is still sitting here in the same apartment in a nice
part of town that the city planners nonetheless call an “area of persistent
poverty,” she’s had a little bit of time to think about the real difference
between rags and riches.

It is amazing to me how much kinder the world is to people with any
disposable income to speak of. When my daughter had some cavities that
needed to be filled this year, one phone call and one trip to the dentist
did the trick — gone were the days of calling two dozen dentists and
social service agencies in an attempt to get someone to take my Medi-Cal
government insurance. When I bounced checks this year, my bank spoke of
“oversights” and covered the difference — they used to speak of
“irresponsibility” and charge me 25 bucks for the insult. When I was on
deadline and my hard drive crashed recently, I drove over to Circuit City
and bought a new computer. When my daughter’s father started acting
bizarre, I didn’t have to yell at him, I just wrote a check to a lawyer and
she did my arguing for me. When Maia and I were driving to Los Angeles and
we got tired of being in the car, we stopped in San Luis Obispo, booked a
big pink room at the Madonna Inn and took a horse and carriage ride around
the lake. When a friend’s car was being lifted onto a tow truck and she
started screaming and crying and pleading with the driver, I said
“Shhh …” handed the guy my secured credit card, and the ordeal was over.

They say you can’t buy happiness, and they’re right, but you can buy an
awful lot of peace and quiet. You can buy grace. I used to think that if your
house burns down and you’ve got money, you don’t suffer. Now I know that
you do, but you get to grieve in comfort. Your kids still get cavities,
it’s just a lot easier to fill them.

Next to motherhood, being on welfare was the most radicalizing
experience of my life. When you cannot stop the cruelty of the world with a
secured credit card, you can’t avoid seeing the oppressive reality of it.
And even if you know enough to appreciate the swiftness with which the
cavities of people with bank accounts can be filled, it’s easy to forget,
while you’re sitting in the waiting room reading People, the evil
cluelessness that once denied your government insurance. I’m trying to get
a second book deal now and my mother says if it works out, I should put
some money down on a house. But I probably won’t. Houses are flammable, and
anyway, I bought the big purple couch on such a whim that I forgot to
measure my door. I ended up having to recruit two neighbor chicks to hoist
it up over my second floor balcony. I don’t think we could get it out of
here nearly as gracefully. But maybe we’ll go to Club Med.