Salon.com > Karen Houppert

Does being a good mom mean feeling like a bad one?

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 00:28:00 +0000

Last fall, I spent months reporting a story about the new trend in "family coaches," folks who promise to hand you the keys to the kingdom: Perfect Parenting. Yep, add to the list of fitness coaches, life coaches, financial coaches -- the family coach. As the latest manifestation of Americans' driving quest for clean closets, superkids and tidy lives, family coaches are newly minted experts who've sensed a void in American life and stepped forward to fill it -- for a fee that, in the D.C. area, ranges from $350 to $450 a month for weekly 45-minute sessions. A cross between "Nanny 911" and "Clean House," family coaches promise a personalized system of parenting that will help (mostly) moms hone their communication skills, set goals for their kids, prioritize, organize and streamline their busy lives.

They join a $2.1 trillion "mommy market," according to the marketing firm BSM Media, which specializes in the field -- from Arts 'n Motion for your baby Botticelli to Gymboree for your kid Komenich. And what if you resist such costly "enrichment" for junior? Bad mommy!

How could a mother eat her own baby?

Sat, 01 Aug 2009 10:32:00 +0000

As news of the 33-year-old Texas woman who murdered her infant son and then ate bits of his brain and a few toes zips around the Internet, our morbid curiosity grows. The story of Otty Sanchez taps deep veins, unfolding like a Greek tragedy: A new mother breaks with her lover three weeks after giving birth to their child. Insane with grief, she hears voices telling her to kill her baby -- the fruit of their union. After murdering the infant, she begins to consume him, returning him to the body from whence he so recently came. In a moment of clarity she sees what she has done. Horrified, she tries to take her own life, stabbing herself in the heart and slitting her own throat.

Our literature profs would have us list the sweeping, irresistible themes: love, abandonment, insanity, infanticide, cannibalism, religion, an epic battle between the forces of good and evil ("He made me do it," Sanchez allegedly wailed in the aftermath, referring to the devil), divine retribution.

As fiction it is high art.

Death-wish granny

Thu, 28 Jun 2007 11:15:00 +0000

My 87-year-old grandmother wants to die.

And no one will let her.

She has not arrived at this decision lightly. Nor even lately. She has been wanting to die for a long time -- and she is probably, practically, a founding member of the Hemlock Society. She has been on its mailing list for years; its literature sits on her coffee table nestled between the Time Life books on undersea life and the space program. It has been there since that table was eye level to the toddler me. I am 43.

She answers all my phone calls these days with gallows humor.

"How are you?" I ask.

"I'm still here, sorry to say," she answers.

My grandmother describes herself as "pro-choice." She believes she has the right to decide her own fate. She thinks that she has lived a full life and now -- when her world has narrowed such that she can no longer drive or even go to the bathroom by herself, when she is in pain from multiple vascular surgeries, when macular degeneration has left her eyesight so poor that she is unable to read a book or even watch TV, when she has fallen and broken her hip twice, her arm once, and her shoulder once -- her time has come. She believes she has the right to end her life at the precise point in time when she, as the author of her own narrative, sees it as over.

“The Blind Assassin” by Margaret Atwood

Tue, 12 Sep 2000 19:11:00 +0000

Margaret Atwood poses a provocative question in her new novel, "The Blind Assassin." How much are the bad turns of one's life determined by things beyond our control, like sex and class, and how much by personal responsibility? Unlike most folks who raise this question so that they can wag their finger -- she's made her bed, and so on -- Atwood's foray into this moral terrain is complex and surprising. Far from preaching to the converted, Atwood's cunning tale assumes a like-minded reader only so that she can argue, quite persuasively, from the other side.

Iris, the elderly protagonist who narrates this story of her family's life, starts with a dispassionate observation: "Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge." When a police officer suggested that the brakes failed, Iris says, she nodded in agreement, but believed otherwise. "It wasn't the brakes, I thought. She had her reasons. Not that they were ever the same as anybody else's reasons. She was completely ruthless in that way." Iris speculates about her sister's last moments: "The white gloves: a Pontius Pilate gesture. She was washing her hands of me. Of all of us."

“Windchill Summer” by Norris Church Mailer

Mon, 19 Jun 2000 19:00:00 +0000

Norris Church Mailer's debut novel is the story of a good girl, Cherry, coming of age in Sweet Valley, Ark., in the summer of '69. And yes, this Mailer is related to that Mailer -- wife of Norman, successor to the one he stabbed in 1960; and yes, she's actually known as a painter, not a writer; and yes, the pair's blended family of nine children must be so over their parents' obsession with the '60s.

All that said, this gentle thriller isn't bad. Imagine a Nancy Drew in her 20s -- having sex and smoking pot for the first time, but still managing to solve mysteries and get lost in caves when her flashlight battery burns out -- and you've got "Windchill Summer." (And as a Nancy Drew fan, I mean that as a compliment, not a slight.)

Cherry and her best friend, Baby, are spending the last summer before they graduate from college living at home, hanging out at the Kwik Kurl and the Freezer Fresh diner and working the night shift in a pickle factory. But when, after two of their childhood friends have died in Vietnam, another one turns up dead, her body mutilated and dumped into a lake, their languid and lazy days come to an end:

Freudian fear and cooked statistics

Fri, 22 Oct 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Last week, in what has become a rite that recurs every decade, Newsweek magazine sounded the alarm. "Tweens: Are They Growing Up Too Fast?" asked the cover. Yes! shouted the copy inside. The age of puberty in this country is plummeting! Ours is a nation of sexually sophisticated kiddies!

"They are a generation stuck in fast-forward, children in a fearsome hurry to grow up," said the authors. "The girls wear sexy lingerie and provocative makeup created just for tweens in order to complete what some parents call the Lolita look." Precocious, strangely seductive young girls in 1999 are "8 going on 25," Newsweek warns, and they "becoming sexually active at an alarmingly early age."

Newsweek is just the latest publication to join the chorus of media decrying a new phenomenon of early blooming, sexually precocious "tweens" -- a marketing term for children between 8 and 12. The Des Moines Register, the Plain Dealer, the Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the Washington Post and the New York Times have weighed in on the topic with headlines like "A Woman Too Soon: The Dangerous Trend Towards Early Puberty" and "Too Young to Be Women."

Teen girls not in a rush

Fri, 22 Oct 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Four Brooklyn girls, ages 12 and 13, are gathered around the kitchen table having an afternoon snack. These randomly selected, middle-class girls are my unscientific focus group -- the same age as the provocative Lolitas who made the cover of last week's Newsweek. Because Newsweek tells me that "tweens" like these are growing up too fast and having sex too soon, I am asking the girls about puberty and sex. These girls in the kitchen are a mixture of giggling nervousness and confidence, trying on big words and big ideas, lacing their opinions with tangled tangents about what their parents think and what their classmates think and what the other girls at camp think.

"So, about the rush to puberty and sex," I begin.

But I'm interrupted. Between sex and puberty, there is no contest. Boobs and periods and boys, oh my! -- these are compelling topics. But intercourse? Totally abstract. Totally dull. Totally distant.

"When I say puberty what words come to mind?"

An avalanche is loosed: "Maturing." "Fickle." ("What's that mean?") "Cooties no longer being a big deal." "Becoming a woman." "Periods." "Moodiness." "Butt-headedness, like my sister, since I'm not allowed to say the other B-word."

Nursed to death

Fri, 21 May 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Thursday in New York's Bronx Supreme Court, Tabitha Walrond was convicted of starving her breast-fed baby to death. The charge of criminally negligent homicide carries a maximum sentence of four years in prison. Sentencing will take place on June 30. In the meantime, questions linger
about the public health system that may have
contributed to her son's death.

Two years ago, Tyler Walrond died seven weeks after his birth. Tired and teary-eyed, Walrond, 21, described to the jury what happened the night of her son's death.

"I came out of the shower. My breasts started to leak. I leaned over the baby on the bed and I saw something was wrong. His mouth was open and there was foam around it. I grabbed him up and showed him to my mother. I said, 'Mama, there's something wrong with my baby.'"

Her voice cracking, Walrond recounts running out to the street to hail a cab to the hospital, clutching the $20 bill her mother had given her. Tears streaming, she explains that she hoped a cab would be faster than waiting for an ambulance. "I told the cabbie hurry up, hurry up, pass the red light. But he wouldn't. 'I'm sorry, miss, I can't,' he told me. I'm crying, 'Something is wrong with my baby, hurry up, hurry up.'"