Salon.com > Mona Gable

Thelma and Louise it wasn't

Mon, 27 Sep 1999 16:00:00 +0000

We'd been talking about doing it for two years, but a few weeks ago my friend Maura and I finally succeeded. We spent three blissful days vacationing together in the lovely resort town of Newport Beach. We were not on anyone's expense account. We also were not alone. We had four kids in tow, ranging in age from 6 to 11, and in prickliness from zero to off the charts.

This was not the original plan, to bring children. We were prepared to leave home without them. And we tried. For months we exchanged e-mails and phone calls, fantasized about camping in Point Reyes, a condo in Palm Springs, various California spas. But as the weeks ticked by it became clear that we were literally going nowhere.

"Why can't we do this?" Maura asked in frustration one day on the phone.

"I don't know," I said weakly. "Our lives are too complicated?"

Actually, I knew full well. Men do this all the time, have yearly reunions with their friends at ski resorts in Telluride or golf courses in Scotland or casinos in Vegas. I'd rather eat nails, frankly, than spend a minute playing golf, even in Scotland, but the point is that many of the fathers I know do it. They get away with their male friends, never fearing the onset of crippling guilt (a condition of motherhood they should warn you about the second you think of getting pregnant).

Wake up to Furrow's wake-up call

Sat, 14 Aug 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Shortly before my son turned a year old, I joined a Mommy and Me
group. The reason I joined was simple: Most of my friends with babies had gone back to work, and I was lonely and depressed.

Fortunately, I didn't have to look too far for help. At the time we
lived in Silver Lake, a hip enclave in Los Angeles rife with co-ops and nursery schools and mommy groups. After calling around, I found a class at the Hollywood-Los Feliz Jewish Community Center. The center was conveniently located just down the hill from where we lived. But I had another, more specific reason for choosing this JCC: My husband is Jewish, and I wanted my son to explore that side of his heritage.

On my first visit to the center, I was appalled. The place hardly
seemed the ideal environment for young children: a decaying two-story brick building with a concrete playground and a sandbox full of gritty dirt. There wasn't even a patch of grass, for God's sake. The school was on Fountain Avenue, a frantically busy street off Sunset near the eastern fringes of Hollywood. You had to
practically take your child's life in your hands just to negotiate a
turn into the parking lot. I also wasn't impressed by the neighborhood, with its liquor store, auto body shop, video rental place and odd mix of falling-down rental units with overgrown yards.

Girly girl

Thu, 21 Jan 1999 20:00:00 +0000

| My daughter is crying. It is the final day of kindergarten, Teddy Bear Picnic Day, and 52 children are talking, shrieking, engaged in frantic activity. I know there are 52 children because I just spent the last half hour frantically stuffing hundreds of green, white, red, yellow and orange gummy bears into 52 plastic bags. Now I'm helping eight 5-year-olds of wildly varying ability sort their bags by color and graph the results. So few gummies, so little time, as they say. This is not great fun, but at least I'm not stuck at the Teddy Bear Sandwich Center. That mother has to carve teeny-tiny bears out of white bread and slather them with peanut butter.

My daughter is supposed to be at the Teddy Bear Coloring Center. Instead, she is tugging on my skirt, tears sliding down her tiny freckled nose. She is the only child crying, as usual. I try to swallow my impatience.

"What's wrong?" I ask.

"Cameron won't let me use the red crayon!" she sniffs. Cameron is short and funny, with a face and personality not unlike Dennis the Menace.

"Did you ask him nicely if you could borrow it?" I ask.

"Yes, and he wouldn't give it to me!"

Sex and the 7-year-old boy

Fri, 01 May 1998 08:09:00 +0000

My son is in love with me. This is no surprise. After all, I have nice green eyes and Jennifer Aniston-type hair, though regrettably not her long-stemmed legs. More importantly, I can tick off the names of the Los Angeles Lakers, play a tough game of Junior Monopoly and have a high tolerance for jokes that revolve around the letter "p." What 7-year-old boy wouldn't adore me?

I grew up in a house of rowdy boys, boys with no-nonsense masculine names like Jack and Tom and Jim. In some ways this made it easy for me when my son came along, red-faced and furious and eager to devour the world. I knew what to expect. Loud grunting noises and flying objects. Toilet seats never put down. Clothes left in a heap on the floor as if the Wicked Witch had just waved her broom and made the person in them disappear. A preference for toys with an excess of body parts and names like "venom."