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Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

The lactating feminist
I'm not a porn star. I'm not burning my bra. I'm just feeding my baby in public.
By Roxanne Beckford Hoge
[07/26/99]

The invisible mother
If everyone is staring at my boobs, why do I feel that I'm disappearing?
By Amy Halloran
[07/26/99]

Tom and Nicole and Colin and Kathryn
"Eyes Wide Shut" provokes literary couple Colin and Kathryn Harrison to spar over marriage, passion, jealousy and the lure of dangerous sex in a vanilla world.
By Colin Harrison and Kathryn Harrison
[07/23/99]

Column
Y'all take care now
30,000 feet above Jackson, Miss., I came to believe it was time to start a novel.
By Anne Lamott
[07/22/99]

Gen X's change of head
To the women who came of age in the '60s, oral sex was an act of great intimacy. To their daughters, it's about as intimate as shaking hands.
By Shari Thurer
[07/21/99]

Complete archives for Mothers Who Think

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I drove fast. It was just me, my little sister and Mama. All the windows were down and the hot wind whipped my long, dark hair in every direction. Nothing compared to the feeling I got going 60 toward curves I couldn't see around. "Soft shoulders," the yellow signs read. I hung onto to the inside of those curves like I did riding the Himalaya at the Miracle Strip Amusement Park, imagining the black rubber tires clutching the pavement. We rocketed around one curve after the other, zinging past cornfields and cow pastures. Grasshoppers green as crayons flew over the windshield. After half an hour or so the car felt real, not like an amusement park ride at all, and I slowed down and drove more sensibly.

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Mama, her face tilted away from me into the wind, her eyes shut, her hair blown crazy. She is there, and not there at the same time. Mama and not-Mama. How many mothers let their 12-year-old daughters take over the wheel? I turned south onto Highway 231 and drove on. Mama did a slow fade and disappeared. Both she and my father end up doing the slow fade in most of my memories of summer vacations, the ones my mind has created out of all the trips my family made to Panama City Beach from the time I was 5 until I was about 12. They are bit players, visible only in the corner of my eye. After all, I'm the one driving the car. It never occurs to me that one day I'll grow up, have children and do my own slow fade.

We went to the beach all the time in the summer. My mother didn't think anything of driving down to Panama City for the day -- it was only a couple of hours from our house in Chattahoochee, but it was a world away from our boring, gray sidewalks, even if they were canopied with wisteria vines, lined with mimosa trees dripping flowers pink as watermelon. The Miracle Strip was a couple of miles worth of unreal gaudiness -- Pepto-Bismol-pink motels, plaster statues of monkeys and dinosaurs, souvenir shops with clamshells out front so big my sister and I could live in them; the Snaketorium, Goofy Golf, the Miracle Strip Amusement Park with the Starliner Roller coaster and giant Tiki Man.

Every trip started the same way, with my parents commanding center stage. My father stood on our front porch yelling at my brothers and sister and me to please be quiet, then turned to the screen door to sweet-talk my mother into coming outside. We always fought over who would sit where in the car, while my mother sat in the house and cried. She was manic depressive and threatened to call off the trip if we didn't stop fighting. We'd quit long enough to lure her out of the house and into the Plymouth.

Next page | As soon as we pulled out of the driveway, my parents disappeared