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Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

Anyone for a poop daiquiri?
I can't do the stony-face thing when it comes to bathroom humor.
By Carol Hall
[10/14/99]

Bad fortune
When the nanny foretold disaster, my son gave me a lesson in blind faith.
By Allison Hoover Bartlett
[10/13/99]

My seeds are sprouting in two wombs
Hank Pellissier, giver of sperm, is about to receive. Last heard from while contemplating insemination, he's now got a girl coming with the wife and a boy on the way with the lesbian gal pal.
By Hank Pellissier
[10/12/99]

Dump the big bang, bring on the blue ox
Kansas isn't going far enough with changes to its science curriculum
By Vicki Rosenzweig
[10/11/99]

Cold plunges and sport singing: Life in a Russian kindergarten
A wee New Yorker is sent to Rodnik, a temple of rigidity and complex grammar. And he loves it.
By Mary MacVean
[10/11/99]

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I discovered that having a sexual secret was the key to really separating from Mom. It was not always easy to have secrets in my mother's progressive household. When I told my mother I wanted to go on the Pill, she sent me to the family doctor. An eminently sane response on her part, it was also a source of tension. I didn't really want to share this big moment with my mom and I resented her for knowing too much about my sex life. I regretted my initial candor and wished I could "do it all over again" -- go to an anonymous clinic, keep my first sexual relationship a secret and experience this rite of passage in private. In a way, turning my first trick allowed me to do that -- there was never any danger that I would tell Mom about this rite of passage, and I now had a sexual identity that was none of her business.

Finally, in my mid-20s, I decided to tell my parents about my profession. By then, I was well-established in my call-girl career, sure of my choice and -- the clincher -- I could truthfully say I was not taking serious risks. My clients were known to me, I had my own business and the police were not a threat anymore. In telling my parents, I flouted a convention of my profession. Very few of the prostitutes I worked with could tell their parents -- and I was regarded as something of a weirdo for telling my own.

Revealing my secret profession did not really change my relationship with my mother -- it brought us back to square one. Her first question was not about sexual morality or the threat of arrest. It was about hygiene. Raised to be a clean-freak, I found myself assuring her that, yes, I was washing everyone and everything on a regular basis. Here I was -- a New York call girl, routinely bedding CEOs, foreign nobles and entertainment moguls in the city's five-star hotels -- justifying my washing habits to my mother. It was a bizarre regression to pre-kindergarten days -- when Mom was herself a 20-something clean-freak raising kids -- and a reminder that, no matter how many beds I climbed into, I would never climb out of my mother's hygienic, middle-class reality.

My parents have been divorced for many years, so I told them separately. Dad, a computer programmer, wondered where I had acquired a taste for business. So did my mother. Both concluded that I must have inherited this from an entrepreneurial grandfather. "It skips a generation," said my mother, a part-time editor. "Your grandfather would be proud of you," my father remarked, though I suspect my long-dead grandfather would have been horrified. In the end, they seemed barely aware of the sexual content of my job. My materialism, however, set me apart from them.

When I told a client that my parents knew what I did for a living, he looked at me as though I had two heads. After that, I kept my openness with my parents a secret from my customers. A call girl's appeal depends, in part, upon her conventional exterior. It's generally assumed that the only parents who know what we do for a living are those too disadvantaged or trashy to care. While my family is free of most sexual hang-ups, I have inherited my share of class hang-ups, and anything that might give clients a trashy impression of my parentage is anathema to me. If girls from "good homes" were expected to protect their parents from the truth, I preferred to have my clients think of me as a "closet case" hooker.

When I ask other prostitutes why they never consider telling their parents, their answers aren't about legality or physical safety. Instead they talk about prudish, neurotic mothers who are so out of the loop sexually that they could never acknowledge any hint of a daughter's sex life -- much less prostitution. "I'm telling you," said one call girl, recalling her mother's approach to sex education: "Not one word about menstruation. Ever."

Amanda, who is a member of PONY (Prostitutes of New York), told me, "I'm proud of my work, and I might even make a good spokesperson -- if I didn't have such a Victorian mother." When she worked for the Mayflower Madam in the 1980s, Amanda kept it a secret. "If my mother found out, it would wreck the family." Her current policy -- "Don't tell this woman anything because she doesn't want to know" -- was firmly in place by the time she had her first period: "I had seen the educational film, I knew menstruation was normal -- but I didn't tell her because I didn't trust her."

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