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Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

Slave labor in the statehouse
Massachusetts Lt. Gov. Jane Swift, succumbing to the pressures of "normal" motherhood, makes nannies of her staffers.
By Martha A. Ackmann
[01/10/00]

Who loves you, Wicks?
I am the mother of a small dyke cop. At least she wears a bulletproof vest.
By Lee Uttmark Wicks
[01/07/00]

My mother loves me, ma'am!
I'm a rough, tough cop. But Mom still tries to keep me home on snow days.
By Ali Wicks
[01/07/00]

Germany shuns "foreign" families
Immigrants and their German-born children find themselves cut off from state benefits.
By Allison Linn and Ayla Jean Yackley
[01/06/00]

The Juggling Act:
WNYC's Series on Work and Family
In partnership with Mothers Who Think and Salon.com

[01/04/00]

Complete archives for Mothers Who Think

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I left home at 16, took my driver's exam in the borrowed station wagon of a land surveyor who, in retrospect, had no business hanging out with a teenage girl, and bought myself a 1974 Cougar XR7 from Crazy Johnny's used car lot, not because it was reliable but because of its cushy leather interior, which could comfortably sleep two, and its affordable $200 down payment.

I can't count the number of times I visited sleazy yet charming boyfriends in the city jail, poking cigarettes through the tiny hole that had been gouged in the wooden frame beneath the Plexiglas window. I slept on the beach, served drinks in questionable bars and graduated from high school by the skin of my teeth.

Also Today Mothers who kick butt How a peace-loving mom stopped worrying and learned to love her fists. By Nancy Hall

Other girls had crushes on the likes of James Dean, but I think I wanted to be James Dean. I may have been a stupid girl, but I wasn't timid.

Sure, I straightened up and went to college before anything I did could go on my permanent record, but I still never developed any genuine fearfulness. I traveled alone in Latin America, rode the subway at all hours of the night and generally misbehaved in public until I married my wonderful husband and became a slightly more model citizen.

My adult adventures have been much tamer than my juvenile exploits, but that's more the result of having to get up in the morning for work than any kind of worries about safety on my part.

Even the birth of my first kid didn't faze me much. I didn't feel anything irrational beyond the normal overwhelming mix of tender emotions and mama bear protectiveness. I was never frightened or worried that he'd get bit by that little thug in his preschool, and after it happened I was blinded with anger, not with fear for his safety.

Even the six surgical procedures he required in one year (all minor, but nerve-wracking nonetheless) failed to send me into a tailspin of panic or worry. Generally, I was a paragon of mommy cool. You name it, I could cope with it.

Then I moved to a lovely Northern California neighborhood that looks just like heaven. Instead of tasteless new construction and master-planned communities, we found a sycamore-lined block of bungalows built in the 1920s. We now live within walking distance of a restored downtown shopping area with antique shops, independent bookstores and coffee houses, and a farmer's market every Saturday -- a little slice of Brooklyn Heights out here in the land of electric leaf blowers and SUVs.

But there's a dark undercurrent to life out here. My car was broken into in the middle of the night during our first month in California. All they took was a Kenneth Cole diaper bag. It was the only designer item I've ever owned and a gift from a fabulous New York girlfriend. Frivolous as that may seem, I'd been violated, right here in lovely, pleasant, smiling suburbia. (What annoys me the most about this is that no thief in their right mind would keep a diaper bag -- they almost certainly tossed it into a ditch after finding not a laptop or wallet but a few Pampers and a ketchup-stained Onesie.)

More worrisome than the minor theft, however, is the fact that our house is two doors down from a skinhead hangout, populated by bald, jackbooted kids and decorated with swastikas on the wall and white supremacist literature in the yard. Three of these Nazi wannabes are now in jail for firebombing the house of another neighbor who they believed to be Jewish. (He's Catholic, but that's hardly the point.) Granted, they're kids who were too dumb to look up how to build a good bomb, not a cult of educated, adult hate-mongers, but they're still a lot bigger than I am.

Next page | Dangerously close to full-blown paranoia