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Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

Breaking the silence
It is time to tell the secrets and share the pain of Japanese internment.
By Rahna Reiko Rizzuto
[02/18/00]

He loves me, he loves me not
Race was never an issue in my life -- until I fell in love.
By Eleanor Stacy Parker
[02/17/00]

Love strands
My daughters are part me and part their father. The evidence is in their springy, curly, ready-to-dread hair.
By Susan Straight
[02/17/00]

Torn to pieces
Brothers and sisters in foster care, rarely adopted together, are routinely split and scattered, never to see each other again.
By Nell Bernstein
[02/16/00]

Beware of "women's culture"
Francine Prose issues a stern warning in the New York Times about market-driven pablum for women -- who are as silly, powerless and narcissistic as a gender can get.
By Jennifer Foote Sweeney
[02/15/00]

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Well, there's a choice. A child could be raised by Quakers or Mennonites in Pennsylvania. I think there is a strange American Puritanism, of course, that's always there, right below the surface, that favors incredible simplicity and austerity for the raising of a child.

And I did too in a way. I really believe strongly that kids should be spared the runoff of their parents' lives and problems. Chris [Toph] didn't know -- nor will my own kids -- about my problems at work, or that I broke up with a person. I didn't want to burden him with stuff like that.

How did you avoid that, especially as a single parent? How do you avoid him being around you when things happen?

Well, he would meet people. If I were seeing someone, he'd go out with us. I only really took him out with people that he's known since he was born. These people are all his relatives, basically.

When I grew up, I didn't know anything about anything. I didn't know a swear word until I was like, 13, maybe. I couldn't possibly utter one until well after that. We couldn't say the word "God" in the house. We'd have to say, "Mom, Bill said the word 'dog' backwards."

I remember my first friend in the world -- who was at the reading in Berkeley the other night -- when we were like, 8 or 9, asked me what "balls" were, just to test me. And I thought really hard about it, and I was like, "Well, it's gotta be ... your butt." I couldn't say "butt" at the time; I had to say "rear end."

I didn't know the first thing about drugs until maybe college. My parents didn't idly talk about adult things and problems of the world and that kind of thing to us, and burden us with stuff. We were left to be kids.

It was the same way, as much as possible, with Toph. He didn't see anything. And I believe in this. There were a few people, my age or my sister's age, that didn't know how to act. Some people are really fucked-up around kids. They think kids need to be deflowered intellectually. I remember a good friend of Toph's in Berkeley, when he was about 10, knew absolutely everything about every conceivable drug-related subject -- all the terms, all the slang. I had no idea what he was talking about. I don't know where he got it. Maybe from his brother, maybe there was some talk in his home. The stuff that came out of his mouth was so old and icky and dirty. It was sort of sad, I think.

You mention in the book a mother who talks about allowing her son to smoke pot at home. She looks to you, thinking that as a young, hip parent, you will understand. Do you feel that other parents had the expectation that you would be more lenient than you actually were?

Yes, I think a lot of parents assumed that our house was a young bachelor pad, chaotic sort of thing. At one point, a neighbor of ours in Berkeley thought that when Toph didn't want to play with her son. Toph and my older brother, Bill, and I were just sitting around and she burst into the house -- unannounced, without knocking -- and she said: "What's going on? Just tell me what's going on!" like really thinking that she was making a drug bust or something, just because Toph was avoiding her son, who was kind of dorky.

There was some of that, but usually once I would talk to them, the other parents were really incredibly nice and generous. I liked talking to them about parent stuff.

These were private schools. The parents in particular at San Francisco Day School were like, wonder parents. These guys were all just incredibly active and smart and they think hard about everything. I would recommend that school to anybody.

All the schools were rather generous. People were always nice to us. I went to public school all my life and all through college and I liked it. Toph went to private schools because we were never sure where we'd be living. They have endowments, they have people who are well off, who are paying more so that people with less can join in on the fun.

I've found that people who are writers or in magazines or doing hip, creative, interesting stuff have a horror of parenting at a young age. These are the people who won't have kids -- if at all -- until their late 30s, at least. Do you feel that you did the same things you would have done as a young adult, regardless of your parental status?

Roughly. I think about this a lot. It's an issue of the chicken or the egg. I never went out a whole lot. Never more than once a week, usually. I always attributed that fact to the conviction I had that something horrible would happen to my brother if I left, obviously, and that I would pay for it for the rest of my life. But a lot of it had to do with work. I like working. I like staying home and working on things and pretending to work on things. And half the time I prefer hanging out with Toph at home to just going to a bar. We had real fun. We had pingpong.

It sounds like you had pretty strict rules about dating. For instance, you never had people sleep over.

Oh, never. Never. It would be just too weird. It got comical here and there. He met many people that I dated, as any child of divorce will meet his mother's dates.

If someone's not comfortable around your child, that's sort of a weeding out. I think that there's some issues there. To think that kids are some other species that you have to act a certain way around, to be nervous around. I've had people who were very nervous around my 12-year-old brother. Whatever. And that's a problem.

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