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Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

When the revolution comes
We asked for grand plans and we got more than a few.

[03/27/00]

Naked to the world
I've been a nude art model for 20 years. But am I brave enough to hang a photograph of me and my daughter in a gallery?
By Pegi Taylor
[03/24/00]

Belly wounds
My tummy is a misshapen battlefield, but I'm not ready to tuck it away.
By Caroline Leavitt
[03/23/00]

The story of your grandmothers
It is the stuff of tragedy and myths and fairy tales.
By Susan Straight
[03/22/00]

Pack of wolves
When my son joined the Cub Scouts, I didn't expect him to learn about peckers, pedophiles and Jesus Christ.
By Stephen G. Bloom
[03/20/00]

Complete archives for Mothers Who Think

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She's not exactly pleased with what I've done with the place. She has -- surprise! -- her own ideas about how her adult son's apartment should look. She has sinister plans for my wall-to-wall collection of back issues of Sports Illustrated.

I'm not a guy who completely lacks a design sense. I know the difference between McCobb and Wakefield. For me, the word "Shaker" does not automatically imply that it's time to break out the vodka and vermouth. I purchased my first piece of antique furniture (a desk) when I was 20. I own a set of Michael Graves coasters.

But my tastes are not mom tastes. And to make matters worse, my mother -- a gentle woman on the verge of turning 60 -- is a decorator. She runs a small custom drapery business in West Virginia. She has yet to spot a swag, a tie-back, a bolt of flowery chintz or yardage of ornate damask that did not cry out to the inner Dixie Carter that rules her aesthetic soul.

My ideas about decor, by contrast, tend to treat golf clubs as furniture. A prospective diversity of indoor flora -- geraniums and ferns and aloe vera plants -- has by and large been reduced to a collection of forbidding cactuses. There are half a dozen remote controls hiding in the sofa's cracks, two-week-old copies of the New York Post heaped in tottering piles, partially read novels left open on every available surface, and credit-card receipts scattered about like pale yellow leaves.

Over my fireplace mantel hangs a pair of mounted deer antlers. My 2-foot-high fake Christmas tree, perked up by three lonely Christmas cards, carries no ornaments and is losing lights at a rate of about six per year. The objects in my apartment that aren't brown or black are orange.

I am a member of a entire subclass of not-so-young-anymore men, living in large cities, who are precariously close to being worrisome bachelors, problem sons, borderline lost causes. Our mothers lie awake at night wondering if good women are ever going to come along to reform us. They struggle to tolerate the hopeless tactics we employ to cozy up our dwellings. They'd prefer nuptials, but until that fateful day, an endless series of decorating tips will have to suffice.

"Those certainly are nice orange chairs," my mother says, meaning: "Why aren't you married yet?"

"Where did you find that?" my mother asks, gazing balefully at the General Electric wall clock that I spent three weeks hunting down in the junk shops of the Upper East Side. The subtext: "You'd better get rid of it if you ever want to get hitched."

Bachelor sons in their early 30s pose a maternal dilemma of unexamined proportions. We're too young to be completely written off, but too old to be parentally cajoled. Our mothers are compelled to resort to a kind of transparent code to improve and edify us. More often than not -- especially if mom cares about the arrangement of her surroundings, as mine does -- this code involves flooring, furniture, wallpaper, shelving, and most troubling of all, doodads, bibelots and tchotchkes: every mother's quick fix for a lamentable decor.

"Why don't you get some baskets for up there," my mother says optimistically one morning while sipping coffee from one of my numerous gimme mugs at my supercool chrome and warped-formica Salvation Army kitchen table, her consternation focused on the bare tops of my cabinets.

"I really never finished cleaning up there," I say, knowing full well that my cabinet tops could, two years after I signed the lease, still harbor rat skeletons or the corpses of cockroaches.

Baskets. Suggesting the purchase of decorative wicker is never a good move where the 30-something bachelor son is concerned. Pier 1 is for chicks. I prefer to shop for my housewares in Bay Ridge garages.

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