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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]

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I keep my mouth shut.

"Why don't I send you your great-grandmother's tea set?"

Suddenly, it's time for Mom to go home.

In my mind's eye, I sustain my own image of the perfect surroundings. Leather club chairs; a Stickley desk; a Frank sofa; wood blinds; vintage golf photographs; a stuffed fish or two; an enormous television accessorized with a powerful Playstation; a Francis!Francis! X1 espresso machine; a kitchen entirely outfitted in gleaming Sub-Zero and Viking and All-Clad; bookcases crammed with first editions; a custom-designed closet for my fly rod, golf clubs, tennis racket, basketball and skis; a temperature-controlled wine-rack; a shower with many, many directional jets. Threadbare Oriental and Turkish carpets. A huge bed swaddled in white. A display case for my extensive collection of French and Italian ashtrays. A wet bar. A speed bag.

In the restlessly nurturing mind's eye of my mother, there resides a vastly better lighted and less deliberately butch apartment that is organized to be shared with a member of the opposite sex. All emblems of masculinity are tidily concealed. The vacuum and the dustrag and the mop come out of hiding more often that once every three months. Living things grow and flourish, bud and flower. Wallpaper borders ring the rooms. There are pillows and fluffy miniature blankets. The feminizing touch is subtle but unmistakable.

Part of the curse of the meddling mom can be attributed to the rental apartments of the Northeast, which, regardless of widespread barely masked dilapidation, often retain enough of their fled former glory to give people ideas. Beneath those 11 layers of paint -- wainscotting! Under that encrustation of filth -- tilework! Visible through the accretions of crud -- great potential!

Since they can no longer effectively tinker with our personalities or psyches, the mothers of us soon to be middle-aged bachelors sublimate the urge into our apartments. They fantasize about blowing into town with swatches and paint chips and, through the whirlwind expenditure of maternal effort, transforming our sad surroundings into cheerful fiancee beacons. "Some mini blinds would look nice in here," they suggest, while in their hearts they know that if we don't gussy the joint up, no woman will ever have us.

"This place has great potential" -- the mom mantra, the semaphore of optimism. Potential, of course, means nothing to us. Scares us, in fact. It's just another word for commitment.

I'm not half as bad as some guys, with their duct-taped recliners and phones shaped like footballs, their seductive leather sectionals, their framed posters of Porsches and end tables constructed from beer-stained issues of Maxim. Their fragrant black bedding. The undying allegiance to the microwave oven and dinners that come in trays. Their mildew farms in the bathroom.

But I can't fully avoid being included in the woeful species. Most theoretically "masculine" decor -- the God-awful girlified arrangements that appear in decor magazines -- strikes me as hopeless. Where are the musty plaid sofas? I wonder when walking through Pottery Barn. Where are taxidermied squirrels? I ask myself on jaunts to Crate & Barrel. Couldn't House & Garden find a guy who owns bowling trophies? What of the cardboard shipping boxes innovatively employed as nightstands? The pride-of-place accorded to stereo equipment? The fridge stocked not with foie gras and Krug but Bud Lite and week-old pizza?

The truth is that the contemporary bachelor pad, in all its repulsive glory, is the final remaining challenge for the shelter industry, a holdout of willful tastelessness that professional decorators -- Mark Hampton wannabes and the editorial staff of Metropolitan Home -- would dearly love to stamp out.

Mothers are the advance men of this campaign. If they can't get grandchildren out of us, the least they can do is force us into accepting window treatments. In their advice, they mingle pity with undying sense that they can bring us around, that they can save us from ourselves.

We, of course, don't want to be saved. We just want to continue to eat dinner without napkins and sleep on the couch and wallow in vigorous bachelor ineligibility. Unfortunately, following the old adage that mothers raise their sons in the image of the men they wish they had married, our moms refuse to give up on us. We have become projects, discussed ruefully among other family members, tutted over in mutually concerned company. "If only he would throw away that Dallas Cowboys beanbag chair ..."

But there is an esthetic bravery in our refusal to be tamed, to become IKEA momma's boys. Proudly, we switch on ESPN beneath paintings of dogs playing poker and ease down into our swayback thrift-shop futons. We make the bed only when there's sex on the evening's menu. We might dwell alone forever in our scuzzy sacrosanct environs, but we'll never be conquered. In the end, we'll break our mothers' hearts, but a precious independence will stubbornly endure. Like cockroaches on the cabinet tops, we won't go away.
salon.com | March 28, 2000

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