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Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

I believed in the breast
And then the control freaks at La Leche League buried me in bureaucracy, bare breasts and too much LLLove.
By Sue Robins
[03/31/00]

No bottle feeders, no spankers
Attachment parents stick to their guns.
By Amy Brill
[03/31/00]

Daniel is good at not dying
A mother lives with the disciplined ambivalence of a do-not-resuscitate order.
By Elizabeth Halling
[03/30/00]

Life as a fate worse than death
A lawyer tries to prevent the ultimate abuse of a tiny victim.
By Beth Broeker
[03/30/00]

When the jailhouse is far from home
Kids with parents behind bars share the pain of incarceration.
By Nell Bernstein
[03/29/00]

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I can't complain -- we have, after all, hired these guys to liberate us from the disreputable old vinyl flooring we inherited from previous owners and install the beautiful maple we bought with our children's inheritance. They seem to know what they're doing. But I am fundamentally uncomfortable because, frankly, I am wracked by guilt every time I hire "help."

Also Today Generations of servitude Once, my grandmother worked as a domestic servant. Today, I need to hire help -- but I can't take the guilt. By Pamela Toutant

With these gentlemen my uneasiness is compounded by a virtually impenetrable language barrier. The guy in the flooring showroom with the plummy Yankee accent has given way to my newfound friends with their lovely but -- to me -- unintelligible Portuguese. "How's it going?" I ask, slipping into the not-yet-ripped-up part of the kitchen to get a cup of tea. "Little English, sorry," says their apparent leader, adding "Good, good."

The hour between their arrival this morning and the delivery of the actual flooring was excruciating -- the three of us nodding and smiling and making gestural small talk, and me saying every five minutes, "I wonder where that wood is," and calling the flooring shop every 10 minutes to be told each time: "It's in transit."

I mimed and used pidgin English to offer tea, coffee, sodas and bananas (the only food available after a pre-floor-day hiatus from shopping). They politely declined with charming smiles, indicating either "I wish you'd go back to your office and leave us alone" or "Back in Brazil, I was a professor of theoretical mathematics and I'd rather eat nails than put in your stupid floor."

But it wouldn't really make any difference where they were from or what they spoke -- I don't do so well in English, either. What do I say after I've said, "The pump's down here. It's been going chook chook chook when it comes on" or "Do you think you'll be able to stay within your estimate?"

I come by my ambivalence honestly: I get it from my parents. For Dad, living in the mid-South in an era that straddled the advent of civil rights, the idea of hiring anyone to do your work for you implied that you felt superior to them, an idea that was anathema to him. We got the impression as kids that it would be a disservice to any self-respecting person, especially a black person, to hire him or her to work for us white folks.

But Mom's hatred of ironing was stronger than Dad's middle-class guilt, and in the end Martha came once a week to do the ironing. Mom never seemed to know how to treat Martha. She would offer her brown-edged wafers and Cokes and sit at the table making small talk with her as if she were an unexpected guest, but when the little cookie klatch was over, Martha still did the ironing.

I was 3 and loved to sit under the ironing board, enjoying the starchy cooked smell of my daddy's cotton oxford-cloth shirts as she pressed them, wrapping my naked Barbies in the cotton handkerchiefs waiting to be done and watching the little balls of spit bounce and sizzle on the iron as Martha tested it.

Once I reached out to touch them as they skittered over the iron's surface, and after I recovered from my burned palm I wasn't allowed to hang out with Martha anymore. She didn't stay much longer anyway, not after she expressed her gratitude to Mom one day for continuing to let her come and work even though she had tuberculosis. Mom was pregnant, Martha was history and Dad learned to iron.

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