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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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The father had a fine, appraising eye for his own work, and never seemed to notice that everything he and his son accomplished was ever so slightly off kilter. Neither Mom nor Dad, however, could bring themselves to ask for corrections. Garry Dean's dad stood beside my mom one afternoon, showing off the wallpaper they'd put up in the powder room -- its stripes a good 3 or 4 degrees off true. "Now that's a right beautiful paper you picked," he offered.

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

"Mom!" I hissed, when he was barely out of earshot. "Why didn't you make him put it straight?"

"Well, he's so proud of it, how could I?" she countered.

When I became a homeowner myself, I discovered I'd inherited this uncertainty about how to deal with what can only be called -- with what I hope is a generous dose of irony -- "the help." And help is what our 200-year-old farmhouse needed, lots of it. Within six months of moving in, we were on a first-name basis with an electrician, a plumber, a roofer and an odd-jobs man whom we know to this day only as Charlie, a Vietnam vet who could be a poster child for post-traumatic stress disorder, and who does only outdoor repairs, refusing to enter the house even to go to the bathroom.

After years of student life, I was clueless about my role. Beyond being polite, respectful and paying on time, what should I do? Serve coffee? Make their lunch when they stayed all day? Inquire about their home life? Should I just clear out, leaving them to work unmolested by my guilt and ambivalence? Was I their boss? Queen for 45 minutes? Should I tell them if the wallpaper was crooked?

Some of this uncertainty comes from my feelings of protectiveness toward this particular old house, which has been mishandled over the years by owners who clearly would have been better off in a nice new ranch house.

It quickly became easy to tell between the tradesmen who really love old houses and those who find them eccentric, even slightly creepy. "Lady," said one electrician, emerging from the cavelike cellar under the kitchen, after our antique electric service proved unequal to handling two computers and a microwave on the same circuit. "Lady, if I were you, here's what I'd do. I'd move out and I'd set this place up as a wiring museum." He fixed the immediate problem and refused thereafter to take our calls. Frank the furnace guy came up from below one day, clearly spooked. "I think there's something alive down there," he confided. He never returned, either.

But our plumber, whose children I'm putting through college, one foot of copper pipe at a time, loves this place. Tommy considers it a challenge to keep us free of leaks, drips, dribbles, seepage, frozen pipes, hazardous materials in our water and even mice that nibble away at our insulation.

With Tommy I have a history. When he called to me from across the coffee shop downtown one day, "Hey, I can fix that sink today if you're going to be home later," and I called back, "You can go on up there anytime -- door's unlocked," I knew we'd reached a new level in our relationship.

I still don't know what to do when he's working here and I'm working at home. I shuffle ineffectually between my office and wherever he happens to be on his knees with a wrench and a shop light, offering iced tea on hot days and coffee on cold, neither of which he ever accepts, intent on getting done and getting to the next job. Should I watch him work? Check what he's done before he goes? Should I offer to help? Why do I feel so guilty that I'm paying this man a handsome sum to do a job of skilled labor I wouldn't begin to know how to do?

Whatever the reason, I'm pleased to say that we may have nipped this thing in the bud before it passes to a new generation. The last time Tommy was here -- his baby-blue truck with the blue toilet seat on the hood parked in front of the house -- my 5-year-old stood shyly behind me, whispering urgently, "Mama, I have something for Tommy."

She crept up to where he was working and, as he looked up, pressed into his hand a shiny red floor tile she'd found on the school playground, one of her treasures. We had an errand to do then, and left Tommy hard at work.

When we got back, there was a message for Meg, written in block letters on the box from the faucet Tommy had finished installing, a penciled drawing of his truck at the bottom.

"Dear Meg," he'd written. "Thank you for the beautiful tile. I've glued it to the toilet seat on my truck." Meg was as thrilled as if she'd had a letter from Santa. Now, whenever we see the little blue truck (with the little red tile on the blue toilet seat) around town, she waves gleefully. "Mom," she asks, "when can Tommy come and visit us again?"
salon.com | April 3, 2000

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