I just wanted to be a cool mom!
Writing by treason on Monday, 25 of July , 2005 at 7:41 pm
A forty year-old woman who wasn’t part of the in-crowd in high school decided to address that, after twenty plus years, by throwing parties at her house and supplying drugs, alcohol, and sex to teenage boys. She’s been charged with sexual assault and contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Or two. Or three. Or more.
My question is why is it important to be a cool mom? It’s not your job as a mom to be cool. It’s your job to raise normal, healthy, well-adjusted little taxpayers.
My mom was strict, and threatened to kill us daily, but she had moments of supreme cool. I remember she wore a black and white pony coat and rode around on the back of my brother’s motorcycle. She brought home our first Beatles records when they changed out the 45s on the restaurant jukebox. She gave us a record store allowance and had a problem with only one record we brought home: Sam The Sham and The Pharaoh’s Lil’ Red Riding Hood. (But she loved Winchester Cathedral. Go figure.)
She brought home a raccoon named Buddy for my tenth birthday and he became the brother I never had - even though I had one brother already. She gave us sloe gin and 7UP in tall glasses (to this day I smell sloe gin and think of holidays) and none of us became alcoholics. She fell over an overpass (long story) and her good-looking young doctors thought she was 29. (I told them I had siblings that age.) When my brother wanted to see Goodbye, Columbus but couldn’t because he was underage, my mother said she’d go so he could get in. Neither one of them got in - they thought she was younger than my brother.
I remember other kids liking the way my mother looked: “She doesn’t look like other moms. She looks better.” When I was little, I watched her get dressed for work and thought she looked like Liz Taylor. She really didn’t, but children have vivid imaginations.
She wore a sexy one-piece bathing suit and sat on the beach at Lake Michigan reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover. She let us read any book we wanted. She bought us a set of encyclopedias and we were allowed to touch them.
What was cool is that even though she worked in a restaurant everyday, on her one day off she would take us to a restaurant and let us order anything we wanted. We especially loved to go to the Loop and eat lunch at The Tartan Tray - the restaurant inside Carson Pirie Scott. My sister always ordered fried chicken; I always ordered seafood.
Sometimes tips would be really good and she would splurge, but include us. She’d melt butter for lobster tails and we’d open a bottle of Andre champagne. We thought we were rich.
She didn’t mind when stray animals followed us home because she brought home her share of strays, too. Animals were allowed on the furniture. At one point we had rabbits hopping around the house. One slept on the couch with the dog.
She never gave our friends drugs and she didn’t have sex with them, but we thought she was cool regardless.
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