T A B L E++T A L K

Is there a "best" age to become a parent? Discuss when you chose to have kids in the Mothers area of Table Talk

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R E C E N T L Y

Are we there yet?
By Ann Hood
What had I left in the Florida of my childhood vacations that I wanted my children to find?
(06/17/98)

Nursing death
By Dawn MacKeen
Can breast-feeding be deadly?
(06/16/98)

Ballad of a bohemian childhood
By Maccabee Montandon
Other kids ate Fritos while I munched macrobiotic chips
(06/15/98)

Wax on
By Joan Walsh
A bikini-waxer muses on the fine line between pleasure and pain
(06/11/98)

Second Thoughts
By Sallie Tisdale
We are all criminals
(06/11/98)

BROWSE THE MOTHERS WHO THINK FEATURE ARCHIVES

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Mamafesto
By Camille Peri
Why it's time
for Mothers Who Think

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BY SUSAN McCARTHY | Naturally I worry about mobs with torches and pitchforks showing up at my door some stormy night to let me know they're uncomfortable with my little ways. Who doesn't? Yet I think for most of us it's a vague, undefined worry -- a nagging sense that high school was not just a passing aberration, but a glimpse into the furthest fastnesses of the human soul. In my case, I know exactly what's going to be bothering them, and it's not going to be my experiments in creating new life down in the dungeon, or my scheme to overthrow the world with the aid of alien invaders disguised as telemarketers, or even injudicious things I may have said about the War on Drugs. No, what they're going to be all creeped out about is the fact that my children don't call me Mom.

There's worse. I like to feel that my life has not been wholly routine, that I have a few unusual experiences and original thoughts to recount. But it turns out that I could have paraglided from the top of Everest clutching an anthrax bomb to my bosom to save the world from an Eskimo conspiracy to trigger a new Ice Age and that would not strike most people as being anywhere near as riveting as my habit of not calling my parents Mom and Dad.

Yes, it's true. I call my parents by their names and I always have and I have no idea why. They claim not to be able to remember why they decided to raise us that way. Maybe it was an academic-circles left-wing Beat-era thing, how would I know? It seemed perfectly natural to me.

But no matter how brilliant one's child-rearing ideas are, the fly in the ointment is always the children's Ghastly Little Peers. Kids, with their shining-eyed honesty, are always the first to ask, "What kind of name is that?" "What's wrong with your skin?" "Is it true you're different and should be ostracized, hunted down and stoned?" and in my case, "How come you don't call your mom and dad Mom and Dad?"

My own Ghastly Little Peers also had searching philosophical questions like, "How come you don't go to church?" "How come your father has a beard?" and "How can she be your mother and your sister?" (OK, I made that one up.) But nothing shocked people like my calling my parents by their names. Apparently it seemed wrong, icky, disrespectful, show-offy, sick.

After a few years I started replying, "I just do. How come you call your parents by their titles? They don't call you 'child,' do they?" This attempt at frank and open discussion was generally met with hostile silence.

There were years of this. Once out of high school, it became less of an issue. It didn't seem so shocking to my Peers to hear an older person addressed by name, or maybe people had learned to keep more of the searching philosophical questions to themselves. Or else they were hoping to stop calling their own parents Mom and Dad.

When I got pregnant, the Mom issue came rushing back in an all-new form. Almost every maternity nurse I've met and almost every ob-gyn tries to put expectant parents at ease by referring to them as moms and dads, often addressing them directly: "Mom, put your feet in these stirrups." "Dad, you wait here with these back issues of TV Guide."

The more ghastly the thing they want you to do, the more babyish their mode of address. "Now, Mommy, we want you to take off all your clothes, get on this treadmill and drink ipecac while these medical students take notes, OK, Mommykins?" The comeback, I suppose, is, "Drink it yourself, Sonny," or "Think again, little Missy." But it always takes me a few years to compose my comebacks.

N E X T+P A G E: I am a traditionalist