Losing My Cool...
by Audrey D.
Mark
The other
night, I was trying to explain to my seven year
old twin boys, Jared & Jasper, what an
oxymoron is. It's you when have a combination of
contradictory words that just don't seem to go
together. I tried to illustrate with some
examples like, “jumbo shrimp”,
“awfully nice” and “pretty
ugly”.
“Oh”,
chimed in my ten year old daughter, Sydney,
without missing a beat - “You mean like 'cool
mom'?”
Hmmmm. Surely,
I thought, she'd simply misunderstood the light-hearted
literary form that we were discussing. However,
that hands-on-hips, twisted lips and look of
general disgust on her face told me otherwise.
I was just
about to really lose my cool and send her to her
room for that sassy sentiment, when I realized
that she might, in fact, be right! Can you keep
your “cool” once you have kids, or do
you immediately go from being a happening
“It Girl” to a washed up “Was
Woman” as soon as you give birth?
I suppose one
could argue that you can't exactly lose something
that you never had in the first place. Maybe
I wasn't all that cool to start with. But before
kids I had lived in NYC in the 80's. I had big
hair and boulder-sized shoulder pads in my dolman
sleeved Norma Komali sweatshirts. My mullet maned
mates & I even managed to get past the red
velvet ropes at some of the city's hottest clubs,
on occasion. But, judging by my daughter's
gagging reflex from my scrapbook photos of this
dance down memory lane I can see now, that even
then, I was more than six degrees away from
anything remotely registering as cool!
I guess today
I'm getting even colder to cool. The only thing
that I've purchased recently that says
“Juicy”, comes in a 6 oz. square box
with a straw and has very little to do with
“Couture”.
Reality aside,
at least Sydney used to think that I was a cool
mom. Cool was as clincher when all it took was a
song and dance with her and her little buddies to
one of Barney's brain boring songs. I've learned
the hard way, that this tactic no longer cuts it.
Today, if I'm caught humming or moving
rhythmically in anyway to her ever-blasting boom
box when her friends are around, she shoots me a
panic-stricken look, as if I were convulsing with
a grand mal seizure. Syd used to play dress up
for hours and hours, trying on all of my clothes
and shoes. Now however, according to a recent
inspection, she insists that everything in my
closet must immediately be burned or buried.
Those matching mother-daughter outfits at the
mall are a thing of the past. Even admitting that
we're mother-daughter at the mall is a thing of
the past.
In my defense,
I grew up with an un-hip mom of my own. Shirley
Partridge and Carol Brady were my only real
“cool mom” role models. This may, in
part, explain the cool conundrum that I find
myself in right now! But today's Hollywood moms
make it look so easy. I wonder if Jamie Lee
Curtis, Teri Hatcher and Madonna are ever be
forced to follow a detailed doctrine of approved
talking points when conversing their kid's
cliques, like me. Heck, it seems that Demi Moore's
daughters not only let her hang out with their
friends, they even let her marry one!
“Certainly”,
I pleaded with Sydney, “you can think of one
mom who has held on and can still qualify as a 'cool'?”
“That's
easy,” she said pointing to my very own
mother across the room, “Grandma!”
I put my hands-on-hips,
twisted my lips and, with a look of general
disgust, replied, “Mark my words, my darling
daughter, one day you may have children and
become an oxymoron of your own - and guess who
will be the cool Grandma then?”
She about lost
it. That was cool!
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