She’s at it again. This week Amy Sohn has a piece in New York Magazine (her column is now called Breeding). The pull quote: When every restaurant and coffee bar doubles as a playroom, is there such a thing as adult space anymore?
But the piece is about so much more than public space. It’s about one woman’s need to be perceived as cool even though she’s doing that most uncool of things: being a mommy.
But first let me say this: what Sohn has to say about public space is pretty much on the money. Now that I’ve got "older kids" I get crazy when I go out to a nice place for dinner with Hepcat and there’s a screaming baby nearby. Hate it. It rattles my nerves; I’ve really lost my tolerance for that sort of thing.
But thank god I had tolerance for it when my kids were babies. We obsess over them and love their every poop, their every scream because we are madly in love. Sure, they drive us to near nervous breakdown. But the perpetuation of the species is dependent on parent adulation of their offspring.
The reason this generation of moms have brought their kids into public spaces is because they recognize the need for connection, the need to get out and be part of the world. What’s the alternative? For moms to be contained in a special mommy ghettos?
It’s noisy, smelly, and nerve rattling, but having babies among the general population means that moms don’t have to endure solitary confinement with child during the early years.
In her column, Amy Sohn is expressing a lot of the sames things that got said a few months ago ad nauseum when the "No Stroller Manifesto" came out.
Remember that? A bartender at Fifth Avenue’s Patio posted a rant against parents bringing kids to bars.
Sohn’s piece is basically a rehash of a lot of the blogging, commenting and conversation that went on back then. I even wrote a Smartmom piece for the Brooklyn Papers about the baby backlash.
Clearly, Sohn is trying to carve out some editorial space for her "self-hating mom" stance. You can bet there’s going to be yet another book out about the totally cool mom who doesn’t want to be identified as a mom (see hippie mom, boho mom, counterculture mom 1960’s and 1970’s).
New York Magazine is obviously eating it up. They ran a piece last week about Urban Baby, an on-line community of moms that delves into some of that territory, too.
I’d say 2006 is becoming the year of the Anti-Mom, the cool mom, the anti-SAHM, the mom who has disdain for other moms and the culture’s current obsessions with mommydom. It’s the backlash backlash.
Clearly, Sohn doesn’t want to be identified as a Park Slope mom. When she goes to the Tea Lounge she wants to say, "I know I look like one of them, but I am NOT!
She does what she can visually to differentiate herself from the pack. "My goal is not to look like a mother so much as a still-young, still-cool person who just happens to have a child."
Ah, the young still-cool person. Sohn may not mommydom, but she’s obsessed with our culture’s preoccupation with youth and coolness. She wants to be perceived as young and cool – in spite of her baby.
How do you spell D-E-N-I-A-L ?
Doesn’t the need to be cool, to be perceived as an urban hipster get annoying, too?
I’m sure a lot of people perceive me as a typical Park Slope mom. But I am so much more detailed and interesting. Which isn’t to say that being a mom isn’t interesting. It’s just we’re all about so much more.
And some of us are cool moms.
When you first have a kid, your tiny little dumpling takes over all your thoughts like any life-changing, milestone experience would. They are more fascinating than anything else in your life because they are life just beginning. It’s miraculous and wonderful.
Over time you come back to your old life. Except it’s never the same; your life is forever changed. You can be hipster cool or anything else you wanna be.
Seems to me, the coolest people don’t worry about being cool all the time. And don’t worry so much about what group they are being identified with. If you’re a cool person you’ll be a cool person – mother or not.