MAMARAMA: A Memoir of Sex, Kids Rock 'n' Roll.
Evelyn McDonnell. Da Capo.
253 pages. $22.
There seems to be a common psychological thread among parents these days, or at least among a certain class of parents.
It goes like this: ''How can I be a mom (or dad)? I used to be so cool.'' The simple, essential act of reproduction has filled a generation with complete bewilderment.
Youth's final days, relatively late to arrive, are a cause for simultaneous wonder and terror.
This collective groping toward adulthood is producing its own literary genre: the memoir of ''hip'' parenthood, the latest of which comes from Evelyn McDonnell, The Miami Herald's pop culture writer.
McDonnell's book is not without problems.
A rock critic by trade, she is prone to such Gen-X generalizations as ''if the 80s were a decade of excess and escape, the 90s exploded with action. Apathy was out; activism was in.'' She also falls prey to the same self-importance plaguing many former writers from self-styled alternative weeklies, thinking that their very presence in a place (late '80s New York, early '90s San Francisco), means that particular place was part of a world-changing cultural revolution.
And for a book about becoming a mother, it's strange that McDonnell's first child isn't born until three-quarters of the way through the book, though she does become a stepmother about 40 pages earlier. The parent side of me wanted to hear more about the struggles and contradictions of parenthood and much less about McDonnell's dissatisfaction with her undergraduate experience at Brown.
But Mamarama is also a heartfelt attempt to understand what has happened to a generation of ''third wave'' feminists that came of age in an era of Bikini Kill, Sleater-Kinney, Sister Spit and the Guerrilla Girls.
How, McDonnell wonders, did those values become subsumed by those espoused by slutty Desperate Housewives and former teen pop stars who are shooting out babies like horny kitty-cats? 'We were students of, and rebels against, women's herstory ..
. We walked bare-breasted down Fifth Avenue with `slut' written across our stomachs..
. We rewrote billboards, published fanzines, grabbed mikes, scratched records, smashed drums. But there was one thing few of us did: have children.
''
McDonnell stumbles through the thorny realms of post-feminist identity, eventually coining a phrase, as parenting memoirists are wont to do. Mamarama isn't, she writes, ``about the perfect madness of trying to be an overachieving super mom; rather, it's about the idea that all moms are super. Just because we have kids doesn't mean we give up our diva glamour as culture mavens.
In fact, parenting adds to our worldliness.''
Fair enough, though anyone who's been forced to sit through a Go Diego Go!-themed birthday party knows that most of the time, parents feel anything but worldly.
For McDonnell, the fact that Bjork, Liz Phair and Kristin Hersh have had children represents a fact of extreme cultural significance. But in a mothering culture that author Judith Warner describes as a ''perfect madness,'' perhaps those aren't such bad role models. For years, writers such as Anne Lamott, Ayun Halladay and Ariel Gore have been laying the flagstones for a different approach; now McDonnell and her generation of post-feminist moms have arrived to finish the project.
But they have much work to do. Even if half the moms in the United States had marched, bare-breasted and tattooed, down Avenue A in 1989, the parenting culture in this country would still be dominated by minivans, Gymboree, the Wiggles and lame, tuneless ''Mommy and Me'' Kindermuzik classes. The rise of Dan Zanes and They Might Be Giants as children's music avatars represents a shift toward better musicianship, not a cultural revolution.
McDonnell's sincere and loving memoir is part of an important larger cultural conversation. The realities of parenthood and family may be immutable and eternal, but the specifics can change. In between poop storms and parent-teacher conferences, parents can set the terms of the cultural conversation.
The world can define mothers and fathers all it wants, but definitions can also change. As long as moms like McDonnell keep talking, their third wave may just triumph yet.
Neal Pollack is the author of Alternadad.
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