Motherhood a challenging gig for rock n roll grrrl

Evelyn McDonnell, a Brown graduate who now writes about music and pop culture for the Miami Herald, explores how a rock chick and committed feminist can add motherhood to her plate without short-changing her child, her family or herself.
SUSIE J. HORGAN
After Evelyn McDonnell gave birth to her first child, Cole, in 2003, she writes, I wondered if I could train him to use a litter box.

In her book Mamarama: A Memoir of Sex, Kids, and Rock n Roll, McDonnell, a Brown graduate who now writes about music and pop culture for the Miami Herald, uses her own experiences to explore how a rock chick and committed feminist can add motherhood to her plate without short-changing her child, her family or herself. It s about how everything changes and how nothing changes.
I have moments, even days, of pure despondency, she writes, when I m not sure I m cut out for this parenting stuff.

I worry I m becoming everything I didn t want to be: a frumpy, grumpy housewife who, two weeks after it came out, still hasn t heard the new Strokes CD.
Then I remember: I don t like the Strokes.
McDonnell, who will read from her book Friday at Brown, delves into her own past as a tomboy in Wisconsin, a rock writer and promoter in Providence, a journalist and poet in New York City and San Francisco, as well as the rocky relationship between her parents.

In so doing, she demonstrates the dilemmas she faced at Cole s birth. Cole was no accident, but McDonnell was ambivalent about everything that surrounded the motherhood gig.
The societal pressure to conform multiplies when you reproduce, she writes.

It s one thing to be a bad girl, quite another to be a bad mom.
While Cole s needs came front and center, McDonnell describes uncovering her biggest journalistic scoop: In 2003, McDonnell and Herald reporter Nicole White uncovered a surveillance operation by the Miami Beach police on rap performers and record labels. At the same time, McDonnell was planning Cole s first birthday party, which happened two days after the story hit the newsstands.

It was a banner day for me too, she writes, knowing I could be in the middle of the most intense experience of my journalistic career and still throw my son a good party.
From that came the term mamarama, which McDonnell describes as the fast-paced jumble of obligations and enjoyments over which a working, independent mother careens through life.
Don t call it balancing a family and a career, McDonnell writes.

I don t like that term. I am not a fulcrum. I prefer to see kids and jobs not as oppositional weights but as complementary pleasures.

Speaking from her home in Miami, McDonnell says she hadn t considered writing a memoir before Cole s birth. It was certainly not conscious, but there was something of wanting to tell my story to Cole. Not that, maybe, he ll ever read it, but some psychological subconscious level there.

I d been wanting to write a book for a long time, and just haven t known where to begin and what to focus on. And definitely, some people along the way thought I had something memoir-ish in me.
So McDonnell took Cole s first week of preschool as vacation time, and Literally, I sat down and wrote the first lines in the book, and that was it.

It just sort of told itself, with a lot of editing stuff along the way.
This is McDonnell s fourth book, but the others were musician profiles and works of criticism. Writing a memoir was a different deal.

In some ways it s very easy to write something so personal. It s very hard to write something so personal and think there s any reason to have anybody else read it.
You re telling a story.

It s by no means my whole life s story, of course. It s very specific aspects. But it s some of the most important things in my life.

McDonnell s husband had two daughters when they met, and they re teenagers now. McDonnell writes about the troubles of disciplining kids who are doing what you yourself did at their age, and cuts to the heart of the dilemma: She may have smoked pot, had sex and cursed Ronald Reagan while in high school, she writes, but I was also getting straight A s. It wasn t so much what Karlie was doing that bothered me; it was what she wasn t doing
She didn t show the manuscript to anyone before submitting it for publication: I had to write it thinking, I just have to tell what my truth is and hope that everybody understands.

And I think the book is written with a lot of love. It s been really positive. It s been amazingly therapeutic for everybody, from my parents to my kids.

I think it helped [the girls] understand my perspective in a way they hadn t seen it before.
Looking back on her life for the book, McDonnell says, she was taken by the fact that everything s been a lot harder, and taken a lot longer, than I thought. She says she thought she d have her first child and her first book by age 30; when Cole was born, she was nearly 40.

At the same time, the perspective helped her remember her better times for what they were. When you re in the middle of some of the most amazing stuff, it s hard to realize how amazing it is.
From the first, issues of gender and gender relations have been front and center in McDonnell s life, from her upbringing as a tomboy in Wisconsin to her involvement in the riot-grrrl movement (documented in Mamarama) to her championing of female critics in her first book, Rock She Wrote.

With a child, particularly a boy, to raise and teach, she says she finds that an enlightened approach is hard to instill. You d think we ve progressed, but we ve really regressed in terms of gender. There s so much rigid, hyper-masculine/feminine role-playing going on among adults and projected onto kids.

The Latin culture in Miami, she says, plays these roles up to the hilt.
There s also the natural order of things to work against. He s such a typical boy, McDonnell says of Cole.

I hate to admit it, [but] there s something to genetics, or they re nurtured from such an early age, because they seem to want to get a stick in their hands and whack it against things. He s this warmonger!
But he also likes putting on fingernail polish and playing with dolls and playing tea with his animals, and you have to say that s part of his identity, too.

In the book, McDonnell laments the resurgence of the princess motif in American culture, and says over the phone that with two teenage girls in the house it s still a struggle.
They were quite tomboyish when I first met them, and they re still really strong and really tough, and they re also beautiful girls. They re knockouts; they re curvy; they really work the Miami aesthetic.

And they know how to do things with hair and makeup that I ve never figured out. But I still find myself trying to teach them about things like self-esteem, and not relying on their boyfriends to buy them things, and to learn self-sufficiency. But they re further along the path and I think they ll get there.

They re definitely not princesses.
McDonnell looks forward to returning to Providence, where she hasn t been since her first book tour. Not for nothing, she says, is the Providence chapter called Set It Off.

I really felt like it was my launching point to adulthood. And it was such a good transition between a small town and New York. It was such a great place to be for someone who loved music.

Evelyn McDonnell reads from Mamarama: A Memoir of Sex, Kids, and Rock n Roll Friday at the Sarah Doyle Women s Center, 26 Benevolent St., Providence, at 4 p.m.