Debra Galant Explains the Universe

Mother shock

Sometimes, linking to my various mamablogging pals, I feel like the old gray lady on the block. They're kvetching about their kids' nap schedules and playgroup spats. I, on the other hand, had to sign a permission slip last night for Margot to take part in her sex education class. (Technically, I'm not sure it was a permission slip, but it was some kind of scary paperwork that involved sex and my daughter and required my signature.) And in less than six months, this same child will be eligible to drive a car. Excuse me, young moms, but do you have any ideas for childproofing the entire federal, state, county and local road infrastructure? Because compared to Margot behind a wheel, any trouble your toddlers can get into is - you should pardon the expression - mere child's play.

That said, I got an e-mail today from Andi Buchanan, mother of a 5-year-old and an 18-month-old and author of a book called Mother Shock: Loving Every (Other) Minute of It (Seal Press, 2003), which is a collection of essays about the dark side of mothering. Andi is trying for a second big push on the book (oops, sorry for the pun) in time for Mother's Day and she's making creative use of the blogosphere. What's she's offering is a free Mother Shock a Day (that is, a daily essay from her book) for the month of May, and she's come up with an ingenious way to do it. If you click on the link below, you'll wind up at a special Yahoo group created for this purpose, and you'll get your daily Shock just the way you would get your regular daily e-mail digest from any Yahoo group.

An idea worth stealing.

Andi is a blogger herself, with a weblog that's linked to her book site. So naturally, she knew exactly what to offer to get me interested in helping out: a place on her blogroll and a mention in the press release about this promotion. She's also an editor of Literary Mama, an on-line e-zine about parenting that probably doesn't pay anything, but would look good on my resume, so I'd also like a regular column there. (Somebody there passed on this brilliant essay of mine about favoritism in blogrolling one's children, but I'm not holding that against Andi or Mother Shock. Then again, maybe it was some other e-zine that passed on that essay. It's not worth a look in my "deleted" file.) And she's also agreed to give Margot driving lessons.

Here's a little snippet from Mother Shock, which indeed brought me back to that September day in 1988 when we took Margot home from Beth Israel in Manhattan. (I believe I referred to the traffic on the FDR drive as demonic.) Here's Andi's version of things:

It wasn't just that the sun seemed so bright to me after being inside for two days, or that the cars driving past suddenly appeared to be death traps on wheels, or that the streets were full of grime and dirt I hadn't noticed before, or even that I saw the people around us as the germ-delivery systems they really were. It was that everything was fragile, everything was tenuous: I had crossed over to a strange new world, a world where another person's life literally depended on me, and everything seemed at the same time both more real and more unreal.

Novel distractions

I may have to go back to the old-fashioned typewriter in order to finish revising my novel-in-progress, Rattled. (Click here to read the first chapter.)

I mean, I was really, really diligently working on my revision of Chapter 23, which has my philandering real-estate developer Jack Barstad striding through the lobby of the Borgata hotel in Atlantic City, and I'd already spent a good hour looking at pictures I'd taken during a trip there in November, and wracking my brain for appropriate adjectives.

I'd gotten this far

It was classy. Boy, it was classy. Polished wooden tables, polished marble floors, polished tinted glass. Just goddamn polished. You could buy a lot of class for a billion dollars. So much class that you'd never know – unless you were in real estate, like Barstad – that the place was built right on top of a dump.

Barstad had always been partial to Trump’s Taj Mahal, with the big white elephants that lined the driveway, the turquoise onion domes and dripping crystal chandeliers. But he had to admit that the Borgata made the Taj look like a cross between a bordello and a Greyhound station. The Borgata – that’s where all the players were staying these days, the real high rollers, and the celebrities, in town from New York and Beverly Hills. He’d already spotted Bruce Willis and his entourage in the lobby. You practically had to make what Bruce Willis made to afford the Borgata, but who cared? Once you’d walked through the sleek chrome-and-glass doors, you'd never stay anywhere else in Atlantic City again.

when I decided to look up the word "arm candy" on the internet for the next paragraph, introducing Barstad's latest bimbo.

And that's where I found The Word Spy.

Arm candy, of course, is

(ARM kan.dee) n. An extremely beautiful person who accompanies a member of the opposite sex to a party or event, but is not romantically involved with that person (cf. eye candy).

but did you know that a booth bunny is

(BOOTH bun.ee) n. A model hired to work in a company's booth during a trade show.

and that a fluffragette is

(fluf.ruh.JET) n. A woman who has only pre-feminist cultural or political heroines (cf. suffragette).

Example Citation:

So I shall live with the Barbies and Little Mermaids, the handbags and hairbands that make up our pink world. Grace will grow out of it, and if she doesn't, does it matter?

She may never be a Germaine Greer, but she can drink sloe gin, subscribe to the Financial Times and join the Fluffragettes.
—Margarette Driscoll, "My girl can't help it, she loves pink," Sunday Times (London), February 28, 1999

Well, you get the idea.

If you're working on a novel, particularly a comic send-up of suburban manners, I can recommend many more interesting definitions to get you off task.

Like alpha mom, trailing spouse and puppy leave.

Hey, it's a dictionary isn't it? I'm working.