…to teach you to dance like Nonny taught me. We are great dancers-loose hips, don’t you know.
…to teach you independence while still letting you depend on me.
…not to subject you to views of my male friends’ penises. I had a pretty good idea what constituted big and small in the penile arena before I was ten. The swimming hole was bathing-suit optional, or more like bathing-suit discouraged-at least until the kids (namely me, as the oldest) reached puberty at which point nudity became divided along the age line.
…to always surround you with energy and creativity. Notwithstanding a little of this, a little of that, I want so much for your childhood to resemble the best parts of mine. Sneaking out my bedroom window and down the woodshed roof to skinny-dip with the boys on sticky summer nights. Coming home from school to General Hospital (the groovy Luke and Laura Ice Palace years) and hot tea and fresh bread on blue-cold winter afternoons. Dressing up in costume and walking in innumerable parades, leading kazoo bands, singing at parties, performing in variety shows, acting in plays. Learning how to cane chairs and grow sweet peas, can tomatoes and freeze spinach, make macrame necklaces, forge chain mail, ride a unicycle, juggle pins, putty windows, chink walls, spud logs, paddle a canoe, sail a catamaran. Contra-dancing. Scavenging for lunch in gardens. Knowing what a fresh vegetable tastes like. Picking wild strawberries and raspberries and blackberries. Helping animals into the world. Stretching out in a field on a cool autumn night, someone’s thigh for your pillow, your stomach someone else’s, watching the stars and humming Beatles songs.
…to teach you to trust people and to love them with all your heart and soul. Okay, I admit you’ll get hurt. A lot. But it’s worth it, I promise. I promise. I promise.
…to be a good mother to you, whatever that means. Whatever you need that to mean.
We will talk. When you can talk.
All my love, Mama
Contributors
Paola Bilbrough is a New Zealand poet and reviewer based in Melbourne, Australia. Her collection of poems, Bell Tongue, was published in June 1999 by Victoria University Press in New Zealand. She is currently working on a novel. From time to time she still thinks nostalgically of communal, subsistence living.
Carin Clevidence attended Oberlin College and the University of Michigan and received a Fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Her work has appeared in Story, Field, Grand Tour and the Asahi Weekly of Japan. She lives on the south shore of Long Island with her husband and daughter and is currently at work on a novel.
Suzanne M. Cody and her daughter Isabel are currently residing in Iowa City, Iowa, with Isabel’s father. Suzanne divides her time between being Mama and working at Prairie Lights Books while looking for the next writing project worth giving up nap time for.
Zoë Eakle was born and raised off the West Coast of Canada in British Columbia. She currently resides in Vancouver where she is an actor, writer and member of the performance group Taste This. She writes largely for performance but has recently made the leap to the printed page with the 1998 release of Boys Like Her: Transactions, a book of short stories from performance written with fellow Taste This members and released by Press Gang Publishers in Vancouver.
Ariel Core is the editor of hip mama, the parentingzine (www.hipmama.com), and the author of The Hip Mama Survival Guide (Hyperion, 1998).
Rain Crimes is an aspiring photographer and currently works as a photography assistant. She graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in literature and has worked at several independent publishing companies and as a production assistant for television commercials. She is inspired by music and poetry and images, and hopes to one day find or create a career that incorporates all three. She lives in Seattle.
Angela Lam lives a double life. By day, she roams the streets of Northern California selling real estate, armed with a pager and voice mail. By night, she haunts the bookstores and cafes giving poetry and prose readings with the shadow of her son in the wings. She took time off in 1997 to attend a writer’s retreat at Hedgebrook in Washington State where she was able to indulge fully in a pampered bohemian lifestyle. She doesn’t think her two identities will ever merge; some people still know her by two different names.
River Light is a thirty-one-year-old writer, actor, feminist, dyke and videomaker (among other things). She has a B. A. in Fine and Performing Arts from Simon Fraser University. River’s essays and erotic stories have been published in a variety of places. In 1998 she co-facilitated a panel/workshop titled ‘Writing Porn’ for Write Out West, a gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgendered writers conference. Light’s work in video has been shown on Rogers Cablevision and on Coast 11 Cablevision, and a two-minute video she created won first prize in the audio/video category of the UN pavilion’s Messages Of Peace contest at Expo86. Her play, A Thin Line, has been produced twice and was chosen for the juried performance festival Vancouver Women in View.
Lisa Michaels is the author of Split: A Counterculture Childhood and a contributing editor at the Threepenny Review. Her work has appeared in Glamour, Salon and the New York Times Magazine.
Cecily Schmidt is currently traveling the country with the man she loves, not searching for anything in particular, yet finding so much, trying to learn what it means to have acquired a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Iowa, cherishing clean water, drawing pictures and collecting words, staying in constant motion, checking out art therapy graduate programs and possible places to live when the time comes to be stationary again.
Elizabeth Shé is the author of the novel Shoulds Are for Saints: The True Life Adventures qfSuzy Le Speed. Her work has appeared in the 2 girls press anthology. Northwest Edge: New Writings from the Pacific Northwest. She is the former editor and publisher of MEOW, a Seattle arts journal.
Diane B. Sigman lives in Northern California. She wishes to express her profound love and gratitude to her husband, John, and to her parents, who generously permitted her to share their story.
Rivka K. Solomon continues to steer clear of turkey (‘Pass the tofu, please’). She is currently writing a memoir about growing up as the daughter of some of Boston ’s earliest feminist activists. She is also editing a book of short narratives by gutsy females, That Takes Ovaries! Bold Females and Their Brazen Acts.
Chelsea Cain spent her early childhood eating organic tomatoes off the vine on a commune in Iowa. The magic and hope of her girlhood continue to shape her. But she still hates carob. The author of Dharma Circlass="underline" A Road Trip Across the American Generations (Seal, 1996), she works as a freelance writer and lives in Portland, Oregon.
Chelsea Cain
