The Books
Rockabye: From Wild to Child, by Rebecca Woolf (Seal Press, 2008)
Rock Star Mommy: My Life as a Rocker Mom, by Judy Davids (Citadel Press, 2008)
My Mother Wears Combat Boots: A Parenting Guide for the Rest of Us, by Jessica Mills (AK Press, 2007)
I used to be a rock and roll girl. I’d always loved punk, metal, and DC hardcore, as well as all the girly standards, like Liz Phair and Tori Amos. During my first foray into motherhood, though, at age twenty, I was single and scared of screwing up my kid, and I felt strongly about the trappings of good motherhood. Because I wasn’t at all sure of my ability to pull this parenting gig off, I did all the things I thought a good mom should. I took my pre-natal vitamins, wore flowered maternity clothes (gifts from my mom’s church friends) and tried to eat vegetables even though they made me throw up violently. And instinctively, I toned down my music.
With one exception. My baby’s dad had given me a CD of a band that he liked called Clutch. They had been seniors at my high school when I was a freshman. Now they were big time, signed to a major label and touring the world. They were pretty heavy. I listened to their self-titled CD over and over, despite the fact that it would be more appropriate for the mosh pit than the delivery room.
And when, at eight months’ pregnant, I heard they were playing in Baltimore, a mere hour from my college, I enlisted my brother to come and stand guard between the mosh pit and me. We went, him shielding my belly, me standing there shifting my weight uncomfortably from foot to foot, feeling like I had a “Bad Mom” sign on my back.
While we waited for the band to come out, I thought of all the shows I’d been to before at Fort Reno or the old 9:30 Club. This is it, my melodramatic twenty-year-old self told me. Your rocking days are over. (She was so all or nothing, that one.)
Luckily, she was wrong. Through a series of uncanny coincidences, I married the bass player for that band four years later and have seen them play too many times to count. I’ve also dragged my husband to see the Cowboy Junkies and the Indigo Girls and other estrogen-laden bands. (Sorry, sweetie.)
But, alas, marrying a musician did not preserve my hipness. My kids are now eleven, four, and two. My favorite Backyardigans song is “Rad Moves.” I think Dan Zanes is super hot. And if I hear “We are the Dinosaurs” in the morning, it’s in my head for the rest of the day. I’ve had to make a concerted effort to stay in touch with the woman I like to call my inner Janis: She who is more than a mommy—my undomesticated alter ego.
Fortunately, just when I thought I was all alone lamenting my lost youth and cool, along come a handful of books from rocker moms that make me want to … well, get up and dance.
Rebecca Woolf is a rock-loving, tattooed L.A. girl who got pregnant at age twenty-three and feared the changes a child would bring. But she faced the challenge head on, deciding to have her baby and keep him.
Her book, Rockabye: From Wild to Child, chronicles her journey from the discovery of her pregnancy through her son Archer’s second year. Woolf is also the author of a blog, Girl’s Gone Child, but thankfully this book reads like a single strong narrative rather than a series of columns.
The introduction, “On Unplanned Pregnancy, for a Friend,” sets the tone for both her initial trepidation and eventual love affair with her son. “It’s OK to be afraid,” she writes. “It’s OK to mourn your single life and all your yesterdays, to look in the mirror and find yourself unrecognizable, to feel as if you’re sleepwalking, sick to your stomach, speechless.”
A few pages later, Woolf tells the same friend, “Soon, thirty-two weeks from now, you will feel like you just made a wish and it came true. You will look into the eyes of your child and see a beginning—the beginning—and you won’t believe you thought this new life meant saying goodbye to yourself.”
I totally identify with this—what mother wouldn’t? No matter how planned or wanted a child is, pregnancy still brings with it the fear of the great unknown, whether it’s your first or your fourth. That’s the strength of this book: the sureness of Woolf’s voice and the lyrical way she has of universalizing the transformative effect of motherhood. When she says, “I will never forget where I have been, and I have Archer to remind me where I’m going, drifting, perhaps farther and farther from ‘the scene’ that once defined me. And that’s OK,” I could only find myself nodding in agreement.
Woolf can also be milk-out-the-nose funny. One of my favorite chapters is “Make New Friends,” where she describes a playdate set up on the Internet. “The only thing worse than a blind date is a blind date with a woman who also happens to be a mother of a son Archer’s age. I don’t want to blow this. Please don’t blow this,” she prays. As she waits for the other mom, she’s confronted at every turn with women who look more organized than she does. “I am not this together,” she writes, “but I take my bag of Cheerios and place it on the mat so I seem like I am. ‘These? They’re organic’ I say, in case anybody’s listening.”
But as she finds her way through the brave new world of mothering, she’s reminded of the fact that the world of young and cool was actually not so long ago for her.
Of a night on the town with her cousin, she writes, “I have forgotten how that feels, that particular brand of freedom, the things you take for granted before you become a parent. When responsibility is just an option and there is all the time in the world for keeping up with the coolest bars and newest bands and road tripping with strangers to dead ends.”
Woolf describes the conflict between cool and responsible this way: “I may have grown out my hair and out-grown my party girl days, but I can still rock out. Growing up doesn’t mean growing out of my favorite shoes … not if they make me happy, not if they’re good for dancing. Just like becoming a parent doesn’t mean laser-tattoo removal and moving to the suburbs. I can have it all. I don’t have to say goodbye to everything.”
Woolf’s poetic prose neatly captures the desire to keep a sense of self while being subsumed in the trenches of parenting. “I may not have the hair or the wardrobe or know where the backdoor bars are anymore, but that’s OK,” she writes. “I have Archer, my ultimate rebellion. Having a baby is like getting a tattoo on your soul.” You don't have to be twenty-three, or be a hardcore rock chick, to read Woolf's words and feel validated about the conflict between being both mother and other.
Jessica Mills takes the idea that the personal is political to a funky new level. Her book, My Mother Wears Combat Boots: A Parenting Guide for the Rest of Us is the What to Expect When You’re Expecting for the counterculture crowd.
Mills is the quintessential punk rock parent, one who’s managed to maintain her personal and political identity in a culture that often makes it difficult. As the singer of the band Citizen Fish, she struggled with isolation after giving birth, at age twenty-eight, to her daughter, Emma-Joy. She and her partner, Ernesto, had just moved to Florida, and Mills was feeling marooned with a toddler in an unfamiliar place. So she built a network for herself, by joining several playgroups and reaching out to like-minded mothers online.
Her book covers community building and creating a cooperative childcare, as well as more esoteric topics like attending political protests with your kids.
If Woolf’s voice is lyrical and musing, Mill’s is down-to-earth and practical. She covers many of the topics you’d expect to find in a parenting book: pregnancy and birth, going back to work, weaning. But she doesn’t write in an authoritarian, “Do it like this or you’re not punk” way, but in more of a “Hey, this is what worked for me, and if you want to do it, too, here’s how” kind of way.
It may strike you as odd that a rockin’ mother of two tries to cover ground that's been covered literally hundreds of times before, but she does hit on several topics I haven’t seen addressed in any of the pink-covered parenting books I’ve come across.
Example one: Gender coding is the way the world responds to your kid based on its sex. Of course no one wants girls to be discriminated against, and boys should be able to play with dolls, but Mills opened my eyes to this issue in a new, more specific way.
“Still a decade away from Emma-Joy’s adolescence, I felt obligated to continue the on-my-toes vigilance to fight back against sexist gender coding,” Mills writes. She describes an incident at the bank when a teller denies Mills’s daughter a sticker, telling her, “We’re out of girl stickers, we only have boys stickers today.” Mills responds brightly with, “Oh, what a coincidence! She’s Michael today.” (Score. The next time my daughter tells me her brother can’t play with her pink kitchen, I’m having a sit-down.)
Then there’s the chapter titled “Who Gives a Shit About Kids and Cursing?” Mills’ initial philosophy on cursing was that context mattered more than the actual words. By this token, racist, homophobic, or sexist language would be taboo, along with unprovoked name-calling. But if her three-year-old drops the F-bomb? How could she get upset when her kid sounds just like her?
The problem with house rules, of course, is that we’re not always in the house. After a few incidents, some involving her more straitlaced family, others with strangers in public, Mills and Ernesto reconsider their stance. Maybe, they decide, the solution was for all three of them to not curse. “The results were nothing short of annoying,” she recounts. Mills ends up feeling that by fixating on “good” and “bad” words, she’s actually preventing Emma-Joy from learning to differentiate contexts. “It also seemed that Emma-Joy began thinking that if any word had the potential to hurt someone’s feelings, they were ‘bad’ and ‘curse’ words,” she writes, rendering even a relatively benign word like “stupid” treacherous for Mills and Ernesto. It seems to be one of the only compromises Mills has made while navigating the murky parenting waters, taking the rest on her own punk rock terms.
When Emma-Joy was three, Mills decided to go on tour with her band, taking her daughter along for the ride. As the wife of a touring musician who’s still gathering the cojones to take the three kids on the road, I read this section eagerly.
Mills took a friend/nanny along, and in true DIY style, they asked for accommodations that included “a smoke-free room, relatively quiet, and no forgotten/misplaced drugs on the floor or some other place that’d be within a toddler’s reach.” (Huh! The things you have to spell out on a rock and roll tour! I’d be curious to see what that rider included. Milk, juice boxes, Patron…)
“People think it’s a big deal to go on tour with your kid, but really, how many punk tours have you heard of that didn’t involve crying jags, temper tantrums, and inappropriate body functions?” Mills writes. To which I can only say, Amen, sister. In some ways, rock and roll and motherhood are more alike than anyone would like to admit.
Judy Davids, author of Rock Star Mommy: My Life as a Rocker Mom and guitarist for the Mydols, always dreamed of being a rock star. She took that fantasy and ran with it. She kicked its ass. By the time she finished with it, her daydream had landed her in the pages of People and the Wall Street Journal, and garnered her some serious street cred in the Detroit music scene where she has roots. And most importantly, she had a heck of a lot of fun.
Despite being a longtime aficionado of rock and roll, Davids wasn’t in a band before she had kids. It took a chance encounter at a PTA newsletter meeting to bring out her inner garage diva. Prior to that day, she had been the uber-mom, running a Saturday morning science club for her two boys and creating homemade Halloween costumes. “I became freakin’ Martha Stewart,” she writes. “I was a little scary.”
By 2002, she was running the PTA newsletter at her son’s school, which, in trademark Davids fashion, she had expanded, opening it up to the kids and calling it “The Writer’s Club.” One day, one of these kids invited her uncle to come speak to the class. That uncle was Jack White, of White Stripes fame. As Davids watched White strum his guitar and sing a song about childhood, she had a revelation: At forty-two, she wanted to be a rock star, too.
She describes watching White play: “He spoke directly to the children as if he were one of them … as if we were all children. Suddenly, I started feeling like that little girl sitting under the backyard maple tree again with her Partridge Family dreams.”
In spite of the somewhat limiting fact that she couldn’t play any instruments, Davids decided to live her dream. “That afternoon, I realized that while I was happy and normal, I wasn’t happy to be normal,” she writes. “I wanted more. I wanted it all. So I made a career decision at 4:30 p.m. that I should have made in my twenties, yet didn’t because I didn’t like the way I looked. Twenty years later, wearing sweatpants while driving a minivan covered in soccer decals, image was the last thing on my mind. I decided I was going to be a rock star.”
Davids realized that since other, more established musicians were unlikely to want her in their band, she would have to go another way. “My only hope was to bamboozle other middle-aged women like me to learn how to play instruments, too,” she writes. “It sounds like it would be difficult, but it wasn’t.”
Within a few months, Davids and newly recruited bandmates Paige Gilbert, Pat McGough, and Kara Rasmussen dubbed themselves the Mydols, and had every kid on the block wearing their T-shirts. They started out playing gigs in Detroit bars and at the local Y and PTA fundraisers.
Davids describes her reaction to the Mydols’ first show, played in front of twenty people: “We had done the unthinkable. A group of four suburban housewives who had been playing together for only a couple months … with a gaggle of ten kids between them … had just thrashed out three surfy punk tunes they’d taught themselves.”
A wave of mom music was building that year, sweeping up similar groups such as the Lactators, Housewives on Prozac, and Frump. By the time the wave crested in 2005, the Mydols had appeared in local and national media. As the attention began to get more intense and the gigs got more frequent, Davids got nervous.
“While my heart was being swept away by all the excitement, my gut was starting to worry,” she writes. Her kids began to ask questions like, “Will we move to Hollywood?” and her husband (who, for the record, was extremely supportive up to this point) would ask, “Who do you love more? Your band or us?”
Davids laments the conflicting demands created by being a rock star mama: “I got the sense that my husband was beginning to worry about me, to worry about how much of my energy the band was taking, and to worry about how much of my energy was being drained away, to the point where I gave up going to PTO meetings and other things, because I was always so busy, and subsequently, so tired.”
The rollercoaster ride had to slow down, Davids says. “I never felt I was a good musician, but I always took great pride in being a good mother. I still was, but I was overwhelmed,” she explains.
The Mydols still play together every few months, although Davids is the only original member remaining. If she did slow down, it must have just been from warp to human speed; two years later, Davids has published a book, appears frequently on CNBC, and is involved in mom-rock from the South by Southwest Festival to Mamapalooza in Detroit. It certainly seems she’s found a balance between being a rocker and being a mommy.
As I’ve moved through my post-adolescent life, some of the artists I love have evolved with me (think of Liz Phair’s move from “Fuck and Run” to “Little Digger”), some of them growing their families while growing their careers, like Ani DiFranco, who takes her baby girl on tour.
Too often, though, rock and roll seems to be outside the vernacular of everyday mom conversation. We’re so busy talking about life with kids and coordinating carpools that e-mailing the new Ting Tings video is far down on the list. But keeping the Zippo flame of rock (or jazz or hip-hop or country or whatever music you love) burning in our mundane lives is crucial. It’s tantamount to building a bridge between our taut, pre-baby selves (okay, maybe I wasn’t taut then, either) and the newer, stretch-marked versions. It says to ourselves, “Self, I know there’s milk in your hair, and god-knows-what on your shirt. I know your boobs are different sizes, and that the mailman is scared to come to your house because you won’t let him leave. But self, when I hear ‘Waiting Room’ by Fugazi, it’s time to rock out. Milk stains and all, we are going to drop everything and dance in the kitchen.”
These books, despite the diversity of their authors and their styles, share the same message: “Yeah, I’m a mom. And I’m not the same as I was before kids. And you know what? I rock harder.”
Last summer at my suburban swimming pool, I sported a swimsuit that covered the parts that mattered (yeah, it had a skirt) but exposed the tattoo of a daisy on my back that’s been there since I was seventeen. As I leaned over to pick my baby up out of his stroller, calling over to my toddler to wait, I heard one of the lithe, super-tan lifeguards say to the other, “So many moms at this pool have tattoos. What’s up with that?” I had to hide a smirk. “Just you wait, sweetie,” I thought.
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