Wild Child: Girlhoods in the Counterculture

when you can come and go pretty much as you please? Or when you want to dress like Annie Hall and your mom thinks you should dress like Janis Joplin? Or when your parents think your rebel boyfriend who drinks too much, listens to punk rock music, lives on his skateboard and is constantly getting suspended from school is a really cool guy? Where do you go from there? Either you become a drug addict or a Republican. Or both.

…not to have you pass out free puppies or political bumperstickers at country fairs.

…to let you be a child for your entire childhood. When I turned eleven, your grandpa told me I could leave home whenever I wanted-eleven was old enough to take care of myself. Or, if I wasn’t going to leave, I could at least participate in the family as a fully functioning adult. When Grampa had his first free-love affair that we knew about, he and Nonny talked about it with me-and I was about twelve. I put Nonny and your aunt and uncle upstairs in Nonny’s bedroom to watch TV and sat downstairs alone, waiting for Grampa to come home from a self-abusive drunken tear to have it out with him myself.

Drugs were also a big issue between your grandparents and me right around this time. Once they didn’t make it home until dawn because they accidentally took Quaaludes thinking they were speed and fell asleep on someone’s couch. ‘Never,’ I scolded, ‘take anything unless you are absolutely sure of what it is.’ I think kids these days take for granted how little responsibility they have-the nineties are much more restrictive about parental sex and drug usage. But getting parents to use condoms might be more than even I am ready to deal with.

…to have indoor plumbing.

…that you will always feel safe around the people I bring into our lives-and if you don’t, that you will feel able to tell me. One of Nonny and Grampa’s friends in particular made me distinctly nervous. If he dropped by when I was alone, he would stick around for a while to chat. Nothing ever happened, but I do remember standing at the kitchen sink one afternoon taking a very long time to wash a carving knife as he lingered and asked me questions about my boyfriends-who they were, what I did with them. I was eleven and hadn’t really gotten around to boyfriends yet (though it wouldn’t be long). I just kept washing that knife over and over, rubbing the sponge along the blade as if I were meticulously removing every possible invisible particle of food. One clean knife.

…that there will be no part of my life that you are privy to that you can’t talk about at school-you’ll know what I mean one day. Or maybe you won’t, since I haven’t indulged on a regular basis since I was twenty and don’t see that changing any time soon.

I’ll warn you now, though, that under the influence of marijuana the women in our family miss out on the good stuff and pass out immediately. If we use it at all, it’s for insomnia and menstrual cramps. Also, I will not be your teacher or your dealer. I knew how to roll a joint when I was twelve-Crampa taught me. And I have never in my life bought a bag of weed.

…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.

Zoe 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