“What are you doing?” my mother yells at me as I head toward the kitchen sink to get water, coffeepot in hand.
“I’m going to make us some coffee.”
“That’s not how you do it!” she says, her voice raising a few octaves and with a sense of urgency.
Actually, it is how I do it. It’s how most people do it. It’s not how my mother does it.
And, as I’ve come to realize during my visit home — not the home of my youth, but the home my parents have made in South Florida — is that my mother does a lot of things in what can only be described as “how you do it,” aka the right way. And there can be no variation on the theme.
My mother, less than a month away from turning 80, has become rigid.
It would seem that Levi Johnston’s 15 minutes of fame would have come and gone by now. Once his would-be mother-in-law, Sarah Palin, lost her bid for vice president, you’d have expected that the somewhat hunky, hockey-playing, self-described “f-ing red neck” former boyfriend of Bristol Palin would have settled into his normal life in Wasalia, Alaska, doing whatever it is they do up there. After all, he’s not really famous for anything other than knocking up his teenage girlfriend.
I suppose he could have become a role model for teen parents, chatting up birth control (or abstinence, as Bristol has been) and personal responsibility.
But instead, the 19-year-old is kissing and telling and trash talking about his infant’s grandparents — and has landed on the cover of Vanity Fair. Because that’s how you get noticed nowadays; you dish dirt. Or you pose naked for Playboy (and Levi had been weighing an offer from Playgirl. Can’t say what he looks like nude, but he cleans up very nicely in some pricey designer togs in VF’s photo spread).
I’m not getting paranoid or anything, but I’m starting to feel that it’s a really crappy time to piss someone off, whether you intended to or not. It’s just that nowadays your misdeeds, real or perceived, are going to land you on a confessional TV show, the cover of a magazine or someone’s blog.
It is Father’s Day, and so it isn’t unusual to have thoughts about dads.
Moms have been on my mind lately, mostly because of reading Ayelet Waldman’s book, “Bad Mother,” and my chat with her. Interestingly, you don’t hear much about dads agonizing over whether they’re Good Father or Bad Father.
Mostly, as she writes in the book, dads just have to show up to be Good Father.
But I think it’s more than that .
Dads have typically provided the financial backbone for most families, and that’s a lot.
They often don’t have the choices many moms do — stay home, work part time, work full time. And increasingly women want men to do more than just be the providers. We want a man to share the household chores and childcare, too.
Looking at my own dad, I have to wonder — was he a Good Father?
