Does your mom style match your ZIP code? – OC Moms: The Mom Blog – The Orange County Register
I don’t usually look to Vogue magazine for parenting advice.
But in the January issue, I was stopped by an excerpt from a new book, “Poser,” by a mother who turned to yoga to quiet her neurotic mothering tendencies. It wasn’t the yoga that prompts me to write this (maybe another time) as much as author Claire Dederer’s mention that the neuroses she was suffering from were particular to her Seattle lifestyle:
“We, the mothers of North Seattle, were consumed with trying to do everything right. Breast-feeding was simply the first item in a long, abstruse to-do list: Cook organic baby food, buy expensive wooden toys, create an enriching home environment, sleep with your child in your bed, ensure that your house was toxin free, use cloth diapers, carry your child in a sling, dress your child in organic fibers … .” and so on. She describes one friend who nurses her toddler son on demand and follows him around the house offering him organic snacks. “these behaviors were the very essence of Seattle parenting,” she writes. “Ruthie was, by the lights of our community, an excellent mother. and she was happy.”
I’m not going to get into the merits of any of these practices. What hit me was the packaging of them into a recognizable culture particular to a certain city. It got me thinking – as someone who has lived up and down the coast – about the variations in such “mom cultures” from city to city.
For example, I ran into some “mom culture shock” years ago when I moved from Los Angeles to Seattle with my kids, 4 and 2 at the time. On a nice July afternoon, I took them to a sandy Puget Sound beach, peeled down to my bathing suit and, as I was applying sunscreen, realized that I was the only one of a dozen mothers on the beach in a swimsuit.
It turned out that Seattle motherhood had its own rules, on matters both big and small. take preschool birthday parties: in L.A., cakes were from a bakery and presents were deposited in a bedroom, to be opened after the guests left. the parents stood around and talked about movie deals. in Seattle, you’d arrive to pick up your child from a party to find toys and wrapping all over the living room and the crumbled remains of Betty Crocker or Safeway on the table. L.A. moms didn’t wear their kids on their tummies or backs; that was for dads only.
Another culture shift awaited when we moved to Orange County when the kids were 11 and 9. while mothers had filled the halls of my kids’ schools in Seattle – helping with art exhibits, international assemblies, and Books and Bagels clubs – I was usually the lone parent in the classrooms at my children’s school here. there was the PTA and fundraising, but the cultural norm didn’t include mothers on a daily basis at school. On the plus side, my daughter rocketed ahead in math at her O.C. school, filling out worksheet after worksheet. If a student at our Seattle schools had come home with a worksheet, parents would have organized a protest.
My friend Julie Mitchell describes the mom culture in her San Francisco circles:
“SF moms are outdoorsy and often seen walking with friends with babies in Snuggies or strollers or at the park with older kids. most are wearing Lululemon or Lucy pants and tops. SF moms also love yoga, the Bar Method and the gym. SF moms are pretty type A when it comes to scheduling their kids’ activities; from tiny tot music classes to elite high school lacrosse camps. ALL SF kids dance, sing, play sports, act, or do some extra-curricular activity. You won’t meet a mom who doesn’t brag about her child’s special talent in something, and this is true of both public and private school moms.”
Demographics and economics explain some differences in parenting style, of course. but not all. many more mothers held jobs and still helped out at school in our Seattle schools than in the ones here.
In addition to soaking up the parenting practices in places we’ve lived, we’re probably burdened with hand-me-down ones. I know I carry some Southern ones that my mother picked up from her mother, who was raised in Virginia.
Perhaps in my inner mom soul, I am partly a Bay Area mom, since that’s where I lived for the first 25 years of my life, even though I never raised children there.
This hit me as I watched a recent episode of “Parenthood,” which is set in my onetime home of Berkeley. A minister asks a couple what kind of religious instruction they plan for their 6-year-old son. the father answers that he plans to let his son find his own spiritual path as he gets older. I laughed to myself: “Now that’s a Berkeley dad.”
Tell us: What defines the mom culture where you live?
Wendy Fawthrop is a senior copy editor on the Register’s print edition. her son is a freshman majoring in business management at Arizona State University, and her daughter is a junior at Villa Park High School and a dance student at Anaheim Ballet.
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