Mother on Fire: A True Motherf%#$@ Story About Parenting! - Hardcover

Loh, Sandra Tsing

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0609608134 ISBN 13: 9780609608135

Publisher: Crown Archetype, 2008

Synopsis

This is a story about the year I exploded into flames. Which turns out to be more common than you’d think, among forty-something humans. Yea, we can hold it together in our thirties, with a raft of hair products and semi-tall nonfat half-caf beverages and much brisk walking to a lot of interesting appointments. Come the forties, though, cracks begin to appear. One staggers suddenly along life’s path; gourmet coffee splats; the wig slips askew. In other words, my friends, THE WHEELS COME OFF.

Sandra Tsing Loh is the fiercest, funniest, and most incredibly honest and self-deprecating voice to emerge from the “mommy war” debates. In Mother on Fire, she fires away with her trademark hilarious satire of societal and personal irks large and small, including limo liberals who preach the virtues of public school but send their children to fashionable private ones, the proliferation of costly skin-care products that just don’t cut it, society’s obsession with aromatherapy, her Chinese father’s disdain for her life as an artist, and $10 Target pants (“Are they running pants, exercise pants, pajama pants?”) that are the ubiquitous Mother of Small Children uniform.

Prompted by her own midlife crisis, Loh throws her frantic energy not into illicit affairs, shopping binges, or exotic trips, but into the harrowing heart of contemporary, dysfunctional L.A. life when she realizes that she can’t afford private school for her daughter, and her only alternative is her neighborhood’s public school, Guavatorina, where most of the kids speak Spanish and qualify for free lunches. In a theater-of-the-absurd-style odyssey, Mother on Fire documents Loh’s “year of living dangerously” among pompous school admissions officials, lactose-intolerant, Prius-driving parents, mafia dons of public radio, vindictive bosses, and old friends with new money as she first kisses ass—and then kicks it.

About this title

About the Author

SANDRA TSING LOH is an NPR commentator, an Atlantic Monthly contributor, and a successful performance artist. She is the author of four previous books.

Reviews

Reviewed by Lydia Millet

In 2004, Sandra Tsing Loh became something of a free-speech cause celebre when she was fired by a Santa Monica-based NPR station because of an obscenity in her on-air commentary. And the incident garnered something more coveted than fame: a spot for her daughter in an exclusive Los Angeles-area kindergarten. But there was a catch: the school's annual tuition, a whopping $22,500. "My Grrrrl power-like battle cry," Loh writes, "devolved to the far less glamorous, 'I am a Celebrity Mom . . . who needs financial aid.' "

This is one of the myriad frustrations Loh recounts in her new memoir, Mother on Fire, a droll rant about her experience navigating the maze of school options for her 4-year-old daughter. The book, based on her one-woman show of the same title, made me laugh out loud more than once. Particularly good is Loh's rendition of conversations with yuppie parents whining about the difficulty of finding kindergartens in L.A. worthy of their allegedly gifted children: "It's very HARD for gifted children!" she quotes one mother saying.

Loh's greatest strengths are these snippets of dialogue and her blunt, funny characterizations of both her own foibles and those of the many other mothers she encounters. She's also witty in characterizing those close to her, including her 85-year-old Chinese father, whom she describes with loving irreverence:

"In addition to the grocery bags on his back, my father is carrying his customary old wrinkled white plastic UCLA bag of what appear to be toiletries. He attaches it to himself by means of a yellow-and-blue bungee cord he found on the beach. Straining forward with the bungee cord around his neck, he looks like Jack LaLanne pulling a tugboat, except that the UCLA bag he is carrying is no larger than the size of a small airline pillow and is about as heavy as a bag filled with Kleenex. Which it may well be. My father hates to waste paper by blowing his nose into a tissue just once."

Loh, who has written four previous books, including A Year in Van Nuys and If You Lived Here, You'd be Home by Now, is not 100-percent politically correct, and she doesn't pull punches. ("Oh my GOD! . . . We are SUCH IMMIGRANTS!!!" she writes of an incident involving her father and the crumpled dollar bills he carries in that grocery bag.) She uses capital letters and exclamation points liberally, a tic that at first struck me as high-schoolish but that came to acquire the comforting rhythm of an ironic code.

The memoir lags every now and then in places where Loh presents herself delivering lengthy diatribes to other people she meets -- in full and complex phrases that could never fall trippingly off the tongue in unpremeditated fashion -- on subjects such as the evils of the baby boom generation. "You boomers have presided over the greatest decline, the greatest return to public-school segregation in U.S. history. Consumers rather than citizens -- it is entirely your doing!" she orates to her shrink.

While she's not afraid to touch on issues of class and race in a way that's both humorous and trenchant, Loh sidesteps the questions that anyone with an even moderately feminist perspective on contemporary parenting should raise. The matter of mother-father divisions of labor, for example, is a source of resentment and turmoil for the 30- and 40-something mothers I know. Its absence here is an odd omission. Loh's musician husband, the affable but somewhat-incompetent-at-parental-tasks Mike, disappears for months on tour in the middle of the narrative -- as musicians must, certainly -- but Loh mentions his absenteeism during the all-consuming school search only in passing.

And there's a certain unfortunate NPR-ness -- an assurance that "It's all OK, everything's nice and homey in the end" -- that attends Loh's ultimate epiphany about public schools, where her daughter ends up: that these schools, held up by women who love their children, are the places to be. Beholding public-school-like diversity around the city, Loh writes with apparent earnestness: "There is grace all around me. The universe hums -- the invisible web." This is a comedian best served hot, not hokey.

But in the end, funny trumps all, and Mother on Fire offers much to entertain the many mothers among us.

Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Radio commentator and performer Loh (A Year in Van Nuys) has penned a hilarious memoir with the same title as her one-woman comedy show, which ran for seven months in Los Angeles. The story begins as a droll little breeze that soon sucks the reader into a frenzied whirlwind as Loh recounts her harrowing quest to find a suitable kindergarten for Hannah, her four-year-old daughter (Loh habitually calls Isabel, her two-year-old, simply The Squid). Spurned by the local Lutheran school (which deems the precocious Hannah not developmentally ready), Loh vaults from pricey and competitive private institutions to public school settings, discovering that the chances of Hannah making it into the desirable public magnet school are minuscule, and only one in 20 is admitted to the idyllic private school, Wonder Canyon, which costs $22,500 per year. Loh is prone to insomnia, expletives (she's fired from her radio spot for using the F word on air), panic (panic attacks are my booster rockets) and exaggeration as she grapples with rejection, middle age, friendship, a clueless but lovable guitar-playing husband and a brilliant but eccentric Chinese father. All parents who have searched for an ideal school for their youngster (and even those who haven't) will be snared by Loh's crackling prose. (Aug.)
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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1

The War Room

This is a story about the year I exploded into flames.

Which turns out to be more common than you’d think, among forty- something humans. Yea, we can hold it together in our thirties, with a raft of hair products and semi-tall nonfat half-caf beverages and much brisk walking to a lot of interesting appointments.

Come the forties, though, cracks begin to appear. One staggers suddenly along life’s path; gourmet coffee splats; the wig slips askew.

In other words, my friends, THE WHEELS COME OFF. Whatever vehicle you were so confidently hurtling along in in Act One of your life, that sped you to age twenty-six, thirty-four, thirty-nine . . . even forty- two? Yea, that buggy will skitter sideways into a ditch, flip over, burst into flames; firemen will have to use the Jaws of Life to get you out. And if you do not find another car to climb into, well . . .

“Look at Anna Karenina!” I remember exhorting my female writing students at Marymount College, spreading my arms wide, and expansively. The Rebecca A. Mirman Chair of Creative Writing—this was my Second Act, the sudden forgiving windfall of a plum teaching job, complete with a year’s worth of truly excellent health insurance, and I played it to the hilt, never mind that I was sweating a lot. Even trying to figure out the faculty parking made me sweat. Anyway, I’d been trying to describe the difference between metaphor and metonymy, how Anna Karenina’s little red handbag sitting by the side of the train tracks does not “symbolize” her but actually “is” her, which is to say it STANDS for her, in the manner of a linguistic SIGN . . .

When all at once I heard myself veer off into a tangent about how depressed I am that over and over I read that novel, year after year, and things never turn out better for Anna. By my count, the last time Anna is happy is on page seventy-six out of a five-hundred-page tome. She peaks at the ball, where she dances with Count Vronsky—and it’s not even during the WHOLE ball—it’s not during the waltz, the gavotte, the schottische, or the fox-trot but in particular during . . . the MAZURKA.

That’s how it was for women in those days, it was all about the MAZURKA—

And then, inevitably, the MAZURKA ends and now come four hundred pages of falling action, of dragging tediously around Europe with Vronsky, consuming all those carbs together, putting on weight, particularly around the neck (with a potato-based diet, all the weight for those Russians would certainly fly to the neck). It’s all about overpriced English baby prams and go-nowhere piazza remodeling projects in Italy (It is! Reread it! Feel free to skip the endless Levin/wheat farming parts, I always do), modern plots for women in the post–Jane Austen/Pride and Prejudice/Elizabeth Bennet era boiling down to just four words:

Indeed—with sudden inspiration, I turned and wrote, in giant letters on the board:

And then I drew a circle AROUND and a diagonal slash THROUGH Mr. Darcy, as one might on a verboten no fumar sign at the train station of life.

“Portrait of the narrative in the postfeminist age?”

And I felt my Marymount College girls actually shrink, and gasp.

“But that’s what true liberation of the soul means!” I cried out, smacking my chalk triumphantly on the board, like a teeny tiny épée. “It’s not like you put on your ‘Save Darfur’ T-shirt, march . . . and then go home to Mr. Darcy . . .”

At which point we entered a brief conversational snorl in which one of the girls argued that HER Mr. Darcy might well encourage her to march, as long as she went home every night to Mr. Darcy’s estate at Pemberley, which she felt she could live with. Another imagined she could share a tent with HER Mr. Darcy in Darfur, perhaps Mr. Darcy was even the co-organizer of the Save Darfur effort . . . And now imagining the safari wear, the eco-carbon credits, and the tangle of yellow rubber Lance Armstrong bracelets, I was struck with a distinct, dismal Jane-Austen-novel-remade-as-a-summer-cable-TV-movie- starring-Matthew-McConaughey feeling. No!

“What I’m saying is, no matter what you do, at age forty . . . THE WHEELS COME OFF!

A pierced-nose student in a Frida Kahlo muscle T clarified it for her more flighty, foolish sisters: “She means for women, at forty, the TRAINING WHEELS come off—”

“No!” I yelled. My upper lip was beaded with moisture, the room felt so hot. “THE WHEELS OF YOUR CAR! THEY SIMPLY! COME! OFF!”

The tragedy for Anna Karenina, of course, is that she lived in St. Petersburg in the 1870s rather than America in the 2000s. One no longer has to hurl oneself under a train upon turning forty—there is medication for that. No, nowadays forty and all the ages like forty (which apparently can range up to fifty-two or even sixty-one) are a mystical opportunity to begin an inward journey of fabulous wisdoming. (On the back of a tea packet I saw it recently, used as a verb: “Wisdoming.” Even the prose of our herbal tea nowadays is amazing!) No, with proper hormonal and nutritional supplements, and a full tasting menu of Pfizer antidepressants, it’s no longer necessarily a bad thing, this bursting-into-flames, this midlife “transition,” this second adolescence—

(Well, perhaps for the men it is bad, particularly for those who’ve already managed to live THEIR ENTIRE ADULT LIVES in a state of adolescence, and here I am thinking not of Count Vronsky of Russia but of my ex-boyfriend of Culver City, Count Bruce.)

Forty-something women, though—this kicking off of their calcified/ thirty-something/Gail Sheehy/Passages lobster shells is the golden time. By God, they’ve EARNED their raucous “You go, girl!”s, their giddy high-fives with somewhat flabby upper arms (upon which shudder bold temporary tattoos), their raspberry-flavored tequila shots, their “Woo woo!”s gaily Dopplering out

the back of the speeding-off Mustang. Lord love ’em, they deserve escape, these sparkle-eyed, plus-aged women, and makeovers, and perhaps a fashion spree, or at least a mad, buffalo-sized wicker basket of wildflower soaps, raffia twine tumbling everywhere amid a crazy menagerie of rose petals and tiny mad bottles of lotion . . .

AROMATHERAPY LITERALLY UNBOUND.

Yea, these women deserve it all, so long have they plowed in the arid fields of their marriages, with dull oxen husbands, in that ceaseless drumbeat of domestic tedium. Divorce is tragic . . . but becomes a bold new start as, wiping tears, our heroine manages to pack just the one overnight bag and grab the red-eye to Portugal or Bali to live in a thatched-roof beach hut and feel the sand in her toes and wear a sarong and drink sangria and have a hot affair with a poetry-writing swordfisherman named Paolo who helps her shed her puritanical type A ways and teaches her about the tides. Come midnight, they tear off her bra and BURN it, howling, like wine-drunk Santa Fe coyotes, up at the stars!

Or at least that was how the forties were being rapturously described in the book I fell asleep on, my face smashed into the spine, on the night my year of fire began.

The book in question was the lush midlife literary romance 28 Beads. It was an Oprah pick, and supposedly ideal book-to-fall-asleep-by—all the female hosts on all the morning shows were reading it. 28 Beads had inspired new lines of scents, tropical marinades, wraparound sarongs (I had never seen Joy Behar in a sarong—it was quite a revelation). I had been so swept away by the fantasy, I myself had just placed twin swordfish filets on the grill, squeezed on a rhapsodic amount of lemon, hiked up my white caftan pants, and in fact was just preparing to wade into the ocean, Paolo waving at me from beyond, under a giant blue cyclorama with puffy white clouds— (And that should have been the tip-off—that sky was much too blue . . . )

When my eyes popped robotically open in my familiar stiflingly close bedroom, much like Linda Blair’s in The Exorcist. The time: 2:07 a.m. Damn! Where was MY fab world-traveling divorce? I thought. I have the miles (coach)! But no. Here I was, once again, waking up in the middle of my life . . . adventure-impaired.

Adventure? Me? In my forties? Where would I even start?

I sat up in the darkness, took a sip of warmish, even brackish, water out of a cartoon jelly glass.

I could start with feverishly burning my bra, sure. But that heady act of womyn’s liberation was so much easier in yon freewheelin’ Joni Mitchell days of olde, wasn’t it? For me personally, a braflagration . . . that would take a full week because by now I have so damned many of them. Look at that unsorted pile of laundry, heaped like a dark hunchback on my dresser. Over the years, in a haze of Condé Nast confusion, I’ve bought—what?—“angel bras,” “T-shirt bras,” “Wonderbras,” “Miracle Bras” . . . I have such a flotilla, I could make my own giant bra ball. The triumphant Carole King music would screech to a halt as I literally struggled to rope the bras together.

(I’m also not sure if the Miracle Bra would actually burn—bought in 1998, the Miracle has since disintegrated into a lone plastic strap upon which hang two lumpen cups of strange discolored polymer. It’s Victoria’s most poorly kept Secret.)

Of course, a bigger gravitational force holding me prisoner of

un-Unspontaneity in un-Adventure land (a new un-Ride in un- Disneyland) are my two daughters. They are disproportionately young, ages two and four, because in the wacky postmodern jumble of things, I’ve happened to birth relatively late, like one of those National Geographic turtles who was...

Edition details

• Publisher: Crown Archetype
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0609608134
• ISBN 13: 9780609608135
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320