1. I will not wear jeans that have a zipper longer than six inches and/or are tapered and end right at the ankle. Those qualify as Mom Jeans. (However, this does not mean you should dress like Britney Spears. Find the happy medium, people.)
2. I will not wear any kind of crocheted or appliquéd vest.
3. I will not wear plain white tennis shoes. (especially coupled with Mom Jeans)
4. I will not cut all my hair off while pregnant in preparation for the Blessed Event. Many women’s rationale is that they’ll need a simple hairstyle so as to avoid baby-food-crusted strands. What they don’t know? Is baby-food-crusted strands are much more attractive than that pseudo-mullet.
5. I will wear a bikini. Yes, it will be uncomfortable. However, we should all wear the stretch-marks and saggy skin as what they are: the battle scars of a war-weary general.
6. I will resist the urge to continually whip out pictures of my children. Yes, they’re cute. But trust me: NO ONE wants to see five million pictures of your child with farm animals at a pumpkin patch.
7. I will not feel guilty when leaving my spouse with the child(ren). You had to be pregnant and give birth, remember? I think a few hours of Dora and that weird show with the sock puppets is nothing compared to the dignity-erasing horrors of labor and delivery.
8. I will make an effort to remain educated and watch the news and read the newspaper and keep up on world news. The fact that Susie went poo-poo in the potty is not a current event.
9. I will not wear a scrunchy. I don’t care if it’s while working out or gardening or soaking in the tub. There is no asterisk for scrunchy-wearing. It’s a deal-breaker.
10. I will not care about being a “hip” mom. I’ll just try to make it through the day without falling asleep standing up

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In case you’ve missed the advertising and PR blitz, the new book Alternadad is Neal Pollack’s memoir about his struggle to remain “cool” despite having fully entered parenthood. But is he really saying anything new? Isn’t this a pseudo-struggle that all of our generation seems to be dealing with? We’ve discussed the problem of trying to assign yourself a “hip parenting” label, not to mention the fact that there are plenty of moms and dads who have retained their own unique style and personalities while raising their children. The difference is they don’t whine and carry on about how difficult it is, because, quite frankly, it isn’t — unless, that is, you are simply a poseur and trying too hard.

In the current issue of Chicago Reader, our city’s free weekly newspaper, a review of Alternadad by Martha Bayne titled “Alternative to What?” sums it up rather nicely:

But the thing is, there’s nothing new about the parenting model promoted here. “Alternative” parenting isn’t about buying kiddie records from Bloodshot or watching Pee-wee’s Playhouse rather than Barney. And it’s certainly not about dissing other parents whose lifestyle choices you deem bourgeois or square. Alternative parenting might be raising your child in a lesbian commune. Maybe it’s homeschooling. Or breast-feeding till age five. Or absolutely no TV or putting all the food in the kitchen at kid-level and letting him choose what to eat.

For all Pollack’s interest in raising a cool kid, what he really wants — like many parents before him — is a child who’s just like him. The subtext here is how unavailable Pollack’s own “high-upper-middle-class childhood” is to his own kid, not to mention most kids, and I wish this idea had been more fully explored. But pop signifiers of bohemian living aside, Elijah’s being raised by a heterosexual nuclear family in a single-family home in a (slowly) gentrifying neighborhood. His parents want to get him into a decent preschool. They worry about property values and crime. They watch too much TV and don’t have as much sex as they’d like. And they want to give their child unfettered access to the dream of individual exceptionalism. What could be more mainstream than that?

Tell it, Martha, tell it.

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