From Riot Grrrl to alt-mom

After 179 pages of "rama," we finally get to the "mama," with the birth of her son, Cole. By this time, McDonnell is living in Miami (where she is currently an award-winning culture critic for the Miami Herald) with her husband and his two teenage daughters. Her son's birth shifts her out of reminiscence and into the more immediate (and interesting) present-tense concerns of the book -- reconciling a liberal, liberated lifestyle with the more conventional and traditional responsibilities and routines of parenthood.

"It's a conundrum: How does a mom who was a bit of a bad girl discipline her kids? What does the woman with three tattoos say when her teenage girls come home with fresh ink and piercings?"

This is one of the tensions running through modern-day motherhood. How do we teach our children not to do drugs when we have so many warm memories of doing them ourselves? How do we teach our daughters the difference between owning their sexuality and giving in to raunch culture? In other words, how do we set limits when all our training is in how to break them down?

Raising children responsibly while hanging onto your alternative lifestyle can make for a tricky two-step. The job of parenting requires a certain amount of settling down, which can be awkward and painful for a generation of women used to fighting for and defining our own identities. We have to put away a part of ourselves in order to focus on our children. We find that before we can do that, we have to first promise ourselves that this time, it will be different. We will navigate the dichotomy between caregiver and cage-rattler with the tools of self-expression, self-determination and lessons learned from our own mothers.

McDonnell strives toward that balance when she says, "Volumes have been written about how to 'balance' career and family. I don't like that term. I am not a fulcrum. I prefer to see kids and jobs not as oppositional weights but as complementary pleasures. I want my life to be integrated, not pulled in different directions. Nor are work and family the only two interests -- even the dominant interests -- of us twenty-first-century foxes. Friendships, culture, politics, travel: We want the world, and we want it now, baby."

Our mothers did the difficult and dirty work of getting women out of the kitchen, and now, as McDonnell asserts, we owe it to them and ourselves to enjoy "all those opportunities nixed by piles of dishes to clean." Somewhat predictably, McDonnell calls for revolution: "I'd like to reclaim momism as a growing branch of activism. The 'motherhood movement' ... could be to the aughties what civil rights were to the '60s." It is a call we should heed. Our generation of women has come through 20 years of foment and backlash to stand strong with our babies on our hips, using our free hands to write books, run companies, sign bills into law -- and yes, occasionally pump a fist in the air.

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Erika Schickel is the author of the memoir "You're Not the Boss of Me: Adventures of a Modern Mom."