My momma told me...nothing.

Currently the mother of a three-year-old, I contemplate the day when I can micro-manage all of my daughter's major decisions. Terrified that my kid will make huge mistakes—just like Mommy, I'm already formulating a way to convince my daughter to remain a virgin until she is at least 19, among a million other "Oh, yeah's."

Flapping away from the nest when I was 19, I landed in New York City for one of those crazy gigs you can do only as a baby: camel wrangler and sheep herder for Radio City Music Hall's Christmas Show. A whole $250 a week and all the alfalfa I could inhale. Dad had failed to keep his garage safe and an act of carelessness—perpetrated by family or friend—resulted in the garage exploding and almost every thing I owned being burned to a crisp or melted. Most everyone else's belongings suffered minor damage; my life was devastated. So going to New York was more like being ejected from a spiralling F-15 than it was a graceful entrance into the adult world.

My tangible past being literally erased from existence, I had to reinvent myself. Only I didn't come with instructions. Today I know the best lesson I can teach my daughter will be that you must teach your daughter about everything you know. My existence is proof of luck, not great brainwork. Now I'm on my feet and have perspective, but this was only after having spent 20 years scrambling around like Scooby-Doo on ice. I should've been home and in my bedroom when the garage exploded; instead I was out getting drunk and high because nobody told me this was a real sign of trouble.

Am I blaming my mother for my life? Yes. She birthed me and it would've been helpful if she'd told me that it's not normal for a woman not to wear clean underwear or socks for years on end (her deal, not mine). Who knows who I'd be today if mom had stepped between Dad and all of us when he was drunk? By the time I was 23 and about to move to Los Angeles, I had never even opened up a personal bank account. When I was in kindergarten, it was another five-year-old, not my Mommy or Daddy, who taught me to tie my shoes. At 11, a girlfriend had to show me how to use a broom: housekeeping and common sense were alien practices. My first gravy-making effort included pouring copious amounts of flour-water mix into a cauldron of fried chicken grease. The flames licked the ceiling and it was over quickly despite my having no idea that tap water is the worst thing for a grease fire.

I tried to make an angel food cake once and didn't know that you had any other temperature options outside of BROIL. Two hours on BROIL seemed about right. In my world, you made angel food cakes and Shrinky-Dinks the same way.

Of course there was failing the first driving test where I was allowed to take mom's El Camino into the worst traffic circle in Monmouth County, New Jersey, at rush hour. This first solo drive resulted in my driving up an off-ramp, where I then t-boned a car driven by a pregnant woman—who happened to know my parents and whose elderly mother was in the passenger seat. When Mom and Dad arrived, they were more concerned with getting in trouble with the pregnant woman—who was shouting (falsely) that she was bleeding—than they were about the fact that I was hyperventilating and trembling and ALIVE. The state troopers shook their heads in disbelief that no one was hurt and both cars were fixable. I shook alone while the victim's elderly mother put her stranger's arm around me with the sympathy of an older woman, even as she ignored her pregnant daughter's hysteria. Talk about traffic circle going nowhere.

Adolescence brought a desperation for good information that was unmatched. Once I returned to school wearing a wool suit in August, before a harsh battle with chicken pox had fully healed. Why? Because it was the day the sex education films were to be shown. Typically, the information confused me and I'd returned a week early. My mother made me go back to school despite the mistake and the parade of scabs and cystic formations that covered my pubescent face.

This leads to that first period. It was literally part of a 'real' curse. The Curse of Tut. The year was 1979. Our class was to go on a field trip to the Museum of Natural History in New York to see the exhibit of King Tut's Tomb. Finding a splotch of fresh blood on my panties that morning, I was more frustrated than scared. Throughout childhood, my mother did nothing to conceal the shelf-load of old style belted menstrual pads and the odd large box of Tampax. But their purpose or connection to reality remained a mystery, even if the bathroom closet remained open all the time. Her pads were for bathroom lab science projects, along with other household chemicals. The tampons were strictly for opening and holding under the tap, to watch their super-absorbent capabilities.

Summoning up courage after a few pantless and panting minutes in our foul, filthy bathroom, littered with what my father kindly referred to as "used shit paper" (our toilet rarely flushed properly and the rest of my family seemed to be ignorant of common sanitary practices), I whined, "Mooooooommmm?" In a moment she knocked. I cracked the door open just wide enough to feed my bloodied panties through the gap and avoid eye contact. From the other side of the door I heard a whimpering, "Oh, noooo."

Wasn't she supposed to be the expert? If she's worried, what should I be? What seemed like hours later, another knock came and the door creaked just wide enough for a simple tampon to creep in like a big hook in a scary vaudeville show. The door closed on me.

Obvious to me now, and maybe the rest of the population, tampon application is pat. But I had no clue as to what to do with this 'thing' back then. Single tampons don't have directions printed on them. I must've been in the bathroom a long time because Mom eventually returned with a knock and a mousy, "You doin' okay?"

Too embarrassed to ask for help, I laid the stupid thing length-wise across the crotch of my underwear. Like a hot dog on a string inside my labia buns. Fortunately my jeans were so tight that the spilled blood couldn't make it much past my clamped private parts. The girlfriend who taught me how to sweep was understandably rolling on the ground at the bus stop the next day as she explained that the Tampax goes, "Up your coochie, you stupid idiot!"

By the time I was finally getting the odd date, at the age of 19, my signals about how to act around men were scrambled. I thought it was normal to take abuse, not talk about things, supplicate, not ask for what you want, fear rejection, stay in a bad place because there is no other place. Young, dumb, selfless, insecure, and big-tittied, I was a car wreck waiting to happen. A lump settled in my throat for years after I heard U2's Bono sing, "Your wheels are spinning but you're upside down..."

My mother taught us never to lock doors, close windows, secure your car, wear a seat belt, or do anything reasonably. Leave your home open to all and everything except the honest discussion about life and plain truths of reality. Exposing myself in that uninformed way through my twenties, ineptitude became my secret guardian angel. Taking stupid chances, success came professionally despite the brainwashed belief that I should fear authority, never take a risk, and think small. After 16 years of mistakes, accidents, faux pas, disasters, tragedies, failures, and humiliations—and a lot of rubbernecking along the highway of life—the silt shifted and I realized I'd become mother to myself somehow.

Even when I thought Mom and I were connecting, toward the end of our viable relationship (before two devastating and wholly preventable strokes rendered her voiceless and paralyzed in a nursing home) it's clear that it was a wishful illusion of friendly inclusion. The mother in me needed to purport an imaginary mother, to take the best care of me—my first born. The reality was that Mom failed to do more than send some cigarette/musk-infused blanket she knitted for someone else—some cheap polyester baby gear—she even gave my lifelong hope chest of generational baby clothes to a stranger. Ultimately Mom wouldn't even come out to visit and help when my daughter was born, even when we offered to Amtrak her and a friend to L.A. (she refused to fly). Never coming out, she sent one card after little Polly was born. When I made the trek to Kentucky where she lives, I noticed her still bending over backward for almost everyone but me and Polly, who she had to be dragged to come play with or watch. Polly's gramma never said, "Nice job," or "She's so beautiful." Not once.

This mother is eager to teach her daughter everything she knows and more.

Theorizing the inevitable embarrassment of conversations about normal vaginal discharge, pap smears, cramps, STD, men, sex, and babies, there's still no guarantee that by the time we get there I will be able to force condoms in her hand without flinching or shaming her. The alternative is failing to act, which was the way I grew up.

The plan is to coerce her willingly into a pure form of instinctive self-confidence by spinning my true stories of disaster, tragedy, triumph, and miracles. I'll still be swabbing her earlobe when she defies my order not to pierce her ears and goes to a strip mall and gets mutilated. It would be naive to believe she's going to think I'm cool forever. Like the tide coming in, her candied cries of "Mommy!" will wash up next as "Momma," then, "Mom," then "Ma," and finally back to "Mom" again. If things get really twisted I might expect the odd phase of calling me by my first name. She does it now at three, anyway.

It's been said there's no convincing your kid that you're not a controlling paranoid freak who won't allow sleep-overs without inspecting the property first. Polly will be pissed at me because I make her play in the part of the yard where I can observe her at all times. No doubt she'll stonewall me for weeks when I refuse to let her go on a weekend ski trip with her classmates. She's not the one I distrust. It's the world.

I've been hit by bad drivers and scam artists, fired by whackos, seriously robbed by men, had my wallet stolen, got attacked in a subway once by a Preppie masturbator, lived on both the west and east coasts, been stabbed in the back by so many 'friends' I can't turn without feeling sore; I've been fingerprinted and mug-shot, sued, harassed, evicted—I even lived with my boyfriend's ex-wife for a year and a crack addict who stole my stuff when I was out at work. I've been stranded on the freeway, helpless and in the rain in the middle of the night, and I've skidded on ice and crashed into a utility pole. Aside from rape, plane crashes, and murder, there are few other things that haven't happened to me.

Recalling teen-hood and how thoughts of suicide soaked me, it's no wonder this kind of parental pessimism is so strong. When I was about 15, having seen all the TV specials and news reports, I knew you should cry for help any way you can. So I went directly to Mom and said, "What would you do if I said I was thinking of killing myself?" A hypothetical cry for help was all I could muster. Frozen for a minute, Mommy took a drag off her smoke, with a strangely humored expression.

"Well, razors are awfully bloody. Guns are really messy. Pills? You can choke on your own puke. A noose really hurts...are you sure you wanna do that?" If I said anything back to her, it's long been erased. It was her advice that stuck in my head, in the long run.

Copyright © 2001 Viki Reed. All Rights Reserved.