I taught the class on Cool. It’s true, I did. Every week, over a dozen university students filed into my classroom to learn, from me, about being cool. What is cool? Why is cool? Where did cool come from and what does it mean? Was I cool? I had to stop myself before I answered. The second you start thinking you might be cool, you’re cooked and categorically uncool. Already, upon reading the title of this piece, I imagine some of my friends giving me shit about claiming to have ever been cool. But that's part of being cool, taking shit from your friends, right?
When an old college friend texted recently to ask if I was going to the Blondshell show at the Mohawk, a local club here in Austin, I replied “Yes,” though I didn't think Blondshell seemed like the kind of band this particular friend would be into. Turns out she was asking because her teenage daughter was going. Hell yeah! I thought. I had tickets to a show that was squarely Gen Z. Was it possible I was, in that moment, a Cool Mom? Let’s explore.
I grew up in a small town in West Texas and spent years doing everything I could to leave that world of conformity behind. Though one could argue coolness creates its own conformity, it still felt, well, cooler to leave. I did, and soon became a pretentious college radio station deejay, playing My Bloody Valentine and other subversive noise during the 4am shift. I spent my twenties traveling with little-to-no money, closing down bars on three continents. Always chasing the cool. And if I’m being honest, maybe I even wrote my new novel Mudlark about a rock star because it was basically the next best thing to being one.
Even though I had a mortgage and a job with health insurance by the time I got pregnant at age 38, I still felt like a woman who'd always have her finger on the pulse. There I was, slinging my pregnant belly out in front of me as I belted out jams at a friend's karaoke birthday party. Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz… But then, there I was, just a few hours later, hoping and praying that I'd wet the bed but nope: my water had broken six weeks early. Soon, I was spending sleepless nights in the NICU with a four-pound beauty. All those tickets to shows I'd bought anticipating my last month of pregnancy as a time to go out with a bang ... money up in flames. Instead, I was soaked in breastmilk, holding this baby skin-to-skin on the top floor of a hospital.
Later, a psychiatrist told me that Old Moms like myself have it easier in some ways (ownership of a safe, practical Honda Civic?) but tougher in others. We have spent years developing an identity based around our own independence and power. Then, all of a sudden, we're domestic servants to a small screaming ball of confusion and wonder.
In the middle of the night, listening to the repetitive sounds of the breast pump (ham-burger, ham-burger) and watching my daughter sleep, I started worrying that wanting to be a Cool Mom would make me a Bad Mom. The kind of mother who makes it all about herself, who brings home questionable friends and shows up late to all your basketball games. But I also didn’t want my daughter to grow up without a sense of who I was. Could I be cool without being the Cool Mom?
As the years go by, I've discovered that being a mother is not a performance. It's a daily negotiation between versions of myself. I'm the person who reminds my daughter to put her water bottle in her backpack and sometimes says no to dessert. But I'm also the person who refuses to play princess games and leaves her with a babysitter so my partner and I can go see Big Thief. I make her listen to Erykah Badu and Sleater-Kinney but then I listen with her to Taylor Swift and Katy Perry, who manages a trifecta of mixed metaphors by calling herself a “dark horse," a "perfect storm," and a "bird without a cage" all in one song. But we both agree that Shakira’s hips don’t lie and that Shakira is cool.
As a professor who understands that the notion of Cool is impossibly wrapped up in gender and race and capitalism, I should probably let the whole idea go. Whether or not my daughter comes to appreciate the distinction between early (raw punk) and late (post-punk) Joy Division doesn't matter, just like it doesn't matter whether or not I am ever the Cool Mom. I am her Mom.
When my daughter karate-kicked her way out of the womb six weeks early, she made it immediately clear she was her own person (i.e. a person who wanted a cake in the shape of a stormtrooper for her fourth birthday). Her first joke happened when she was two, farted at the dinner table and then said "bon appétit" (something she learned from a picture book featuring a French snail). Now at eight, she often leaves the room because she "needs to go daydream." She is unique and amazing in ways that go far beyond the concepts of taste and cool.
If she one day ends up in the therapist's chair talking about me — as Blondshell herself asks in the recent jam about her own mother, “What’s a fair assessment of the job you did?” — I'm pretty sure that whether or not I am/was cool will not even come up.
Once, when I was foolishly trying to give my daughter fashion advice, she said, “Mom, listen. You like cool, but I like pretty.” She didn't mean it as a compliment.
I thought that was pretty cool.
Mary Helen Specht is the author of Migratory Animals, a New York Times Editors’ Choice and winner of the Texas Institute of Letters Best First Fiction Award and the Writers’ League of Texas Fiction Prize. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Prairie Schooner, and numerous other publications. A Fulbright Scholar to Nigeria and Dobie-Paisano Writing Fellow, Specht currently teaches creative writing at St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas, where she lives with her family. Her second novel, Mudlark, is available July 21, 2026.
source https://www.scarymommy.com/parenting/i-was-cool-before-i-had-kids-my-daughter-doesnt-care
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