Fall From Cool

From Hip to Humiliating in One Eye Roll

I admit that I don't spend a lot of time worrying about how my behavior will reflect on my children. I sing and dance in supermarkets when the muzak moves me. I wear more leopard print and sequins than a woman who doesn't live in Miami really should. And there is the small matter of chronicling my kids' every developmental misstep in print.

But my friends with teenagers tell me that a parent's greatest offense is not what she does, wears or, um, writes. It's her mere objectionable existence. "Unfortunately, it just gets worse with age," says another mom I know. "My 14-year-old can barely stand me asking her a question and is mortified when I dare to speak to one of her friends."

"Yeah," echoes the mother of a junior-high girl. "My daughter asked me not to talk to her friends. Like, I am driving them some place in a car and I am not to indicate in any way that I can hear what they are talking about."

The mother of a high-schooler told me she's not even "allowed" to get out of the car when she picks up her son from school. Once, when he was late getting to the parking lot, she wandered around campus looking for him. When he saw her, his shame was so exquisite you'd have thought she cartwheeled naked through the quad.

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