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for the dog's birthday, made her children elaborate Halloween costumes out of old grocery bags, and her knots came out just right on the shoelaces when they broke.
    She put a basketball “hoop” over the clothes hamper as an incentive for good habits, started seedlings in a toilet paper spindle, and insulated their house with empty egg cartons, which everyone else threw away.
    Sharon kept a schedule that would have brought any other woman to her knees. Need twenty-five women to chaperone a party? Give the list to Sharon. Need a mother to convert the school library to the Dewey Decimal System? Call Sharon. Need someone to organize a block party, garage sale, or school festival? Get Sharon.
    Sharon was a Super Mom!
    Her gynecologist said it.
    Her butcher said it.
    Her tennis partner said it.
    Her children . . .
    Her children never said it.
    They spent a lot of time with Rick's mother, who was always home and who ate cookies out of a box and played poker with them.
     

Unknown
    12
    What kind of a mother would...
    lose her amateur status by turning pro?
    Louise and Estelle
    Next to hot chicken soup and vitamin C, Louise considered breakfast with her children as the most overrated ritual in American culture.
    What was so great about sitting around a table with two surly kids fighting over fifteen boxes of unopened cereal?
    She relented once a year. She called it her Annual Christmas Breakfast with Mommy, complete with candy canes and favors. The rest of the time Louise worked at staying out of their way.
    She had discovered early that she was not like other mothers. It disgusted her to take knots out of shoelaces with her teeth that a child had wet on all day. She was bored out of her skull sitting around buying hotels for Park Place with funny money. She was not fulfilled walking around with a handbag full of used nose tissue handed her by her children to dispose of.
    Housework didn't do a lot for her, either. Neither did the women who talked about it. She refused to break out in hives just because someone had found a way to get spaghetti stains out of plastic place mats. One day when the group was talking about Heloise's eighty-seven uses for nylon net, Louise snapped, “Why don't we just make butterfly nets out of it, throw it over ourselves, and check in at a home?”
    Her goal in life was to hire a woman who would come in and sit with her children while she worked.
    Pier husband would not hear of it. “Give me a reason,” he kept insisting.
    “I'm bored,” said Louise.
    “That's not a reason,” he said. “That's a symptom. You should keep busy.”
    Maybe he wanted her to lie like Elsie Waggoner, who said she got a part-time job to buy her daughter's Barbie and Ken dolls a wardrobe to go to Ohio State for the weekend.
    In desperation, Louise did the next best thing. She volunteered.
    It didn't take long for word to get out that Louise was “easy.” She'd chair anything. She'd save animals she hadn't even heard of, raise funds for diseases she couldn't pronounce, and sit through three-hour meetings where the only decision made was where to have the next meeting.
    In 1973 she set a record for volunteering more hours in a year than any other woman in the community.
    She also set another record ... unofficially. Louise hired and fired more babysitters in a year than any other woman in the history of women's liberation.
    Louise demanded a woman who would read to her children and play games with them when they were bored.
    She wanted a woman who would be there to share (heir day.
    She wanted a woman who would bake them rookies, mend their broken toys, and kiss their scraped knees.
    She wanted Julie Andrews flying around with an umbrella for a buck an hour.
    The list of women who worked for Louise Concell would fill a book. There was Mrs. Crandel, who was a soap opera addict and between noon and 2 pm the world stopped.
    There was Mrs. Sanchez, who made gin ice cubes and was discovered only when one of the children had a