Wild Child: Girlhoods in the Counterculture

Title:

Wild Child:
Girlhoods in the Counterculture

Author:

Chelsea Cain

Year:

1999

Synopsis:

Tofu casseroles, communes, clothing-optional kindergarten, antiwar proteststhese are just a few of the hallmarks of a counterculture childhood. What became of kids who had been denied meat, exposed to free love, and given nouns for names? In Wild Child, daughters of the hippie generation speak about the legacy of their childhoods. The writers present a rearview mirror to contemporary culture; with an eye on the past they remind us that there is more than one path through the present. Contributors include Lisa Michaels (Split) and Ariel Gore (Hip Mama).

Foreword

Moon Zappa

M
y name is Moon Unit Zappa. I was born in New York City on September 28,1967. So the story goes, my parents had been married just a handful of days prior to my birth, and as my father was leaving to go on tour for a frightful stretch in support of his latest musical efforts (and us), he gave my mother the option of naming me either Moon Unit or Motorhead. A simple offering of two names to choose between in his absence, having nothing to do with gender. When I arrived she selected Moon.

Were we hippies? My dad
hated
granola and tofu. In fact, he willfully ate Hormel chili from the can and plump-when-you-cook—‘em
meat
hot dogs, which he skewered on a fork and cooked over an open gas burner on our kitchen stove, like a home-owning hobo. No one was
Oming
in my house and pachouli and drugs were forbidden. The pure hit of reality was the high we were riding.

Yet we called our parents Frank and Gail (never Mom and Dad), we were allowed to decide whether or not we felt like going to school on any given day, and later, when we were teenagers, my mother insisted that we shower with our overnight guests in order to conserve water.

We lived in Laurel Canyon. Where all the rock stars were. Where all the artists were. Where all the people who were going to take over the world with their God-given creativity were. My mother smoked cigarettes and ate mostly peanut butter and grapefruit. She didn’t wear shoes when she went to the grocery store. She certainly didn’t wear a bra. She made English Breakfast tea with milk and sugar for scantily clad women with smudgy eye makeup, women who smelled like powdery old books. The men who visited us had patchy beards and bad posture and smelled like B. O. Crouching in the nude near my playthings, they melted brightly colored crayons and made candles out of old milk cartons. Everyone seemed to be unwashed, musky and recently fucked. If they wore clothes, they were flamboyant, mismatched garments with bright colors and crazy patterns that clashed. On the men, clothing always clung to the fleshy parts of their bodies, and drooped and flared where there was hardly any meat on their bones. The women wore tissue paper-thin kerchiefs or dyed, crocheted, doilyesque halters that left nothing to the imagination. I have a vague memory of women attempting to conceal large areolas with black masking tape and colored Magic Marker.

At my house, clothes were an extension of the imagination, used to name who or what you were for the hour or so you had them on, a dinosaur or a witch or a superhero. Clothes were costumes for putting on shows. When I had to leave the house and go to a place where people might be wearing clothes, my mother let me wear my frilly coocaracha underwear on my head. My hair was wildly unbrushed and I could pull clumps of it out of the leg holes to make ears if I wanted, but mainly my undies were a hat. Once, when my mother (barefoot, of course) hitchhiked to the grocery store with me in tow, a man approached us in the dairy section and tried to sweet-talk me to get to her. At the ripe old age of two, I already knew enough to sense that something was energetically ick about the whole shabooh, and reportedly announced, ‘Fuck off, pervert.’

By the time I was six, I began to notice that my family was different. My first clue was a television show for preschoolers called
Romper Room
. At the close of every show the teacher would look in her magic mirror and say goodbye to the children lucky enough to be named Susan or Kim or Debbie or Michael or Billy. No mention of a Moon Unit or a Dweezil (my brother, two years my junior, with hair and eyelashes longer than my own). Nor did we look like the children on an incomprehensibly dull
Mr. Rogers or Sesame Street
. No first-graders I knew found pornographic cartoons lying around next to blow-up sex dolls in their childproof homes with the backyard swingsets. They didn’t know about R&B or astrology or the Ouija board or how to have a seance. Absolutely no one my age cussed (and therefore remained sadly unaware of our terrific free-dom-of-speech amendment) or knew what gay was or made Barbie and Ken fuck and orgasm loudly or bent spoons in her spare time or got to stay up late and either go to clubs, or watch scary movies or skin flicks with
their
moms and dads. Other children could not keep up with me or keep me entertained; neither could timid grownups for that matter. The most fun I could hope for was to see the look of horror on another child’s face, one with the normal parents, as I scared her into awareness, hoping, I now realize, to get a glimpse of what my reaction to what was happening around me was supposed to look like.

Which is why when I first heard about Chelsea’s project, I took an immediate interest in the book. The testimonials of children caught between two worlds? Hippie parents combined with obedient, conservative grandparents? The pendulum swing of our parents’ chosen lifestyles in sharp, rebellious contrast to the lives their parents chose, and the effects of all this on their lab-rat offspring? Yippee! Throw in a special, soul-sisters-only vibe from the daughters of
the
daughters who courageously said ‘yes’ to living life as the equals of men, in defiance of societal norms and authoritarian opposition, and you have one sa-weet deal. For me, personally, a chance to not feel like a mutant outcast because I get to discover other girl humans who endured some of the same bizarro shit in their households.

It turns out I’m not the only one who grew up with the same regard for everyone and every living thing. Like these ladies, I was taught that no man or woman is above you. Not even a policeman or a president or a pope. I was told these are just jobs. People in the army or the government, or lawyers…that’s just what they do, not who they are. Authority figures? Ha! Underneath their uniforms and beliefs are flesh and blood humans, same as me. We all answer to something larger than ourselves; therefore, the act of simply calling a teacher or a grownup ‘Miss’ or ‘Mr.’ seemed like a ridiculous, arbitrary, socially agreed-upon rule for an agreed-upon order. It stirs up the same confusion in me now when I stop for a red light in the middle of the night on a deserted road. (I confess, sometimes I sneak through. But ya better do it while you can, before they implement those evil cameras at
every
corner to monitor our diligence in obeying the rules about when to stop and when to go.) At my house we were exposed to everything, because knowledge is power. At my house there was no supervision, so there was no reason to sneak. At my house there were no rules, so there was nothing to rebel against. I hated it.

It always left me with an awful floating feeling that most, if not all, of these lovelies experienced, of too much space, of too many choices. I felt very often (and still do) like I was doing a moon walk and my cord came loose from the ship. Ick. I craved rituals and rules like my friends had. I prayed for curfews and strictly enforced dinner times. Uniforms and organized events and people with
goals
amazed me.

Before reading this book, I thought of hippies as people who were in tune enough with nature to remember to look up from time to time—to notice the vigilant sun and moon standing as sweet reminders that happiness is always available to us—but not grounded enough to retain and make use of this understanding. Hippies can’t be bothered with uptight concepts like good grooming or looking presentable. Hippies take the time to discover ‘the truth’ about Who We All Really Are out in the boonies, safe from society’s soul-poisoning distractions, but do not have actual jobs, and whose discoveries are therefore rendered useless and ineffectual to the rest of man(notso)kind. Hippies are either meditating in absolute silence, or in symbiosis with nature and her bountiful herb—eating, growing and smoking organic, but lacking the follow-through to vote or take action to protect all things green. God knows how slowly things run in a health food eatery or co-op checkout line. Hippies explore sexually taboo terrain but their children, too young to choose the lifestyle for themselves, suffer the consequences of being exposed to too much stimulus too early on, more than most of us experience in a lifetime.

I am only half right. After reading this book and the offerings of the women hand-picked by Ms. Cain, I’ve happily come to new understandings about others and myself. It turns out that I am not as isolated as I once thought. It turns out that I am part of a tribe (of fringies, but a tribe nonetheless). Understanding and accepting fringie life helps me to better navigate the waters of the normie world, for although I am not as crunchy as some, I am certainly crispier than most. I am proud that I, like so many of the women in this book, will never have beige carpeting in my house, will never own or wear a skirt suit, will never revere misogynistic steak-house politics, and will never be a
Rules
girl, obedient to some outdated, fifties model of partnership. I find there is a common bond and an actual language that is immediately understood by super-crunchy-granola types, one that is as colloquially familiar to me as val speak or wall street chic cheek is to its kind. This book explains my envy of the French language with its luxury of a
tu
and
vous
to establish a boundary of familiarity, something that is sorely lacking in my own vocabulary. It unravels the mystery behind late bloomers with my background. As a child, I was given free rein; now I am only employable as an empress of the universe, or something in ‘the arts.’ (I
can’t
be in fluorescent lighting, it’s against my body’s religion.) In a love-all-serve-all-blurred-edges-universe, one tends to lose oneself rather easily. Whatever it is I believed hippies lacked in goals, I now realize they more than make up for in tolerance.

Growing up between two worlds, I learned to judge people by their actions, not their outsides. People are either part of the problem or part of the solution. For or against the planet and everyone on it. Black, white, fat, skinny—who cares? The wise counterculture hippie in me doesn’t care about that. Lazy is not black or white or brown or yellow. It is lazy. Sexual carelessness is not hippie; it is sexual carelessness. Lastly, everyone has a story to tell, everyone is unique and everyone has to find her own way in this world regardless of her upbringing and her relation to the starting line.

If you grew up in bare feet, you may find this book a comforting balm of commonality. If you are a normie, you might appreciate the, at times, alien differences between us and our collective ‘life is short but very wide’ approach to things. Either way, these essays offer a vivid glimpse of the wild ride of a counterculture childhood. All in all, a compelling anthropological gathering.

Love
,

Moon Zappa

August 1999

Introduction

Chelsea Coin

T
his is what I remember: the rusted frame of an old car aban-loned in a ditch near the farm, Ray sitting on an overturned bucket watching his vegetable garden grow, the comings and goings of men in John Deere caps and plaid shirts to and from the barn across the road, the long drive into town in the red ‘62 Ford truck, the taste of dust rising from the lane, the blackberries, the smell of wet dogs, standing on my tip toes to pluck a seed from a sunflower, gathering brown eggs in the chicken coop, priming the pump, swimming in the pond, snapping turtles, strawberries, morning glories, snapdragons, the Allman Brothers’
Brothers and Sisters
album cover, how there was music, always music, music during big dinners at the long table in the kitchen, music that colored everything (the kitchen was yellow, the house was white, my dress was red), music at night when the dogs would run barking in a pack through the neighbors’ fields, listening to Bob Dylan on the porch while my mother taught me the difference between Chile tomatoes and cherry tomatoes in our garden, waking up every morning to music.

I am the child of hippies. I spent my plump, naked girlhood frolicking through the vegetable garden and spinning on the porch to crazed, hippie banjo music. I called my parents by their first names until I was nine and knew who John Lennon was before I had heard of Jesus Christ. Grace Slick and Che Guevara were my role models—not Farrah Fawcett, not Betty Ford. I wanted to grow up to be a fire dog. I ate millet casserole and wheat bread, uncoerced. I was weaned on goat’s milk. Until I was six, I insisted on wearing a different color sock on each foot. I ran with the dogs. I buried my dolls. My mother told me I was an artist. My father taught me to sing. I didn’t take baths. I believed Richard Nixon was lying, and I believed I could grow up to do anything.

For my parents and their friends, the idea at the heart of the counterculture was simple: rejection. Rejection of the Establishment’s war, its social mores, its institutions, its hang-ups, its corruption and its pantsuits. The counterculture was a social phenomenon, not a political one. There was no hippie manifesto and, unless you count Woodstock, no one ever called a summit meeting. Yet, some common threads linked the hippies. Like my parents, many were from white, middle-class backgrounds. Many were antiwar. Many used drugs. But the hippies were not at the forefront of the anti-Vietnam movement, like the students or other members of the New Left. Their form of social protest was nonparticipation—total rejection of the war machine and all its accouterments. Cops were ‘pigs,’ the president was a crook, America was spelled with a ‘K,’ adults were not to be trusted—even white sugar was suspect.

Although the hippie trip started out as a social experiment, it became political despite itself. The hippies set about creating a lifestyle that not only abandoned, but defied the cultural norms. By rejecting the expectations and betrayals of their upbringings, they could start fresh with the next generation. They could change the world one child at a time.

Back in the ‘real’ world, the world my parents had forsaken, the questionable futures of these children soon became the source of much anxiety along the cul de sac. What was to become of kids like me who had been denied meat, exposed to free love, and given nouns instead of names? What future lay in store for children who were raised with no boundaries, who knew about drugs and Janis Joplin and the female orgasm, who were never instructed in the art of personal hygiene, who were alienated from mainstream culture, who were taught to question authority, government, the social order? Certainly such children would be ill prepared to participate in ‘normal’ society, much less join the Junior League. At best they would be maladjusted; at worst, sex-addicted, atheist, communist artists.

Hippie kids grew up the products of a great experiment. As with any scene, there were good parents, and bad parents, and everyone’s experience was not the same. But these parents were all trying something different, something radical, something revolutionary. Their failures, in many cases, could be considered as unique and interesting as their successes.

What better way to learn about a lifestyle than by looking at the children it produced? How successful were the hippies at insulating themselves from mainstream culture, and what influences could they not escape? How have the children of the hippies taken up their parents’ legacy of rebellion? What aspects of the counterculture have these children embraced as adults, and what have they rejected?

As children of the counterculture, we faced constant negotiation between home life and outside influences. We learned to live between two worlds: the one our parents created and the straight one that surrounded us. Our parents couldn’t shield us from mainstream culture—though many of them tried. They could simply do their best to pass on their values and beliefs about a difficult, corrupt world. Many of us still struggle with this dichotomy, vainly attempting to be true to each world and betray neither. We may be hippies at home and yuppies in the office. We might want to make pottery and grow organic vegetables and still be drawn to cell phones and Jettas. We struggle to retain the truth of who we are, which many of us find rooted in our childhoods, even as we live in a world that may eschew our alternative beginnings.

Our parents offered us a rare freedom to create our lives as we chose. It was part of a larger commitment to freedom that came to define the hippie counterculture. Free love, free speech, freedom from societal restraints. Those of us who felt safe in this freedom reveled in it, those of us who did not feel safe pined for structure, curfews, limits. Freedom without a safety net can have dire and lasting results. In collecting these stories, I wanted to explore what hippie kids had learned about freedom from coming of age in an environment that valued it so highly yet may not have considered all of its consequences.

I have chosen to focus on girls, because I think that raising a girl ‘outside’ of society has particularly radical implications. These hippie girls were raised in an era that was just beginning to liberate girls from the expectations that accompanied generations of social and sexual repression. They were being raised by young women who had rejected the roles prescribed to them, for the promised liberation of the counterculture. I was interested to see what type of feminism this would spawn. How would that early empowerment affect their gender politics? The writers in this book all have strong independent voices; they are the daughters of mothers who were courageous or desperate enough to walk away from a lifetime of gender roles and boundaries. For many of these women, the promised liberation of the counterculture proved to be an empty one, as traditional gender roles followed them to the communes and the farmhouses. For their daughters, the promise was to prove more fruitful.

I started this project in an effort to understand my own experience, through the experience of my peers. Of my values, beliefs, propensities, quirks—of who I am today—what do I owe to my upbringing, and what is simply a result of my own inevitable peculiarities? Yet, this anthology has taught me much more than that. Its lasting value will not be only in the anecdotal memoirs themselves, but in their collective insight on the unique impact that this specific social experiment had on its children, and how that impact, and its implications on child rearing, has not yet finished reverberating.

This anthology begins with a birth and ends with another. We come full circle, from girl-child to woman to girl-child. To begin, Zoë Eakle writes of her home birth to hippie expatriates on the Canadian island of her childhood. To end, Suzanne M. Cody writes a letter to her infant daughter about her own girlhood, and what she would and would not change. In between, Ariel Gore laments what was lost when the world, the counterculture and her childhood changed. Poet Paola Bilbrough remembers her New Zealand counterculture girlhood in poetry that is evocative of the strange magic particular to her hippie outback home. Elizabeth She describes the darker side of free love run amok. For a perspective of another sort, Angela Lam writes not of her own girlhood in the counterculture, but of her friend, Summer, and how a brief encounter with Summer’s family challenged Angela’s sheltered world. These and the other essays recount a particular American childhood in ways that shed light not just on their parents’ choices, but on the radical implications of attempting to raise children outside of mainstream society.

A social experiment only becomes revolutionary when its implications transcend the moment, when it pervades and changes the society, when it ripples through the generations. The legacy of the hippie trip is not merely in its children, but in the fact that we are still working through the lessons of our upbringing, the successes and the failures. What we take from that experience, what we incorporate into our own lives—
that
is the legacy. We are sex-addicted, atheist, communist artists, after all. We are the people our grandparents warned us about. And we are having children. It can only lead to more ‘uncivilized’ behavior.

Our parents laid down their weapons long ago, but the hippie kids in this anthology, and all the hippie kids I know, still struggle with questions: questions like when to take on society, and when to go along; when to live in the straight world, and when to abandon the rat race and take a summer off to follow Phish; when to march against clear-cutting-animal-testing-ozone-destroying-pro-life-legislating-poor-people-exploiting-fundamentalist-special-interests, and when to stay home and watch
The Road Rules
on MTV.

If there is anything that these essays teach us it is this: There is just no way that you can escape being influenced by a childhood designed specifically to influence you. We were raised in a culture intended to teach us to challenge everything everybody else was telling us—to subvert the dominant paradigm. No matter that this sentiment has more currency as a bumper sticker than as a core cultural value of the nineties. You can take the girl out of the counterculture, but you can’t take the counterculture out of the girl.

Chelsea Cain

Portland, Oregon

August 1999