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Published Sunday, May 12, 1996, in the Miami Herald.

MOTHER, MAY I?

Would your mom permit you to hang her from the ceiling and dress her like an angel? Would she drag a large wooden cross down a supermarket aisle? Would she pose in a geisha girl's kimono? A treadbare fur coat? Prison stripes? Probably not. So, lucky Judy Olausen. The photographer's 74-year-old mother, Vivian, will do anything for a wacky picture, such as Mother as Enabler, above. Vivian explores parenthood's wild side in Mother (Penguin Studio, $24.95). We love the wooden clothespins, the poker chips and the I Like Ike button.


Barbara Kingsolver


Motherhood: Twenty Stories of Contemporary Motherhood (North Point, $22) spans the range of maternal experiences. Editors Katrina Kenison and Kathleen Hirsch began to collect these stories when they were young mothers starved for fiction that would illuminate their reshaped lives. Moving them, and us, are Laurie Colwin's giddy new mom; Jane Shapiro's single mother who describes her teenagers' ``hair-trigger adrenaline glands'' and Sue Miller's older heroine, who looks sadly at her son's troubled marriage but cannot guard him ``against his share of pain.'' Other contributors include Perri Klass, Eileen FitzGerald, J. California Cooper, Kate Braverman, Mary Gordon and Barbara Kingsolver, who contributes Quality Time:

Miriam's one and only daughter, Rennie, wants to go to Ice Cream Heaven. This is not some vision of the afterlife but a retail establishment here on earth, right in Barrimore Plaza, where they have to drive past it every day on the way to Rennie's day-care center. In Miriam's opinion, this opportunist placement is an example of the free-enterprise system at its worst.

``Rennie, honey, we can't today. There just isn't time,'' Miriam says. She is long past trying to come up with fresh angles on this argument. This is the bland, simple truth; the issue is time, not cavities or nutrition. Rennie doesn't want ice cream. She wants an angel sticker for the Pearly Gates Game, for which one only has to walk through the door, no purchase necessary. When you've collected enough stickers, you get a free banana split. Miriam has told Rennie over and over again that she will buy her a banana split, some Saturday when they have time to make an outing of it, but Rennie acts as if this has nothing to do with the matter at hand, as though she has asked for a Cabbage Patch doll and Miriam is offering to buy her shoes.

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