MY TV MOMS: C'MON, GET HAPPY!

Mother’s Day is fast approaching. I’m not a mother, but I have strong opinions about the mothers who raised me on TV many years ago. Here are some notable ones:

June Cleaver (Leave it to Beaver), Donna Stone (The Donna Reed Show), Kathy Williams (Make Room for Daddy), Harriet Nelson (The Ozzie and Harriet Show), and Margaret Anderson (Father Knows Best; Mother knows diddly) were all just too darn prissy for my tastes. They did their housework wearing dresses, high heels, and fancy jewelry, for gosh sakes! Their homes were immaculate as the women in charge. Heck, my own tennis-shoes mom slaved over housework wearing a bib apron over a bra and Bermuda shorts and the place still looked like a train wreck. I just couldn’t relate to these TV moms at all.

Later on came Carol Brady (The Brady Bunch) and Shirley Partridge (The Partridge Family). Carol had a live-in housekeeper, for Christ’s sake, so she was definitely on my despised list. Shirley, on the other hand, was more to my liking. She was raising five kids on her own, just like my mom, so she had my sympathy immediately. Not only that, but she also wore bell-bottom pants, sang, and drove her brood around like nomads in a wildly colorful bus. How cool was that? I loved Mrs. Partridge. And it didn’t hurt that her son Keith (David Cassidy) was cute, in a teen idol sort of way--even though I was in my early 20s when the show aired.

The Roseanne Show was a big hit in the 1980s, although Roseanne was the antithesis to the previous TV moms. She was brash, bawdy, and didn’t even seem to like her kids very much. They couldn’t get away with a lick of orneriness--she’d done it all before herself, so she was wise to their every move. What a killjoy. She behaved worse than the kids. But here’s what I liked about her: she always wore sloppy oversized shirts covering her big belly. We had the same personal stylist.

These days the only TV show I watch that features motherly roles is Desperate Housewives. The stars, all mothers in various stages of madness, wear tight leggings, low-cut, boob-belching tops, and constantly have sex on their minds.

If Mrs. Cleaver was still around on television, she would be popping her pearls.