Teenage Hood

Mummy, where’s my hoodie?

Have you seen my phone?

What’s going on today?

Can I have a loan?

Is there breakfast somewhere?

Is it already cooked?

What do you mean, my hoodies' here?

Of course I looked!

Muuum, can you help with Maths?

Its due in tomoz

Why should you help me?

Just because…

Hey Ma, watcha doing?

There’s sport on the other side

Where’s the remote control you say?

The battery’s gone and died.

Oh and the cat’s been sick

The dog has done a wee

I’ve remembered that my friend called

And said he’ll stay for tea.

And the letter, that was on the side

Was it important? Only I

Spattered it with bacon fat

That I was trying to fry.

I've got no clothes that I can wear

What do you mean, why?

Just look in my wardrobe!

There's nothing Superdry!

My shoes don't fit, 

I've grown again

My waist size Boys

My feet size Men.

Mum, I can't remember everything

Your exams weren't as hard as mine

And no, I don't believe your brain

Has atrophied with wine.

Huh? Wait till I’m as old as you

And have kids of my own?

I’ll bring them here, to my old Mum

They’ll be with you, at home!

Why are you laughing? 

What’s the news?

What do you mean Retirement Cruise?

Who’s gonna find my missing shoes?

Or anything else I lose?

OK Mum, I get the gist

I understand your view

Now if you could find my phone

I really would love you!

Food Glorious Food

One of the things that G and I insist on in our chaotic life is that on a Sunday we sit down as a family and have a traditional Sunday roast. This is not set in stone, but on the whole since just before the boys started to arrive 15 years ago we have managed to stick with it, and the dining room table gets cleared of all the week’s debris and we chat, argue and catch up on funny things that have happened in the past few days over crisp roasted potatoes, the waft of cooked meat and piles of brightly steamed vegetables.

 

Alas, I have never mastered the Yorkshire pudding, but have tried on several occasions, and it always becomes a discussion point – the last one was flat, thick and solid and resembled a fried Victoria Sponge, which G rather kindly pointed out was probably a delicacy in a country somewhere…  So Aunt Bessies aside, everything else is slaved over and slavered over and disappears three times faster than it took to cook.  But it allows us an oasis of time in which the boys tell us and each other of any gossip, problems, or just argue over who is going to get the last piece of crackling.

The main reason, of course, that I insist on the roast, is an idea that when my boys fly the coop – which inevitably they will – they will always know that on a Sunday I will be cooking and hopefully they will occasionally return, partners in tow, maybe even one day with kids of their own.  And it will be just a case of tossing a few extra potatoes in the pan and then that ancient chatter will begin again.  Obviously I have watched far too many American movies, because I can’t claim this to be a family tradition, but I would love it to become mine.  Another friend with kids far older than me, but to whom this is a genuine generational family thing, said that in actuality it gets very stressful – one of her boys brought home a vegetarian girlfriend who insisted that she couldn’t eat anything, another grown up child decided to bring all his mates home from the all night rave they had attended and one threw up in the toilet, and her mother in law turned up unexpectedly once and has made it every Sunday since…

Food and its connotations is a funny thing.  There are generally two extreme camps – one who Eats to Live (E2L), and the other which Lives to Eat (L2E) – with variations in between.  It is very taxing if you are an L2E and you go out for a meal, or on holiday with an E2L.  One of you is looking forward to the new culinary experiences, the other is merely looking forward to getting through the next meal and going on to life experiences.  One sees the pleasure in food and the other cannot understand why food is a pleasure.  Often the E2L is a fussy eater too.  That really bugs the L2E.  It should probably be a category on Match.com – it would help shake those dodgy first date nerves if you knew that your date was more interested in his Steak Bearnaise than the chicken fillets in your bra…

A mummy I know who has 4 children will cook a different meal for each of her kids every night.  She is an E2L, and envies the fact that my kids eat what is put in front of them.  As a mum who leans majorly to the L2E side, I really feel for her.  (And I also feel a little bit smug…) But the fact of the matter is that food is a social thing , whether it is a takeaway with your partner on a Saturday night, a coffee and a bun with other mums at Costa, a picnic with the  family, a kids birthday party.

We have had some very enjoyable meals in our lives – Elvis in a Mytchett curry house, watching Duran Duran in The Sports Bar in Monaco, Grandma and Grandad’s 50^th Wedding Anniversary, Spanish tapas with friends. But one of the most memorable was a sandwich.  In a strange turn of events (another long story) we ended up lunching with a beautiful and acclaimed Welsh songstress, her then fiancé and her mum.  She picked at the Panini that the blushing waiter had placed in front of her.

‘What?’ she asked eventually, as Little Man (who was 6 at the time) stared at her hard.

‘Why have you left all your vegetables?’ he asked, pointing to the salad on her plate.

She looked around wildly, the waiter hovering anxiously as I glared at my child, and then her cheeks flushed.

‘I have had some vegetables today… I had some fruit juice before I came out this morning’, she said eventually, looking at her mum for support, who was laughing helplessly.

‘Oh,’ said Little Man, not looking convinced, totally ignoring my looks of death and then brightened.  ‘Can I have your chips if you’re not going to eat them?’

And he did.  

Mad Dogs and Englishwomen

I live in a household where life hurtles along at an impossible pace, and often there does not seem enough hours in the day to gather our thoughts, let alone the runaway socks, games kits and missing folders.  Even the pets have gone mad – the dog has developed a conversational tone rather like Chewbacca (this apparently, is quite common amongst collies, but still takes every visitor to the house by surprise), one of the cats has taken to hiding behind the bin in the kitchen and leaping Cato-style hissing and spitting out at the unsuspecting canine who then launches into an indignant soliloquy, and the other cat has discovered a liking for getting into boxes.  This is a problem when you are having work done in your house, or things delivered, as all tool boxes and vans have to be checked.  He narrowly escaped a surprise journey to Leeds in the back of a lorry delivering beds…

But what can you do when you are a busy family of five and where everyone has interests or activities that need to be attended to and where life, although fast, is fun?   I sometimes look around the house and wonder what it would actually look like if everything was in the right place, all the ironing was done instead of creating a huge hulking ready-to-topple mountain in the corner of our bedroom, if all the surfaces were clear instead of being immediately filled up with stuff and if there wasn’t a wail from one of the toilets for toilet roll because we’ve run out…

I wonder what it would be like to live in a home where all the mugs matched in a colour co-ordination dictated by the décor, rather than what blobby blurred concoction your child managed to mix at the Ceramic painting party he attended.  And wouldn’t it be nice to sit down on the sofa and not hear the crunch of the missing folder that you were looking for before the school run this morning.  In such a house, the dog wouldn’t create his own carpet of hair as he chatted conversationally in Chewbaccarese, Cato cat would simply purr and look beautiful and Box cat would sleep in the £30 cat box that I bought for him.

 

I envisage a life in which, Maria von Trapp-style, I would hand the kids full kit bags with nothing missing with a cheery kiss and a wave off to school.  I would then efficiently walk the talking dog without breaking into a sweat and getting drenched in torrential rain or spattered with mud, magically lose 2 stone in doing so, get back, swiftly hoover round the house, singing all the while, and then sip a cup of Earl Grey whilst dinner simmers merrily on the stove.  Hell, we could even throw in some singing birds who dust the surfaces and a Bambi who sweeps the floor.

But for the moment, I am content to see just how many more clothes I can place on the ironing mountain before we all shout Timber! and scatter before death by linen. I look at my aged sofa which creaks when you sit on it and I remember all my children sitting on it from the age dot, their chubby little legs in socks barely creeping over the edge of the cushion, then to the school shoes stage and now one of them has feet in a size 12. The scratches and dents in the skirting boards remind me of the countless hours of fun had when learning the skateboard, or the kids smashing into each other in their toy pedal cars.  The paintwork, where one child denied to the hilt that he had graffitied, until we pointed out that he had signed his name, can always be refreshed.  The clutter on the surfaces can be cleared, only to replenish at another day.

The truth of the matter is our household is mad, it’s messy, it’s in continual motion.  But that’s what makes it home…    

On the Social

As a writer, marketer, and certainly as a mum, I have a peculiar fascination for social media.  This is a bit of a love-hate relationship.  For years I would look at the Facebook phenomenon and puzzle why everyone would be so interested in the lives of people they barely knew, and in some cases actively disliked.  I saw my personal friends fall in and out with respective virtual friends, some became depressed at the apparent golden lives of others, and some deliberately maintained a role as a voyeur – looking and judging without commenting.  As a slightly addictive and very quick-to-pen personality, I deliberately kept out of the social media loop for a long time, knowing that to commit word to type would mean that I had left an indelible print that may come back to haunt me for many years.

However, there comes a time when actually, as a parent, it is best that you know the danger that your kids face, rather than warn them ineffectually and hope that they don’t fall into the abyss created by social media.  This started when Eldest Son turned 13, and could now legally have a Facebook account like his friends had had for years.  Like many parents, I felt that there was only a certain amount of control that I could continue to have over my kids lives, and what better place to start than with social media – allowing him to have that freedom of voice, yet setting up administrative parameters and rules to be obeyed for his own safety, and ultimately legacy.

And so we joined Facebook together. And while I was at it I joined Twitter (@ruthym007) and had a brief flirtation with Pinterest, YouTube and Instagram.  During the course of my writing and work, I have looked at many social media sites, blogging sites, chat sites, community sites and interactive web sites and have found that there are enormous social e-groups out there – all willing to give you the benefit of their advice, whether or not you want it.  It becomes an all inclusive, all pervasive entity that sucks you in, whether you or not you want it.  And so you become silently embroiled in the anger of the mum from Fleet who has just been splashed by a 4x4 on the school run, and others join in with that fury and cite their own stories of puddle rage, and then the conversation turns to general ranting against all people who drive 4x4’s, and then the 4x4 drivers of the group start protesting that they are not all bad, and so on.  It can take hours of your life, or just seconds, your choice.

And this is what, essentially, the divide in social media is about.  It is a tool for communication that was not available to people of my age when we were growing up.  The most that we committed to on paper was the odd (in my case some very odd) letters, both personal and official and flirtation through an office fax.  Photos were three dimensional and kept in albums (or in my case plastic bags in the loft). Now emails can be forwarded to another circle at the press of a button, and anything on social media can be captured and resent to any corner of the world.  None of us can escape it – even if you are not on social media, a picture of you, no matter how old, can be flashed around the world in seconds.  And it’s the same with those old letters and flirtatious office faxes.  So what is the answer?  Well, the likelihood is that you will never know about it, unless someone mentions it, and for years I found myself amazed that everyone knew what I had been doing at the weekend courtesy of friends on social media.  At that point perhaps only 50% of my personal friends were on it, and we laughed at those who obsessively clicked and tapped their status updates wherever we went.  But that percentage has shifted, and two weeks ago I was out with a group of 8 mums, and only one was not on Facebook.

Sadly, I see more and more people of all ages sitting opposite or beside each other tapping away at their phones.  The art of communication it appears is electronic.  From a personal point of view I now make an enormous effort to leave my phone in my handbag and no longer place it on the table in a restaurant.  It is actually more difficult for me than it seems, but if someone has taken the time to meet me for a meal, it is the least that I can do.  And I don’t have that kind of relationship with virtual friends.

On the other hand, I saw the power of Twitter only last night. We have been party to enormous amounts of flooding around our area due to an unprecedented amount of continual rain.  A horse was trapped on a patch of land the size of a dining table. @Natasha_Herald tweeted <If you have a horse trailer please tweet>  It was retweeted 92 times, shared to Facebook  and several offers of help were produced in 20 minutes.  A newly built community that worked at electric speed.

Of course, in the meantime, Eldest Son simply uses Facebook as another communication tool, rather like his mobile or his Xbox.  When he came back from school last Friday with an extra pair of school shoes (I kid you not) and I was ranting and raving about having to phone or email around the list of parents, he simply put up a message on FB and within two minutes came downstairs to announce that they were Harry’s and he would give them to him on Monday. I was left twittering ineffectually.

Watching Benefits Street last night on television, about a street in which there is a preponderance of unemployed people living on the poverty line in social housing, I was struck by the sense of traditional community that they displayed, albeit in a rudimentary way.  But then again, how does that differ from the many social groups on-line? Joined together in a common cause, whether it is the dole, dancing, disease or dogs?  Perhaps rather than fighting the rise of social media, we should embrace it for what it is in all of its contradictions, superficial, helpful, distracting, empowering, depressing, meaningful, pointless – and above all malleable. Communities on social media do not replace the ones that we build in real life, but they can build you up when you are down with a simple <Like>, they can find you anything you want, they can advise, they can lecture.

And unlike Real Life, there is always an off button.

The Middle Ages

In a few days time I will turn 45.  This is not as much of a shock or a feeling of desolation that I had when I turned 30.  Losing my twenties was something that took a lot of headspace, and the fact that I was pregnant with my first child meant that I couldn’t even celebrate in style.  And turning 40 was initially overshadowed by the death of my beloved grandfather, once the funeral was over I had two days before I was whisked off to the Ice Hotel which was a truly magnificent and an unforgettable experience.  Lying down at -10C in an art exhibit of a room made entirely of ice in a bed comprising sleeping bag -on -reindeer skins- on wooden pallets- on ice blocks resulted in one of the best nights sleep that I had ever had.   And of course, turning 45 is not really a big birthday… it’s a good age, where you have a bit of time before you hit five oh, and you are only five years away from when you turned 40.  So it’s a good mid age.

Having a birthday in January is always a bit depressing.  Most of your friends are broke from Christmas, or detoxing for the New Year.  All of your presents are bought in the sales, which is great for the giver, but not great if you need to take something back because it doesn’t fit.  Or even worse, you get given unwanted Christmas presents– one year I even found the Christmas gift tag stuffed into the box with a little private message to my friend…  But on the up side my birthday comes at the time of the month where the memory of Christmas is distant, the detox is beginning to become a struggle, and my good friends will always come out to celebrate!

Rather weirdly, due to work or other circumstances, I’ve hit an age where I am either ten years older or ten years younger than some of my friends.  Having three kids roughly 3 years apart from each other in age means that my school life spans a number of different mummies. To one set I am still a young mum, to another I dispense sage advice with all the grace of an elder statesman.  It is a stage at which I am comfortable.  I watch other mums stressing out about things that used to worry me – what level books their child reads, why the Science teacher doesn’t seem to ‘get’ their kid, the unfairness of sports teams selections – and I know with the benefit of hindsight that it all works out in the end.  On the other hand, with my eldest I have learned from the older mums that although it is a first time for me, as a senior my child is far more capable than I would expect, and when there is a real and actual problem, he will come to me. (Although if it is Maths, I will still send him to his Dad…)

At my age I have now seen the downsides of life as well as the upsides, and hopefully have learned from them.  In my twenties I was ambitious (and successful) and unthinking when it came to trampling over anyone when it came to my career.  I earned and spent a lot, without a care for the future.  I had a great time, and yet it took a lot of effort and energy in keeping up the momentum.  But I did a lot and experienced a lot, and part of me would probably be shocked if my kids did the same, but another would be sad if they didn’t at least have the freedom to try.  In my thirties I rethought my career ambitions so that I could work from home with my young kids – this was fulfilling, frustrating and fast paced.  This was also the time of weddings – one year we went to nine… My thirties disappeared faster than any other era.   Hitting the forties brought on the divorces – friends shattered the illusions of the Happy Ever Afters and I found myself trying not to side with one or the other.  It brought on the deaths of beloved members of family - one year we lost 5.  It  hit me personally last year showing  just how tangible and precious life is when we nearly lost Eldest Son, aged 13, in a rowing accident.  And you start putting on weight – Fat and Forty – it’s not just a saying, it’s a prediction…

Over the decades I have survived the advent of emails, HD TVs (let alone colour ones) and mobile phones.  I have learned to cook, briefly unlearned to cook in my twenties with the attraction of  takeaways and microwave meals, and then started to like cooking again.  I work in a job that suits me, rather than my conforming to the job.  I now change my hair colour, not because it is fun, but to cover the grey.  I’m never going to be the shape I was in my twenties – the years have taken its toll – but I am relatively comfortable in my own body. I have three fit and healthy boys whom I adore and to whom I will always be Mum.  I have learned (with some degrees of success) to not react to those who deliberately goad me, or whom I dislike on the first meeting.  They may have a point. I now take the time to enjoy my surroundings, be it on a walk in the woods with the dog, or a brand new cocktail bar. I have some very dear and old friends and some new acquaintances that I am looking forward to getting to know better.

I am old enough to have learned to give and take, and young enough to enjoy it. 

So it is with a philosophical smile that I will raise a glass to myself on my birthday.  Yes, in a couple of days I will be turning 45.  But I will be smiling.

Out of the Mouths of Babes

If you have children of 5 years or over, and are a car driver, then you will (if you haven’t already) one day discover a strange phenomenon known only by London cabbies or Limousine chauffeurs – that of the Invisible Ear.  That is, from the moment that your progeny starts to bring friends home for tea, or in the spirit of good mumminess you offer to give a wayward child a lift, or it’s your turn to do the football run, or indeed (as has once happened to me) a strange child simply clambers into the back of the car and demands to be taken to my house (I didn’t), as the driver, you suddenly become invisible.  Gone then are the two most important things that your children will say to you every day 1) what they ate for lunch  2) what are they having for dinner? 

Instead, their friend brings out of your child more information than you have ever done, and what amazing information that is – unless of course you make the stupid mistake of joining in, in which case if it’s the teenager involved, he merely looks at you wishing that you would instantly explode, if it’s the preteenager, he rolls his eyes and says that you’re really sad, and if it’s the 9 year old he and his friend become instant mutes and giggle on the back seat pretending to shoot you with their fingers…

But if you stay quiet and carry on driving, they carry on talking.  I now know why in my twenties, even thirties, all right… maybe a little into my forties, I would get into taxis with my mates after a night out, and at the end of the journey the driver would be laughing.   It is because, once those car doors close, there is a false sense of privacy, a feeling of shutting out the rest of the world, a space in which to release all that information that is rushing around your head, be it muzzy with alcohol, dizzy with teenage hormones or sparking with prepubescent neurons.

A friend of mine F, whose turn it was to do the netball run, set off in the car to pick up her daughters friend.  F rolled up to the house at 8.30 am in her duvet coat and wooly scarf, beanie shoved on her slightly hungover head, feet trussed up in wellies, teenage daughter in a strop.  The other mother A opened the door impossibly coiffeured and impeccably dressed in a crisp white t shirt and blue jeans, with casually low slung converse boots and not a scrap of make up.  Inwardly F marveled at how great A looked for her age, A was, after all, an older mum, as she bundled the girls into the car.  As she drove off, her daughter turned to her friend with a sigh and said ‘Your mum is soooo cool, she wears fab boots. And she looks sooo cool – I really love her hair, and she’s so pretty.’  F studiously carried on driving although her ears were reddening.  The other girl stopped BBMing on her phone and turned to her daughter, ‘You wouldn’t have said that a couple of weeks ago – she had a chemical peel and bits of her face were dropping off all over the place and she looked like an angry baby.’

Because of the car, I can now proudly talk as an expert on the merits of Xbox versus Playstation, can tell you why the England Cricket team are hopeless, what the best school dinner is, whose single is really the best in the Top 40 regardless of statistics, and who is the fittest girl in Year 4 (and why the girl with an ipad mini and an iphone doesn’t rank).  Other mums who have ferried my kids to places have told me what I wear in bed (or not), which of my children received a bona fide Valentines card (or three) and didn’t tell me, who we entertained for dinner at the weekend, and what I am getting for my birthday…

It does not, however transcend the Teachers Ear Syndrome, which thanks to several friends of mine, have kept us entertained on many a night out.  I asked one friend how her new posting was working out.  She said that a five year old Irish boy with the face of an angel had told her that his mummy thought she was much better than the ‘focking halfwit’ of a teacher that he had had before.  She was torn between correcting his language and defending her predecessor…

Perhaps though, it is best to enjoy the Invisible Ear phenomenon for what it is – a sign that your kids are growing up, learning to express themselves no matter what their age or style, and testing out their ideas and opinions in a contained (and motorized) vehicle. 

Just sit back, and enjoy the ride…

Tackling the Ma-Fia

I was doing the Taxi Run of Mum job which is normal most weekends – Middle Son was at a birthday party and I had already rescued stranded Eldest Son from the railway station (at the age of 14 he has discovered train travel – but alas not the intricacies of the Sunday Train Timetable)- and decided to stop in for a cup of tea at a friend’s house.  This woman runs her own successful business, has a house in which you could eat your dinner off the floor (unlike mine – unless you have a penchant for grey fluff) and a permanently optimistic view on life (I know, you hate her already).  We sat and chatted for a bit, and I said how I was looking forward to de-Christmassing the house and packing the kids off in their daily routine that is school.  She let out a sigh.  On enquiry, I found that she was not upset at the imminent thought of getting up for the school run, screeching at the kids to get into the car, racing towards the closing school gates,and finding that the swimming kit/school bag/lunch money (substitute what you will) had been left behind – oh no, she was getting worked up by something entirely different.  It was, she explained, having to deal with the other mums.

Now before your (or is it just mine?) imagination leaps forward to the images of the Mummies of Surrey and Hampshire hiding behind the school fences ready to leap out at my unsuspecting friend brandishing their Kath Kidson fold up umbrellas and yelling at the tops of their voices, she allayed any fears by saying morosely ‘It’s not that they are nasty, they all mean well, but they are just so full on – and this makes me feel inept.’  You see, my friend had got caught up in what I like to call the Ma-fia.  The Ma-fia are present in every society, every country and every community.  They comprise, very simply, mums with a Common Purpose.  They can be in the PTA, they can be in the Girl Guides groups, they can be on the soccer pitch, or the yoga class, or even the local library.  If you have a child, the chances are, whatever your circumstances, you have run into the Ma-fia at some point. 

The Ma-fia are kind to their members, travel in packs, swap handy hints and tips – subject related , and socialize together with great hilarity and with a common enjoyment – again, subject related.  The Ma of the Ma-fia, though, is not such an easy pushover.  She is, as Constance Van Flandern coined all those years ago, an ‘Alpha Mom’.  She is the leader, the one who decides who is in and who is out – who sets the initiation tasks, no matter how subtle (‘Oh, you take your tea with sugar? You’re very brave, considering your lovely curvaceous figure…’) and who sets the direction of her Ma-fia group.  Unlike the rest of the group, who begrudge any new people joining, and indeed are very resistant to change, Ma fully embraces the new and will advance, amoeba like into new territories, gathering people under her wing as she goes, spitting out those who she no longer needs, and the group simply follow behind.  This was where my friend came in.  Torn between the human urge to run with the crowd, the very real desire to be friends with the mothers of her daughters’ friends, and the feeling that she would somehow lose her sense of choice, she had escaped during the holidays by turning down every well meaning invitation to meet up.  But now term time was looming again, and she was worrying.

‘I am’, she exclaimed, dunking a biscuit in her tea and not noticing the soggy crumbs defiling the perfect polish of her granite work surfaces, ‘Blaming Grease, all the way…’

Now this was not a reflection on her diet, or indeed the can of WD40 that I noticed by the oven, but rather the seminal film of hers and my era – Grease, starring a very handsome John Travolta and an innocent young Olivia Newton John.  It was also the start of a whole load of ‘Teen Angst- Don’t belong to Groups- Trials of Individuality- Now belong to Groups’ type of films that we regularly used to go and watch and then discuss in detail whilst forking out for a coke and a bag of chips on the way home. It seemed that the desire to belong to the In Crowd overrode all common sense.  Thus Sandy, who tagged along with the Pink Ladies, and Danny, who headed up the T-Birds in their black leathers, were caught up in circles of their own making. One of the reasons that the film was so successful was the transformation of Sandy at the end into black leathers – her initiation and acceptance to and from the Pink Ladies complete, and therefore she was a worthy contender for the cool Danny (who never really convinced us with the Preppy look that he briefly adopted for Sandy’s benefit).

I turned to my friend.  She sat there morosely, bemoaning the fact that if she turned down more than three coffee or dining out invitations in the next couple of months then she would be ostracized by the Ma-fia, and her daughter would be tarred with the same brush.  This was a sensible, sane woman, who was not thinking sensibly or with any degree of sanity… ‘Just say NO’ I said.  Actually, my advice was a little more sanguine than that.  Frankly, the Ma-fia only succeeds on the fear factor – the fear of failure or being segregated or being ousted.  It is relatively easy to walk away from the group, but only without fear of remonstration.  This can be achieved in many ways – the excuse of busyness, the joining of another Ma-fia group, participating in the odd activity to keep the peace, or even setting up your own group (in which case you take on the mantle of Ma and all the Alpha problems that that entails). She smiled at me ruefully. 

I have no idea what path she will take.  And indeed, if in climbing out of one situation she heads off into another.  And it is very difficult to try not to belong. One thing I did urge her to do was to watch that old film again. 

Sandy’s transformation from innocent schoolgirl to leather clad vamp was actually not an attempt to join the Pink Ladies.  In fact, throughout the film, and most importantly at the end, she never wore their jacket.  Instead, at the very moment that she was accepted by them (and us), she had opted to wear a black leather jacket, reminiscent of the T-Birds.  She had transcended one group and become the Ma of an all male group. 

Grease really is the word…