The Mommy Blog | Adventures from the Wonderbelly of Motherhood

Friday, June 12, 2009

Other people who write, Family, Momversation

The momversation.com video before this last one, on stressed out working moms (oxymoron), caused a bit of a comment/posting frenzy. As I followed the thread through the momversation.com site, Twitter, and other blogs, I left comments sprinkled about like little “amens.” So guess what? I’m going to cobble them together in a post and hope it relays a coherent viewpoint on this whole judging-when-no-one-should-be-judging thing because there is no possible way for any mom to really feel the unique pain and joy of any other mom, regardless of work status, workload, workplace, or worklessness. Take that, UrbanDictionary.com.

One good thing that came of it is that I got an idea for a great web site, bought the domain name, and am working on it now. Stay tuned.

In response to Katie D.‘s comment, “I think you all must know that you are all kind-of a big deal hear on the interwebs with us moms who regularly read your blogs and watch you on Momversation. So I would say shooting for the middle has gotten you somewhere above that realm. And I think that is awesome because it proves that we may not be able to do it all, but we can do the things we really love doing quite well… One final thought: I really, really don’t like it when statements are made that give women some cast of credit for being able to “play trucks for four hours straight.” It feels like a statement like that should be followed with an “or whatever it is you do.” Sorry, it’s just a personal pet-peeve of mine and I think it comes from a misunderstanding of what SAHM’s really do.”

Honestly, thank you for the compliment, but I think there are many days when I/we don’t even aim, we just shoot for something and hope it lands. I’d go so far as to say (for myself) that it was a sense of totally doing it wrong and being inadequate as a mom that drove this need to write and let loose, and in the process discover that others felt the same and remove some of the stigma.

Also, no one plays trucks for hours. Kids might play trucks for hours, we might check on them over the hours, but seriously, no. You point out something shiny after a while and move slowly to something else, and stay downwind until you’re needed again.

In response to Sarah at OhanaMama’s comment, “the lovely ladies at momversation seemed waaaaaaay to calm to me to be working moms. Can I please have whatever it is they are taking because I would buy stock!.”

Clonazepam.

And in response to “I also wondered what sort of support group they have? Babysitters, mommy’s helpers, grandparents, are their children in school? Because I have yet to find a support system and am trying to conquer it all, just my hubby and me.”

Oh, and no support group. Just a few days “off” while they go to Dad’s, during which time I do laundry and wash the 648654th dirty baseball uniform of the season. I WISH I had someone else to help. I’d be a nicer person and a saner mom. Never had a mommy’s helper, never hire babysitters because when they are with me, that’s our time, period.

Stressed? Like a German consonant.

The kids are in school, and that helps so much. It feels like it took forever to get that last one through half-day kindergarten and have more than two hours in a row to do anything. Hint: if you have more than one child, you are delaying that time, waiting for each successive child to turn six.

[I understand that for you] Not having family close by is hard, but you can’t put a price on having the only other person on the planet who loves those kids as much as you do right there under the same roof.

In response to Cheryl’s comment on kdiddy.org’s post reply I will admit that this is one of the prickly issues that pushed my buttons, and I have a hard time having discussions about it without getting either accusatory or defensive. But, while I haven’t watched that episode, I saw the listing and caption on Dooce.com, and, to put it as diplomatically as I can, didn’t particularly think that Heather is the best poster child for working parenthood. Not that there’s not work involved in her blog empire, but that she just doesn’t begin from the same point on time management, logistics, control over workflow, etc. that many of us do.

I’m really disappointed to hear that there were no WOHMs (which is the acronym I’ve seen most) represented in the episode.”

@Cheryl, If I could find a job, I’d be a WOHM in an effing second!

One thing that drives me crazy about these conversations is that for purposes of time and editing for continuity, we have never addressed the fact that our being home isn’t necessarily by CHOICE. No job, no money for daycare. No job, plenty of time to get showered and dressed for two hours a week to film an episode. No job, good luck with insurance.

I’ve come to the conclusion that the only way I’ll ever be able to take care of my family is to marry rich, and unfortunately, that’s tacky.

In reply to KDiddy’s remark, “…because I’m a mom, I need to add a “mom” prefix to all nouns? “Well, let’s see, today I needed momceries so I went to the momstore and got mombread and momilk and mombutter.”)

Oh, and having “mom” somewhere in the name helps with searches and site optimization. : ) As I’ve learned from being the first to call her site The Mommy Blog. Who knew it would become a genre?

In response to MissZoot’s comment on kdiddy.org’s post reply to the episode, “Let’s talk more about the “not cleaning” part. I’m so glad that is what gets cut off your list too. I keep things picked up, so I can find things, but clean? NEVER. Bathrooms? Gross. Kitchen? Disgusting. Bedroom? Tornado.”

@Zoot, I have been getting dressed out of the laundry basket for ten years. I don’t think I even open drawers anymore. We should all share photos of our laundry FAILs.

In response to MissZoot’s own post reply to the episode, “There are two different types of working Moms. Those who work AT home and those who work OUTSIDE the home. I believe there is a huge difference in the TYPE of stress that a Mom who works OUTSIDE the home and a Mom who works AT home experiences. And what bugged me about the video? Most of the women on the panel were discussing working Mom stress as Moms who work (sometimes part time) INSIDE THEIR HOME. Shouldn’t at least half of the Working Moms on the panel be Moms who have to squeeze the 40-hour work week between commutes and trips to the daycare? Who can’t take that walk down the hall to throw the laundry in or lay chicken out for dinner and have to figure out ways to get those things done AFTER work?”

Baby, you know this better than 90% of the people who have ever been to my site: I was a better blogger when I worked in an office. I swear I feel like my best work is behind me because that frenzy of commute and care and cleaning and cooking and spousing and not sleeping because I had three kids in four years fueled great writing at an inhuman pace.

Now? I’m so depressed about being a divorced, out-of-work mom that I can’t even drag my ass to the computer to produce like I used to do. Now that I depend on it for what little money I do earn, I should be on it like a mofo, but the dismal state of my personal economy makes me sad, which needs medication, which costs a buttload because I have shit insurance, which is going to run out in a couple months (COBRA), and will be near impossible to replace without a working spouse (or any spouse) because I take medications for depression, which is caused by being out of work and… I’ve just gone cross-eyed.

Friday, May 22, 2009

Other people who write, Family, Fellow Parenting Authors, Moms Like Us

I have over fifty books in piles next to my desk that have been sent to me by publishers, publicists, authors, and agents. Their hope is that I will review each book. Mind you, these are only the ones I have expressed an interest in reading. There are lots more requests that get deleted because no one is paying me for this shit and I only have so much time to read after everyone’s in bed.

So, to do at least a bit of justice to these fine authors, knowing full well that it will be a warm day at a Chicago Bear’s playoff game before I get around to them all, I will list them here, and try to maintain a running list of what’s on deck. (Chances are that at any given moment I am reading a half-dozen of these at once and would give a schizophrenic review at best, which would beg revisitation of my med schedule for which I haven’t time nor money nor inclination.)

If I have missed any titles, please let me know in the comments. Any omissions or errors are mine and not a reflection on a book’s merit. Void where prohibited. Results may vary.

Family Life:

Biographical/Autobiographical:

Fiction:

Non-fiction/Inspirational:

Children:

Friday, May 15, 2009

Other people who write, Family

I’ve just finished reading an advance review copy of Phillip Done’s (rhymes with “phone,” wish I’d known that four years ago) new book, Close Encounters of the Third Grade Kind: Thoughts on Teacherhood. I loved it even more than Thirty-two Third Graders and One Class Bunny: Life Lessons from Teaching, which I’ve read at least four times and recommend to everyone I know.

If you know a third grader, or third grader teacher, or have even been a third grader, read this book, and then buy a copy for everyone you know.

You know how when you get a teacher you love and then whenever he/she asks a question you jump out of your seat, hurl your arm out of its socket, and beg to be called on so you can answer real-quick and then tell a story of your own? No? Am I the only one who did that? Well, reading this book makes you feel all jumpy and eager to share just like that poor little attention-starved child with the unibrow and big feet. I can think of about a dozen fab blurbs for the cover. Just let me know if you need one, sweetheart. Oh, that reminds me: as I waved goodbye to the kids tonight I said, “Bye-bye sweetie! I’ll miss you!” and my ex turned and said, “You too!” Uh, I meant my daughter, but right on.

He has so many fantastic stories to tell, and I kept firing off emails thanking him for doing what he does because I have a feeling that my middle child’s third-grade teacher views this year as a form of penance. She’s spent a lot of time out on the ramp of the portable classroom asking why he won’t do work that even approaches his ability. In fact, I forwarded the email she sent me letting me know that he did not complete a writing assessment yesterday because he spent all the allotted time sticking erasers up his nose and eating lead from a pencil to amuse his classmates. (When I questioned him later, he feigned ignorance. So I explained it a little more slowly, and he found The Loophole. “I didn’t have an eraser up my nose; I had one of those rectangle erasers and it was split halfway, and I opened it and clamped it on the OUTSIDE of my nose.” Ohhh, well, then.)

Teachers seem to be magnets for this stuff. Just tonight we were all at the school fair, and while I went off to guide Daphne through the Mexican buffet, a random kid walked up to my boyfriend, Phil, and asked, “Is barf recycling, trash, or landfill?”

“What?” said Phil.

“Is barf considered landfill, or trash, or recycling?”

“You mean throwup?”

“Yes.”

“Well, in some cultures—wait, are you saying you’re going to throw up?”

“No, my brother is.”

At this point I had arrived at the table and was doing the dancey-squealy thing with the kid’s mom because we’ve met only once before but are soulmates and bffs. I stopped hugging her just in time to hear, “I’m going to throw up.” Her younger son walked right over to the trash bin and fire-hosed it for forty seconds straight. WOW.

I went over and rubbed his back, asking if he was ok, and when his mom joined me I went off to get paper towels. I have to give this kid credit: he stayed bowed over the trash just as I asked and stayed that way until I could come back with napkins and break that string of vomit going from his lower lip to the hefty bag. His mom said they’d be going home, his older brother said, “Uh, I’m just going to get my dinner,” and the younger brother said, “I’ll wait outside.” I went with him.

Standing in the courtyard, I scoped out the nearest trash bin and turned him by the shoulders to face it. Just in case. He said he actually felt much better then, so I said, “Well, just in case, let’s go wash up with soap and water before you get into your mom’s car.” That was the last I saw of him until twenty minutes later when he and his brother ran up to us from the face-painting booth, apparently fit as fiddles. His mom is so cool. She just kept on talking with us.

Know how we met? Her son and mine arranged a playdate at pick-up, so we shook hands and agreed to get her kids back to her somehow later. I loved that she was so casual about it. When she called a few hours later I gave her directions, and she walked into the house with a bottle of wine, which we proceeded to empty while the kids tore up the yard. I couldn’t believe it. I heart her. She completes me.

Off to bed now—have been reading too many Lost message boards and my head is hurting from the theories. Plus my throat hurts from talking so much today. It’s been ages since I left the house and conversed with the general public for longer than it takes to do the school run. I’ll probably have to have speech therapy AND physical therapy once this Fifth Disease runs its course. Stupid Parvo.

Sunday, May 03, 2009

Other people who write, Momversation, Fellow Parenting Authors

An Interview with Melinda Roberts
by Jackie Papandrew

Melinda (Mindy) Roberts is one of the trailblazers of the mom blogging movement, having started her groundbreaking The Mommy Blog seven years ago. Now, as Roberts says, “Every third blog created these days seems to be called The Mommy Blog…All I’ve really managed to do is make my brand the Kleenex of the blogosphere.”

Mom Writer’s Literary Magazine just put out the new Spring/Summer 2009 Issue, and it’s definitely one worth picking up. I say “picking up” because Asha Dornfest is on the cover and I’m featured, so you might want to hang it somewhere in a heavy, gilt, museum-quality frame. Or, you can read it online. Suit yourself.

The fun thing about reading a feature for which you were interviewed MONTHS ago is seeing what’s current, what’s isn’t anymore, and what you said that maybe you shouldn’t have. I talk the same way I write: one draft, no revisions, no looking back. More balls than brain. Usually, though, there’s something funny in there I’d forgotten about, like the bit about the dueling nightstands in our house. I’m thrilled with the profile. Need a new photo, though.

But please! Have a look yourselves, and see why I practically worship Asha, co-panelist at Momversation.com and creator of the ever-more-famous ParentHacks.com.

Friday, March 27, 2009

Other people who write, Family

The school science fair was the other night, and boy are my arms tired.

For starters, there was no rhyme or reason to the displays. There were approximately 467964368763 science experiments, all displayed on the same three-foot tall, tri-fold presentation boards. All using the same Word Art for titles and text. It was like looking through a room full of travel brochures and trying to figure out which one your own kid wrote. It was not for the faint of heart, and temperatures approached Irritable with all the bodies in the cafeteria.

My best friend’s son (who will marry Daphne one day, God willing) did an experiment based on something he saw Les Stroud do on Survivorman.

The title refers to the host of the show, Canadian filmmaker and survival expert Les Stroud, who must use his skills to survive for seven days alone in remote locales with little or no food, water, and equipment.

During the filming of each episode, Stroud is alone and operates all the cameras himself. He is equipped with only his clothes, camera equipment (which he does not use for survival except in an emergency), his harmonica, a Leatherman multi-tool, and often “everyday items” relevant to the episode’s particular survival scenario.

In one episode, he ran out of water and was forced to build a solar still to recycle his own urine. Understandably, this seven year old boy was FASCINATED with the idea. He wanted to do it for the science fair.

His mother, being ever sane and sanitary, encouraged him to use water with food coloring in it instead of his own urine. He built the still, waited and observed, and it worked! So, of course I had to see the presentation board.

When I found it, another parent was hunched over, reading all the little notes and peering at the pictures. While waiting my turn to check it out, I said, “I can’t believe they wimped out and didn’t use urine.”

The man looked at me as if I were crazy. I glanced at the board. No mention was made of the inspiration behind the project. Great. I just walked up to a stranger and talked about drinking urine without a shred of context.

In other news, I plan to finally get around to listing and even reviewing some of the eleventy books y’all have so generously sent to me. I’m actually reading some or all of these at once, and finished the others some time ago. It’s long overdue, either way. So stay tuned for comments on all of these books.

Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Other people who write, Family, Life

PERFECT update this morning from ZenHabits.

Let the World Pass You By

“The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.” - Bertrand Russell

Post written by Leo Babauta. Follow me on Twitter.

I was sitting outside my new home yesterday (we just moved last week, and we love the new place), watching the world go by.

There were people in cars, in a hurry to get to their next appointment. There were birds flying by, insects just as busy as the people in cars, plants and weeds thriving in the humid Guam climate.

Inside the house, my children were also busy, as ever, making a mess of the house (which my wife and I would soon clean up), getting into things, their natural curiosity overpowering our previous pleas for them not to play with lotion or take things apart.

The sky was slightly overcast and there was a cool breeze, quite strong and pleasant actually.

It’s not often that most of us just sit quietly, and allow the world to pass us by.

Why not?

What is so important that it can’t wait until later? What email must be answered right this moment? Do we really need to read all those articles online, all those messages from others, all those newspapers and magazines? Do we need to have the television and radio and Internet on all the time?

Is life passing us by as we keep our minds super-busy? Are we missing out on the beautiful world around us as we constantly think about the future — what we need to do, our anxieties about what might happen — and the past — what we did wrong, what someone else did to us, what we said, what should have happened?

When was the last time you just sat, and observed? Why not do it today?

Thursday, January 15, 2009

Other people who write, Technology

I don’t subscribe to many email lists; in fact, I think I can count on one and a half hands the number to which I’ve intentionally and usefully subscribed, but I read an incredibly insightful post one day and thought, oh hell, might as well have SOME zen in my life. I subscribed to Zen Habits last week and it’s been paying off nearly every day.

Today’s post is brilliant: a list of features he’d like to see in GMail. He is already a huge fan, and given the improvements they’ve made over the years, thinks they do listen.

Google Features I’d Like To See
by Leo Babauta
Ability to tell other Gmail users that I’m busy and can’t be bothered with more email, similar to how your status shows in Gmail chat, but appears when they’re about to email me. If they decide to email me anyway, despite my “Do Not Disturb” status, they will be warned that the email probably won’t be read, will be archived and become dusty, and that they’ll have to send a follow up message to me in a few days because I’ll have completely flaked on replying.

The ability to remind you to follow up on an email if someone hasn’t replied and you’ve marked it as needing a follow up. Also, if you enable auto-follow-up, it’ll automatically follow up with a short, polite email. Or maybe it’ll just play a small coughing sound in the other person’s Gmail: “Ahem…”

Phone answering service. Should be able to converse with the caller, and sound like me, and route any relevant info to Gmail. If the caller is a telemarketer, the Google service should try to sell them something, such as my book, and be very pushy about it. Don’t take “no” for an answer, Gphone!

A button similar to “Report Spam” for when you receive a spam email, except that it says “Spam Back” and when you press it, the spammer receives all the spam you’ve received in the last 90 days.

Yet another similar button that says “Report Joke/Chain” so that anytime someone keeps sending you joke emails, chain emails, or sappy forwarded emails, these are automatically filtered out (like spam is). Real emails from the same sender would be let through the filter. In addition, you can enable an automatic reply to the sender of chain/joke/forwarded emails that informs them that they really should pause longer before forwarding messages to people, as it fills up people’s inboxes needlessly, the blonde jokes weren’t very funny in the first place, and no, Bill Gates isn’t really tracking this chain email and won’t give you a million dollars for forwarding it.

It reminds me of the old days, managing the software for a foundation and listening to requests for new features, and thinking, “You want to do this… without people? What, you stay home and collect the paycheck?” He gets carried away, but I swear to peanuts if any of this becomes available I will be adding features like Count Dracula.

Heh. At the end of the post, is says, “Post written automatically by Google autoblogger.”

I love it.

all over it like interest on a credit card

Thursday, January 08, 2009

Other people who write, Life

History is not a straight line going from the beginning to the end, it loops and swirls eventually finding its way back to places its been before. Don’t believe me, see for yourself.

Man, careful how far you click through on that one there, you could get lost for days.

History is repeating—duh—and I dug further proof out of my files while looking for the garage door warranty (Torsion spring still broken. No open for you.). The paper was yellowed and wrinkled, old, at least ten years, but I’d carefully preserved it, thinking it would retain its relevancy.

Unfortunately, I was right.

I give you Jonathan Clements’ “41 Ways to Accentuate the Positive” when the economy has gone to hell. Number eight is particularly apt for me: “You don’t feel sheepish anymore about owning mutual funds.” Or about having given the retirement accounts away in the divorce.

You can't win if you can't play. You also can't lose.

Saturday, January 03, 2009

Other people who write, Family

So the kids have been off from school for two weeks now, and it’s been great wearing pj’s the whole time and letting the routines, bedtimes, and meal quality slip, but we are now engaged for re-entry. Brace yourself. Items may have shifted during flight. It will take some time to regain balance and agility, especially in the homework department (frankly, I’ll be happy just to find their backpacks).

Alpha Mom has an excellent set of tips on How to Get Your Reluctant Child to Do Homework (without Yelling, Threats or a Double Martini). First, I’m going to side with Phil, who says the kids shouldn’t be drinking martinis while doing homework. The rest is awesome advice. I’m going out to buy several egg timers this weekend (because they for sure will be broken, “fixed” or otherwise tampered with). Personally, I think Tip #4 is the most critical.

By Christina of Fairly Odd Mother

1. Make Homework a Priority.
Set a time of the day aside for homework and don’t stray (often). If homework is something your kids have to squeeze in between karate, piano lessons and soccer practice, they’re not going to think of it as important. And, unless you really enjoy overdramatic tears and hearing every excuse in the book, avoid doing homework right before bedtime at all costs.

TheMommyBlog