Julie Pippert: Using My Words

There are worse things I could do

2009-10-27T12:48:00.010-05:00

It's a jungle out there, which requires skilled juggling and a bag of tricks, too.

When Grease! (the movie) came out, my friends and I went Grease-crazy. Everyone bought the album, and we poured over the foldout album cover's yearbook style collection of photos. We tried to decide which T-Birds were cute versus too greaser, and which photo of Danny and Sandy was best. Meanwhile, the vinyl record played on the record player in the background, repeating the songs until they were burned into my brain for thirty years (and probably beyond).

For my birthday, I had a fifties themed party that year. All the kids came in rolled up jeans and tee-shirt or puffy poodle skirts. I have the photos still, and there we are dancing, singing, and mugging in a big group for the camera. It's amazing how period-perfect we looked. It's amazing how carefree and happy we were.

When I look at the photos, I remember other things beyond the giant amount of fun we had at my party, beyond how thrilled I was when the first doorbell chimed with the first guest. I remember how my entire birthday nearly crashed and burned before it even happened, courtesy of a very mean girl who lived on my street. And I remember how Grease fixed it.

Most girls liked Summer Nights or Hopelessly Devoted, and I did too, but this little heart-breaker from Rizzo (Stockard Channing) was my favorite.

Grease was the first time I caught a hint that the incredibly scary Girl World (via Rosalind Wiseman) I inhabited was not my own personal limited experience (and occasional nightmare). Here was an entire movie about the scary dynamics between girls, their friends, and boys, too. It was, apparently, a universal truth, a universal experience. That truly helped to know. The movie played to sterotypes but not too deeply. Each female character had a little bit of complication and depth:

You had Betty Rizzo, the head Pink Lady. A tough girl. Hard of mouth and hard of heart. Sexy. The school loose girl. Plays insider jokes to heighten a sense (or fear of) exclusion. Sets up pranks and prats for Sandy, the new girl, to trip over. The Mean Girl.

Then there was Marty, often Rizzo's right-hand girl. Pen pal to a long billfold full of servicemen. Goes for older guys. Flirtatious. Hints of sweetness and innocence, or wicked irony in naming her after a cherry that's been popped and pickled. Borrowed sophistication.

Frenchie was the girl who floated around the edges of the Pink Ladies, and tried to truly befriend Sandy, but not enough to stand up for her when the ladies target her. Frenchie has her own issues, anyway.

Jan, the class clown who seemed to follow Rizzo more often than not.

Last but not least, you had Sandy Olsson, the new girl, the good girl, the one who is just trying to be nice and yet somehow inadvertently stepped all over toes everywhere while trying to figure out who she is and how she fits in.

The quintessential coming of age story.

Also? The quintessential Girl World movie. Well before anything starring Lindsay Lohan. A whole generation before, in fact.

Shelley was the Rizzo of our neighborhood, and Moria was her Marty/Frenchie. Mine as well. Shelley was completely a power player -- a player with power. She was the youngest of older parents, with older siblings. Her older siblings were in high school and could barely spare us a glance. She was incredibly spoiled. She got more money, candy, and TV than the rest of us combined. She also got a lot more freedom. And she used that liberally.

She'd plan trips to the corner store, which required walking up a major road for several blocks. My mother put her foot down with a big no. Shelley sweetened the pot saying she'd buy everyone a bubblegum who came. I pleaded. I whined. I threatened. My mother held firm. And so I'd watch the kids tromp off with Shelley, who had the lead, of course. She'd tell them how to walk and which songs to sing. They all came home with new bubblegum card packs. How I felt: my mother was in my way of maintaining my position in the pack. She was ruining my life. And it was all Shelley's fault, too.

Shelley moved in after we did, and by the time she arrived, my sister and I were good friends with the two sisters next door -- by luck we were all of an age. Shelley leapt into the center of that, of course. She offered constant tests of her friendship and friends' loyalty to her. She'd dare them, challenge them to prove how they'd do anything for her, for her friendship, and the kids invariably did.

Except me.

And thus began the battle.

By the time my birthday rolled around, the war was in full heat. Shelley threatened to tell everyone to skip my birthday. Much drama and threats and tears and yelling and more drama ensued. I wish I remember exactly how it all worked out, but my memory gets a little hazy at that point. I think some of the mothers talked and the kids were given no choice. Except, maybe, Shelley. She never said one way or another whether she was coming, but in the end, with the entire neighborhood and our friends all there, she came. The last guest to arrive.

I remember her arrival and how I tensed. Missy, my lifelong good friend who went to another school and lived in another neighborhood, had heard about Shelley but never met her. Caryn, my very own personal best friend in the whole wide world, knew Shelley well from school. When Shelley arrived, I deployed my manners, but then I also gave into a hissy fit. I stalked back to my bedroom with Missy and Caryn and vented about Shelley coming.

They tried to reassure me that I should ignore her, that it would be fine, that she wouldn't cause any trouble. They talked me into returning to the party and having fun anyway. Then Missy delivered the coup de grace, "She doesn't seem so bad, anyway, Julie," she said, "I mean, from your descriptions I sort of expected Regan!" (Regan, from The Exorcist.)

Could nobody see how bad this girl was? How manipulative? Could nobody see her games? Every time I tried to talk to anyone about Shelley and the misery she caused, I got a lot of "ignore her" and "it's not that bad" and "you need to quit making such a big deal out of it" and "let it roll off your back." I also got, "she's insecure," and "she's jealous of you," which I did not buy for one second. Shelley had nothing to envy, that was clear, plus she never seemed envious or insecure. The worst was, 'You're letting her do this, letting her get to you." After a while, I began to believe that it was true: I was the problem, I made the problem by naming it, and it was all my fault. Not to mention, I must deserve it.

On some level, though, I continued to think Shelley was the bad news, not me, and someone needed to notice and take care of it.

I stalked out to my party with my friends, and Caryn, always the fun and funny girl, said, "Let's twist again, like we did last summer!" She swung her hips and demanded music and dancing. Nobody cared it was anachronistic. Nobody cared because we all just wanted to have fun.

I ran to the big stereo table and grabbed the Grease album. A Rizzo photo caught my eye. Suddenly, the Shelley v me situation was so clear. It was life or death to her, or felt like it was to her, to be in charge of the Pink Ladies (or our neighborhood). It was who she was, and my constant challenges on the basis of fairness and principles to her authority, while seemingly rational and reasonable to me, were attacks of the very fiber of her being to Shelley. Shelley would never give up her Queen Bee perch, and we'd never be friends, no matter how much I followed my mother's entreaties to "be nice and you'll make friends." I didn't like her, she didn't like me, and we disagreed about the rules of the 'hood.

Right in the moment I was ready to slap her with my glove (metaphorically), I realized...I didn't even really want a duel, and the principle was really not that important to me. I'd been engaged via my stubbornness, only. In fact, maybe, just maybe, I was part of the problem. In fact, maybe, just maybe, I'd been a bit territorial about the friends when she arrived. Maybe I wasn't quite blameless. Maybe things weren't so simple or black and white.

I looked at Caryn, Missy, and the girls I really liked. True friends.

In my mind, I stepped aside. The next day and the day after that, I stepped aside. I quit letting Shelley be That Important, That Powerful. I'd made my point -- I wasn't her subject. I couldn't force others to make the same choice, and in that instant, I realized that these girls probably wouldn't. They'd keep playing her game. In the end, that had been what I'd wanted. In my mind, it was justice -- to convince these girls to see the power player for who she was and to abandon her court, so we could return to the happy play days we'd had before she arrived.

But it would never be, and so, I opted out.

I took the measure of the other girls and recognized them for the Marty, Frenchie, Jan, Betty Rizzo, Sandy, Patty Simcox and so forth that they were. I recognized them for who they were as much as which roles they played. And I got it, sort of.

I opted out, and things were more peaceful. Nobody thanked me. Nobody expressed appreciation that I'd quit putting them in the middle of a struggle between me and Shelley. Nobody said they were glad that the tenseness eased.

But the friendships got a little easier, and Shelley's teasing had no more nerve to hit.

I found out that Shelley wasn't evil personified at all, sometimes, she was even kind of fun. But, she was not a girl I'd ever particularly like. And that? Was okay. Because we could get along.

I wish I could say that there was never another problem, or that I didn't continue to have to close my eyes and count down my anger. I wish I could say I really learned learned that lesson, and never went through the same things again and again throughout my youth. But, I needed to learn it a little bit more thoroughly. The key, though, was that Shelley, Rizzo, and Grease! did provide valuable perspective: it's not really life or death, it's not the end of the world, you can make a choice, and in the end, you can always opt out.

I'm still learning how and when to do this, but as I raise my daughters -- and re-read the new edition of Queen Bees and Wannabes (just go get it -- it's still as good, and better, with updates, additions, and the new technology chapter that helped me and my husband settle on a Specific Policy WRT Technology and now I sleep better at night. really.) -- I have an empathy for the Girl World they inhabit that I hope translates into useful and supportive parenting.

Because of all the Shelleys, Morias, and similar that I met in life, it caused me to constantly seek perspective and positive tools to handle the situations.

Because of Grease! and Rizzo, I always suspect that under each Girl World role-player lies a real feeling human being, who, regardless of role, probably feels like the real girl Rizzo sang about:

I could hurt someone like me,
Out of spite or jealousy.
I don't steal and I don't lie,
But I can feel and I can cry.
A fact I'll bet you never knew.
But to cry in front of you,
That's the worse thing I could do.

It doesn't make us like each other. It doesn't make the world sunshine and roses whenever we're around each other. But it does provide an underlying base of understanding, that can enable us to let it go -- in a real way, a positive way, not a "try to shut it out and sweep it under the rug way."

So when my older daughter refused to say goodbye to a classmate one day, and when I asked about it said, "She's always so mean to me!" I thought of Mean Shelley, and I thought of Wise Rosalind, and I checked my personal baggage and asked, "What does that mean, she's mean to you? What is mean?"

In this case, mean meant bossy. Mean meant challenging my daughter's perceived right to run her own show, and that show might include a cast of characters that overlapped the other girl's show. In this case, it meant a Shelley and Julie dynamic.

I took a deep breath...and we talked.

I watched my daughter consider taking the same step I had, and letting it go. For now, though, we agreed that you don't have to be friends, but you do always have to be courteous, which means accepting it when it comes your way.

It's never simple, never black and white. There are always multiple players in any game, and a key is deciding what you are doing, and whether it fits with your own personal convictions for who you are and what your morals are.

Imagine all the people...celebrating more birthdays

2009-09-30T13:49:00.010-05:00

It was days, really, between learning my friend was being sent home, cancer treatment suspended, and learning she had passed away. Sadly, the first symptom came well after the cancer had already metastasized and spread. They began intensive treatment, aggressive. It was hard on her, but she had a lot to live for: loving family, loving friends, and two beautiful children, as well as all of her work, including a book she authored for children about children on the autism spectrum. That was her: a do-er.

She was the sort of person you could picture growing older, still doing. I could even picture her forty years from now blowing out a cake full of candles. In my imagination, over her cake, her hair was still bright, as it was before she got sick. She’d do that, I knew, keep herself looking nice. She’d have a big smile, and she’d tell everyone they shouldn’t have made such a fuss, but everyone would ignore her because they knew she was deeply touched -- family and family times were everything. I wished that for her with all my heart.

When I got the message she was gone, I denied it. I didn’t believe it until I read her obituary in the paper. I left a comment on the online memorial. I spoke about what a fantastic person she was. I spoke about how heartbreaking a loss it was. I mentioned nothing of my anger.

The next day, I went for a run. My feet pounded the track in fury. The hot Texas summer sun pounded me back, just as brutal as my anger. I hate this, I thought, I hate this day. My children had been surly, uncooperative, and cranky. The day was intolerably hot and humid. The sun was relentless. I pulled myself along the straight stretch before a curve that took me along the water.

My iPod stumbled out of my pacing songs and Falling Slowly came on. I nearly clicked to the next song, but the lyrics caught and tugged at my grief. We’ve still got time…the song trilled. But my friend doesn’t, I thought, my friend hasn’t got more time. Why not? I knew how she’d feel about that, and that she’d be of two minds, and unapologetic. That’s how she was. She called it like it was. But she also called blessings for what they were too. I felt ashamed of my ingratitude: for having known her, for all the gifts I received from her, for the beautiful children she brought into the world and would not get to see grow up, for the fact that I had today, another day with my children even if they were cranky and I was grief-stricken and miserably hot.

I took the curve in the track a little slowly and I thought hard about her. She’d have loved this hot day. She’d have loved to be healthy and bickering with her children about getting ready for day camp. She would have loved having this day, I knew. And I wanted to give it to her, a late or early birthday gift, depending upon how you looked at it.

Here it is, I thought with my mind and heart, here is this day, another day, one you would have liked, one that was hot, one that was about being a mom, one that was about making a healthy choice.

I sent the experience of the day up and out, and away to her. And a little bit of grief fell away from my heart. She may not have another birthday, but I do. She may not get to celebrate another birthday with her kids, but I can. And I can send the appreciation and joy from that to her.

My friend, and all the other friends, mothers, sisters, daughters, brothers, fathers, husbands, wives – all the other people who have gone, or are still here fighting, or stand beside someone fighting cancer – are why I joined the American Cancer Society’s More Birthdays effort. I can take a page from my friend’s book and be a do-er. I can celebrate and recognize that every birthday is a blessing.

***********************************************************************************
I am a member of the American Cancer Society's Blogger Advisory Council, a small group of volunteers that advises the Society on its social media strategy. Part of our mission is to spread the word that we have power in the fight against cancer. The first step is to build awareness and engage women. Visibility equals power! So we have started a blog "chain" to spread the word among women bloggers. We call it Bloggers for More Birthdays.

You can help me!

Join Bloggers for More Birthdays by dedicating a blog post to someone you love who's been affected by cancer. Host the badge on your site to build visibility. It's a simple way to celebrate those you love. Just write a post, host our badge, and know that whatever you write, you’re raising awareness and inspiring others to join American Cancer Society in the fight against cancer.

And please, host the special Bloggers for More Birthdays badge on your blog to encourage others to join. Just visit our site for the code to grab a badge, and sample posts.

We want to spread the word, so we ask you to get others in your networks involved by sending them your posts and asking them to dedicate a post of their own. If you don't have your own space online, email a post to bloggersubmit@officialbirthdayblog.com and we'll post it for you.

You can tweet about the chain as well, please use #morebirthdays:

Examples:

dedicate a blog post to someone you love with cancer and tell their story join http://bit.ly/13kS6L for #morebirthdays

blog against cancer: join http://officialbirthdayblog.com/category/bloggers/ for #morebirthdays

Blog for #morebirthdays, less cancer join http://officialbirthdayblog.com/category/bloggers/

Happy Birthday.

The American People in their Righteous Might*

2009-09-11T11:15:00.018-05:00

* Title from a speech by FDR immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor

Eight years ago I was so pregnant I was at that "oh no you didn't go and make me move, now I'll have to sit on you and crush you" stage.

When I woke up that morning, I lay on my side, the left, of course, with my knees slightly bent, of course, and I contemplated the floor. Was it going to be easier, I wondered, to maneuver the upper half of my body upright first, or to kick my legs hard enough to get momentum to drop them over the edge of the bed to help hurtle me into a standing position?

In the end, hunger is what really got me out of bed that day. But still, I moved at the speed of snail.

That's why I was still in my car zipping through Salem, slowing only to consider stopping for a pistachio donut at the greatest little bakery right before the historic square. In my mind, the morning is molasses slow motion and details are vivid. It was a gorgeous perfect New England fall day. Brilliant sky, crisp air with sunlit warmth. I glanced to my left as my car slowed for the curve and checked out the window display for the Salem doll lady, then swung my head to the right to drool over the gorgeous Victorians. The witch museum off the square was preparing for Halloween. Not a morning like any other, a sharper more perfect morning than any other. A day that should have been as spectacular as the weather, as the coming season with all its fun and treats and special moments.

NPR chirped the news in my ear. I turned off to Marblehead, and as I drove into my work parking lot I felt so lucky: I was pregnant, healthy, had a great job, lived in the most beautiful place in the US, had a great husband and life was good.

That's why I was so stunned, so disbelieving when the newscaster stumbled over his words and said, "This can't be right...we're getting reports that a plane has struck the World Trade Center...we don' t understand the report, we need to check, we'll keep bringing information..."

That's the moment the day started to move in fast motion blur.

I actually ran into my office building, the first office was the film guy. He had all sorts of TVs and equipment and people were crammed into his office.

"Oh my God," I said, "They're saying...planes? In New York City?"

"I know," my coworker Frank said, "We're watching..."

And the bodies parted and we turned to the television just in time to see the second plane hit. There was a long, loud audible inhale, and maybe a short scream, but what I really recall was the publisher's long low moan. "My son," she said, "My son is in that building!" She hurried from the room and it was so, so quiet until several people started murmuring oh my god.

The newscasters were talking about Boston, about threats and planes to Boston, to the Financial District where my husband worked.

I tore my eyes away from the television and hurried to my office. I called my husband, "Oh my God did you see?"

We spoke for a few minutes then he said there was a commotion outside his office. He came back a minute later, "There are military planes flying over my building," he told me, "What is happening?"

"You should leave," I said, "I heard they're shutting down the trains."

"I don't know," he said, with that reluctance of people who've been through too many false fire alarms.

A minute later I heard urgent shouting behind him. "What was that?"

"A fireman," he said, "He told us all to get out, now, not to shut anything down just go."

"Do it," I said, "Run as fast as you can to try to get space on the train. Get off at Swampscott," I said, naming a stop significantly south of us, "I'll drive to get you."

"I'll call you," he said. But cell service went out and it was the last I heard from him for hours and hours.

Nobody understood. Nobody comprehended. But urgency began penetrating the shock.

I drove to Swampscott and waited. Much later than expected, the train arrived, so full that people stood on the steps, clinging to the rail, white-faced, silent. People poured out. "There he is!" an older woman said out loud. "Oh I'm glad," I said. "Do you see your husband yet?" she asked. "No, no, not yet." Her son joined her and they lingered beside me until I burst out, "Oh thank goodness there he is!" She smiled at me and left, one happy end to one story that day.

Every architect in America who watched the news that day knew what was coming. The World Trade Center towers are standard lesson in architectural school. My husband predicted nearly to the minute when the towers would fall, and how. Later, I heard countless architects share the same story.

So much grief and anger. So much sudden comprehension. So much seeing what would happen next with deep dread. So much so unavoidable. So much anger about what could have been, or should have been, known and avoided.

My sister-in-law called. She'd been rounded up by the FBI. That's how she phrased it -- rounded up. "I stood behind him in line," she said, "The terrorist guy, the one who flew the Boston plane. He was right in front of me." She was terrified and the FBI kept questioning her. They took all her bags -- briefcase and purse -- and her car. She cried. Not from fear, but because she had nothing to tell them. She wished she had something to tell them.

We all wished we had the right words that day, the ones people wanted to hear.

I remember being so confused by my shock. "It's not like it's the first time this sort of thing has ever happened," I kept saying.

"Always will we remember the character of the onslaught against us.

No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.

I believe I interpret the will of the Congress and of the people when I assert that we will not only defend ourselves to the uttermost, but will make very certain that this form of treachery shall never endanger us again.

Hostilities exist. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory and our interests are in grave danger.

With confidence in our armed forces - with the unbounding determination of our people - we will gain the inevitable triumph - so help us God. "

--- Franklin Roosevelt's Pearl Harbor speech, December 8, 1941

The truth is, history and past events not withstanding, it was unprecedented, what happened that day.

Shock became anger, anger became action, action became war, and then the losses compounded, as did the deep divisions, and the cementing of opinions and sides.

Eight years later.

That baby is nearly eight now. My baby, I mean, not the war.

But you can't hardly think of ages without realizing that we've been at war my daughter's entire life. That children her age are missing someone. I read an essay today by a 9/11 widow. She has meticulously architected, in her mind, her husband's death, and her own life to this day.

This morning, on another 9-11 -- which remains, no matter what, not just any other day in September, not any other Friday or birthday or deadline or any event, special or mundane, Nine Eleven -- I felt sluggish as I did eight years ago. I pushed myself around the track, though, bribing myself with an episode of This American Life: "Fine Print." They interviewed an Iranian man who had been seized, imprisoned, tortured and forced into a false confession about conspiring with Western Powers. Western makes me think of cowboys, which isn't too far off if you think more deeply about how the West was won. Western makes Middle Easterners, okay, Iranians, think of 1953 and how the West won then, too. They have not forgiven or forgotten, and it lends credence to the false confessions, which are actually well-planned and profesionally delivered.

Omid Memarian's confession was well-planned and professionally delivered, despite his best attempts to surreptitiously poke sticks in the spokes.

He said that he realized, a week or so into his detainment (such a word) and torture, that he wasn't even the real target -- the perceived threat. He was merely an innocent bystander, so to speak, a tool to threaten and get at the real targets and true perceived threats. He sounded put out, and humiliated. To go through all this and just to be a tool.

Sort of like the people in the Towers, on the planes, in the field in Pennsylvania. The people lost in 2001.

Memarian falsely confessed in 2004, his country ramping up its anti-Western strategy, possibly as a direct result of US actions -- although they seem to dislike the British as intensely -- which were a result of the 9/11 attacks which were a result of...

War is a Mobius strip.

So here we all are, eight years later, continuing to feed in on ourselves, feed on ourselves.

Memarian also said that while he was being tortured he thought, "I don't want this to become that divisive moment, that defining moment, not for me, not when I'm only 30."

As a journalist, he said, explaining, you spend time with people in tragedies, and you realize that there are these moments when life becomes split into Before and After. He'd interviewed detainees and torture victims, among others, and he said they just never quite recover themselves.

The producer of the show, Nancy Updike, didn't ask him to explain what he meant. At this point, eight years later, we all comprehend what that means.

1941
1953

In 1969 Elisabeth Kubler-Ross published her book On Death and Dying. In 1969, a lot of people knew a lot about loss and grief. In 1969, four generations of men had fought four generations of wars. In 1969, war didn't bring about a baby boom, it brought about a baby bust. The joke is that the Baby Boomers were too busy being eternal teenagers and living selfishly to actually have children, but if you asked me straight out I'd say that's silly, straight out.

Anyway, as we all know, they waited until the first Gulf War was over to have children. Maybe we all thought war was petering out, by then. It certainly didn't have the same impact the Vietnam War had on us, culturally. Also, the Greatest Generation had already happened, so what was left to the rest of us? Lesser? Frankly that was fine by me. I didn't mind having a lesser and more comfy life. I was happy to appreciate the mettle testing the gradnparents' generation had sustained if it meant I got to miss out on a Great Depression and World War.

Anyway, though, as we all know, that wasn't to be.

2001
2009

Kubler Ross said there were five stages of grief. Have we hit number 3, Bargaining, yet? or are we stuck at 2, Anger?

You aren't supposed to rush the process.

But maybe, just maybe, it's time to let go of the second stage.

I heard that the ability or willingness to traverse the stages linked to the amount of meaning and purpose one has in life.

Here's to us finding, nationally, a new and strong meaning and purpose beyond the before and after, beyond the anger and fear.

I learned a lot more about loss and grief, personally, this summer. That's why right now it feels so important, urgent maybe even, to me to say we need to celebrate.

A short while ago, on a curve in a track by the water, I cried about a lost friend. I cried because I hated the day -- it was hot, the children had been contrary -- and she would have loved it. I cried because I was here and she was not. How I wish you were here to have this day, my heart cried. That's when it hit me: I needed to have this day and find the joy in it, and send it up to her, somehow.

Live and let live.

We need to have this day and find the joy in it and send it up, somehow.

Anger in another language

2009-09-08T13:17:00.007-05:00

I've been subtly correcting my children lately. Persistence has anger management issues, which I realize is the definition of a four year old, but directing that from anti-social to acceptable communication is the definition of mother.

"Stomp your foot, say I feel angry! That's okay! It's not okay to hit or say hurtful things!"

If I had a dollar for every time I said that the private school tuition would be paid for.

We used to say mad. But the phrase "I'm mad" began to get under my connotation, denotation, and grammatically OCD skin.

I did not like picturing Ophelia. I did not like being put in mind of a mad bull, someone enraged; greatly provoked or irritated; angry; abnormally furious; ferocious; extremely foolish or unwise; imprudent; irrational.

Although upon reflection, perhaps mad is the right word, after all. But we've stuck with anger. Angry sounds like something you can get under control. Mad, enraged, fury does not.

Betty Draper is walking fury.

My friend Becky generously loaned me her disc collection of the first season of Mad Men. I leapt into the show a few episodes into season 2. Season 1 is a real eye-opener. It also proves that this show was completely self-actualized and brilliant from the beginning.

Yesterday I watched the episode where an ad man appealed to Betty Draper's vanity and asked her to be a model for a campaign. It was all part of a different campaign entirely -- to recruit her husband from Sterling Cooper to this other firm. When he declined, Betty's photoshoot and campaign was scrapped. Ruthlessly. Without thought for her face, or any saving of it. The next day, she went outside and began shooting at her neighbor's pigeons. It's nearly too complicated to explain why, but she had her reasons.

I think it was really because he made her little girl cry and she was just that done with men and their oppression and manipulation.

I was thinking about Betty Draper when reading (again) Isabel Allende explain how Chilean women render their men utterly dependent on them domestically, pampering them like babies, thinking they are queens of the castle, without really understanding they were royalty in name only.

It's really about trying to find comfort in any perception of power in a powerless place.

I wonder how Chilean men who can't cook for themselves and mad men who objectify women into sex and chess pieces explain the current level of pigeon-shooting anger that obscures our national vision now. Pea-soup murky hazy miasma.

Anger.
Mad.

Ira.
Furia.
Cólera.

Choler makes me realize we have a long and lethal history with anger, we people. We understand it is more than an emotion; it is also a physical and physiological thing. In horror movies, anger summons poltergeists who feed on the fury, are attracted to it.

I wonder if too many of us in the US, in the world, have become poltergeists, attracted to and feeding off of anger.

Today I told my sister I am angry about everything. For example, I told her, I am angry that some utility company or another has been digging in my backyard for nine months. Then I laughed because it is foolish to be angry about this. It's self-pity really. But I've got a hearty mad on about it.

She said she is angry too. For example, she told me, she is angry that she ordered a necessary suit for her son three weeks ago and said she needed it by today. The store said fine, then when she went today to pick it up, the angry sales clerk angered my sister by telling her she was being ridiculous: delivery trucks only come on Thursdays.

My sister called me in the first place because she is angry about something else. I am angry about that, too. We are angry because it is, and even more because there is nothing we can do about it.

Oppressed.
Manipulated.
Powerless.
Angry.

My Facebook stream and any news or blog feeders are clogged with anger.

I laughed long and hard during the moment in Mad Men when, based on an old fraternity prank, Pete and Harry decided to clog up the airwaves with Nixon and Secor laxative ads, blocking Kennedy from TV. That show. So clever. In the good way.

In a different scene, Cooper came to see Sterling, and told him to put out his cigarette, "It makes you look weak," Cooper said. He backed up his point with an anecdote about Neville Chamberlain and Hitler. Hitler planned the meeting in an old castle that forbade smoking, which cost the cigarette-addicted Chamberlain greatly. "By the end of that he would have sold his mother to Hitler for a dance," Cooper said.

"All I got from that story," Sterling said, "Was that Hitler didn't smoke."

All I got from that story is that the writers know their history. Mr. Appeasement, that's what they called former Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. I've never before heard anyone blame cigarettes for his giving away of a chunk of Czechoslovakia to Germany but I have heard the logical equivalent of bipartisanship blamed.

But drinking and smoking are time-honored methods of smoothing over awkward social moments, and without either, I bet there were plenty in that meeting between Neville and Hitler. Of course later Mr. Appeasement had to resign, but he got a new job in in Churchill's War Cabinet, which I always thought was the embodiment of the old adage about working from the inside out, but now I wonder if it's the embodiment of the old adage about an angry dove, furious about being bitten, morphing into a hawk.

Outside of Mad Men, we seem to have lost sight of our history. Forgotten it. It's a big hole in our perspective. It means we are perpetually four year olds, relearning lessons each generation, over and over, about anti-social versus acceptable communication of anger.

Why Playing the Whore Card in Reference to Mombloggers is So Not Cool

2009-08-11T09:59:00.011-05:00

I'm really really glad I missed BlogHer this year. Every account makes it sound like a Self-Righteous Fest rather the the community building, sharing, learning, and fun I expect from that event. Then, that spilled over into the rest of the online community, and now moms who blog have garnered a reputation for being greedy, graspy harpies who cage fight for minor pieces of swag, like deranged parents beating one another up for the last Cabbage Patch doll.

Way to further the rep.

Even if people had fun -- and good for you -- clearly there was a major undercurrent I had been calling Culture Clash (which provided private amusement because it dredged up funny old 80s bands to mind) but have now begun calling the Whore Wars. You can subtitle it: That Same Old Mean Girl Judge and Jury Fest We've Had Since 5th Grade.

It's because yesterday someone played the whore card in reference to the mombloggers + PR + Review = Sometimes Profiting/Being Compensated While Blogging.

Don't be a whore, this person entreated.

ACK

ACK ACK ACK ACK ACK

Let's be honest here for a minute. Who sees big bloggers making a bit of a living at this and doesn't wish for that, just a little? Who loves blogging but doesn't wish to earn a little something from it, too? Who found a passion in blogging and doesn't want to succeed at it, grow in it, go to the next level? Who NEVER EVER wants to earn something for doing something they love?

You are welcome to head back to your ashram, my friend. Go in peace and with my good wishes. Maybe I can be you in my next life.

Okay back to the rest of us.

I started this blog as a business. It was intended to boost business, keep a Web site fresh, etc. I started it to promote some of my artwork and my other services. I started it because I intended to require my authors to promote their works via blogs. It was the Hot New Marketing Model and before I asked someone else to do it, I needed to know how to do it, and whether it was reasonable, and how to do it well. (Also, members of my writing group such as Halushki and OmegaMom had talked it up as such a positive medium and experience. It sounded like a Can't Lose proposition. And it has, in fact, been a Win! On so many unexpected levels.)

It evolved into a more personal venture because I moved most of my business work elsewhere and also I learned a large number of crucial lessons along the way that caused me to change direction and refine my strategy.

Writing is a business for me, and my sidebar clearly says so.

I had no ethical dilemma about putting ads on my sidebar. Why in the world wouldn't I grab the chance to augment my effort with income? I put effort into this, writing is my business, and my goal has always been to earn from it. The fact that I discovered this was a wonderful way to interact with a marvelous community was a bonus.

My family still needs to eat.

I had no ethical dilemma about trying out products and reviewing them. I personally prefer personal recommendations and reviews from people I know to any other criteria for selecting a product, service, or serviceperson. (Why do you think Angie's List is so successful?) I bought Ecover dishwasher tablets because someone on Twitter assured me they were good, and if I liked the dish soap, I'd like these too. I bought the A/C I have because the Small House movement recommended several models for good price and good green status. It helps me.

By the same token, I like to tell people about things I particularly love -- such as the Spanx Bralellujah which is the BEST bra I've ever met (and no, I got no free products or entreaties for reviews, but if I had I'd take it in a New York minute) -- in the hope that it helps them.

Believe it or not, I consider this part of being a member of a community.

It was never a question to me whether I ought to accept any sort of profit or compensation for effort I make from this or other online writing.

When it was an ethical dilemma for so many, I was boggled. Seriously.

Think of me what you will, but it sort of felt like a more erudite airing of the young babysitter who says, "Oh I don't know, whatever," when asked how much her time is worth.

It also smelled a bit like a prettily wrapped but still sexist package: why are women expected to contribute out of the goodness of their hearts? Why is receiving compensation a prospect that somehow corrupts what they do and makes them into whores in the eyes of their community?

It boils down to this for me: I want to earn from this OR I don't. The don't side is fair enough, but it isn't, in my opinion, an ethical question or a question of right or wrong -- it's an "I don't want to be obligated in any way."

Because the truth is, if you accept a job -- whether it pays in money or product -- you do accept a degree of obligation (or at least I do in my mind). I'm not per se obligated to write, or write positively, or on a timetable, but I do accept trying out the product, service, etc. I understand that by forming a relationship, I've agreed to Having Expectations on both sides.

Like I said...I'm a professional and this is a business. I know how to go about my business.

But now you've got the "it's for fun only" camp and the "this is a good business model" camp clashing, and suddenly you have insults such as "selling out" and "lacking integrity" being hurled until you reach the crescendo: whore.

A profitable venture is not inherently ethically wrong or lacking in integrity.

Yes, I wrote a positive review of a Ridemakerz event because it was an AWESOME experience for the whole family. I would never have tried that if they hadn't invited me. I subsequently had my kids' birthday party there and more parents found out it's fun. It felt like such a win-win.

Now I have paused to ponder that people I know and respect in the blogosphere consider that "selling out" and even possibly being a "whore."

That's so sexist and insulting. It really, really is.

Whore is, by its very first definition, about women: 1 : a woman who engages in sexual acts for money : prostitute; also : a promiscuous or immoral woman

An immoral woman. A woman who accept money for an effort. A woman who makes money from blogging is a whore, is immoral.

It sounds an awful lot like slamming a glass ceiling down hard and judgmentally on a group of people who have, by dint of a sexist workplace, already had to choose between career and family, and yet, by dint of wonderful technology and new marketing models, found a way to eat her cake (be at home) and have it too (contribute financially to her family and maintain her skills and independence).

Women, more specifically moms who blog, have begun succeeding in this market in major ways.

Suddenly, we have discussions about integrity and ethics and trust and ruining community. We use the whore word.

So some people aren't doing it "well" or meeting someone's standards. I have faith that this is a majorly impressively intelligent community and those who do it well and with integrity will succeed, and we'll begin avoiding those who do not meet those criteria. From backchannel discussions and intelligent conferences such as Mom 2.0, I know people know the difference between honest and with integrity and not. I know people I know who are doing this as a business are already employing personal integrity and standards.

Implying that it is otherwise on the whole has, I think, contributed to many negative perceptions, loss of opportunity, created an unnecessary divide within the community, and, I'm going to go ahead and say it, added to the National Advertising Review Council’s investigative units decision to impose rules, regulations and limits on bloggers that no other journalist or writer has, even when doing the exact same thing!

We're shooting ourselves in the feet, folks.

I bet some bloggers decided to forego any compensation, even if they needed it, because they were scared of alienating their community. Would you EVER ask that of ANYONE else?

"Dear Free Monthly Community Newsletter That Is So Wonderful to Read and So Useful to Me, Please quit running ads, I find them distracting, junky and they ruin my trust in your content. It makes you a big sell out. A whore."

"Dear NPR...please quit doing pledge drives. I know you need money to operate and bring me all that great content I ove and rely on, but I just hate it when you ask me for money. You bunch of whores."

ACK!

ACK ACK ACK!

Let's be reasonable. It's the business model, friends. I agree: some will do it well, and some not so much. You can trust spots like Cool Mom Picks, for example, and bloggers you know and like. You may not prefer it when they do things for compensation, but let's be fair, okay? Blogging takes time and ultimately it costs. It's okay to profit a little from it.

Let's roll back the debate, and stop using pejorative, sexist insults such as whore.

Instead of judging, asking "should we," and stating moral imperatives, why don't we instead use our voices to say "hey this one was good, and I like it when, and these are the best Dos in my opinion," and help each other grow and develop constructively.

It's not reasonable to ask people to stop or to make big soapbox ultimatums about refusing to cross paths with people who profit or advertise. You can do it, but it's not reasonable. It's not going to stop. I won't quit. I need an income. I know I'm not alone.

But we can -- and should -- speak up about when things are done well. It's new, this business model, and we can shape it positively instead of trying to destroy the opportunity, each other, and our community with glass ceilings and judgments.

Acceptance...sort of

2009-08-10T20:31:00.005-05:00

The other day I was looking at this gorgeous house. It was my ideal sort of house: sort of large and rambly, older but fully restored with the same character and time period architecture, a flowy floor plan but with a fair amount of openness, and lovely furnishings...just nice enough to be nice but not at all out of a catalog or showroom. Homey. Classy. Clean. Lovely.

All of the sudden, with a hitch to my stomach, I thought, "I am just never, ever going to have a house like this."

For a second, I mourned.

I am never going to have a house like that because my husband is an architect and I am a writer, and we will likely never make That Amount of Money necessary.

I am never going to have a house like that because my husband is an architect in the same way a doctor is a doctor and a plumber is a plumber: they do grand work for everyone except themselves.

I am never going to have a house like that because I am Decoration and Flair challenged. I even once took a couple of courses at a junior college and a weekend seminar from a furniture design place to try to get some basic skills. However, I stand before you Not Like That At All, you know, all Good At Decorating. Mostly I find stuff a big fat bother that needs cleaning and so forth and I don't like it.

I am similarly DIY challenged. I'm not motivated nor do I have the drive or skill.

For these last two points, I can do it, if I put my mind to it, but mostly, to be honest, I don't.

I am never going to have a house like that because our children are just like us, only maybe a little bit worse. We all live much, much more in our heads and in the ether out there somewhere than in our actual home. I think I am the most homey and I say that knowing full well it is a pathetic statement.

I have a million things I'd rather do than tend my home. I'd rather read a book, take a nap, go for a drive, explore a trail, try a new restaurant, talk to a friend, write anything, volunteer, help a cause....

I am never going to have a house like that because I am who I am and I have chosen my life as I have.

As things stand, I either do it myself or find a new level of income and pay someone.

Except, if I earn more money I'd rather take a trip with my family. I'd rather send my kids to music lessons. I'd rather pay for private school. I'd rather take a class.

I have a million things I -- if I'm honest -- would spend money on than tend my home. If I'm honest, we could -- if our house were a bigger priority -- have saved money to do things for it. Instead, we've spent that money elsewhere, which I think says a lot about our priorities.

We haven't been terribly good, truth be told, accepting this with grace and alacrity. That's because in our area, homes are the priority. We've gotten that message loud and clear our entire lives. We hear it now as people we know renovate, remodel, redecorate and otherwise make their homes very nice.

"Oh we ought to see about doing that," we say to one another, half-heartedly, in that "oh someday we ought to weed the garden" tone of voice. You know the one, the "yeah, it's a should but not ever likely to be a will" tone.

We're always slightly apologetic and occasionally mildly fretful about the state of our home. I do think both of us wish we could do better by it. Sometimes, we'll get aggravated or chastened enough and we'll start saving or making a plan, which we always end up abandoning because something else comes along.

When we recently took a trip, we stayed in a Small House. This is a whole movement, the Small House movement. It's about being green, and lowering our carbon suckage. I liked how do-able that house felt. I have not felt do-able about a house since we lived in a one bedroom apartment, actually.

"I wish we had this house," I said. The family agreed.

That means we want about 800 square feet on a lot of land, with two bedrooms, a loft, one bathroom, and an open kitchen-living-family space. Like a cabin. Little House in the Hill Country.

It could be the inexpensive do-able home base that we returned to from every other place we'd rather be and all the other things we'd rather be doing.

Or not -- maybe we don't really want that. Maybe it just seemed perfect for our vacation.

Mostly, I'd like that grace, that acceptance of this is who we are and this is what we have and we're good with that. We need new floors, if you measure by fancy Jones standards, and new windows. Our cabinets could use freshening.

Instead, my husband is having a holiday with the kids while I go to a conference.

At my age, it seems as if you must let go one by one (or in batches) of things you dreamed of or thought of when you were younger. Many of those things are surprisingly easy to let go of.

With time I expect the rest of these will float away too.

...and that's why it made perfect sense that the cats peed on my business suit.

2009-07-18T10:49:00.011-05:00

They are cute, these kittehs, but I now see that they are all a part of God's plan, my cross to bear, as it were.

As I revealed in my post about how I know I am Chilean, I believe in the fair and equal balance of good and bad, which I hope/believe I can control through the Art of Self-Imposed Minor Suffering.

If I have too good of a day or too much good comes, I'll spend the next day atoning, trying to bring my minor suffering back in line enough to mitigate any additional instances of major suffering. I'll drink my water without ice, and no flavoring of tea. I'll skip eye liner. I'll eat a Weight Watchers frozen meal instead of getting that Schlotzky's sandwich I want. I'll watch Duck Dodgers with the kids.

As soon as good news came down the pipe, I know the bad will, too. I consider myself lucky because the universe likes me balanced in the middle, and I know it could be much worse on the other end.

I could, for example, be the police officer who lost a handcuffed suspect on I-10, I could be the person who found that vicious -ism graffiti at the fire station, or I could have numb thumbs from too much texting.

I don't know why the universe operates this way or why I have been selected for this section of the Bell Curve, although I've made plentiful contributions to the Fair to Middling Writers Fund by purchasing many books with theories.

None of them know, either, but God love them for trying. It gives me hope that they do try.

That same wishful wannabe optimism co-mingled with Chilean POV is why I'm willing to believe in the space elevator but not odorless, trackless kitty litter.

I thought the universe spoke to me this week, actually. Through my purse. Which, when you think about it, is exactly the medium through which the universe ought to speak to a busy on the go woman these days. A burning bush would elicit a quick dial of 9-1-1 on the cell. An old man with long beard who is carrying a rock wold get a cash donation. But talking through a purse? That's a clever, modern God who has caught on to what we'll pay attention to.

It was this past Wednesday afternoon when my purse reached out to me. I was in a rush, hustling from one thing to the next, in crazy heat. My purse---which is really a woman-mom-worker combo case---was heavy, banging against my back. I had the beginnings of a headache, which I counted as my due for having a seriously interesting day.

I'd better get green tea, cold at least, instead of that coffee, I was thinking to myself as I muscled my way through heat so thick it felt like a new heavier gravity. Oh I wanted coffee, how I wanted it. Rich caffeine on ice with fat free soy and a dollop of French vanilla. Grande, of course.

And that's when my purse spoke to me. "Progress report!" it demanded.

Of course, I thought, of course when I have a Divine Amazing Interaction it will be incredibly practical and results oriented.

My steps slowed.

Well I still need to write an article about that health rally on Monday, especially now that I've got those photos. Then there's the article about that sexist cartoon. And schedule the two chats I have in mind. Plus prep for that contract. Oh and call The Client, the One I've Been Needing to Call. Prepare for the kids' birthday party, follow-up on RSVPs. Buy the toys for the party. Promote the circus. Followup on that call. Write two more articles, fulfill volunteer obligations, reach out to those contacts, check on that thing....wow, uh, can you check back later, Demanding Universe?

I stepped inside the Starbucks, expecting a cool blast of air, but found none. I was almost slightly relieved. This practically gave me permission to get the coffee, all things (and balance of suffering) considered.

"Progress report!" my purse demanded again, and this time, the man in line ahead of me whipped around and shot me a look. I gave the startled deer in headlights look and innocent silent shrug. He narrowed his eyes at me, anyway. I now knew, however, that this wasn't all in my mind.

"Just smile and wave, boys, smile and wave," my purse advised.

Now the man's eyes widened. After another look at me, he turned away and edged forward slowly, away from me.

I stuck my hand in my purse and began feeling around as nonchalantly as I could. The demands and advice grew more insistent, "Progress report! Smile and wave! Progress report! Smile and wave!" My hand landed on a small, hard toy. I pulled it out.

A Madagascar 2 Happy Meal Penguin toy.

I pushed the button on its back, "Progress report!" I pushed it again, "Just smile and wave, boys, smile and wave."

"Ohhhhhhhhh," I exhaled in enlightened wonder.

In front of me, the man's shoulders shook a little.

I stuffed the penguin back in my purse, wait, maybe it would keep talking. I pulled it out and inspected it. Ah ha, an off switch. I stuffed the muted penguin back in my purse.

But it's not nice to ignore the universe. It will get your attention, one way or another. And that's why it makes perfect sense that later that night, the cats peed on my business suit.

Her Invented Country, My Invented Country

2009-07-02T08:31:00.006-05:00

I am reading, no, savoring, Isabel Allende's memoir, My Invented Country. I am taking my time with this book, picking up small portions delicately, raising them to my eyes and mind with slow anticipation, chewing and digesting them lingeringly.

Once, I considered myself an avid scholar of the magical realism genre. That was back in my scholar days---the late 80s and early 90s. Gabriel Garcia Marquez was king. I found Allende's House of the Spirits a pale imitation of his work.

Why was magical realism so appealing to me? Nobody ever asked.

However, Allende, in her memoir, has finally answered the question for me: I am a ghost of Chile, wandering the practical world with an imaginative mind fixated in superstition and surprise divined from stockpiles of observation.

Chileans, Allende asserts, offset their superstition, sobriety and natural intolerance with a love of regulation, "I believe this obsession of ours with legality is a kind of safeguard against the aggression we carry inside; without the nightstick of law we would go after one another tooth and claw."

She says the Chilean bureaucracy is a crazy tangle of reel after reel of red tape, "Recently, a busload of us tourists crossing the border between Chile and Argentina had to wait an hour and a half while our documents were checked. getting through the Berlin Wall was easier. Kafka was Chilean."

Chilean, you see, is more than citizenship; it is a frame of mind.

Her memoir is an unraveling of this Chilean frame of mind---a sociological exploration of how such democratically minded people ("We love to vote," Allende writes, "If a dozen kids get together in the schoolyard to play soccer, the first thing they do is write a set of rules and vote for a president, a board of directors, and a treasurer.") who live so precariously amid natural disasters and poverty remain so optimistically and superstitiously hopeful.

She writes, "At heart we know very well that life isn't easy. Ours is a land of earthquakes, why wouldn't we be fatalists? Given the circumstances, we have no choice but to be also a little stoic---though there's no reason to be too dignified about it; we are free to complain all we want."

Chileans, it seems, practically accept the strange and catastrophic, which explains magical realism in so many respects. In a life of such vulnerability to things beyond your control, the best method for explaining reaction is to seek a causal action in yourself.

It explains the reason why Allende's family embraced the Chilean spartan and stoic belief that discomfort is good for one's health. Her grandfather advocated cold showers, lumpy beds and bad shoes and food to ward off tragedies such as cancer.

Bring the bad on yourself, it seems to suggest, and divine intervention will not be compelled to force you to suffer.

I know this mentality well.

One time I heard a performer making a joke about the Latina nerves, "The women in my family have more nerves than women of other races, and they are more active nerves, too. As a result, it seems their nerves are constantly in question or on the verge of collapse."

I know this mentality well, too.

I'm not just enjoying Allende's memoir---which displays a greater gift for narrative, even, above and beyond her fiction, which I have since come to appreciate---I am eternally grateful that she pointed me to my country of soul origin.

She carried her Chilean mindset with her into her new life in the US, and I have apparently carried mine with me into this life. I was never sure about reincarnation or ghosts, but reading this book has convinced me. It is the best explanation.

Allende's house in California was built distressed, she shares, with high open ceilings to provide space for all the ghosts. This makes sense to me. Around me everyone works so hard to keep the old, the ghosts, the past shut out, arming themselves with phrases such as "let it go" and "let sleeping dogs lie."

I, on the other hand, strongly and firmly am convinced that sleeping dogs will eventually wake up, and ghosts will haunt you no matter what, so may as well be ready for when that dog wakes and create space for those ghosts. I believe it is better to work around the spiders and let them go about their business as I go about mine. In Chile, this would make sense. In the US, not so much. It has always given me the sense of being foreign; moving frequently as a child only exacerbated that sense.

Allende talks about being a foreigner and moving often, too:

From the moment we left Chile and began to travel from country to country I became the new girl in the neighborhood, the foreigner at school, the strange one who dressed differently and didn't even know how to talk like everyone else. I couldn't picture the time that I would return to familiar territory in Santiago, but when finally that happened, several years later, I didn't fit in there either, because I'd been away too long. Being a foreigner, as I have been almost forever, means that I have to make a much greater effort than the natives, which has kept me on my toes and forced me to become flexible and adapt to different surroundings. This condition has some advantages for someone who earns her living by observing; nothing seems natural to me, almost everything surprises me.

She finds native status intriguing and attractive and explains this is one of the chief things that pulled her to her husband

He never has any doubt about himself or his circumstances. He has always lived in the same country, he knows how to order from a catalogue, vote by mail, open a bottle of aspirin, and where to call when the kitchen floods. I envy his certainty. he feels totally at home in his body, in his language, in his life. There's a certain freshness and innocence in people who have always lived in one place and can count on witnesses to their passage through the world. In contrast, those of us who have moved on many times develop tough skin out of necessity. Since we lack roots or corroboration of who we are, we must put our trust in memory to give continuity to our lives...but memory is always cloudy, we can't trust it.

Like Allende, I married a native, and a few years ago, after some time in another foreign place, we returned to his place of origin. I, who have no ties to my past, each ribbon severed eventually with each subsequent move---it is too hard to maintain a past life while building a new one, not too mention the space for you closes and everyone is so married to the concept of moving on---remain intrigued that my husband's old piano teacher lives in our neighborhood, we run into his former teachers at restaurants, and a past classmate is his mother's eye doctor. His parents are still married, and until recently, lived in the exact same house my husband grew up in.

I realized our differences on a visit back to his home early in our marriage; he still carried house keys and felt no hesitation about using them to enter his childhood home with no notice. In contrast, I knock on the front door of my parents' homes, places they moved to after I was an adult, and waited permission to enter.

I envy these roots, and do not understand why my husband works so hard to shake and avoid them.

As a result, I can identify with Allende when she says she has absolutely no sense of certainty. I know what she means when she says, "A friend of mine says that we---we Chileans---may be poor, but that we have delicate feet. She's referring, of course, to our unjustified sensitivity, always just beneath the skin, to our solemn pride, to our tendency to become idiotically sober given the slightest opportunity."

When she describes Chile as, ". . .the way a country road might look as night falls, when the long shadows of the poplars trick our vision and the landscape is no more substantial than a dream," I know this place, and have been there.

Allende describes my invented country when she writes about her own.

It's a brilliant tale.

If Hamlet and Ophelia had gotten married, had kids, & moved to the suburbs...

2009-06-08T09:04:00.002-05:00

SCENE I. Elsinore. A platform bed in the master bedroom.

MOM and DAD modestly under covers.

DAD

Who's there?

MOM

Nay, answer me: stand, and unfold yourself.

DAD

'Tis now struck twelve; get thee to bed, child-o.

Exit Child 1

MOM

Well, good night.
If you do hear or see another one,
The rivals of my sleep, bid them make haste.

DAD

I think I hear them. Stand, ho! Who's there?

Enter CHILD 1 and CHILD 2

CHILD 1

Tis us, fair father, Friends to this bed.

CHILD 2

And liegemen to our fair mother, bearer of us and our not so fair antics.

MOM

Give you good night. (to DAD:: And not in our bed, ho!)

DAD

What, has this thing appear'd again to-night?

MOM

I have seen nothing. (to DAD:: Ignore those specters and they shall return from whence they came.)

DAD

Mom says 'tis but my fantasy,
And will not let belief take hold of her
Touching this dreaded sight, twice seen of us:
Therefore I have entreated her along
With us to watch the minutes of this night;
That if again the apparitions come,
They may approve our eyes and speak to it.

MOM

Tush, tush, 'twill not appear.

DAD

Peace, break thee off; look, where it comes again!

MOM

It would be spoke to.

DAD

Question it, Mom.

MOM

What art thou that usurp'st this time of night,
Together with that small and tantrumlike form
In which the majesty of buried restful nights
Did sometimes march? by heaven I charge thee, speak!

DAD

It is offended.

MOM

See, it stalks away! (to DAD: Our work here is done!)

Cars, and trucks, and dirt, and bugs---that's what some little girls like

2009-05-19T18:29:00.012-05:00

My girls are girly girls. They like their dolls, their dresses, their creature comforts. My little one prefers bows in her hair.

But this has never, ever stopped them from reaching out to traditionally "boy" areas of play. One of my favorite photos is of my girls and a couple of friends in princess dress-up costumes paying with Tonka dump trucks outside.

In our backyard, we're creating a natural habitat. We started with the pond and it has grown from there. We're planting ecosystem- and fauna-friendly plants, and trying to make sure our backyard helps the plants and animals we share our space with. This gives our children ample opportunity to delve into the world of bugs, tadpoles to frogs, crawfish (yes!), snakes (yes!) and even some cute mammals such as bunnies, not to mention our bird families.

Overall, I'd say our kids are the normal amount of skeptical reluctance to new things, but their natural curiosity leads them to try anyway, which is our general family rule.

So when we got invited to a promotional party at Ridemakerz, I was a little put off by the big focus on boys, even though I understood why it was specifically reaching out to boys. Making a car sounded wicked cool to me, even better than stuffing some bear (although my kids are huge fans of Build-A-Bear).

I RSVP'd my yes, and we went.

Hoo boy.

The party was on Sunday and my kids have not stopped with the cars since. First, they had a BLAST choosing from the umpteen million (technical number I hear is 70) body styles. Then they loved getting to choose which tires and rims, but wait, it gets better...then they found the stickers to decorate the car with and the blinged out accessories and went crazy. The guy who helped us was good about explaining the car parts---my girls now know what a chassis is!---and showing the girls how to put the car together all by themselves.

Since coming home with the cars, the kids have played with their Ridemakerz car in our cul-de-sac every day---which requires borrowing Mom's and Dad's cars for friends. I asked my kids about their favorite part and both said "making the car," which, after some investigation, meant "applying power tools to the assembly of the car."

That's my grrlz, all about the Power Toolz!

Now they want their own Power Toolz.

They got to register their car on a computer, get a certificate, and even create custom license plates.
My husband was impressed that they only offered American car models, but I think he was trying to sound smart and adult because I know what he really liked was (other than the whole thing) choosing the accessories (is there a more technical term for those spoilers, bumpers, running boards, etc?) because he loitered there the longest.

My only complaints here is that our lives now revolve around their Hot New Cars, we have to play Name My Car while we drive (and I really suck at that game, just ask my brother), and they overheard our Ridemakerz guy tell us we can bring our cars back in to redecorate them.

Can we say Ridemakerz Addictz?

I can't explain to you why I feel better about watching my kids play with their cars, or why I like Ridemakerz better than the alternative. Maybe it's a relief to know we haven't locked our kids into stereotyped gender roles. Maybe it's good to know that remote controlled toys don't intimidate them, or they didn't even notice the store was geared to boys (the younger is very sensitive about that). Maybe I'm glad that even though Persistence chose the hot pink car, she chose it not because it was girly but because, "It looks fast!" Maybe it's because Patience chose a mini-Cooper in blue.

I think it's all of these. I just feel good to see my girls have fun, show confidence in slightly complicated toys that take tools (they just do it, no hesitation), and not even hesitate or consider that they are treading into an area girls were basically banned from when I grew up (not that this stopped either of my parents---especially my dad, who, as a race car driver on the side, was very into all things car).

But truthfully, it might be that I think it was way more wicked cool than almost anything we've done and it does my heart good to see my kids and their dad having equal levels of fun playing.

Ridemakerz has stores, a Web site, and lots of data about all the types of cars they offer, and ways to use them. You can check the Ridemakerz Web site for the details.

Right now I'm too busy planning two Ridemakerz party. Yes, you heard me. My kids decided that's the party they want this year. I'm also taking the gift card Ridemakerz gave me and putting it towards a party for the members of my mom's club. I want to give back to this great group of women but it's also selfish---now my kidz can meet their kidz in the cul-de-sac and they can all play with their own carz and leave mine alone!

Women with Big Dogs (and infertility)

2009-05-07T10:08:00.013-05:00

My husband and I were turning thirty. We'd been married for five years or so and the families had the grandchild bug bad. Both of our sisters had recently presented the Most Perfect Precious little baby girls ever born, and our parents figured, based on our niece's extreme level of adorable and intelligent, that their children (meaning us) were capable of producing wonderful babies, the best kind of baby: the sort who does cute and then goes home with their parents. Everyone loves a child whose diaper, feeding, and crying all night is not their problem.

Until you actually become a parent, you really have no idea how much work the care and feeding of a baby will seem like to you. Every parent has a big job ahead of him and her, but some of us are lazier and more self-indulgent than others.

But you never know that, really, before.

So, one day, after caring for our two nieces---at the same time---we figured we were ready for kids.

What's the saying? God laughs at those who make plans. Well, His stomach must have been awfully sore at each and every thought of us.

Let's have a baby, we said to each other, rather smugly and self-congratulatorily.

This is how it works, and I know this is fact because the very gruff and red-faced assistant football coach told me so in high school health class (as if we hadn't wondered about sex well before that sophomore year): if you have sex, you get pregnant.

Just like that.

Barring getting pregnant, you get a disease, a terrible one that makes all your limbs fall off and your brain rot---after you go crazy because you aren't emotionally ready. Or God smites you with a bolt of lightning or a crazed mask wearing killer gets you while you are creeping, in a short t-shirt, down a darkened hallway.

And you should hope for one of the last two cases because having a baby as a teen or getting a sexually transmitted disease as a teen is the very worst thing that could ever happen to you in your life and your entire life is down the toilet, forevermore. Caw Caw.

It should be no wonder, then, that an entire generation of people waited until 35 on average to have children, if they escaped the Health Ed Coach's Curse, that is.

We all understood, from our divorced Boomer parents and our teachers, that becoming a parent ruins your life in horrible, horrible ways.

Nevertheless, as we transitioned from the "Teen, Take 2" Twenties into the "It's About Damn Time You Two Settled Down and Grew Up" Thirties, we forgot those lessons in the face of the beautiful reality of parenthood.

We wanted in to the club.

Unfortunately, our application? Was denied.

After the first year of Trying To Conceive (this is the official title of that phase, I know because iVillage says so)---arguably my husband's favorite part of our marriage ever---we started thinking, umm, maybe the coach got it wrong.

Meanwhile, everyone around us wondered if we got it wrong.

"How are you doing it?" someone asked me once. "Maybe you're doing it wrong," someone else said to me.

I'm not kidding. I am completely incapable of making up the ridiculous on the fly.

Then other people told us we needed to relax, take a vacation, quit thinking about it, use a pillow, and other graphic suggestions that really? I have a right to not know they know.

Infertility gave us our first inkling that parenting may not necessarily take a village, but the village doesn't know that. They all think it's all their business.

Infertility also gave us the skill of positive redirection. My husband and I both became workaholics. By God, maybe I couldn't produce a baby but I would produce three of the top ten bestsellers for my publishing company that year. My husband decided to become a bi-continent worker.

And we got a dog.

A puppy, actually. A round, roly, lovely chocolate Lab puppy.

As we waited for our puppy to reach the magical "ready to be adopted" age, we shared with family and friends that we'd have a dog soon. We were so happy to have good news to share, about an expectant event. Our friends and family were so happy to have good news to express joy over, about an expectant event. We were very pleased with ourselves, and everyone relished the break in the "no news is bad news" phase we'd been loitering for a few years too long.

Except one person: my friend Cate was appalled.

"Tell me you did not get that dog in place of a child," she said.

"Don't all people get pets in place of children?" I asked, "I mean, in suburban middle-class America, where dogs just are, versus other places where they have an actual function other than sponge to soak up family's affection and spoiling?"

"We're going to the lake," Cate said, "You need to see what life with a dog really is."

Cate meant Lake Winnapausakee, otherwise known as Golden Pond. We'd spend a nice long weekend enjoying the beauty of the lake and soaking up sun, but first, we had to drop by her in-laws for a visit.

As Cate's little station wagon---her two dogs in the back, my husband in the middle, and me up front---jounced along the unpaved long drive to the house, Cate said, "Okay, we need to get our stories straight."

"Our stories?" I asked.

"Yes, how we met," she said.

"Umm, we met in the infertility group," I said.

"Yes, but we can never, ever say that," Cate said.

Cate was openly gay, living in a long-term committed relationship with her partner. They were both honest with their families, friends, neighbors, and everyone who knew them.

But we had to hide our infertility.

She was willing to let everyone know about her homosexuality, with pride.

But infertility? Needed to stay a dirty little secret.

That's what it was.

And that's how it felt.

Like a secret shame.

Shame and dirty little secrets lead to lies.

So we lied. I'm a horrible, horrible liar. I blushed, stammered and nearly blew it. But we got our "story" straight.

No pun intended.

But it's a fact: the infertile are defective.

We are also screwed.

No pun intended.

After the second year of infertility, when the doctor said something about anovulatory, I had this flash where I thought, "Oh, my gosh, all that wasted opportunity!" I thought back on high school and college. Then I thought about the bottom line. "Oh NO! All that money spent on birth control! I could have a second house in the mountains of France by now!"

We are also the ones who break all the comfortable little maxims.

This makes people angry at us, at least I think so. People don't like to be troubled with other people's troubles, other people's long-term grief. They don't like it when bad things happen to good people because it makes them ask too many questions of themselves and their beliefs. They don't like long-term support. They get impatient for you to wrap up your problem and tie it off with a nice bow, stick a card on it that says "Finally Finished! And moving on, back to Normal!"

Before that though, they get impatient and angry with you. You can tell when people hit this state because they start with pat answers to you when you talk to them.

"Maybe it's not meant to be."
"God must have another plan for you."
"There are millions of children who need good homes, you should foster or adopt."
"You should get a dog."

Sometimes it takes people five minutes, other times they can hang in for years, but then drop off.

In the end, though, we got lucky. We lived in Massachusetts, which happens to be a state that believes access to health care, for any and all health woes, is a right. The great and mighty Commonwealth of Massachusetts provided us full access to the highest quality reproductive endocrinology available.

That's why I say my daughters were gifted to us by the state of Massachusetts.

People always want to hear my birth story. Less and less now, as the kids are older, but it still comes up.

It's sort of like people wanting to know how my husband and I met. It's a cute story: we met in our astronomy class the first semester of my freshman year of college.

That's just a pat one-liner. the real story is much more complicated (and in my mind, more entertaining, because it involves Mardi Gras, a drunk guy I ran into on Bourbon Street who I'd known since childhood, Tulane Law School parties, that guy from Brandeis, and Robert Goulet.)

But nobody ever asks about that part, you know the part that answers this question: how in the world have you two been together for so long, and married for sixteen years?

(Or better yet: Robert Goulet? How long ago were you in college, exactly?)

But that's always the real story.

I can't tell the birth story without choking back the real story, the one that answers the real question: how did you become a mother? Because the birth story is completely not the answer to that.

Also, actually, in some way, I hate my birth stories. The first one was remarkably hard, and I thought I might die. That part I didn't care about, because then I thought my baby might die and it would be all my fault. I failed at the getting pregnant right part, and now I was failing at the giving birth right part.

But I was lucky. All through my pregnancy I'd had excellent health care. I was Mature (which is code for "over thirty first time mom"), married, solid income, a house, health insurance, and access to a great system that was the exact model President Obama wants all over the country: completely high-tech and computerized and interconnected. Let me tell you? It works, great.

You want it---truly you do, and I don't care what political party you vote for. You want that health care, even more than you want a new ultra light and thin plasma TV. Or that house in the mountains of France.

Because of that health care, I got pregnant. Because of that health care, we saved that pregnancy. Twice. Because of that health care, we saved me, once. Because of that health care, my baby was born healthy and fine. because of that health care, my baby was cared for after birth as she needed to be.

Because of that health care, I had weekly nurse support for a full year after I gave birth. Because of that health care, I was a better mom, and less women had post-partum physical and emotional issues.

Because of that health care, I got pregnant again.

That's a really funny story.

But you can't hear it right now.

Instead I'm going to tell you that during that pregnancy we moved to Texas, where I no longer had access to that health care.

First, in Texas, the insurance company got to exclude my pregnancy and offer no prenatal or postnatal care at all.

When we were finally able to close our jaws after that shock, we checked costs, and found it was cheaper to pay for COBRA to maintain our Massachusetts health care, than to pay out of pocket.

If any of you know about COBRA, you should now be mouth agape.

We were glad we kept our insurance, though, because then I had trouble in that pregnancy and had to be hospitalized, and then put on bedrest.

Imagine paying for that out of pocket.

Instead of choosing whether or not to get the best care for me and the baby, based on what we could afford, we just did the best thing we needed to do in order to preserve my health and the baby's life.

I can't even imagine where our family would be if we had not had that health care. We'd probably be a family of three instead fo four, and we'd probably be living with relatives because we probably would have had to sell our house to pay for medical debt.

This morning, as I did my laps, I thought about my story, and its other possible outcomes. Despite the 80 degree heat and 84% humidity, I felt chilled.

We were so, so lucky. We were lucky to live in Massachusetts where we got great health care. I didn't know anyone who had troubles or complained about health care, because everyone had access to it there.

We were lucky we could keep that health coverage when we moved to Texas. Here, everyone complains about health care. Here, I hear about troubles with access to health care.

Lives hang in the balance. This isn't about entitlement or pull yourself up by your bootstraps. This is about women and children, and little babies. Babies who were made and are coming and deserve the very best chance available.

My babies did, and I am thankful every day for it.

That weekend at Lake Winnipesaukee, I convinced Cate that I was a woman worthy of a big dog. The truth is, everyone who is going to have a child should get an audition weekend like Cate gave us for the dog.

I proved I could hide pills in peanut butter, remember the care and feeding instructions, and throw a ball out in the water for fetch.

Luckily I still retain those skills.

I earned my big dog, and my status as dog mom, and I earned my babies, and my status as human mom.

But you don't know that---my whole story. You don't know how or why I am a woman with a big dog going in laps on a track. Or how I became a woman with two girls in the back seat of my car.

And if you ask, for my birth or "coming into motherhood" story, what you probably really want is a magical realism description of that moment when I first held my baby.

You don't want to hear about the infertility, the challenges in my pregnancies, the hard labor, or how access to good health care saved our lives.

But that's the real story---and it is the one that spotlights the making of me as a mother. It is the one that shines the light on how essential it is that all women have access to what I had.

Join MOMocrats as we support the White Ribbon Alliance's efforts to help save mothers and babies through access to health care with their "Every Day is Mother's Day" campaign.

Write your own post, and we'll do a link love post on Mother's Day at MOMocrats.

FREE! A GIVEAWAY! And if you comment here, I'll enter your name in a drawing for a brand new DVD of Dog Days of Summer, which has been called a "brilliant film" that is a "tense Southern Gothic slice of literature."

And all that's best of dark and bright, Meet in her aspect and her eyes

2009-05-06T11:18:00.007-05:00

She gets angry, oh so angry. She is kicking the table legs, throwing sand on the playground, staring you in the eye as she defies directions. She swishes her head away and up in the air, with a big "Humph!" and crossing of her arms to add an exclamation point to the end of a sentence that is already exclamatory enough. Her tone starts at whiny and ends at petulant. Her joy is the exception now, rather than the rule. For some reason, her world infuriates her, all the time. Calm is a fighting word. Even when she is laughing or happy, it is more of a defiantly triumphant pleasure than pure joy.

The people around her who care are perplexed, and out of patience. There is always something, and it is always making her oh-so-unhappy.

We think if only we knew what it was, we could fix it.

But what we do know is love, and this we give freely, sometimes with patience, sometimes with impatience. But if we offer it, love and calm, like stroking a frightened upset animal, it will eventually settle on her, a mantle of sorts, maybe temporary, maybe more.

I always believe that in the end persistence is pervasive, which can be a very good thing, because the ideal is that the love and calm overcomes the fury. And we see once again the bright shining well past the darkness, so that is what you see first and last and most.

In the battle of the sexes, I side with backpack wielding little girls

2009-04-24T16:14:00.008-05:00

It's a savannah out there.
I was sitting in my car, by the curb, waiting for my daughter to come down the path. School was out, it's Friday, and children ran as fast as they could---not so much away from school as towards freedom.

But one pair sprinted past the rest. A girl chasing a boy. In early elementary school, and often, all through it (back in my day, anyway) it always was the girls chasing the boys. My husband swears it was the other way around. But as I recall, boys would run up, tease, and run off, with a backward glance that begged, "Chase me!"

And we did. Usually laughing. Usually.

I knew both of the children. She's a first grader on my daughter's soccer team, and he's a neighborhood second grader. The girl had an uncharacteristically intense face. Normally she has a huge smile as she runs towards after school freedom, but today her face was pinched in a concentrated frown.

The boy? He appeared to be running for his life. He spotted a tree and clumsily hefted himself up into it, as high as he could, as fast as he could.

Without a sound, the girl flung her backpack up and whacked the boy on his rear end, which dangled over the tree limb that was his perch. She yelled something, and the boy shook his head. WHACK! went the backpack again. She appeared to repeat herself, the boy refused to look down. WHACK! WHACK! WHACK! went the backpack wielded by a girl who, by all appearances, was actually angry.

Suddenly, I recalled that sometimes, when chasing a boy, that burn in my chest wasn't just from my lungs working hard in the endless rapid circling of the playground. Sometimes that burn was anger.

Sometimes boys went too far in their taunting and teasing and stepped on the girls' pride.

You could tell the ones who wouldn't take it, would never take it. Their faces, as they chased the boys, read clearly, "You're going downtown Buster Brown!" They weren't giggling. I recall pinning a boy, who a moment before had been laughing, thinking his taunt hilarious, until I actually, fueled by a burst of fury, caught him, and knocked him to the ground.

My knee in his chest I said, "Take it back! I mean it, take it back forever!"

"Okay, okay, I take it back I take it back!" he cried in surrender.

"That will teach you!" I said with a humph, marching back to my girlfriends.

I watched that little seven year old girl giving the little eight year old boy the whatfor, and I thought, "That is awesome."

I really, really did. Make of it what you will, but it makes me warm and fuzzy inside to see little girls not taking it from little boys.

That's because I know in a few years, before they even leave elementary school, the boys, physically progressed beyond their emotional maturity perhaps, will continue those taunts, and if girls don't fight back, they'll never learn that you catch more flies with honey than vinegar, and they'll think it's okay. They'll draw around them girls who twitter and giggle instead of twisting their noses, hard, like they should when boys are cruel to them. The boys will develop a sense of entitlement to taking from and treating girls any way they like.

We think as parents that we teach our children how to be, but we must also accept just how very much outside society---mostly of their peers--shapes them too.

When I thought harder, the boy I chased and knocked down hadn't insulted me at all, but had instead insulted my best friend, who cried in response. I was avenging her honor, with more verve than I might have done for myself.

I suppose, on some level, I should have thought that the girl beating the boy with her backpack was doing something wrong, and maybe I ought to have hopped out of my car and stopped it. But in truth, I know the kids, he probably teased, and she was probably defending her honor. It seemed like kids learning to work it out for themselves. I was quite sure it would get worked out, and they'd be play buddies again before we knew it. It's important to draw boundaries and ask others to respect them, and this is how children do it. Sure, sure, we parents work to teach them other, better ways, but their peers must teach them, too. That lesson is essential.

And I know little girls are told too frequently too often in too many ways to be quiet and take it.

So I sat in my car, watched her teach him a lesson, and hoped she learned one too---a good one, one in which defending her honor was fine, being angry when taunted was fine, and not taking it from boys was exactly the way she ought to live her life.

Side note: Lest anyone feel defensive about boys, the other side of the story, how girls treat boys, etc, relax. This is, in fact, just one side of the coin, but it is a true side, and I, a girl, am most concerned with this side as I raise my girls.

How to be a Hero instead of a Zero (in your kids' eyes)

2009-04-21T06:44:00.014-05:00

It's easy: take the kids to Disney on Ice: Mickey and Minnie's Magical Journey!

Sit very close to the action:

Where the kids get to see live action Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, and Donald and Daisy Duck.

Then have a lot of awesome segments of the kids favorite Disney shows from Lion King...

to Little Mermaid...

to a brief moment of Mary Poppins with quick segue to Peter Pan, where you have some BIG awesome skating numbers including flying and Tinker Bell...

Catch a PRICELESS video moment of your enraptured and joyful kids clapping enthusiastically to wake up Tinker Bell (then taunt the Webz with it by not showing it because well, it's your kids faces)...

Include an adorable segment with Lilo and Stitch, including a rocket ship and incredible alien costumes (sorry, was too enthralled to remember to take photos!)...

Then wrap up with a HUGE exciting number where all the skaters come out as the favorite characters...

Take them out for ice cream afterward and you just might get, "This is exactly the type of day a kid loves, Mom!"

Breastfeeding is like five whole minutes of your life, total...so to speak

2009-04-13T14:48:00.023-05:00

Hi.

I'm speaking from the position of a person with two kids. Not babies, kids. And trust me, that makes a difference.

While they still need us on a daily basis in many ways, our kids don't need us on a minute basis.

In general, that means things such as

if a kid is thirsty, I can say, "Hey you know where the cups and water are..."
if a kid is hungry, I can say, "Hey, grab a cheese stick or apple."
if a kid wakes up before sunrise on a Saturday I can say, "Hey, go play in the playroom."
if a kid is bored I can say, "Hey, go knock next door and see if your friend can play."

Do you see a theme? I have more space, more choice. My kids are fairly independent, and I can baby them, or not. But they do still need me, and parent is still my number one job.

Recently, there has been some hoopla about a couple of articles that were semi to very critical about breastfeeding and its antifeminist yoke. I've read several bloggy responses, comments to those, and the original articles in question (Judith Warner's latest blog post at the New York Times talking about banning the breast pump and Hanna Rosin's Atlantic article about the case against breast feeding).

Do you want to know what I think? I think it's much ado.

When I first had my first baby, I joined a great mom's support group. People razz Massachusetts but seriously, it's a great state. It gets an awful lot right, including healthcare, which I still miss. Part of the service to new moms was a free, nurse-lead support group once a week. For the entire first year of your child's life.

I can't possibly express how very valuable that was, but I expect you can guess.

I promise it made all of our lives that much better. Every single place should offer that exact program.

But the very best thing about that group is the timeline the nurse drew.

One day all of us new moms were having a good, old-fashioned feel sorry for ourselves vent. We felt overwhelmed, we felt too taxed. We felt touched out, exhausted, done in. Our bodies felt off-kilter, our backs ached from carrying big diaper bags and babies. We felt drowned.

"Of course you feel that way," the kindly nurse said understandingly, "This is taxing, it's exhausting. You are done in. But let me show you this."

After agreeing that the average age of the group was about 32, she drew a line, marking off certain life highlights---first day of school (A), high school graduation (B), becoming a mother (I).

"Here's what you don't know yet," the nurse said, "But I do, because my kids are grown and I have grandchildren now." She added two lines like this:

A---------B----------II---J----------------------------------------------------

and in between those two close together lines (I) that? That is how long your baby is a needy little baby.

J marks the spot when you----rather than your baby---are begging for your offspring's attention and affection. The rest? is the rest of your life (God willing).

Do you see much space between the two Is? That's right---not much; it's a blip.

Do you see how quickly J comes? That's right: fast.

It can feel like forever, at the time. You can think it's going to kill you, at the time. You can think you'll never be a real person with a real life again.

I lived through that baby period (I), twice. I know how it kicks your rear end. I know how it takes all of you, physically, mentally and emotionally, and then demands more. I know you cry Uncle (or just cry period) and wish for your own Mommy.

I also now know that nurse was right: it's a blip.

My kids have no round left on them; they are all length and angles. Cribs, sippy cups, toddler beds, four outfits a day, bottles, special baby food, and all the accouterments of infancy and early toddlerhood are finished and gone.

But guess what?

I'm still a mom.

I still have to work out how to work, live and play without shirking my parental duties, which, for the record, are in play for the remainder of our lives.

So while these moms sit and kvetch about the "unnatural antifeminist oppression" that breastfeeding is, I will pause and wonder just how oppressive they find the rest of parenting---and if that doesn't trouble them, then I will wonder just what it is about using one's body to nourish one's child that is so deeply, inherently submersive and subversive for them.

I'm going to guess it's a matter of perspective. Or possibly lack thereof.

The timeline is a tough concept when you are mired in the midst of the Is, but keeping it in mind can help, does help, as does a sort of Zen acceptance of, "This is now, and this too shall pass."

Breastfeeding is a matter of months, literally. I know very few people who go past 36 months, and let's be honest, we all count in months until after 3, don't we? So months. Breastfeeding is a matter of months.

If these women feel oppressed and tied-down and suppressed as strong women from the few months dedicated to breastfeeding---then how in the world will they ever reconcile the lifetime duty and obligation we take on for our children when we become mothers? The compromise, the sacrifice we are obligated to make at times, sometimes too frequently for our comfort?

And that's what it is really about, you know?

When we engage in a lifetime partnership with another person, to some degree, we begin living our lives for that person. When we become parents, to an even larger degree, we begin living for those people, these people, our children.

And, somehow, we must balance that with living for ourselves. It's a condition of humanity. It really, really is. Whether you ever become a parent (or not), unless you are an absolute hermit, in some way you must balance living for yourselves with living for and with others.

If you do become a parent, that doesn't end when we wean a nursing infant, whether it's done from the breast or from a bottle.

I breastfed, a number of my mom friends did too, and a number did not. It seemed split fairly down the middle, to the best of my recollection. I could not have cared less what the other mothers did; I was too busy trying to do my own thing. But, it seems that there were freedoms and limitations to both breastfeeding and formula feeding.

For example, you know how mindless you can be when you are sleep-deprived and a new mom. If I left the house with just me and my baby? We were fine for the short period of time we could be out, you know, diaper and nap time and good humor span considered (all of which factors are relevant regardless of feeding method). If my friends did the same, they had to go back home to get the bottle, formula and water.

If my friends wanted to get away by themselves for a while, it was no problem usually; they could leave the baby with a sitter and a bottle of formula. That is, if the baby would eat from another person other than mom. And guess what? Sometimes? A baby won't.

I could do the same, but only for as long as my pain point of engorgement could stand it. I left bottles behind, too. So usually my baby and whoever cared for her was fine; it was just me.

But I found, when out for Mom's night out with fellow moms---and I did go out; I appreciated, courtesy no doubt of our support class, a culture that encouraged us moms to nurture ourselves, too--- we all had a sort of "time limit" out and it seemed to be about the same length, regardless of whether we were engorged or just tired or simply ready to be home with our babies.

What I'm really saying, I guess, is that the obligation to the baby really wasn't due to or freed from based on whether we breastfed or bottle fed. I did not personally notice a big difference in lifestyle.

Maybe it's mental---and that's a fair qualifier for deciding between breast or formula, because an okay mom is a better mom.

Me? I consider myself a slacker sort of person, in a way. I like to achieve maximum efficacy with minimum effort. For me, that was breastfeeding. It spoke to all of my needs and wants. For other moms, it's better to formula feed.

It is what it is.

At McDonalds today, half a dozen four year olds ran like wolves. I couldn't say who got breast and who got Similac. I also couldn't say who co-slept, who did not, who was sleep trained, who was not, who had a pacifier, who did not, and so forth. The children appeared happy, healthy and nurtured and I doubt a single one of them had the exact same infancy as another.

At the elementary school today, fifty seven year olds ran like wolves. I can't tell you what sort of infancy any of them had, either.

I stood to the side with the teachers, also moms. Although I can't tell you what their early days with their babies was like, in terms of specifically what they chose to do or not do. However, I'm sure I could tell you in general what the experience was like: simultaneously empowering and take you down to your knees like. That seems to be universal.

But today, the kids ran madly and happily, and the women, all of us working, stood on the side and had intelligent cogent conversation about things.

Breastfeeding, bottle feeding, pacifiers, sleep training and all the weighty decisions of infancy are a phase for you and your baby.

Those will give way to other weighty matters, such as "my kid is six and not reading yet, is this an issue?" and "oh no Mean Girls!" and "Gifted and Talented: to test or not to test" and "ballet and soccer, just enough extracurricular activity or too much?" and "holy crap are we saving for college yet?" and so forth.

If you feel so oppressed by the charge of feeding your child that you make it a Big Fat Political Issue on Par with Lack of Fair Pay and Piss Poor Family Leave protection...let me assure you that the ONE THING that never changes is hungry offspring demanding food and weighty parenting challenges. The issues change and kids get more independent...but they will always demand nourishment in some way.

If nourishing a child is oppressive to the level of being felt as anti-feminist to you, then I don't know...maybe it's not for you.

And that's fine.

That's what feminism is: choice for us as women, freedom to choose.

Yeah, there is the common choice, the popular choice, the choice generally regarded as ideal and bucking that method is sometimes tough, but if you're happy with the choice you made you should sit within satisfaction in that, okay?

The rest of us are probably way too self-absorbed and mired in our own choices to be spending much time judging you and yours.

And if not? Oh well.

It truly, truly is like the the quote from Hamlet that I used in my last post says:

"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."
William Shakespeare, "Hamlet", Act 2 scene 2

Oh yes, easier said than done, trust me, I know.

But how much wiser we can be in our reconciliation if we know and accept that, I truly believe.

A Friendly Word

2009-04-06T10:29:00.016-05:00

Oh they are great and wide, these swaths of our minds and imaginations. We think, sometimes, that what we know and experience is the sum total of the world, that it is what we think it is---when we are deciding things. When we are figuring out things. When we are determining.

If you ever asked us, I think most of us, well, the ones I know anyway (just proving my point) would acknowledge a broader understanding of a Hamletesque world.

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
William Shakespeare, "Hamlet", Act 1 scene 5

The other Hamletesque point I'd like to make might surprise you:

"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."
William Shakespeare, "Hamlet", Act 2 scene 2

Thinking, hmm, is that the real problem? Or is it the underlying assumptions we make about events and people that is the real problem?

"I hate her! She's a mean girl!" my daughter said, very angrily, the other day.

"Is she mean, really, all the way through her heart?" I asked, "Is this really about her, or is it about you? Mean is a pretty serious accusation. Let's talk about what happened to make you say this, and figure out what's what here."

As we delved into the event, I came to understand that what had happened was that a friend had hurt my daughter's feelings. In struggling to deal and understand, my daughter slunk home in anger and despair. By the time she arrived home, her mind had firmly fixated on the idea that she was the poor put-upon child harassed by a mean friend. The offending incident? My daughter, arriving later at the friend's because we'd run errands, was initially not included in the game that had already started. She'd lashed out, then was told that she could never play.

Her entire world suddenly centered on that one event, and it was the new outcome of her entire life.

"Shhhhh," I said, "Listen, do you hear the birds, look, see the cardinals at the feeder?" She sat on my lap, something she can still do at this age. I stroked her hair.

When her heart and mind slowed a bit, we talked about how in every angry situation and fight between people, everyone contributes something. We talked about feelings, and how feelings can seem like thoughts, but aren't really.

My feelings get hurt, too, when I feel left out, I told her. Sometimes when a friend leaves me out a lot, I think that friend is mean and doesn't like me anymore, and I feel sad. And when I act on that, I usually regret it, but then I don't know how to undo it, if I even can. That's because those were times when I let my feelings be my thoughts.

Ego. Pride. These are the things that always get in the way.

When we create expectations of others in our heads, then sit back and wait for them to fulfill our desire of them, we have created a path to failure.

"What did you picture in your head," I asked my daughter, "When you went to your friend's house?"

"That we would play and have fun!"

"That's reasonable, but then that didn't happen, so..."

"I got mad! She should have let me play!"

"Hmm," I said, thinking. I have become ambivalent lately, or maybe I mean confused, about this overarching expectation of all inclusivity all the time. I am weighing the issue. What is our obligation to one another? What about when our own needs conflict with a friend's? Is it a clear right and wrong?

I thought about a string of comments I'd heard recently from friends, expressing disappointment and displeasure in friends who had not met expectation. Friends who were, the upset person threatened, on the verge of being reclassified as "not friends." If they didn't shape up. By which, I assume they mean, become who that person needs and wants them to be, on some level, to some degree.

Each time I hear this I think, oh dear. Yes, just that articulately.

I think we are on guard, vigilant really, for a terrorist in our own lives. The Disappointing Friend. People make a living writing and speaking about Toxic People in our Lives. Are we unhappy? Who is it, exactly, that is poisoning us to be unhappy?

Maybe the real question is what is poisoning us. Maybe Shakespeare had it, back when he said hundreds of years ago through Hamlet---the ultimate poisoner in a way, the archetypical self-absorbed character who could be classified as Toxic Friend, and yet who, usually, we sympathize with and feel empathy for, largely because he speaks so truly---that thinking is the bane of our existence. Thinking, by which I assume he meant, really, assuming and expecting.

I say this because the full exchange between Hamlet and Rosencrantz includes Rosencrantz retorting to Hamlet's observation, "Why then, your ambition makes it one; 'tis too narrow for your mind."

More specifically, Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2:

HAMLET
243 Denmark's a prison.
ROSENCRANTZ
244 Then is the world one.
HAMLET
245 A goodly one, in which there are many confines,
246 wards and dungeons, Denmark being one o' the
247 worst.
ROSENCRANTZ
248 We think not so, my lord.
HAMLET
249 Why, then, 'tis none to you; for there is nothing
250 either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. To me
251 it is a prison.
ROSENCRANTZ
252 Why then, your ambition makes it one; 'tis too
253 narrow for your mind.

Do we, with our words and expectations, lay confines, wards, and dungeons for others? And, therefore, for ourselves? Simply by thinking it so?

"I think maybe that 'playing together' should be the hope rather than the plan..."

My daughter stared at me, confused.

"I mean, maybe next time she says you can't play, maybe you ask her why not, and ask her when you can, or you step back and watch a minute, and think of a way you can fit in to the game," I said.

My daughter's mind worked.

"They were playing pet shop," she said, "But only had three cages. That's why I couldn't play."

Therein lay the key to release from the dungeon, the opening of the confined mind.

"Have we got something here you can take to build a cage, so you can be a pet in the pet shop?"

Her brow furrowed.

"What are the others using?"

"Beach towels."

"Ahh," I said, "Well we have plenty of those."

Ask next time, I had said to her. Communicate. Step back. Think. Find a way. Release from the confines of a narrow ambition. Can we, the adults, do that?

Doesn't take much to make me happy and make me smile

2009-04-03T09:02:00.006-05:00

I am driving in my car, with the windows down because it is a beautiful day and I don't care if the wind messes my hair. It is sunny and 60, my favorite. The sky is an even blue sheet above me, and the road is a blur below me. Lily Allen is singing "Smile" on my iPod and I do, because I am old enough to know it is complicated, how she means it, not ironic. That's what we do: we just smile. Plus it's a pleasant and light tune.

I'm still in my workout clothes, fresh from the track and my laps. I sped along that track, relishing the fresh laid gravel, still damp from yesterday's rain, so the dust and pebbles didn't kick up so much. I circled past the sea twinkling back at the sun, over and over. I watched seagulls and pelicans fish the schools who risked the surface to catch some of that warm shine for themselves. The huge birds dove, scooped, then rose---the only white specks in the otherwise spotless sky. Triumphant, they tickled their full bellies along the tops of the tall wetlands grasses that grow out from the coastline. After my laps, I did a cool down walk, circling the trees and hibiscus bushes, and I wondered if I looked to some creature the way the birds looked to me.

In my car, I am less a part of the ground and more a part of the air. I am dog happy with the breeze in my face. Now Lynard Skynard is singing about Alabama, and I think about the South in the Spring and feel a little sorry for my Northern friends. Spring comes early and stays a while, late even this year. It smells different, damply verdant today thanks to the welcome rain yesterday. A front from the west temporarily pushed the humidity out to sea, so it is perfect, perfect today. And that makes me smile. Although sometimes it is hard to come by, it doesn't take much to make me happy.

Just watch this joy:

The Quiet Chat in the Hallway

2009-03-11T10:48:00.010-05:00

This is Part 1 in a series about the balance between self and parent, and parenting during challenges.

Part 1: The Quiet Chat and why I had it

When I worked in publishing, one of my authors, a doctor, introduced me to a new phrase: The Quiet Chat.

You don't want to know what it means, but I'm going to tell you anyway. It's the medical equivalent of the Blue Wall. In other words, when a doctor has a problem---drugs, alcohol, shaky hand, memory loss, etc---the medical world prefers to deal with it quietly, behind closed doors. Without going into any kind of discussion about the pros and cons of this strategy for managing problems, let's just leave our stomachs right in that gut reaction of More Than Faintly Disturbed and transition over to the kind of Quiet Chat parents get to have.

Don't you prefer to handle your family's situations privately?

And yet, how often do you really get to do that?

Of all the things in life, parenting tends to be one of the most public--possibly because it seems so very visible, and people think what they see is the whole story. it rarely is, though.

Like most, my husband and I prefer Quiet Chats, handling it at home, among our family---where largely it all resides. It usually starts with a conversation between co-parents...the conversation usually begins and ends with a plea, "What are we going to do about this?"

But sometimes it spills into school and that's when you get to have the Quiet Chat in the Hallway with the teacher, as I did today. I've had quite a few quiet chats with teachers lately.

Today's chat was about Persistence. Her teacher had noted some clinginess to me and some boundary-testing. Welcome to the club.

Persistence is a boundary-tester by nature. She notices lines and cracks in pavement. When we walk from the car to her school she hops over every crack, and insists on walking in an odd loop on the painted lines of the parking lot. These are her own rules and superstitions, all of her own making---the only kind she believes in and will follow. If I told her to walk on the lines and hop over the cracks, she'd immediately stop, and would abandon her superstitions about it faster than a politician forgets his campaign promises.

She also notices lines and cracks in people. She will find your buttons and push them, tip-toe along the edges of your boundaries, keep you off-balance. Nine out of ten times she will stay on the right side of the line, but on the tenth, she will cross over, and you will crack.

In dog training you learn that you don't have to give a dog a treat every time because he will remember that he got it once, and will always hope that this time will be that once again. Our dog trainer told us, "Dogs are wicked superstitious that way, if it happens once, they remember that." Once our dog leapt over a two by four to get into a room we didn't want him in. He was a puppy, and didn't clear the board, which fell on his paw and bounced back up, landing with a huge plop and clatter beside him. Even after he was a full grown dog, up to my hips, one two by four in a doorway will prevent him from entering a room.

Parents are as superstitious as dogs. We always remember the once, especially the onces that are treats to us.

"Do you remember that Saturday that the kids got up, got Cheerios, turned on the TV and played quietly until we woke up?" I asked my husband last weekend, who had been dragged from bed by a child who sneaked past my admonitions and defenses. "Leave Dad be," I told the children, "He's tired." My husband was exhausted, sleep-deprived after maybe 10 hours of sleep the whole week. But they wanted him, and so one distracted me while the other sneaked up and woke him.

"Maybe," he said, "Or maybe we just dreamed that."

It works against us too. As Persistence runs along the boundaries, I get to a point when I over-react, my nerves stretched to the ends, because I remember the times that she crosses the lines, and I am tired of waiting. I know she will do it. I am fatigued with the effort of keeping her on this side.

"Your hands are full with that one," my husband's coworker, coworkers actually, said about Persistence when I dropped the kids at the office on Monday night.

Yes, our hands are full with that one.

Our hearts, too, because as clever as she is about our lines and cracks, she is clever, also, about the effects constant testing can create, and so her charm is abundant, her charisma enormous. She can make you laugh out loud, or reach her for a huggy squeeze right before your temper tips to angry. There is just something about her, people have said to me, that reaches out and grabs your heart. She makes you care

Her teacher cares.

And so she just wanted to check in with me about the clinging, and the testing.

I confirmed, provided context---husband working a lot, I'm busy, she's in boundary testing mode defcon 8, Patience has had incidents at school and is coming home and taking it out on her little sister, and so forth.

"I just have to hold firm on the line," I told the teacher, "And sometimes that creates conflict. She resists, I discipline, and so forth. Today was a tough morning. She refused to get ready, we ran late, she missed breakfast so only got cheerios in the car, and so forth. She knows, and so, I think, she clings a bit, just to get enough reassurance that it's true my love doesn't go away, even in times like these..."

"That's what I thought," the teacher said, "She said you've been busy, using the computer, also that daddy's been at work..."

She said it with the kindness and understanding I know makes up the core of her, but I felt the icy chill in my chest. Guilt. Shame.

Parenting is choices. The things I love to do for me do not involve my children. I went to a reception and reading on Monday, for an author I admire greatly. He is the example I kept in mind every time someone told me my writing was too dialogue-y and not plot-driven enough. I like characters, how they interact, and the things they say. Action is fun but sometimes so is watching a river flow by. I live in my head, and so, it seems, do my characters. I came home Monday night with stars in my eyes. The conversations I had revolved around my favorites topics, and nobody got bored or told me the things I say and think make their brains hurt. Nobody laughed and said enough intellectual. Nobody threw an arm around my shoulder and said, "You are one intense chick but we love you anyway." Not once. They seemed intrigued and invested, as I was, and so I loved them all.

But my children could not be there. So, while my soul was renewed on the Julie-level, my children were at my husband's office until nearly bedtime.

In the morning, I was awakened by angry children. I had betrayed their expectation of me by doing for myself instead of for them, and their father had betrayed them by not following their expectations of being the me Substitute and for not making up for that by Doing Something Special.

"Daddy didn't take us out to dinner!" Patience said.

"Daddy forgot to go to the store and buy snack for school and today is my snack day!" Persistence said.

The dam opened and the children let flow a flood of whines. I rolled over to see the clock. My room was dark, but it was after 7 a.m. I hate daylight savings.

My mind, by this point, already soggy, was quickly drenched with the torrent of complaints.

"Patience," I said in my 'everybody be quiet voice,' "I'm sorry you don't feel like you got fun time with Daddy. Let's schedule some time this weekend, when you can do fun things, okay? Persistence, let's get ready fast so we can leave early. We'll run by the store and get the snacks, okay?"

Some people make a great living at a job like this for corporations.

I'm adding Solutions Expert on my resume.

But in that Quiet Chat with the teacher, my bravado faltered and fell off in a single sheet. Instead of "glue that binds the family" and "solutions expert" and "balanced woman and mother" I became, instead, "woman who is selfishly pursuing own ends and missing her desperate children's pleas for attention."

We think things are private, we think we manage things in the home, but when the teacher spoke to me, I realized that every time my children leave me and our home, they carry their own stories with them, which they share. Or broadcast. Depending.

I thought I was juggling work and family so well, but now my younger daughter is acting up and I saw it in the teacher's eyes: it is directly related to my busy days.

My husband and I have been trying to make up for it by devoting ourselves to the children on the weekend, especially with fun activities, such as trips to the Children's Museum and family get-togethers. The funny thing, the odd thing, is that I think, in a way, the kids would so much rather nothing very special at all. I think they'd just as soon be home, running in the yard, largely ignoring us until they happened to need us in some way, while knowing we were there at their disposal. Rather like an armchair.

We think our lives are opaque for our children, but they never, ever are. My children see me enjoying myself greatly outside the home, and on some level, this terrifies them. On another level, it enrages them. They want all of me.

Instead of feeling boxed in and resentful, I felt guilty. I immediately began sorting through my obligations, determining which could be dropped.

And then I felt resentful, because the truth is...if we had more of my husband, my role wouldn't be so crucial.

I'm not living more life right now, I'm not actually more busy than usual right now. I'm busy, it's true, but when I have an equal co-parent, it's not as noticeable.

My children have switched their dependence to me 100%.

And so...it is left to me to figure out what to cut. From my life.

After my laps this morning, I sat on the memorial bench and watched the waves lap against the boardwalk posts. I listened to a long-ago This American Life episode called "Didn't ask to be born," about parents, good parents who did their best, who lost their children in arguably the worst way: emotionally and relationally.

"I felt horrible, the worst failure and shame, like the welfare mom standing in the grocery line with food stamps and candy bars while everyone clicks their tongues in judgment," the one mother said.

And I knew how she felt. How do we not lose our children. How do we not lose ourselves.

It all flows together. Someday, Persistence's boundary testing will serve her well. Someday the example I set of being a person as well as a mother will serve my girls well. Each time we act up---me, or the kids---we are telling each other something, "Look at me, see me, see my needs." Someday it will serve us all well because we will not fall into the habit of ignoring one another or of creating a person and situation that is convenient for us, rather than who and how it really is.

Today, on the coast, the waves, wind, and sun were consistent, easy. Little waves lapped in to shore with a soft breeze in temperate air, with sun peeking from behind clouds just enough for bright, not enough for heat. I know tomorrow everything could be completely different, and I'll adapt.

This, too, will pass. And we will adapt.

Today I will keep in mind that the children really more want an armchair mom, instead of a well-balanced woman, and rather than trying to do something special, as I did yesterday after school, we will come home and just sit. I'll sit outside with a book and the children will run and play and largely ignore me until they need something, but I will be there, on the side, in their periphery. Until they need me.

Meaningful Conversations: Tribe, Phalanx, Marketing, and the Internet

2009-02-25T09:04:00.015-06:00

I have recently been thinking about the pros and cons of blogs, chatrooms, Facebook and Twitter. What need does each fulfill? What need does each block? After some contemplation, which those of you who know me well enough to know was very deep indeed, I decided that the ability to converse in a back and forth manner was a big pro of Twitter, but the ability to converse at length and with thought was a big pro of chatrooms and blogs. So...I'm endeavoring, in my own way, to create the best of all possible worlds, and allow conversation and thought to mate on my blog. Bear with me as I try this out and refine it as I go. Feel free to make suggestions and thanks for participating.

Meaningful Conversations 1: Tribe, Phalanx, Marketing, and the Internet

Yesterday, on Twitter, someone (and I'm sorry I forget who) linked to a video of Seth Godin talking about tribes.

Then, today Sarah of Slouching Mom selected phalanx (def.: noun, 1. any closely grouped mass of people: a solid phalanx of reporters and photographers; 2. a number of people united for a common purpose) which I thought was a really, really interesting concept to consider within the context of the Internet, specifically as it applies to social media.

It's easy to think of mommybloggers as a phalanx---aren't we united in common purpose? To share and create a community---hopefully one that pays dividends in some form or offers remuneration, more preferably? (Stefania at CityMama eloquently describes her journey from casual blogger to professional blogger and marketer.) Aren't we all trying to do the same thing? Commune with other moms, shares tips and tricks, and make a living for our families?

No.

To be a true phalanx, in my opinion, all the mommybloggers would have to be unified behind a single blogger or project. Our goal would have to be that this person’s or blog’s single goal succeeds.

And we don't all want that. We don't all want the same thing. We want what we want for ourselves, which is, of course, personal success (however you might define that).

However, in order to succeed online, I need for this medium to succeed and be a place that facilitates success, and that is the point on which we converge.

That's why women bloggers---mommybloggers---are truly a tribe (def.: noun, 1. A unit of sociopolitical organization consisting of...groups who share a common...culture and among whom leadership is typically neither formalized nor permanent. . . .3. A group of people sharing an occupation, interest, or habit: a tribe of graduate students.)

Seth Godin says, "I don't want everyone to have a tribe. I only want the people who want the world to change, I only want people who have something to say, to make a change, to make things better...The world is lined up in a way now that instead of having to have power or cash, you can make change and have influence merely by leading people who want to go somewhere."

This point is not lost---or invisible---to the marketing community. They are always after the influencers, and the influencers invariably have a tribe.

What's new is people figuring out how to use these online influencers and tribes as an effective marketing stream.

In the mommyblogging community, we talk (okay, kvetch) about how marketers reach out to us. At the recent Mom 2.0 Summit, there was a lot of talk about treating moms as if we are a single entity, unified by gender and mom status.

What I think we're really talking about is phalanx versus tribe.

Marketers need to understand that we're not a phalanx. We don't all have the same interests or a common, unifying goal---as much as it might appear we do. Instead, what marketers are actually seeing are alliances within tribes.

These "cooperative effort alliances" work with an attitude of reciprocity, "you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours, and together we can get each other much further than we could on our own."

Consider Cool Mom Picks, which reviews and promotes different products that can rapidly become The Mommy Must-Have. The Parent Bloggers Network also reviews products, but additionally provides space for networking. Most appealing to me is The Motherhood, which offers space to listen to conferences about gardening, pose questions to other mothers for answers and ideas, and more.

The sites run the gamut from straight up marketing to focus on the conversation.

What's important to me is that I know the purpose behind these sites, and it's to provide space and information. Sites such as Cool Mom Picks, while friendly and appealing, don't pretend to be my personal friend.

It reminds me of a time my husband and I, newly married, met another young couple, who invited us to dinner. We'd wanted to meet other married couples, so we were thrilled at the possibility of new Married Friends. We were thrilled, that is, until, polished and wearing our "best but not trying too, too hard" outfits, they opened the door and invited us in to have a glass of wine and...listen to their Amway presentation. Suffice it to say, we didn't stay for dinner and never again spoke to them. It's just not a good way to initiate a relationship.

It's also not a good way to use an existing relationship, as good a product or as well-intentioned as it might be.

Bottom line for me is that I love recommendations from friends. That's probably my number one source of selecting products. I love when friends know information about the products and can answer questions. I don't love friends who consistently try to sell me on something when it's their job.

In other words, I don't like to mix business and pleasure.

Sorry, but it's true.

I don't like heading to friends' blogs only to catch them hawking.

I know when it's happening, even if it's a story about the fun times a couple has baking a cake with lots of bonding and laughs. Like Anne Shirley, I know when a story has been co-opted to sell Rollings Reliable Baking Soda, no matter how allegedly seamlessly it's been integrated into the tale.

And for the record, I also notice the new prominently displayed labels on television shows. I'd rather commercials, if it's all the same to you, PR Firms. I'd rather not watch Debra Messing spend five minutes using the entire line of Oil of Olay products at the beginning of the Starter Wife.

In fact, I am pretty good at tuning out or clicking away from advertising, especially when it intrudes on what I really went to see.

The truth is, I plan my purchases. I do! When I want information about what to get? I go do my own research, usually on the Internet, and that's when I want to see reviews and details.

When I want. When I ask. When I'm ready.

I know that the point of advertising is supposed to be to make me think "Puffs!" when I need to buy tissues, but to tell the truth, it doesn't. I apparently have limited space in my short-term recall and I triage "make lunch for kids" and "dentist tomorrow at 9" as priorities for that space. When I go to the store, I weigh price point against alleged features splashed on the packaging. Sorry Puffs, you usually lose.

But we keep talking about products.

If we think back to Seth talking about people wanting to make the world better, that means this all applies to ideas, too.

Again, this isn't a point lost on or invisible to issue advocates and politicians, who have also entered the social media arena.

But are they using it effectively?

And more importantly, are they using it appropriately?

At the end of the day, I think the best avenue to success is not so much to form a tribe as it is to form a phalanx. It's tooting a horn in my own band, but I think the MOMocrats are one of the best examples of a phalanx on the Internet. This group of women united to not just advance women's voices and concerns in the political arena, but we joined forces under one common goal: get our political party elected into office. It worked, and what’s more, we all became much more active and a bigger part of the overall effort than I think we would have individually.

This is where I drop off the presentation and ask you to join in the conversation.

* Talk to me about what you think of bloggers who become vehicles for marketers---whether it's ideas or products---and whether any can or have seamlessly integrated "for profit" blogging into their main stream of blogging.

* Talk to me about whether it's realistic to believe that integrating marketing into a personal blog can be seamless. Can it be, or is it invariably jarring and offputting, even if elegantly done? We're pretty sophisticated these days and I'm pretty sure we can smell marketing a mile away. What do you think?

* What questions, issues, obstacles, etc. do you deal with when encountering marketing requests for your blog? (By the way, Dawn at kaiseralex came up with a pretty good formula for determining what your blog real estate is worth.)

* How can this be something that provides that shiny dividend for us?

What do you think as a reader and/or a writer, or even more specifically, as a marketer?

Meaningful conversations:Tribe v. Phalax

P.S. Eventually I'll figure out how to set this up to feed from Twitter, and give everyone "permission" to talk in advance.

Valentine's Day, then...and now

2009-02-13T06:37:00.006-06:00

I remember my Valentine's Day childhood parties well, even though these days it seems like a hundred years ago. I went to a lot of different elementary schools so the parties are distinct, rather than a blur of similarity of places and people.

There were a lot of common points, though, regardless of place.

We'd sit at our desks---the old-fashioned kind (now) with the wood top, attached by a metal bar to the hard, slick wood seat (one size fits all, hard for smaller bottoms). The cubby was underneath the seat, so children's heads tended to bob down as if going under water to get a fresh pencil. We'd have ants in our pants, the teacher would say, because not one of us could sit still. Every now and again a child, usually a boy, would explode up from his desk, no longer able to sit at all, and the teacher, resigned to this sort of thing, would say something like, "Mark...Mark, what are you doing up?"

And poor Mark, a victim of a heady case of excitement beyond his control, would say, "I need to sharpen my pencil!"

The teacher would say, "You sharpened that pencil two minutes ago."

Mark would pause, scratch his head, shuffle for a reply.

The kind teachers would give in, help him save face, and say, "Oh go ahead, sharpen it, but walk!"

The room on those days would smell even more vividly of wood and lead shavings, overlaying the mingled odors of many thrilled children and the sharp acidic scent of chalk dust.

At some point, a mom's face would appear in the door window, and the teacher would gesture for her to come in. Smiling, carrying a tray, the mom (and maybe one or two others at the suburban middle-class schools) would enter, slightly tentatively, unused to being in the classroom, their own childhoods and classroom experiences fresh on their memories. Smell is one of the best agents of memory, they say, and classrooms are so full of smells.

"Where should we put this?" the mom would ask, and the teacher would gesture to the cleared reading table.

The teacher lead the party in those days, when I was a child. The children waited at their desks, impatient and trying hard to listen to the directions.

We smelled the cupcakes, or the cookies, and we knew that in the cubby under our desks were little boxes we'd painstakingly decorated, full of Valentine's we couldn't wait to hand out to our friends.

The teacher would tell us to put our boxes on our desks, and then, in orderly lines, we were to walk up and down the rows dropping each Valentine into each box. Once finished, we sat back at our own chairs, and the moms wold start handing out the treats. In my mind, it was usually cupcakes, maybe because I love those best of all.

While we ate, we go to read through our Valentine's. Back then, some were the store bought little paper ones, but at least half were still handmade. The store bought ones were considered cool...because they came printed, like formal cards, and had popular characters of the day on them. One year every single boy handed out Star Wars cards, with photos of a grave Luke wielding a light saber and stating, "May the force of love be with you."

After cupcakes, and after we'd been instructed to put all our cards back in our boxes---mine always had a paper doily red heart, usually very similar to other kids because back then, we often decorated our boxes in class as an art project---to show our parents later, after the boxes were tucked back into our cubby under our desk...the teacher would hand out her gift, usually lollipops, the sort with a looped handle instead of a stick, the sort with blurry white printed messages on them. If you licked just enough but not too much, you could usually make out the "Happy Valentines!" message on it (no space for "day").

Sometimes one mom brought a box of Necco candy message hearts. I never liked this candy much, but I loved the secret messages on each one. Also, in late elementary school we had devised a fun game for those hearts.

After the party, the teacher and moms would shoo the hyped up on sugar kids outside to run. We loved this extra recess and fun, plus the fact that normally it was forbidden added an element of extra thrill. The moms and teacher would stand on the side, sometimes nibbling on leftover cupcakes (or cookies) and chat, probably about how funny sugared up kids are or maybe reminiscing about their own childhood parties.

My friends and I would gather in a circle and show our hands, in which we had secretly clutched our candy hearts.

"I got Be Mine," Lori triumphantly said.

We all ooohed because that was the best one.

"Be True," I said, slightly disappointed.

"Kiss Me!" Kelly said happily. This was a big score for her, because it carried a huge fear factor.

"I think mine says Call Me," Shannon said. We leaned in to try to read it, but couldn't quite agree, maybe out of sympathy for Shannon because Call Me was the worst one.

"Wildcard," Lori announced, sure in her answer, positive we'd follow her lead.

"Wildcard!" we cried and Shannon smiled.

"I choose BE MINE!"

We all giggled and Shannon and Lori linked arms.

"Okay," Kelly said, and we turned and ran.

Shannon and Lori chased Mark and Chris, screaming, "BE MINE!!!"

I ran after a random clutch of boys, shouting, "BE TRUE!"

"KISS ME KISS ME KISS ME!" Kelly shrieked, clamboring up the slide.

Whoever the Be Mine girls caught had to be theirs for the rest of the day, a slave to their whims. Lori caught Mark, and she demanded that he get on all fours and bark like a dog, which he readily---and happily---did. I caught Chris and made him eat the Be True candy, which acted as a truth serum in our game and meant he had to tell the truth the rest of the day.

"Who is smarter?" I demanded, "Me or Kelly?"

Kelly ran by just then. She yelled, "I am so KISS ME!" I noticed she didn't latch on to any one boy and simply caught and released them one by one. The boys ran, terrified and yet---underneath---thrilled when caught. After she released them, they were triumphant, "HA! I got away!" They'd run, taunting her to chase them again.

Shannon tried to convince Mike to comply with the Be Mine demand, but he would not go along.

When recess ended, we were exhausted and happy. We packed our bags to head home, enjoying the secret cards in our pretty boxes---something more interesting than the usual homework.

It was the best day, and seemed a million miles in either direction from Christmas and Easter, both of which we openly celebrated at public schools back then.

Holidays seem so different now. They are planned, more elaborate. The moms seem overly familiar with the classroom, and the teacher stands to the side, while the moms put the kids through activity paces on a timetable. Store bought cards are so de rigeur that fancy, crafty "scrapbooking moms" make beautiful homemade ones, and those carry cache. The teachers may hand out lollipops, but they are lost in the sea of lollipop bouquets, M&Ms, and Oriental Trading Co gift bags. The little Valentine's cards are carelessly tossed aside as impediments to the candy or gift.

"Look honey," I try to capture my four year old's attention, "Look at the cute card from this friend!"

"Another lollipop!" she says instead, "A heart with a heart drawn on it!"

I sigh, and consider that her bounty is bountiful indeed.

I recall keeping my box of Valentine's, with warm friendship wishes, under my bed for months. On down days, I'd take it out, and remember the fun, and the friendship.

I have only sent my kids in with little cards. They are cool, the 3-D ones that change pictures, but there is no pencil, eraser or candy attached. Just a warm wish of friendship.

At my younger daughter's party yesterday, I stood beside another mom who looked anxiously at the collection of elaborate Valentine's.

"I only sent in little cards!" she said.

"Me too," I said. The I thought how it was the babysitter, not me, who had helped my kids with their cards and boxes. Valentine's fell on a particularly crazy busy week this year, when my hands---and calendar---were overly full. My husband and I are delaying our own celebration until sometime in March, when things so far look calmer.

We're so busy these days---the general us, I mean, as well as my family specifically---and we try so hard for the children, to make it incredibly exciting, this burst of attention and special day with fun event. For me, that meant squeezing in an attendance at the party on a day when I had deadlines. It was worth it when my daughter raced full speed ahead at me and slammed into my legs in joy. For others it meant sending in a fancy batch of Valentine's.

"It's okay," I assured the other mom, "It all matters, and we all have different things we add in, all in different ways. After the candy is gone, my daughter will hang on to the cards, and she'll enjoy those for a long time to come."

The other mom smiled at me, and I thought that's one thing that won't change: the children's anticipation of this day and event, and their joy and pleasure of it.

It's only the next day, but the candy is already gone (eaten or ahem disposed of) and my daughter has lined up her cards on her little art table. She gazes at them, rearranges them, and touches them every time she passes by.

That's another thing that never changes, either.

Happy Valentine's Day. Be true.

I went to Beautiful

2009-01-27T11:06:00.016-06:00

The time is right
The time is right
I'm gonna pack my bags
And take that journey down the road
Cause over the mountain I see the bright sun shinning
And I want to live inside the glow
Yeah

I wanna go to a place where I am nothing and everything
That exists between here and nowhere
I wanna got to a place where time has no consequences oh yeah
The sky opens to my prayers

I wanna go to beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. . .

Beautiful, by India Arie

My soul needed cleansing this morning. Last night, I let it get dirty. Someone said ugly things about me, about me to my kid, and I let my temper overwhelm me. I said some ugly things about that person.

Someone told me that same person said out of line things to her, as well. As she shared her story, I struggled back and forth about providing support or staying out of it. I feared, rightly, that were I to get involved and provide support, I'd be unable to set myself aside and simply be a friend. I rightly feared that My Feelings would assert themselves, and that I'd make this as much about me as about her. My feelings, it seems, are still a little angry, or perhaps it is my social justice nerve that is aggravated. I was angry about these events---these current and past events that all seem to flow together with the ease of dirty oil skimming the surface of water.

I stared at the dirty oil, and let it pollute the whole of the water.

I let it get inside me, and flow out of my mouth: an angry, ugly black stream.

And so last night, I let my soul get dirty.

This morning I woke with a bitter aftertaste in my mouth, a terrible breath of shame that I haven't felt in so long. I woke with a sense of karmic retribution hanging over me. And, defeated, I began to surrender to it.

By the time I drove my youngest daughter to school, I realized I had drowned in the oil and shame, the morning above the surface, over my head.

We drove across the bridge, water on either side of us---and though we could not see it at all because of the thick fog, we believed it was there, we took on faith that objects remain static in our world, even if we can't see them.

That's when I realized that I had not seen these feelings in a while, but that didn't mean they were no longer there. I tossed up a question to myself: and so what can I do?

resolve it. peacefully. let it go.

After I dropped off my daughter, I went to the track and began my stretches for my morning laps. I felt my muscles stretch and warm, and I realized I've been neglecting my neck and shoulders. I incorporated some Lotus Link yoga stretches, and felt such a loosening that I knew I had been not seeing my own stress through the fog.

I did my laps, tuning in to my mellow and positive music---skipping the invigorating dance songs I usually prefer. I turned it low, and used the music as background, so that I spent more time looking and seeing. As I came around the bend into the straight stretch, I saw the birds.

Two or three flocks covered an open swathe of grass under the oaks. They pecked at the ground for seeds and bugs, and circled the young trees where park gardeners had been watering around the trunks. A noise, maybe my own plodding feet hitting the track, shocked them all into flight. They alighted on the branches, and some of the birds pecked at each other to gain control of certain branches.

I realized that since the hurricane, there are now fewer trees, and the remaining trees have fewer branches. It looks like less, it is less. But it's still enough. There are still enough trees, still enough branches.

Why did that blackbird peck so fiercely for that one branch? It's a short one, it sticks out, unprotected. Why that branch? Why such a ferocity of purpose to get that branch?

That's when it hit me: like some of those other birds, I'll always find it easier to fly away to another branch because I know there are enough, there will always be more.

But some people are more like the blackbird.

And, having been pecked, I would have flown away, but I'm tied to this tree, this branch, by tresses of obligation.

For a moment, I lost my ability to fly, and thus felt powerless, at the mercy of the blackbird. There is the core of my anger. The blackbird is wrong, there are plenty of branches. There is the first ring of my anger.

I can't leave the tree, and it can be a pain point to have to find a new branch, but...it is what I must do.

I let myself feel fortunate that I can believe that I will find a new branch. I let myself feel fortunate that I trust I will find a new branch. I let myself appreciate the power in me that i can fly, and find a spot to land. I let myself like this in me. I let myself think of it as a strength, not a weakness or flaw.

Then, I noticed the sun had come out and poked a hole in the fog and clouds, creating a crown of blue at the top of the sky. The blue slowly yet surely spread further across and down, the clouds and fog retreating to the sea. The unmuted and unfiltered sunlight opened up a fresh and crisp world.

new clarity. brightness.

Quickening my pace, I turned my face up to the sun and spread my arms wide.

I will let it in. I will let it in.

I walked on, feeling my own fog blow out behind me. I turned to look back, and saw the blackbird still preening on the won branch, keeping its neck and head high, working to keep its feathers from blowing in the wind. And I did not hate that bird at all, because she saw only one branch and had to have it. I understood, and looked at the other birds, back on the ground, hunting, pecking, eating, drinking, some flying up and surfing wind currents. That bird sat still on her branch. She seemed content to stare down from her perch.

I ran on, with a little laugh, birds off the tree in front of me coasting on warm air currents.

We flew forward, preferring the feel of the wind in our faces---in the sky open to our prayers, feet free of gravity. And she sat on that branch, and we were where and how we needed to be.

Falling and Flying

2009-01-13T10:32:00.005-06:00

She is three, no four now, and she is running along a stretch of grassy lawn. Her feet flash over the mix of brown and green blades of grass and the skirt she wears---skirts and dresses only---peals behind her, bell-shaped. Her short hair, self-cut, flops beneath three bows placed strategically yet erratically on her head. She faces forward, never looking away to either side or behind herself. Her arms and legs pump fast and hard as she races to meet up with friends to play, big kids, who are waiting for her in the cul-de-sac. Except she never thinks they will wait for her and so she, the younger child, spends her life running to keep up.

I shuffle more slowly behind her, trying to gauge the right distance to stay back---enough forward to assuage my desire to protect and enough back to respect her desire for freedom and independence.

She has no idea I am there, but I watch her closely, not just for safety but for the remembrance of pure emotion I know she feels. She is unguarded, yet. Her joy at finding and playing with friends is open and flows like a wave over and through me. Her excitement about joining in the game makes my heart beat faster. That must be it; it can't be my pace walking behind her.

But it might be my fear when I watch this baby of mine, child of my body and heart, running to a future that I don't know and cannot control.

She reaches the corner and stops. Her body is still, frozen beside a tree. I stand quietly across the street, waiting, watching, wondering when or if I should step in.

You see, what she ran towards was not there.

The children were someplace else and the cul-de-sac was empty.

When her shoulders began to sag, I spoke up, "Persistence..."

She perked up, her relief in my presence evident; she wasn't alone. This time, she didn't have to deal with the emptiness and absence alone.

"Mom!" she said, running towards me.

"They're not there, they're gone! The friends are gone!" she said.

"I know, I wonder where they went," I said, my voice a little tight because our rule is that you don't move locations without telling me and now I wondered where Patience had gone. Patience, who has chucked the shackles of my apron strings as an unwelcome weight as she hikes her own path. I have to develop sneaky skills that allow me to keep tabs while she enjoys perceived total freedom, a state she has violated by breaking a rule meant to inflate my trust with confidence.

"I no...don't know," Persistence said, shrugging. She has begun being careful to avoid "baby" language such as "amimals" for animals and "no know" for don't know. But her faith that I can fix this situation is still absolute.

"Why don't we go see if our neighbor is home to play," I said.

"Okay!" she said, and slipped her hand into mine, skipping alongside me as we walked back towards our house. This time we kept pace and walked side by side. This time my stride was confident. This time I knew my place.

***********************************************************************************

In the park where I do my laps on the soft surface track there is a bench beside an oak tree. Next to the bench is a plaque with every parents worst nightmare on it. It is a memorial plaque for a boy who died when he was 18. His senior year, and mine. I did not know this boy, and once I asked my husband, who grew up here, if he did, or if he knew what had happened, but my husband was as clueless as I. Although I've read the plaque several times, it gives no clue about who the boy was or what happened to him. No hint as to why he never got to grow into a middle-aged man, as he would be now.

So I try to piece it together from the context, but I only end up with more questions. Did the family remain in the area? Do they still remain here? The bench, plaque and tree are well-kept, but perhaps that is park maintenance rather than loving family who still grieves. Was this park important to him? There is a playground and also an old rough swing on an oak tree. The swing is really just a big stick through a rope. I wonder if the boy did kamikaze stunt swinging there at that tree on that swing, with his friends, as boys will. Or did he die here? I don't know, that seems unlikely.

Perhaps it was in the water. It's a waterfront park, and the lake runs out to the bay here. I don't know whether he went voluntarily or involuntarily. Once upon a time, a guy told me a lot of teens in this town killed themselves that year. So I don't know.

I don't know how it came to be that this boy never aged beyond gaining the right to vote, but I do know that a mother and father lost their son, and their grief sits on a copper plate on a stone by a bench under an oak tree in this park. Perhaps that space was for them. perhaps his mother sat on that bench and stared out to sea, trying to undrown from the enormity of it.

How do you ever let go?

************************************************************************************

My little brother is three, no four, no three, or maybe four, and he is in the back of my car calling out the make and model of every vehicle on the road. I couldn't identify half of them. I'm in my very early 20s and we're running errands together. I'm buying some new things for my apartment and it's a hot and humid summer's day in Atlanta.

"Kudzu kudzu kudzu," we sing together as we pass a grove of dying trees choked with the parasitic vine.

"Shoot the hootch shoot the hootch!" we sing as we drive by the Chattahoochee River.

He resumes identifying cars and trucks, and I couldn't recount that for you if I tried.

But we're driving in my car, and he's gazing at the sky through my hatchback, which he loves. it lets the sky in my eyes, he tells me.

My brother is seven or eight and he's calling me on the phone crying because it has been confirmed: the schoolyard rumor is true that there is not really a real Santa Claus. He is devastated, his pride hurt because he feels fooled and his trust breached because we all lied to him. He wants me to pick him up from school and come to my house to be with me and my husband because he never wants to speak to Mom or Dad again because they lied to him.

I am sitting in my office holding my office phone. I hear the buzz from the cubicles outside my door, and I stare out my darkened UV-reflective window.

I ponder how to respond. I wonder how a very much bigger sister can be there for her little brother, because he is a child and I am an adult, one of The Adults who has perpetuated this myth on him. As an adult, I understand why we did this, why he is upset, and why he can't come to my house. If I were younger, closer to his age, I might help him run away, but I am not.

"You are going to have to go home," I say, "You are going to have to tell them how you feel." Then I told him I was so sorry, so lamely. I am trying to not wish harm to his classmates who brought him to this state. I am failing.

"I am so sorry," I say again, "So sorry this happened."

I do not know my place. I do not know what to say to him. I do not know what to say to my parents about this.

My brother is in his early twenties, finishing college, training to be an officer in the Army, and working a responsible job.

"A blackhawk has crashed [location redacted};word is no cadets on board, but 5 crew injured, at least 1 still trapped in wreckage," tweeted a friend.

Wow, I thought, that is where my brother is right now, but he wouldn't be on a Blackhawk.

I called my father.

"Your brother's not there," he said, "He's at Ft [redacted], or he's supposed to be. They were flying out today."

"Flying out today?" I asked, "Flying out on what?"

"Helicopters," my father replied and then, that moment, that's the moment it hit us: that could be the helicopter my brother was on.

"Just wait," I said, as we both tried to slow our hearts and dial back the panic to worried, "Just wait, my friend said it was four Guardsmen and an officer, that wouldn't be him. Why don't I try to dig up more details and you try to call him, okay?"

Unbeknownst to us, my father must have been calling my brother in the middle of the chaos. He couldn't reach him, and called back to say so.

"I'm sending you a link to a live ongoing news story. It sounds bad but I don't think it's him," I said, "Call me as soon as you hear anything."

Frantic time, thirty minutes, an hour, a day, a lifetime, I can't say how much time passed. I forgot to look at the clock.

This is the new normal, new normal, new normal, a part of my brain chorused behind all my wildly speculating thoughts.

My father finally called, "Your brother sent a text. He figured we'd be worried, and he said he's okay. He does know the people, and said it's a long story and he's busy so will call later when he can."

Could it only have been an hour? One hour of wondering?

I thanked God for modern technology that got us information so fast, and reassurance so quickly. I thanked God for this mercy, that my brother was okay. That today, it was not a sad story for our family. But then I remembered it is a sad story for another family. Another boy's name for another plaque.

The rock lump that had been sitting in my stomach ever since I learned of the accident moved to my throat, and my heart cried out for mercy for the injured and the killed and their loved ones.

My brother called later, and my father called me to relay the story. My brother, it seems, was standing near the helicopter, waiting for the next Blackhawk to carry him to his training exercise. he stood beside his gear, which included weapons, and the pilot gave him a thumbs up. He gave a thumbs up back, and the Blackhawk lifted up, maybe about 150 feet, and then it corkscrewed down, hard and fast. My brother and the others grabbed their gear and ran for their lives, pieces of the helicopter flying past them and pelting behind them. They then turned back, running to the crash site, intent on helping. Later they learned the fates of those on board.

He was not injured, my brother, but I think perhaps that he was hurt.

I do not know my place. I do not know my stride. I do not know the right amount of space. I do not know what to say to him.

But I will do my best, and at the end of the day, it is enough, I hope, that we try.

It is what it is and other closure for 2008

2009-01-08T10:49:00.010-06:00

The last few months of 2008 were a little mind-blowing in a "I'll let you know when I've finished processing that" kind of way.

Have you ever gotten busy and let your house go? You know what I mean...skip the laundry, dusting, cleaning, tidying, vacuuming and so forth and one day, walk in, notice the mess and dirt and think, "Holy crap, how did it get this big and bad so fast and where in the world do I start?"

Have you ever just backed out of the house and decided to find errands to run and a good excuse to eat out in order to avoid the mess and all you have to do?

Overwhelmed.

I haven't written much because I've been so overwhelmed, and had no way of figuring how to break it down and which one thing to tackle first.

The next thing I knew, the things I wanted to say had piled up on top of one another and I? had no time to get to it, but more than that, it was such a cluttered jumble in my mind that I needed to break it down.

Let's go back a few months...

I traveled this year! Oh how I traveled! All on my own! And I liked it.

I went to San Francisco, Denver and Pittsburgh. I met friends I know through blogging, traveled the political wheel with writers I respect and politicians I tried hard not to show too much awe to, and listened to our country's foremost experts on the current state of the environment and its effect on our health.

I experienced and took in so much I had to play it cool while my mind slowly digested how! freaking! amazing! my life had become.

I went on the radio. My words traveled through many channels to reach many eyes.

My kids returned to school. Patience exploded as a strong and interested reader with an even stronger penchant for science, math and art. Persistence picked up letters and concepts with a rapidity that I think startled and sort of frightened us both.

We got hit by a hurricane. Some were hit harder than us, and some hit less hard. Some businesses are back, and some are gone forever. It's hard to tell a sad story without sounding self-pitying or pitiable. It's even harder to tell this story without sounding angry or entitled. It's harder still to tell our story without feeling ashamed because some have it so much worse. We took on damage. If we do all that we should, we'll spend over $35,000. Insurance gave about $3000. FEMA gave exactly $0.00. So we're getting creative, seeking financing, trying to be conservative without being frozen, and working to make good decisions that help us recover from this. Most especially, I want to reach a better balance of helping myself recover and helping others who are in need.

My husband and I both flipped another year older and celebrated 15 years of marriage. That's right...fifteen. years. married. This officially means I am practically dead even in time with knowing and being in a relationship with him as long as I didn't know him.

Stop a second...what a concept.

The kids flipped another year older, and suddenly, for birthday and Christmas presents, I realized Patience had gotten so much more sophisticated this year, so much older, that I was stymied what to get her. I was no longer shopping for both kids in the "little girl" aisles. I got her speakers for her iPod, and we set up a CD player with her own stash of CDs in her room. Sometimes she retreats there, closes her door, and listens to music. Do you know what this makes me see? The Tween years looming.

Persistence, after having clung to the toddler-ness of being a toddler until the very last second, was suddenly All Done with the toddler years. By age she was no longer a toddler, and by mind, too. She was determined to be a Big Girl, keep up with Big Girls, do all that Big Girls can do. She wants to read, too. She wants to fix her own food, too. She chooses her own clothes, fixes hair, and makes her bed. She loves to play with friends, and her most important achievement right now to her is the ability to pump her legs and swing herself. Riding a bike is a close second.

And that means, officially, we have two children, one of whom likes to remind me that she is this close to being ten. What is the significance of ten I ask. That's the age upon which she seems to expect a Granting of No Longer a Little Girl rights. I hope I get some official booklet in the mail because honestly, I'm not sure what those rights might be. The right to get locked in an ivory tower, perhaps.

We were suddenly done with babies. At first, the freedom was liberating, but then I felt a wee bit of that sting of emptiness.

People seemed to sense this---both the being done with babies and my sting---and they started asking about more kids (because two isn't enough? or we can't possibly be satisfied with children of the same sex?). They do this despite my age, my health, and my infertility. And for the first time in a long time, I have felt the sharp bite of Being Infertile again. No, no there cannot be a "last minute baby" for us.

By November, when I went in to see my general practitioner for my annual physical, I realized what was happening: I was feeling the youthness of my life edging away and I was feeling my age.

I turned my head to gaze at a poster on her wall. It read: If you took typewriting classes in high school, it's time to see an internist.

Holy crap, I thought, that's me! That poster means me! My age group!

That cemented it for me.

I'm getting older. My kids are getting older. My cats passed on. My dog's schnoz is graying. So is my hair, and my husband's. The youth portion of life? Has ended.

It had been coming on for a while, this feeling.

In San Francisco I demurred away from some late night running parties...I had to get up early and needed my sleep. In Denver I let some events pass by. In Pittsburgh I listened to some other people talk about oh-so-very-much that they do and I thought, that's cool for you but me? I am in a simplify mode. I am in a focus mode. I am in a triage my priorities mode.

To what end? I ask this a lot lately.

I've started looking at older people with an intense interest. Today as I did my paces around the track, an older man joined me. We crossed several times because he was slower and walking clockwise while I was speedy and counterclockwise. This seemed meaningful, hinting at some sort of metaphor. He carried on at his unhurried pace, unmotivated, uninterested or unable maybe to go any faster. He felt no pressure to do anything beyond what he came there to do, at his own pace. Meanwhile, I moved forward as quickly as I could.

I told my husband last night that I do this every day for three reasons: endorphin rush, to look damn good for my age, and to be healthy. "As long as I have my priorities straight," I joked.

As 2008 closed, the birthdays past, the holidays sealed shut and gotten through okay, I made that vow to myself, a resolution if you will: to get and keep my priorities straight.

A lot of what I've done the last year has been good and brought some incredible times my way. I'll never forget the amazing parts of 2008.

But some of it came at a cost, one I might not be willing to pay long term. A lot of what I do is so very, very competitive. It demands much, gives little but I do it because when it does pay out, it can be amazing.

I've been thinking a lot about how much I prefer my little locally-owned grocery store, and the little clothes boutique near it. I've been thinking about how I like little spaces, with concentrated and focused choices. I've been thinking about how maybe I need to apply that more liberally through other parts of my life: give myself permission to stick to the little, to my preferences.

So this past year I tried out different yeses and noes. Some were right, some were wrong, and this year I think I'll build on that.

Meanwhile, I'll be enjoying my children: Patience and her self-created books, where her writing is catching up with her art, and her new sympathy and understanding that reflects that her self is growing as much as her body; Persistence, with her sunny giving nature and love of fashion and books, the new care she applies to her independence, which she doesn't seem the need to fight for just as fiercely. I'll also enjoy my husband, because who doesn't appreciate the person with whom you can communicate with through grunts and gestures (and a little mind reading) when words (or cell phones) fail you, as they seem to more and more these days.

And I'll try to break it down, and bring out a little more, one at a time, again here.

What December Looks Like Where I live (Today)

2008-12-08T09:57:00.004-06:00

High today: mid-70s
High tomorrow: upper 70s
Lows: mid 50s to low 30s (when cold front comes through later this week)

Everyone is all excited about a freeze, but,despite my really poor performance in my meteorology courses (yes! I took them! required for a geography degree!), I'm pretty sure the weather can't be at 32 for ten minutes and create a freeze, as much as some of us might wish it.

So...show me photos, give data...what's December like for you right now?

P.S. This is one of two waterside parks near my house that are my favorites for jogging/walking. Lately I've been at this one most of the time, and the relative warmth and green struck me as funny beside the Christmas tree in the gazebo.