The Mothery

About The Snake

2009-12-08T14:57:00.008-05:00

I'm being eaten by a boa constrictor
I'm being eaten by a boa constrictor
I'm being eaten by a boa constrictor
And I don't like it at all!
Oh no! It's up to my toe!
Oh gee! It's up to my knee!
Oh fiddle! It's up to my middle!
Oh heck! It's up to my neck!
Oh dread! It's up to my ...

My son used to recite this Shel Silverstein rhyme when he was young, eyes wide, fascinated and terrified by the notion of being slowly consumed by a giant snake.

But it turns out that constrictors eat their prey head first.

We know this because we own one.

When he was eight years old my son adopted his first reptile - a corn snake named Simon with a gorgeous black and white checker board pattern on his stomach. Over the years the menagerie expanded to include a three-toed box turtle, a green anole, a blue-tongued skink and a collection of Madagascar hissing cockroaches, in addition to two dogs.

Ten years later, we are the experienced owners of a six-year old boa constrictor. When we got him, he was a beautiful juvenile snake with hourglass-shaped saddles alternating down his belly and back. When held, he would calmly coil around your forearm like an exotic piece of jewelry. At home I would often drape him about my waist or neck and watch with interest as he shifted position, his muscles rippling down the length of his body.

Of all the giant constrictors - snakes that kill by squeezing and suffocation, as opposed to a venomous bite – boas are the species most commonly kept as pets in the US. More than a million snakes have been imported into the US in the past thirty years, and two-thirds of them were boas, which tend to be smaller and more docile than other popular constrictors such as pythons and anacondas.

Our snake is now more than six feet long, and weighs about 30 pounds. Though still very tame, he’s incredibly strong. It’s generally understood among reptile enthusiasts that handling a snake more than five feet long is unsafe without assistance, so I carry him around a lot less now. And draping a constrictor around your neck or waist as I used to do - well, let’s just say that was one of my stupider ex-habits. When constrictors kill, they squeeze their prey around the neck until it suffocates, and then consume it, whole (and headfirst).

There have been no recorded incidents of a boa killing a human, although boas are considered capable of doing so. The deaths you’ve heard or read about – like the 2-year old in Florida who was killed by her mom’s boyfriend’s snake last summer, or the Bronx man whose snake attacked while he tried to feed him a live chicken – were all by pythons. And most snake accidents are the result of what herp geeks refer to as “stupid feeding errors,” i.e. human keepers doing something ignorant when feeding their reptile. Snakes have poor vision but a very fine-tuned sense of smell, so if they smell prey, they will strike at whatever they see moving. Years ago our boa would slam his snout against the side of his tank if I walked in front of it after introducing a rodent. I feared he was becoming aggressive, but actually he was just being a snake and I was just being an ignoramus.

As my son’s departure for college approaches, I had planned to donate our boa to a zoo or university. But I never imagined that my generous idea would be met with bemused smirks. In fact, there is a glut of unwanted exotic pets – most of them large reptiles – whose owners didn’t realize that herps can live more than thirty years in captivity. Some of the largest constrictors grow to thirteen feet and over one hundred pounds, requiring custom-made habitats, sizeable rodents for feeding and knowledgeable care. As a result, large snakes are increasingly abandoned by their keepers when they get big, and this has become a problem in places like Everglades National Park in Florida, where they are multiplying rapidly since they are non-native and have no natural predators.

Just as I had gotten okay with the idea of taking two dogs AND a snake with me when I bust out of Beantown next year, the US Geological Survey published a risk assessment of nine non-native constrictor species, including boa constrictors, and concluded that they pose a high risk to the ecosystem. The US Fish and Wildlife Service testified before Congress last month, requesting that the constrictors identified in the report be added to the Lacey Act, a federal law which identifies various species as injurious to people and the environment, and regulates their sale and transport. As I write, the Senate is considering Bill S373 – “The Python Ban” - which would prohibit importation and interstate movement of the nine species.

If the Senate passes the bill, I’ll need to get a PERMIT to move the boa that nobody wants to adopt.

Last summer a group of my film making colleagues cast our snake in a video they were making for a local contest. I took him to the set wrapped in a pillow case, in the midst of a late night downpour. He was very sedate, while my friends were intrigued but anxious. Then, after a few hours of shooting, as we unwound over a bottle of wine, the boa unraveled himself from my arms and rested his chin on the table in front of us. He was like the cool snake dude, hangin' out over cocktails after a long night’s work.

“I love your snake,” said one of my friends. “Look at him. He’s so low maintenance.”

College Shopping

2009-11-20T16:48:00.007-05:00

My son turns eighteen in two days. To celebrate his entry to adulthood, we’ve begun visiting colleges.

Correction - we officially started last March, when we attended our first open house at a small private college in Maine. Their brochure showed an idyllic campus on a hill overlooking a lake, and described a vibrant community of collaborative learners.

We arrived to find a small, hodgepodge assortment of modern buildings, and a lake nowhere in sight. If there hadn’t been a sign announcing the institution’s name, I would not have guessed it was a college. It was cold, and muddy, and everyone was wearing a perfectly plastic open house smile.

That day students matter-of-factly explained that athletic seasons are brief because of cold, field labs are limited due to ice, and Biology majors mostly study “dead animals.” As we walked the campus and my skepticism mounted, a car roared up next to us, radio blaring, and a young woman hopped out, smoking from a hookah. We retreated to the dining hall for lunch, and when my cheeseburger-loving teenager realized all the offerings were vegetarian he exclaimed, wide-eyed, “I don’t think this is a fit for me.” I tried to convincingly ask “Are you sure, honey,” taking his arm and heading for the car.

A line of bearded men on motorcycles sped past us as we exited, and I wondered aloud where they were going. A few minutes later we rounded a bend in the highway and noticed all the choppers neatly lined up in the parking lot of long, single story building with a sign that read, “Topless Coffeehouse.” Until that moment, I didn’t know such a thing existed, particularly not in a small, seemingly idyllic college town in mid-state Maine. But it does, and you won’t read about it in any brochures.

So last week we re-started our college visits and where did we go but…back to Maine, the day after its residents voted down the right to gay marriage. Why gay marriage is clearly wrong but a topless coffeehouse fine escapes me.

This time we drove even further north, and when we arrived on campus, a cold gust of wind blew the car door shut before I could get out – an omen? We walked around, and once again found ourselves shivering in the cold amidst a small hilltop collection of academic buildings. This wasn’t an open house, but a visit we had personally arranged so that we could sit in on classes, observe faculty and students during a regular school day, and attend a soccer game.

At this school we learned that Marine Biology majors had rescued at stranded (living) porpoise from the shore the previous evening. We saw plenty of animal remains, too, notably the skeleton of a 40-foot humpback whale whose carcass a professor had hauled in from the beach. Even though it was early November, and the temperature was below freezing, the soccer team practiced, outside, and invited my son to play with them. And the dining hall offered plenty of non-vegetarian options. As we returned to the motel that evening, my son said, “my head is spinning,” but he was beaming.

We were still treated with marketing smiles and glowing statements about how great the school is. But I highly recommend doing your college research in person, rather than relying on pretty pamphlets, the dog and pony shows sponsored by admissions offices and even the data on www.collegeboard.com. Maybe all my journalism classes have gotten me thinking that everything needs to be fact-checked, but once you start the college application process as a parent, you quickly realize that colleges are corporations and admissions officers its sales reps. And eighteen year olds, as experienced as they are, still need some help with their shopping.

She's Gone

2009-11-02T13:01:00.004-05:00

I have been seeing a woman for the past twelve years.

She wasn’t my girlfriend, or even my friend. But I’ve spent two or three hours a month, times twelve, times twelve – in total almost six hundred hours – in deep conversation with her, and she probably understands me better than anyone else.

When I first met her I was reeling from a failed marriage and dating a man who wouldn't leave his wife. Back then my diet consisted almost entirely of coffee, liquor and cigarettes. In the mornings I would walk very slowly across Harvard Square to my office, concentrating on moving one foot in front of the other until I reached my building, feeling worried all the way that I might not make it. In the evenings, after my son drifted off to sleep, I’d sit on the windowsill in my tiny apartment, smoking and staring out at the sky.

Rather than dissecting the present, when we met she took me immediately back to an equally painful, unacknowledged time: childhood. For the first year or so I would emerge from her office sobbing, hanging my swollen, red face toward the sidewalk, and hope not to see anyone I knew as I stumbled home. It sounds cliché nowadays, but there is a kind of primal utility to unpacking the sorrow of your youth under the guidance of a kindhearted non-parent, to properly grieve and then move forward, accepting full responsibility for your independent adult life.

The later stages of our relationship were based on Vipassana meditation and Buddhist teachings. When she first initiated this I balked, thinking she wanted me to convert. As a preacher’s kid steeped in Methodism for two decades, I'd had my fill of organized religion. But Insight Meditation is more a philosophy of life than a religious doctrine, and despite my initial reluctance its logic gradually became apparent to me. In fact, for me the extreme rationality of the practice was its most attractive element.

If you read Siddartha in high school you know the basics; if not, they are that the world is full of suffering, and that we spend our lives perpetuating that suffering by trying to distract ourselves from it, and from the fact of our impending deaths. The goal of Buddhist practice is to develop compassion for ourselves and others and ultimately, awareness of and freedom from the cycle of distractions that keeps us unhappy.

Lest this description sounds a bit new-agey, as it initially did me, it essentially means this: the human mind works to maximize our comfort (survival) in a type of undeveloped universe in which we no longer live. We’re designed to seek out the familiar, even when it’s unhealthy, and we thereby unwittingly repeat history. Breaking the cycle is possible, but It requires concerted effort to move away from our habitual responses and engage with the world in more conscious, mindful way.

The main method Buddhists employ toward this goal is silent meditation. Not just for minutes at a time, but days, months, even years.

Try to sit in silence without turning your attention to the scattering of ideas that come your way. Concentrate on your breath, the simple act of inhaling and exhaling, the sensation of air moving rhythmically through the body. Try to silence the perpetual voice that each of us hears – the one that drones on about mistakes and failures, casting judgment and manipulating our experience. Sounds wonderful, right? Yet turning off that voice and calming the mind is extremely difficult to do, even for accomplished practitioners.

Once long ago she told me that the amazing thing about extended meditation is that all your emotions present themselves, even though you’re not interacting with anyone. Each of us goes through our days believing our feelings result from the circumstances of our lives and our encounters with others. But if you go into silence, as she has, you see that regardless of your environment, every thought and emotion - sadness, anger, joy - comes from within you and is under your control.

In this year when I’m embarking on enormous life changes of my own, I feared ending therapy would be a setback. I’m still uncertain of my own life course, managing only brief moments of silence and clarity. Yet strangely enough her departure has made me feel strong. Maybe its from watching a role model break with convention and take a leap into the unknown to achieve a lifelong goal. Maybe its seeing a stage of my own life conclude, and having the opportunity to remember back over the past twelve years and acknowledge that there has been positive change.

I'll picture her going forward with shaved head, carefully layered clothes, knapsack strapped to her back, silent.

All shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

Bicycle Commuting in Beantown, Part I

2009-10-12T11:29:00.021-04:00

Lots of Boston drivers, particularly those who have never navigated congested roadways on a bike, mistakenly believe that cyclists are not allowed to ride in line with vehicles. Cyclists, likewise, think they do motorists a favor by weaving around traffic or moving through red lights if an intersection appears clear. Contrary to popular belief, the safest way for cyclists to travel city roadways is to ride as if they were driving a motor vehicle.

During October, the Massachusetts Bicycling Coalition (MassBike) will pilot their Same Roads, Same Rules campaign in and around Boston. The campaign’s message is that, in order to safely share the same roads, cyclists and motorists must abide by the same laws.

Until last year, Massachusetts defined bicycling as a recreational activity not liable to traffic regulations. But in January, the State passed the Bicyclist Safety Act, standardizing procedures for ticketing cyclists who ignore traffic laws, and making certain motorist actions finable offenses, including opening a car door into a cyclist’s path (known as “dooring”), cutting in front of cyclists after overtaking them, forcing cyclists onto the shoulder, and cutting off cyclists when turning left at an intersection.

While the Bicyclist Safety Act was a boon to both local and national cycling advocates, the challenge lies in getting already-overburdened police departments to enforce the new regulations. Police in Cambridge are known to ticket cyclists moving illegally at particular busy intersections, but authorities in Boston can’t begin ticketing cyclists for moving violations until the Registry of Motor Vehicles updates its computer system in 2011.

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Board, about 700 "pedalcyclists" are killed each year, which represents about 2% of US roadway fatalities. Massachusetts had 10 cyclist fatalities in 2008, out of a total 363 traffic deaths (a little higher than the national average). The majority of bike crashes occur under a very discrete set of circumstances. According to the Bicycle Helmet Safety Institute, the "typical" bicyclist casualty is a sober male aged 16+ riding without a helmet, between intersections, on a major urban road on a summer evening. More specifically, male cyclists are 7 times more likely to crash as females, 91% of bicycling fatalities occur when the cyclist is not wearing a helmet, and most crashes occur at urban intersections, between the hours and 5 and 9 pm, from June through August.

Cyclists can substantially reduce their risks, then, by wearing a helmet, obeying traffic signals at intersections and riding vigilantly, with a light, in the evening. Yet any Boston bike commuter will tell you that she sees cyclists violating the principles of safe riding, not to mention traffic laws, on a daily basis.

Beyond passing traffic regulations, the government can prioritize infrastructure investments that affect travelers' behavior, and increase cycling safety. When gasoline prices briefly topped $4/gallon last year, increasing numbers of commuters around the country took to their bicycles in response. But Washington’s inclination to keep fuel prices artificially low figures prominently in America’s car-centered culture. In European cities like Copenhagen and Amsterdam, where gasoline costs $7/gallon or more, more than 50% of residents commute to school or work on a bicycle. This dwarfs the rates in America's most bike-friendly cities - Portland and Seattle - which register 6% and 3%, respectively.

Likewise, despite the evidence that traumatic head injuries account for the majority of cycling fatalities, no state in the US has yet passed an all-ages bicycle helmet law. Like 20 other states, Massachusetts’ age-specific helmet law applies only to riders 16 and younger, and the law is not typically enforced. Even in bike-friendly Washington State, all-ages helmet laws have been passed in just a few localities.

In 2007 Boston hired a Director of Bicycle Programs to coordinate its efforts to make the City more bike-friendly. Since then, the city has made infrastructure changes aimed at increasing safety and convenience, including new bike lanes, bike cages and racks and regular promotional events, like the Bike Friday meetups held last summer, where cyclists could commute into town en masse and receive a free breakfast before heading to work. Next year the City plans to introduce a bike sharing program to provide 3,000 communal bicycles at various points around town. But Boston will also have to prioritize resources to enforce traffic regulations if it really means to engender respect about the importance of sharing the road.

Ironically, increasing the number of cyclists on the roadways ultimately makes them safer for all travelers. Road fatalities in developed, bike friendly countries occur at about half the rate they do in the US. But an appreciation for sharing the road can only be cultivated incrementally, through consistent penalization of traffic violations and increasing numbers of law abiding cyclists confidently taking to the road. Efforts like MassBike's Same Roads, Same Rules project, which educate all travelers about their rights and responsibilities, are a small step in this direction.

Narcissism-Blogging

2009-10-09T19:27:00.011-04:00

I remember putting “diary” on my Christmas list one year as a child and receiving a small, hard-bound volume secured with a metal latch and a tiny key. The key was as significant as the book and the notion of recording my thoughts. That I could write whatever I wanted, however embarrassing or inappropriate, and no one but me - the keyholder - would know, conferred grown-up ideas about the value and privacy of my own thoughts, not to mention the purpose of documenting my experience.

Personal blogs are the modern day version of the diary, but a digital megahorn has replaced the key. Today’s confessionals are written in the hope that strangers will discover them, and that a loyal following might even develop.

Is it narcissistic to publish one’s life story for public consumption? What about writing in a locked journal? Recording any thought or idea signifies that the writer considers it important enough to make permanent, which involves self-absorption, or at least self-interest.

The power of chronicling one’s own experience for others lies in the sense of connectedness that can result. When consuming others’ life stories, readers seek something either completely foreign or very familiar, something that makes them say, “oh my god,” or “oh, yes.” And even when reading about exotic subjects, most people are ultimately searching for a common thread, some element of the story that feels recognizable and suggests a universality of experience.

Even outwardly self-absorbed prose can be appealing when written beautifully or in an appropriate tone. In his 1976 review essay Some Memories of the Glorious Bird and an Earlier Self, Gore Vidal’s review of Tennessee Williams’ 1975 Memoirs, the author assesses Williams’ recollections in relation to his own memories of their encounters and the community of expat writers with whom they associated in the late 1940’s. The approach might be irritating if not for Vidal’s brilliant execution:

“I picked up Tennessee’s Memoirs with a certain apprehension. I looked myself up in the Index; read the entries and found some errors, none grave. I started to read; was startled by the technique he had chosen. Some years ago, Tennessee told me that he had been reading (that is to say, looking at) my ‘memoir in the form of a novel’ Two Sisters….He must have [also] found it technically interesting because he has serenely appropriated my form and has no doubt forgotten just how the idea first came to him…”

With his careful use of witty language, ironic tone and a hint of self-deprecation, Vidal stops short of outwardly condemning Williams, humorously implying an influence on his friend’s work and causing the reader to want to keep going.

(Selections from both the Vidal essay and Williams’ Memoirs can be previewed free on Google Books.)

There are obviously also hazards in writing about oneself, particularly for the web. In C Jane, winner of the 2008 Webbie for Best Major Blog, Courtney Jane Kendrick records the details of her daily life as a Mormon mom in Provo, Utah:

"I do have a blog. Some blogs are family keepsakes with photos, mine is a literary blog. It is where I do most of my writing...I am a career blogger at this point, it is my work-from-home profession and it is more than a hobby. Different from a digital scrapbook of memories, here is where I focus on improving my thinking and writing skills. I have a private blog where I keep cute pictures of The Chief eating cake and petting cats, but my official blog is less mommy more me.”

This post, from July 2009, is not only poorly written, but it doesn’t particularly say anything. It reads like a passage you might find in an adolescent girl’s locked diary, like a self-therapy session in which the author is writing out loud, trying to convince herself that there is meaning to her efforts. Although an authentic voice or honest tone can attract readers, journaling online requires at least a nod to the possibility of an audience larger than oneself.

As author Lauren Slater explains in her essay, One Nation, Under the Weather, “No author authors alone. Every text is a joint construction of meaning.” That idea is particularly relevant to blogging, where there is potential to connect with an audience of millions, provided you keep that fact in mind as you compose alone at your computer. The sharing of personal experience makes both writer and reader vulnerable – to remarkable engagement or humbling alienation - requiring that the writer remember she has thrown away her key.

Cycling in Beantown

2009-09-21T10:46:00.003-04:00

This morning WBUR ran a piece in which I was briefly interviewed about bicycle commuting in Boston by health reporter Sacha Pfeiffer.

More on cycling in an upcoming post. It was a bit chilly out there this morning!

On Content in the Blogosphere

2009-09-20T20:13:00.009-04:00

Last week a local web guru came to Journalism E-138 to tell us about all the technical stuff we can use to spiff up our blogs. Normally I would require a couple of cocktails to get through such a discussion. But since I recently spent an hour on the phone with Go Daddy trying to comprehend the meaning of ANAME and CNAME records, and Technorati is still rejecting my blog claim because my url isn’t properly configured, I took a deep breath and arrived, venti iced Americano in hand, to try to embrace the geekfest.

In journalism they say – or at least they used to - that content is king (not to mention accuracy). The feature stories in National Enquirer and Star (remember that crazy one last year about John Edwards fathering a baby with his lover?) have supposedly got nothing on the fact-checked, highly-researched and edited offerings of reputable publications like The New York Times or The Washington Post. Though surfing the web can sometimes feel like traipsing through a wasteland, I’m grateful to digital media for breaking the monopoly held by the self-proclaimed arbiters of truth and good taste, which used to determine what was and wasn't publishable.

Now that everyman has a voice, and according to Technorati there are over 60 million blogs in the US, does the old maxim about superior content hold up? And what constitutes “content” when you’re talking about blogs? Is it the verbiage in the posts, or also the form? Do visual artistry, technical flourishes, links, comments, advertisements and the frequency of updates also comprise a blog’s content? Is there a metric that best reflects quality, like subscriber base, unique page views, advertising revenue or shout outs from other blogs?

In considering this pressing question, I checked out an award-winner from the 2009 Weblog Awards (“The Bloggies”). Bloggie award winners were chosen by more than 900,000 readers last year and announced at the South by Southwest Conference in Austin, Texas - kind of a big techie deal.

In 2009, CakeWrecks swept the awards, winning best food weblog, best new weblog and best writing of a weblog. The blog provides “a gallery of deformed, distasteful and bizarrely decorated wedding and birthday cakes,” with photos submitted by readers, and light-hearted commentary provided by the blogger, Jen Yates of Orlando, Florida. According to Examiner.com, CakeWrecks launched just over a year ago, and already has 65,000 visitors a day and 937,000 followers on Twitter. Ms. Yates is about to embark on a national tour for her blog-related book, Cake Wrecks: When Professional Cakes go Hilariously Wrong.

Aside from the posts, CakeWrecks displays archives and links to blog-related merchandise on one sidebar, and baking-related advertisements on the other, as well as on the masthead. Social marketing links enable readers to share posts with an easy mouse click, and there is a section to post comments. The experience of this blog, which actually involves minimal reading, is enjoyable; the layout is lively but well organized and not too overwhelming.

In her interview with Examiner.com, Ms. Yates claims that prior to blogging, email comprised the extent of her technical expertise, and that she “never expected anyone to read my goofy cake blog.”

I find CakeWrecks amusing. I’m charmed by Ms. Yates’s, “I have no idea how this happened” posture, and I’m impressed by her rapid success. I also liken CakeWrecks to the lure of perusing People magazine or Seinfeld reruns when I’m profoundly bored or have just had a terrible day at the office. Technically embellished or not, the blog elicits a fleeting shot in the arm that relieves my stress for a nanosecond, and possibly enables me to be the funny one at the water cooler tomorrow.

Lest I come across as a humorless snob, not unlike the tastemakers of olde, let me confess that one of my favorite new blogs, which to date has won zero awards, is Sunday Magazine Paper Doll Challenge. Ilisha Helfman, a graphic designer from Portland, Oregon, posts original paper doll costumes created from the cover of the New York Times Sunday Magazine each week! Her captions briefly summarize each week’s cover story – handy since I stopped buying the Sunday Times once they jacked the price up to six dollars - in addition to costume-related commentary parodying the TV program Project Runway.

How have I survived without this until now?

The form and substance of the CakeWrecks and paper doll blogs are similar – each provides a regular graphic post embellished with witty repartee poking fun at something else, which is intended to entertain the reader. While one-year-old CakeWrecks boasts lots of advertisements, Sunday Magazine Paper Doll Challenge has none, maybe because it only launched a month ago, but maybe because Ms. Helfman isn’t interested in monetizing. The lack of extraneous information in the sidebars does make for a cleaner, more focused experience, in my opinion. Simple = Elegant. Or am I’m just old?

I would argue that technically-sophisticated, widely-read blogs like CakeWrecks do not provide a better experience. What a reader prefers and consumes ultimately comes down to a matter of personal taste and luckily, the higher powers can no longer constrain that. I admit to feeling mild annoyance when looking at CakeWrecks. Who needs another cheap laugh at someone else’s expense? What am I learning from this? However, if I’m honest, I’ll admit that it’s not altogether different from what Sunday Magazine Paper Doll Challenge delivers. I can convince myself that the latter is a quieter, thoughtful blog that conveys more artistry, though I’d be willing to bet the up and coming generation-low-attention-span would disagree. In the end, no matter the reader, each blog delivers an ephemeral sensory boost that may or may not help us through another day in the real world.

Toward the end of his presentation last week, the web guru class speaker confidently stated that, “Good blogs are full of useful information.”

Go tell that to the 34,000 CakeWrecks subscribers.

On Farms, Happiness, and Coming Full Circle

2009-09-14T10:26:00.009-04:00

I grew up in a rural town in northern New York State, where the wide open spaces were dotted with farms and apple orchards, and summer breezes carried the scent of cow manure. Most of the time I remember feeling bored and anxious to begin a faster-paced, sophisticated adult life anywhere else. Many of my classmates didn't pursue higher education, but I broke ranks and won a scholarship to an elite northeastern college. When I left, I thought I was deservedly moving up and away from my small town, working class roots.

Years later as a young mother-to-be, I rented an apartment in an upper class suburb hundreds of miles away from my childhood home. I wanted my own family to live in a privileged suburb with tree-lined streets, manicured lawns and community playgrounds, where the high school offered advanced placement courses and graduates were accepted into the Ivy League.

Giving your children things you couldn't have in your own youth is one of the joys of parenting. Every painful childhood memory spurs an emotional evaluation of your own parents' successes and failures, and a desire to correct their mistakes, if only to secure incremental improvement between generations. Attributing every small success to something you're doing right is easy and natural, even if you have no idea what that something is.

When he was thirteen and a high school freshman, my son started to have panic attacks. He'd always seemed like a happy kid, but that year he'd start crying while dressing in the morning, and it would escalate to sobbing as I drove him to school. By the time we reached campus, he would be gasping for breath and pleading to go back home. I didn't have the heart to force him, so I would drive him back, where he'd stay - sometimes for days at a time - until he regained his confidence.

Whenever I'd ask what was happening he'd say, "I don't know, Mom," and stare off into the distance. I tried to be the stable, encouraging parent, but in truth, when the house got quiet at night, I would have a panic attack of my own. Why couldn't I fix this?

Tutoring, psychotherapy and concurrent prescriptions to stimulants and antidepressants had no effect - my son was miserable and failing ninth grade. I brooded a lot that year, about the effects of divorce on children, expectations of single mothers and memories of my own bewildering teenage years. I wondered if unhappiness was simply an unavoidable part of adolescence. I wondered if my son was clinically depressed, or worse.

At year's end, despite his poor grades, he was offered a coveted spot at a public agricultural high school thirty miles from our suburb, where the campus is a working farm and every student learns to ride a horse and drive a tractor, in addition to studying the basic academic subjects. There is no advanced placement, and many graduates go directly to work rather than attending college.

The first day of the new school year, we made the rush hour drive to campus, passing meadows which stretched to the horizon and an old-fashioned ice cream stand on the side of the road. As we stood there, breathing in the crisp air and surveying the grounds, I realized that strangely enough, we had come full circle. My son had wound up in the type of farming community that I was raised in, one that I had worked so hard to get away from so that he could have a better life.

That year my son learned to ride a horse, shepherd cows and deliver a newborn lamb. He made the soccer team, and he made new friends, and slowly, he got happy again. Maybe he just needed time. But it seems so obvious now, the rehabilitative potential of those things I rejected in the quest for something more worldly - the earthy scents of manure and fresh hay, the calming effects of having animals around all the time, and the joy to be found in devoting a part of each day to the physical world outside of one's own shelter, and one's own mind.

I still marvel that my son found his bliss in exactly the type of place I'd denied him.

Starting Out

2009-09-06T18:18:00.007-04:00

First, some concerns about blogging:

1. I'm a quiet person who thinks Americans talk too much.
2. Lots of bloggers assume an in-your-face, know-it-all tone that makes me wince.
3. At the end of any given day, my head is spinning from the onslaught of online information.

Why add to that?

Well, because I got a spot in Journalism E-138 ("Blogging") at Harvard Extension School, and I have to blog, publicly, to pass the course. So maybe there's a way to do this without adding to the snarkiness of the blogosphere. Plus, it will force me to write regularly, and I need the practice.

Worst case scenario, I can do what NYT reporter Douglas Quenqua says 95% of bloggers do: just call the whole thing off after a couple of months.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/fashion/07blogs.html

Our course instructor, Elizabeth Soutter, blogs about motherhood at http://damomma.com/. She scored a book deal, and hey, I'm a mom, too. eMarketer says there are 32 million moms online and the demographic is exploding!

When I mention this to my tech-savvy 17-year old, he glances up lethargically from his Blackberry and says, “Mom, that’s not interesting.”

In the meantime I have purchased one of the few remaining domain names containing any iteration of the word mother – www.themothery.com. This amuses me because Webster’s definition of “mothery” (pronunciation muth´ er ee) is “consisting of, containing, or resembling mother (in vinegar).” That feels right. I contain mother, but also other things. Over the next 12 months as my son prepares to leave home and I begin to rearrange my adult life, “mother” will become a lesser part of my identity. I’ll become mother-y.

If you drink red wine, you’ve probably noticed the grainy sediment that collects on the bottom of the bottle. Over time, oxygen converts the sugar in alcoholic beverages into this sediment, called “the mother,” which eventually becomes a gelatinous blob of bacteria like the one pictured on the left side of my masthead (credit to Christine Nguyen's awesome cooking blog http://holybasil.wordpress.com/un-petit-peu/ for this image). The mother is what turns wine into vinegar.

That feels appropriate, too. This year could go well, like aged wine gracefully fermenting into fine vinegar. Or it could go poorly, like the microbial slime that didn’t “take” and got chucked into the garbage.

Please keep your fingers crossed.

This morning my own mother phoned to ask why she couldn’t find my blog, “the mothery” (pronunciation mŏth´ er ee, as in winged insects). I imagined myself over the next 12 months, sweeping out the moths, dog hair and detritus that have accumulated in my life for the past 18 years. That also seemed fitting.

Don’t misunderstand me. I love my son, who has incidentally turned out to be one of the coolest human beings on the planet. He is easy, and impressive, and my main source of deep laughter. Other parents with surly, demanding teenagers are envious. But single motherhood has also meant endless explaining, juggling, nail-biting, number-crunching and running, running, running. I occupy a job that has zero relation to my skills or interests, one that I could probably do without a college degree, because it pays the bills. So it wouldn’t be honest to pretend that motherhood hasn’t often left me wondering what it all means.

At the same time, single parenthood has left me relatively unburdened. I own very little save a reliable car, bicycle, a cool camera, two dogs and a large snake. No mortgage to get out from under during a recession, no husband to persuade, no lucrative career path that I’m afraid to ditch, and I am nearly debt-free. Not so different, really, from a new college graduate except for the cynicism and having to finance another four years of tuition. Starting over is a lot less daunting when your circumstances have prevented sinking deep roots.

So for now, my blog will be themothery.com (pronounce as you wish), and it will be less about motherhood per se and more about the transition to a mother-y existence as my son and I embark on the journey to independent adult lives.