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What do you think of the new TIME cover story on the "backlash against overparenting?"

2009-11-20T18:18:00Z

The most e-mailed story at TIME at the moment is the new cover feature from the issue that hit the stands three days ago. The story takes a fresh look at a topic Babble covered 24 months ago, namely, our societal tendency in the past decade to "overparent" our children. The fact that the TIME story is already being emailed around like crazy doesn't surprise me. It's a hot topic, to be sure; In fact, the interest is high enough that my 2007 piece on overparenting remains one of the most-read stories at Babble, even two years later.

The TIME piece looks at overparenting from a different angle than I did, instead highlighting what their writer has christened a "slow parenting movement," and making the case that there is now an identifiable, cultural "backlash" overparenting. While I found TIME's story well-written and very interesting, I am not sure they have this one quite right. I certainly agree that there have been several excellent books and feature stories published in the past few years on how and why parents should slow down, relax and enjoy their kids. However, as thought provoking as these recent books have been - especially Free Range Kids by Lenore Skenazy and Last Child in the Woods by Richard Louv - I don't believe the books or the writer-advocates who were interviewed in the TIME story are actually having any meaningful impact on how we are raising our young.

Of course, and as TIME points out, the economic downturn of the past 24 months has led to some quantifiable changes for American families, including decreased ability to pay for extracurriculars for the kids, and more time together, as underemployed parentsspend less time at the office or factory. However, I think it remains to be seen whether these changes - driven by unhappy economic circumstances that parents would like nothing more than to change - will translate into a longterm adjustment in how families spend their time and allocate resources once the grown-ups are able to get back to work.

Later tonight, after my kids are asleep, I will be writing up a much more substantive blog post about the TIME piece, and about overparenting vs. underparenting from my own perspective. So if you are interested, check back here in this same space sometime tonight for an updated post.

In the meantime, however, I want to hear what YOU thought of TIME's coverage of this issue. Do you believe that TIME has identified a real trend or major cultural shift in the way we parent? Are you personally seeing parents scaling back and easing up (and I mean outside of the media, in actual families' lives and choices)? Are your friends - whether by choice or necessity - less obsessed lately with antibacterial soap, organic baby yogurt, special lessons, and excessive worries about college entrance exams? (Or if you live in NYC, preschool entrance exams). Are you or anyone else you know letting your kids walk to school when you weren't willing to do that, say, two years ago? Have you read "Free Range Kids", or heard about it?

Share your own observations on TIME's thesis in the comments below. I will take the most interesting, entertaining and insightful comments and feature them in the updated version of this blog post that I'll publish later tonight.

Until tonight,

-Katie, 72% slacker + 28% neurotic mom (Does that add up to 100%? I'm so bad at math. I think it's because my parents didn't hover over me enough while doing homework, or even check to be sure I did it at all. DAMN THEM! But if it adds up to more than 100%, I'll just say that it's because I always give MORE than 100% as a mother! Yeah, that's the ticket. ;-)

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Adult Garanimals: What's Your Working Mom Uniform?

2009-11-20T04:51:00Z

This is a photo of me, earlier tonight, talking to the very clever students who run the University of Tennessee's digital journalism showcase, TNJN.com. I had a great time, and appreciate having been asked to talk about what I do for a living.

As you can see in the photo below, I am wearing my defacto version of adult Garanimals - black, black and then some more black. These black on black ensembles are easy to throw together without being all matchy, matchy. Or at least that's what I like to tell myself.

The adult Garanimals are a great solution for me to pull together quickly and painlessly as I rummage around each morning, attempting to get myself dressed, C dressed for the day, all the kids fed, and everyone out the door in time for school and work. The only down side I've found is that black does tend to show all the dog hair and stray curry that one might encounter in a given day....

So what's your own working mom uniform, or do you have one? Tell me in the comments below.

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When working moms go berserk

2009-11-17T03:20:00Z

As I have mentioned, I have been working A LOT lately. The reason I am working a lot is a good one; the area of business that I oversee for our agency is booming. That's fantastic and it's especially fantastic given the fact that the economy is not booming. I am trying to take full advantage of the opportunities that are happening for the agency and for me right now, and that has meant a lot of hours for the past six months.

I have been looking for a new mother's helper to handle afternoon duties (school pick up, tumbling lessons, lacrosse practice, etc) for a while - and I finally found a wonderful person (YAY!) last week. But week before last, I still had no help. So that means E had to stay in aftercare at his school several afternoons a week. And he HATES aftercare. He hates it. There is nothing specific he hates about it; it's just the idea of it.Most of his friends at school have mothers who do not work, or who work part time. Almost none of them seem to work the kind of demanding hours that my job entails. So he sees them go home right at 3:30 pm when their moms arrive in a line of gleaming minivans and SUVs to pick them up. But he has to stay in aftercare when he would really rather go home, like "all the other kids." But such is life. I explain to him often that my job means we have a house and food, but right now, he only sees that my job means....aftercare.

So anyway, week before last, before the fabulous Anna Laura began work as my new mother's helper, I had one particularly busy day where I didn't manage to get to aftercare to pick E up until 5:45 pm. It was already dark outside and the school felt thoroughly deserted. I walked into the cafeteria, where the last three kids and one or two aftercare workers were hanging out, waiting for the neglectful working moms. As I walked in, I could see the look of disapproval on one of the aftercare worker's faces. I tried to ignore it.

I approached E, who was sitting at a table, and in a cheery voice that belied my tiredness, asked him to gather up his things. As he did, the aftercare worker with the disapproving mien approached me, and told me that E had been loud during the study hall period of aftercare. I turned to E, who had his things ready by now and was waiting to leave, and I asked him to apologize for his behavior. But before he said a word, the aftercare lady turned to him and said in a tone of voice CLEARLY intended to convey that what she was about to say was actually for me, and not for E, "That's okay E. All of us at the school understand that it's REALLY, REALLY HARD to behave when you are so tired of your mother leaving you in aftercare so late."

Normally, I am a patient person. I make it a habit to pick my battles. I don't waste energy on ultimately meaningless tangles with people over things about which I will never change their minds. But I was tired. Very tired. I had worked my ass off all day, and my feet hurt from the heels I was wearing. I love my job, but that day hadn't been one of my best. And I already felt incredibly guilty about leaving E in aftercare until 5:45 pm, when I am well aware that he hates staying there at all. And this combination of tired + guilt meant that I snapped. I just...snapped.

"May I speak to you for a moment?" I hissed at the woman, as I motioned her out into the hall, away from E's ears.

I explained to her that I did not appreciate her snarky, patronizing attitude, and told her that she wasn't doing E any favors by essentially excusing his misbehaviior as the result of having a working mother. I suggested that she try to be positive with the kids in her care who have working mothers in order to help them feel positive about their own family realities as well. But she just stared back at me in a way that indicated her utter disdain. She shrugged and told me she was "sorry" if I "misunderstood" what she had said. But here facial expression said she was mostly sorry that she couldn't tell me what she REALLY thought of me, because she knew she could only go so far with her backhanded insult before I would take it to her higher ups.

And that's really pretty much how it ended. I turned on my heel and walked away, quickly retrieving E and hurrying him out to our car to go home. She never changed her look of derision. I felt really irritated all the way home, despite my attempts to shake it off and focus on asking E about his day. And I have to admit, it's bothered me ever since.

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What are your biggest parenting mistakes so far?

2009-11-07T12:45:00Z

Lately I've been thinking a lot about being a bad parent. Specifically, I've been thinking about ways in which I have been a bad parent. H turned 18 a few weeks ago, so I have now had ample opportunity to screw up. And I have screwed up, in big ways and small, and in important ways and in ways my kids will never remember.

These days, mothers are continually encouarged to ditch the guilt and to avoid blaming themselves for anything that happens with their kids. This is obviously a big switch from decades past when mothers were assumed to have complete and total responsibility for every aspect of a child's emotional, physical and intellectual well-being. We were blamed for everything from autism to sexual orientation to whether our kids went to Harvard or prison. Basically, it was all our fault.

Obviously, these attitudes were absurd and illogical, and I am sure that many women suffered huge amounts of pointless painful guilt because of them. But today, as I wrote in a recent essay, the pendulum has swung waaaaaay far in the other direction. Now, we moms are given a free pass on almost everything. No matter what we do, and no matter how badly, and no matter how it obviously impacts our children, we're told that we don't need to feel guilty. Guilt is bad, pointless.

But I disagree. Yes, we need to be realistic about the fact that no parent is perfect and that we will undoubtedly make mistakes. All of us will, and most of our mistakes aren't that big of a deal in the great scheme of things. But some of our mistakes ARE a big deal. Sometimes, when parents screw up, the impact on their children is significant or even catastrophic. And in those cases, I think that some guilt is natural and healthy.

And looking back over 18 years of parenting, I have some guilt. I made some big mistakes. I have learned from them, and I won't be repeating them. I don't intend to wallow in guilt forever, but I do have some mothering guilt over my errors and missteps along the way. I can't blame anyone else for these errors, and I am not trying to excuse them or rationalize them. But in order to do a better job going forward (we have LOTS of years of active parenting left in our household), I want to learn from them.

I'm assembling a list of my own "18 years into this gig, these are my worst parenting mistakes" list for an upcoming blog post, but in the meantime, I am interested from hearing from readers. Whether your oldest child is 2 or 22, what would you say is the biggest mistake you've made as a parent thus far? What have you learned from it, and what will you do differently going forward? Let me know in the comments below.

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Maternal musings on what it might feel like to be adopted as a toddler

2009-10-30T20:39:00Z

Last night C and I were driving home from the grandparents' house - just the two of us - and for whatever reason, I decided to drive around the block before pulling into our driveway. As we drove past our house, where 28 month old C had clearly been expecting me to stop, she suddenly began crying, "No, No mama! Go back to C's house! That's not C's house!" She was really upset until we finally did arrive at C's house, less than 30 seconds later. This was the first time I realized that she now has an awareness of which house on our block is HER house, or that it matters to her.

C has been a creature of routine and habit (much like her father) since birth. She likes a regular schedule, with naps and bedtime handled in much the same fashion every time. She loves her white noise machine, and she howls in real grief if we ever (God forbid) forget it when we spend the night as a family away from home. She actually begs for the "noise maffine" by name. She likes me to read books in a certain way, and she notices if her toys or doll furniture change places. While C is more aware of and attached to certain elements of her physical environment and routine than many other children her age, she's no different than any other older baby or toddler in being completely enamored of the few people who care for her the most: mama, daddy and in her case, grandparents and older siblings. All of these things - her family, her house, her white noise machine - already matter to her - a lot. And she's still just a baby, really.

When I see how attached C is to her people and her things and her life - at the tender age of only 28 months - I sometimes wonder what it must be like for children adopted at around age 1, 2 or 3, as so many children are, both internationally and domestically. At that age, even if a child is coming from an insecure environment with less attachment to caregivers, she knows, or at least thinks she knows where she belongs, and to whom. She knows her foster mother or the orphanage workers. She knows the toys in the nursery, and what kinds of foods she prefers. She may have a favorite song that someone hums to her absentmindedly while they bathe her. What must it feel like when that's suddenly, completely gone?

Please don't misunderstand. IN NO WAY am I being critical of adoption, or suggesting anything even remotely negative about adoption, adoption of toddlers or about adoptive parents. My musings are not about adoption, but about the actual experience of being adopted for a child who is older than an infant, but still a baby. Old enough to be very, very aware, but still far too young to understand or express herself as clearly as she might want to. I wonder, when I look at C, playing with a favorite doll, or when she asks where HER dog is, how she could possibly cope with being removed from everything that's familiar to her - even if it were for all the right reasons - at this particularly vulnerable age.

But likely, she would, because most adopted children thrive and grow healthy and strong with the loving parents and families who bring them home as very young children. Whatever memories - negative or positive - of the life they lived before slowly dissolve into a new life, with new people and new toys and new songs. But watching C at this particularly fascinating developmental stage, where every day she's becoming more aware of who and where and what she is, I do wonder what it feels like, the first time an adopted child of her same age realizes that this new house - full of the people who will eventually come to be her whole world - isn't HER house. One day, but not that day. Not yet.

I'd be interested to hear in the comments below from those of you who were adopted as young children yourselves whether you've retained any memories - specific or vague, positive or negative - of the people and things and places you knew before you joined your family.

Oh, and before I wrap this post up, let me share three of my personal favorite adoption-related things online:

My cousin J's blog, with lots about her family's recent adoption of a newborn son, our family's newest member!
My writermama pal Dawn Friedman's site, with lots of great stuff about open adoption
A story about my dear friend Kimi's very unique and very beautiful international adoption journey

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I love the "Terrible Twos"

2009-10-22T13:50:00Z

So lately, C has been an absolute joy to me. She's 27 months old, talking in complete sentences - which are generally hilarious - and she's increasingly engaging in real play with her toys. I love watching her "cook cook" at her play kitchen, or pretend that it's time for the Breyer horses (passed down from her previously horse-crazy older sister's collection) are ready to go to sleep in their big wooden barn. She has this fantastically entertaining and ongoing conversation happening with her hands lately where she says absurd things like, "It's okay hands! Pretty soon we'll be out of this carseat and we can play!"

Here is a video of C playing with her toy kitchen. Please ignore frightening animatronic monkey heads sitting on the dining room table. Suffice it to say that E went through a phase about four years ago where he was obsessed with monkeys, and we now have all these wildly expensive yet creepily lifelike electronic monkeys that we are trying to figure out what to do with.

And I also love dressing her at this age, in adorable little get-ups with smocked dresses, corduroy jumpers, tights and mary janes. It's truly like playing dress up with a doll, only she's cuter. And yet even with all this exciting verbal, intellectual and emotional development, she's still very much a baby. She has baby fat on her face and legs. She sleeps in little footed jammies, and she has sweet baby snores when she sleeps (she still sleeps with us). In some ways, this age seems pretty much perfect.

C in the bath at 27 months.

But one of the great things about raising four kids of four very different ages (mine are currently 2, 11, 14 and 18) is knowing that each age has its special charms.I know that age two will be followed by the the amazing pretend play of age 4, and the wonder of watching your child read for the first time at age 6 or 7. In late elementary school, they are sweet, yet incredibly independent and smart, informing you of amazing facts and bits of information you really didn't know. Middle school allows you to begin to see them blossom into adolescents, with the first, charmingly awkward romantic advances, and that changing body that is as amazing as the changes of baby to toddler. Then there are the teenage years, where you get to have honest-to-goodness, REAL conversations with this almost adult person. Occasionally they even give you advice that's so wise and smart that it knocks your socks off.

Yep, each age has its charms...and its horrors. And those horrors are different for every child and every parent: the sleeplessness of the newborn, the constant nursing of the seven month old, the nasty diapers of toddlerhood, the complete meltdowns of preschoolers, the hassles and logistical challenges (softball practice, the costume for the school play, etc) of the elementary years, the mouthy sullenness of early adolescence, and finally the terrors - absolute terrors - that come with having a teenage child.

I've now lived through each and every stage, and like every parent, I have my favorite and less favorite ages. I have some friends who could barely tolerate the newborn phase, feeling that their heads (not to mention their boobs) would explode from the constant neediness. Other friends love, love, love the Class Mom, PTA President, Costume-Sewing, Lesson Shuttling phase that elementary and 'tween years bring. Some parents I know are all about teenagers, and have houses filled with their adolescent offspring's friends each weekend. I think that each parent's favorite age and stage is a combination of the parent's temperament, and the child's. For parents who have several kids, favorite stages can be different with each child, too.

Given all this, I will now reveal my favorite stages thus far:

Newborn phase: Love it. I feel literally euphoric, and drunk on babylove. I love a newborn's tint hands and feet, and how they make that little mewing sound when they nurse. I love those tiny little newborn nightties, I love bassinets and baby swings and all the accoutrements of newbornness. I love those first weeks of getting to sit around in my nightgown, enjoying the occasional prescription narcotic pain reliever (recovering from childbirth, of course), and soaking in every second of newborn deliciousness. Yep, this is a favorite time for me. (Maybe I'm actually a bumpaholic! Heh;-) )

C, one week old (so only 37 weeks gestation)

Infancy: I find the stage from about 6-18 months to be THE hardest stage of early childhood. During this period, each of my children have seemed kind of, well, pissed off. It's like, once they can sit up at about 5-6 months, they really want to be able to DO something, but they still can't. And that leaves them whiny and me peevish. And they want to be carried all the time, everywhere, which is hard to do, even with a babysling or backpack (my two fave babywearing items). All of mine started walking between about 11-13 months, so not long after that, when they stopped careening into everything with the drunken stagger that comes with being a brand new walker, they seemed a lot happier. And I was too. But one year olds are still pretty tricky creatures, even after they learn to walk. They have a tendency to want to do ridiculous things like eat catfood from the bowl in the kitchen, and that gets really old. Lots of meltdown tantrums at this age, too. At least with all of mine. They were grumpy right before they learned to walk, and grumpy again right before they learned to talk. After each developmental breakthrough, however, they each cheered right up.

Toddler: I've already admitted to loving toddlerhood, and why (see above).

Preschool: Everything I love about toddlerhood, only better! They sleep in later on weekends (yay!), no longer require diapers on outings (yay!) and they say even funnier things. But there is, for me, a bittersweet quality to the preschool age, as I know that - as my grandmother used to say about children this age, "that baby will soon be all used up." I'm already finding myself having some of that bittersweet sadness oflost babyhood about two year old C, because I know she's almost certainly my last baby.

E - sheer joy at age 4 or 5.

Elementary years: I have enjoyed the heck out of each of my three eldest kids' elementary school ages, except for one thing: the school part. I am just terrible at keeping up with all those school papers I am supposed to sign and diorama assignments and soccer practice start times. And school seems to get more and more complicated with each child, too. (I swear it wasn't this complicated when H was a third grader.) And I've already written extensively of my hatred, sheer HATRED for our homework system. However, leaving the school logistics aside, I adore kids this age. They are so open and physical; I like the sounds of bouncy children rushing around the house. I love watching them play with their toys, and the fact that they still like toys (wait til you see how hard it gets to buy holiday gifts for your kids after toys no longer hold any appeal). I enjoy seeing their peer relationships start to develop in a more independent way, and I love reading chapter books, rather than little kid books, with them each night before bed. Ten year old girls haven't yet figured out that they are "supposed" to live their lives for anyone else, and their confidence blows me away. Ten year old boys haven't yet figured out that they aren't "supposed" to give lots of hugs and kisses to their mamas, and I love that. Yep, the elementary age years are pretty darn great overall.

H (12), J (8), E (5) - Fiat the dog - still certifiably insane six years later...

J and me, Edisto. She's about 8 years old here.

E and me at my wedding to Jon. E was eight years old here. Still little enough to snuggle.

Middle School: For those of you who haven't been through it yet, I don't want to freak you out or anything, but here's the deal: middle school is just as scary as everyone says it is. (Example: that whole "sexting" thing? It isn't just some made-up ratings grab story for Dateline. SEVENTH AND EIGHTH GRADERS ARE REALLY DOING THAT!!!! AGGGGHHH! Quelle horreur!) The best advice I can give you about parenting a middle schooler is to do whatever you can to keep your child from growing up too fast for as long as you can. Don't give in to the "everyone else's mom lets them" whining, because as it happens, not every 11-12 year old has a cell phone and yes, you do have a right to read your middle schooler's email. . I made a lot of mistakes during middle school with H, and the biggest one was that in too many ways, I let go of too much of my absolute parental authority (and I mean authority in the truest, non-PC sense of the word) far too early, believing that I had some obligation to accommodate his need for autonomy and self expression. I was, as I've written previously, flat out wrong. So hang onto the reins as long as you can and as tightly as you can during middle school. Err on the side of too much authority rather than not enough. Keep a super tight control on technology use. And remember that each child is going to be different. In my own case, H made middle school quite....challenging for his mama (I don't think he would mind me saying that), while J, who just started ninth grade, made it easy as pie. Same family, different middle schoolers...

High School: H, who just turned 18 this month, also made high school....uhhhh....challenging.(if by "challenging," you mean that his mother thought she might keel over and die if the whole thing got any harder). So I am probably the wrong person to ask on this one. But H is doing some serious growing up recently; he starts a new job this week, and starts college in January. I am really proud of him. (But he owes me BIG TIME for what he's put me through. I'm just sayin'....)

H and me; he's a freshman in high school here.

H and me, Christmas '07.

H, just turned 18.

To me, as a parent, high school is scary. It just is. It's far scarier than I realized when I sent H off for that first day of ninth grade. No matter how hard you try, you cannot completely protect your high schooler from bad people, choices, influences...But having gotten one child to the age of 18, I can now say that I am MUCH more confident being directive and yes, strict, with my teenagers-coming-along. Parents have to get comfortable and confident saying no, or even HELL NO to things like texting after 11 pm, unfiltered internet access at home or mushroom-glorifying Grateful Dead posters on your teenager's bedroom wall - anything that voilates your values as a person and a parent. It may be a cliche, but it's true: your job is not to make them happy or to be their pal. It's to get them safely to age 21 with a well developed character, and with your sanity intact. And I gotta tell you, that's waaaaay harder than it looks.

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I really would prefer to be driving this bus

2009-10-19T14:02:00Z

Seventeen days ago, I got sick with a virus. The sudden intensity of how hard and fast the virus hit me apparently gave some kind of nasty wallop to my autoimmune system and my previously happy thyroid. In these past 17 days, I have been hospitalized for nearly a week, readmitted to the hospital for another 24 hours, and have spent the rest of the time in my pajamas, trying to both get my job done (my boss has been AMAZINGLY WONDERFUL about letting me work from home) and mother my children, plus be some kind of wife/friend to poor Jon, who has been stuck doing everything I cannot do (which is a lot when you are talking about 4 kids, 3 dogs, a giant old house, and - yes, believe it or not - his own paid employment at which he's actually expected to appear on time each day and do good work. )

Even after all the CAT scans and blood tests and spinal taps and MRIs, the docs still can't tell me exactly what the virus was that did this to me. All I can tell you is that right now, I feel like I was hit by a Mack Truck and I am trying to recover. The last doctor I spoke to (during my hospital readmittance late last week) said he strongly suspects H1N1, but we will simply never know for sure. Whatever it was, it has given me a really excellent reminder of what it means to be humbled in the face of something bigger and more powerful than I am.

You see, I am used to being in control, on top of things, busy and very productive. And ever since this illness hit, I have been unable to be any of those things at even close to the level I am used to. I remain absolutely exhausted - bone tired in a way I cannot even adequately put into words. Getting dressed wears me out. Standing up for periods longer than 10-15 minutes wears me out. I am able to sit in a chair at home and work - phone and computer at hand - but even that still kind of wears me out. At this point, I have not yet returned to my actual office. I had hoped to do that today, really hoped to, but there is simply no way I was up to it today.

Frightened is the way this whole thing has made me feel. I am not in control. I am not driving this bus. It does not matter how much E needs me to take him shoe shopping this evening (and he REALLY does), I have no $$#&%ing idea how I will pull that off, as the idea of going to a store and buying something (which I did one time since this all started - a trip to Target last week - made me need to lie down for 4 hours afterward) sounds a bit like trying to climb Mt Everest.

Tomorrow I will start partial work days in the office. In fact, tomorrrow I have an actual work-related presentation to do - to a group - and I had really been looking forward to it, so I am trying to draw on that previous enthusiasm to gather the energy to do the good job I want to do. Again, I can't tell you how much it means and has meant to me that my employer is being so understanding. This removes a huge, huge stress from me and from Jon. I know that not all employers are so kind about letting employees ease back in to work after an accident or serious illness, and I am truly grateful.

But honestly this whole thing of being "sick" with some sort of non-specific viral/autoimmune something for 17 days now is beginning to feel, well, embarrassing. People have been SO nice (I can't even begin to express my gratitude. I get teary just thinking about it) about bringing us meals, and helping in other ways, but at this point are people seceretly starting to think I am kind of faking? Being a drama queen? Milking the situation in some way so that I can continue to be treated "special." Abusing my body in some way that is causing me to be so unwell? These are the worries that plague me at the moment. I hate feeling like people are maybe thinking I am drawing this thing out. I mean, come ON, who is sick for 17 days with something no one can actually put a name to? That sounds kind of suspect, dontcha think?

Mostly, I just want my body back. My energy back. My life back. I want to be in my office, brainstorming with my coworkers and having lunches with clients. I want to take my kids to the zoo. I want to fix a real meal for my family without feeling like I have to sit down every three minutes. Heck, I'd even happily take back the- far-more-than-10-pounds I've shed since this all began if I could just be myself again.

One smart friend reminds me to surrender. This is bigger than I am. More powerful. The fact that no doctor can give it a simple name, like "meningitis" or "snakebite" or "she was run down by a a recycling truck while crossing Cumberland Avenue" makes it even more important to surrender, she says. The fact that the specifics are somewhat unknowable gives it greater power.

And maybe she's right. Maybe I need to be more forgiving of myself, because right now I am feeling like this is somehow my fault, and that there is some magical SOMETHING I could be doing right now to make the recovery go faster. To regain my strength more quickly. To get back to where I was before this began so suddenly one evening just 17 days ago (it seems like an eternity at this point).

I will be well again. I don't know if that will be next week or next month, but I will. The thing I am realizing though, is that I don't get to decide when. I want what I want when I want it... I want to drive the bus. My bus, in particular. But apparently, that isn't how this life thing works.

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My middle-schooler's "You Can Ask And I MIGHT Tell" Policy

2009-10-09T02:30:00Z

(NOTE: H, J & E all gave me specific permission - yes, I asked - to blog about this particular topic before I put my typing fingers to laptop ;-) )

Before H became a teenager, I always kind of imagined that he would be willing to talk openly with me about his dating life. I am not sure what made me imagine such a thing about a teenage boy (maybe I watched one too many episodes of "The Brady Bunch," where Greg talks girl trouble with his parents...) but I just sort of thought that if I were a good enough mother, with a good enough relationship with my adolescent son, he would want to share these important things with me. But Greg Brady he's not; there have been no late night chats about the state of his love life over milk and cookies in our kitchen. In fact, he just turned 18 (!!!), and in the past 6 or 7 years, he's only deigned to actually introduce two girlfriends to me (or to anyone else in our family). Any attempt on my part to proactively elicit specific info on any particular girl only encouraged him to become MORE clammed up.

So I kind of gave up, assuming that some day, should he ever decide to - let's say - become engaged to be married or something, he will at at least send me an invitation to the wedding. (I hope.)

J, on the other hand, who just started her freshman year of high schol, is more than willing to talk with me about dating and boys (and also with her Aunt Betsy, J's "other mother"). In fact, dating and related topics are actually a frequent topic of mom-daughter discussion these days. I love how open she is, and how willing to tell me what's on her mind, and what's going on in her life. I don't delude myself into thinking that she tells me everything, but we definitely have a very close relationship where we are comfortable talking about topics I would have keeled over, dead of pure embarrassment before I ever would have considered talking about with my own mom.

If I hadn't already mothered my way through the teenage years with one kid who would clearly endure waterboarding before telling me whether he has any romantic interest in anyone in particular, I would be patting myself on the back about now, confidently smug in the "fact" that my obviously superlative parenting skills were the sole reason that J is so open with me about this stuff. But honestly, I haven't done anything any differently with Kid #2 than I did with Kid #1 when it comes to encouraging these sorts of conversations. So I know that this is one instance where Judith Rich may be onto something, because in this developmental area, nature clearly kicks nurture to the curb; some teenagers are obviously born with a willingness to tolerate, and even indulge their mothers' annoying curiosity about their love lives, while others are not.

And now along comes E, who just started 6th grade last month. E has always had a certain way with the ladies, as well as a natural confidence that I feel pretty certain will assure him no small measure of success in the teenage Dating Game. He's also much more chatty in general than his older brother, H, who is naturally quite reserved and private. So I erroniously assumed that E would be more like his sister J (and Greg Brady) when it comes to openly telling mom exactly what's up with his love life. But only 6 weeks into middle school, he has already let me know that he's still trying to decide where he will fall on the continuum of openness.

As is the case in most 6th grade classes, E's class is starting to have some early-stage "dating" stuff happening within the student body. His best guy friend L, with whom he's been pals since L's mom and I were pregnant with the boys at the same time, is quite happy to tell me which 6th grade boy likes which 6th grade girl (including about himself), and he's alluded to E having some interest in certain girls, and vice versa. But when I have tried to ask E about any specifics, he shuts me down. Yet, he did allow his sister J and me to play a rather ridiculous guessing game tonight (ridiculous because there are probably fewer than 40 girls in the whole middle school) regarding which female middle schooler he is considering asking to the upcoming 6th-7th & 8th grade dance. He seemed amused at our guesses - both silly and serious - but he wouldn't give us so much as a hint.

Finally I asked him teasingly whether he intends to be more like his big brother or his big sister in letting me in on what's going on with his love life. He responded with the cryptic statement, "Mom, I have a 'you can ask and I might tell' policy." He went on to say that between his older sister, mother, Aunt Betsy and female cousins, he knows he's going to get asked a lot of questions by the women in his life, and he's trying to decide how much to share. I promised I wouldn't bug him about it, but J made no such promises. In fact, she told him that he has to tell her because as Big Sister, she needs to approve of his potential girlfriends. (I laughed, but I kind of like this idea! I think she has pretty good taste ;-)

So we shall see how this plays out with E over the next few years. Will nature trump nurture? Is this a boychild thing? Will his sister's declared Girlfriend Veto Power be used with any authority? Stay tuned...

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Part-time parenting is really the best of bad options

2009-09-29T04:27:00Z

In late 2002, my three eldest kids' father and I separated, followed by a legal end to our marriage about 18 months or so later. Our kids were 10, 6.5 and almost 5 years old at the time. So for the past eight years or so, their father and I have shared legal custody 50/50 - and for the past two years or so, we've also shared physical custody 50-50. In a practical sense, this means that every Sunday night, our kids switch houses for the week. They spend one full week at their father's house, and then they spend one full week at my house, and so forth and so on. Their two homes are only a few miles away from each other, and to the extent we are able, their father and I attempt to keep all other elements of their lives (aside from the actual switching of houses) the same whether they are at Dad's house or Mom's house: sports, friends, time with extended family on both sides of the aisle, etc. We do attend two different churches, but we really do try to maintain consistency across the two houses ("try" being the operative word here; we do not always succeed).

I have a number of friends who are divorced from their kids' fathers, and each of them handles this custody sharing thing a little differently. I have one friend who has 100% custody, and her kids rarely ever see their father (his choice). I have other friends where the kids live primarily with one parent, and the other parent is more like an "extra" than an actual parent. That doesn't mean that the kids love that other parent any less, but their relationship with him (and yes, it's usually a him) just isn't the same as the one they have with the parent who actually cares for them on a day in and day out basis. I also have one divorced friend who essentially has a commuter relationship with her kids. She has a very high-powered job, primarily located in another city (kids in Nashville, mother traveling between NYC and ATL for lawyering), so she flies in to see her kids once or twice a month. She also chats and emails and texts and Skypes with them nearly every day, and she takes them on fabulous vacations in the summer and over the winter holidays. She decided that her children's need for the stability of a single home (and her ability to earn the money it takes for their father to mostly be a stay at home parent, and to allow all of them to remain in that stable, comfortable, single home) was more important than what she believes would have been an artificial 50-50 time split that would have been more about HER wants and needs rather than about what would actually be best for her kids.

When my children's father and I broke up, the idea of one of us moving to another town or another state didn't really even come up for discussion. Neither of us could imagine a scenario in which we wouldn't see our children regularly - daily if possible. Speaking only for myself, I can't imagine creating a situation where the children would have to negotiate two communities or two groups of friends or two majorly different schedules in summer and winter. The changing back and forth between the two houses seems hard enough for them. Since my marriage ended, I have been offered some fantastic job opportunities (New York! Atlanta! Chicago!) that would have required me to either give up significant time with my children, or to attempt to make the case to the family court powers-that-be that the children should move with me, far away from their father. If I had chosen to pursue such a course - something I would never have considered because my kids need their father - it would have meant that the kids would have been unable to have spontaneous extra time with one parent or another on a Wednesday evening, just because they were feeling a random, mid-week longing for some extra dad or mom-time. It would have meant that the idea of both of us easily attending a school play or even an important pediatric appointment would have been impossible. So in many ways, I feel like we have made the best of bad choices with our two houses in the same town set-up. They see both parents regularly. Both parents are equally involved. They have the same friends and coaches and schools and activities, even though they have the hassle of switching back and forth between two houses.

I am absolutely NOT judging divorced parents who make a different choice regarding how to organize parenting time, schedules, careers and geographic locations. A case can certainly be made that the value of children having a truly primary home with one parent, while still getting plenty of summer and holiday visits, along with daily phone/skype/text conversations with the other parent, offers a certain stability and routine that our children's schedule does not. But this is the set-up that seemed to make the most sense to us. And despite some of the obvious shortcomings - such as the fact that the kids do have to do that SUnday night shuffle each week - I still believe that it's the best choice for us overall, giving the realities of our family life.

Over the years, I've written a lot about how hard it is for me to be separated from my three eldest kids half the time - how much I miss them. For the first two or three years, I literally cried myself to sleep many nights when they left for their father's house, just because I missed them so much. It was very hard to go from being a full time, work-from-home (stay at home) parent to suddenly being without my young children 1/3rd of the time. I no longer cry myself to sleep, but I can't really say that I've ever actually adjusted to the whole thing. The bottom line is that when I got divorced, I effectively signed away the right to enjoy half my kids' childhooods. Poof! Half their childhoods lost to me in an instant. It really was (and is) as dramatic as that.

As they have gotten older, though, the emotional difficulties for me as a mama that come with simply missing my children during the weeks when they are with their father have been replaced with a whole new set of more practical and logistical challenges. Even though their father and I try to communicate clearly and often about what's going on with each of them as they move back and forth across both households, and even though schools continue to make it easier for two-household families like ours by providing certain web-based organizational tools, it's still hard to keep up with what's going on with your kids when they are busy and you are busy and you only have them living with you every other week.

The every-other-week absences mean that I lose the organic, easy threads of conversation about things going on at school with this friend or that teacher that should be a normal part of parenting one's child. When E leaves for his father's house on Sunday evening, he may be reading and enjoying Book X, but by the time I see him next, he's on to Book Y, and my moment to chat with him about how much I enjoyed Book X when I was his age has passed. Or J will forget that I wasn't there on Wednesday when some bit of classroom girl drama happened at school, and she'll reference it the next week in the context of some other conversation, and I'll have no idea what she's talking about. Plus, even all these years in, it's just a weird feeling to have your kids tell you about parts of their lives that have absolutely ZERO relation to you - people they know or places they have visited or restaurants they tried out or neighbors they play with or conversations they have had.... It's just an odd way to parent when you are - for all practical purposes - kind of disconnected from large areas of the day to day goings on in your childrens' lives. I'm just not sure I'll ever completely adjust to it.

Do you share custody? How do you arrange your schedule? Do you believe that a primary residence is more important than equal access to both parents? Talk about part-time parenting in the comments below.

The school sick day dilemma: should they stay or should they go?

2009-09-25T12:55:00Z

When I was growing up, my parents were - how to frame this as positively as possible? - completely and utterly intolerant of any physical illness in their children. Injuries - particularly the more dramatic ones my siblings and I acquired over the years, like the night I literally had the back of my skull partially caved in when my horse kicked me in the head - were more acceptable because they were evidence of interesting activity and a commendable willingness to take risks. A nasty injury also became storyspinning material for the whole family, which gave it added value in our excessively verbose clan. But my mother in particular, and my father to a lesser degree appeared to see any physical illness as a sign of flawed character and a poorly developed work ethic.

My mother came by her anti-illness tendencies honestly. Once, when I told my maternal grandmother that I thought I "might have allergies" (having heard about "allergies" for the first time when I was in 7th grade from a child who got to miss school one afternoon each week to go see her special allergy doctor, which sounded appealing), my grandmother responded - in a tone that let me know the matter had been settled - by saying, "we don't believe in allergies in our family." She went on to explain that women who suffered with "allergies" were the same sort of lollygagging, uninteresting kind of people who were continually complaining of those similarly suspect "migraines."

My father was somewhat more tolerant of the concept of illness, since he did sometimes suffer from sinus problems that caused headaches and general discomfort, but he was totally without sympathy for any whining or expression of pain due to physical injury. Once, when I was about eight years old, my pony threw me straight into a barb wire fence while my father was watching. I was wailing and covered in painful scratches, and my father's immediate response was to get down on his knee, firmly grab both my hands, look me straight in the eye and say, "Kate, you are either going to ride that horse or let the horse ride you." He then scooped me up, definitively placed me back on the (bareback) pony, and insisted that I make the pony do whatever it was I had been trying to get her to do before she slung me into the tangled, rusty wire fence. (As it happens, that was some of the best advice my father ever gave me. To this day, I find myself applying it to all kinds of areas of my life, all the time.)

In addition to simply telling us to "knock it off" if we whined about having scraped a knee or fallen off a bike, my father also had a belief that any cut or open wound required immediate and thorough application of a vile, noxious, staining purple liquid antispetic called "merthiolate." He used this stuff - which burned like hell, and was made of something sort of like the mercury-infused liquid inside a glass thermometer - on children, dogs, horses, cows - you name it. If you were an animal or young human, and you spent much time around our house, you would eventually end up having the dreaded merthiolate applied to some area of your body. The merthiolate application hurt so much more than any cut or scrape that I think we kids tended to avoid letting anyone know we had done anything like, say, sliced off the end of a toe because we figured risk of gangrene was preferable to the alternative. I think it's possible that my father played the merthiolate card as part of a carefully crafted parental strategy designed to reinforce his "no whining" message; if we whined about having stubbed a toe, we knew the merthiolate would be the result. If so, his strategery worked. No way, now how was I going to tell my parents if I stepped on a rusty nail or sliced open my leg on the pile of tin sheet roofingthat was stacked behind our barn. I'd suffer in silence, thankyouverymuch.

In my entire childhood, I never once remember my mother or grandmother taking a day to lie around and do nothing because they weren't feeling well. Sick days were verboten. I realize now, as a working mom myself, that part of the reason that that my mother and her working mother before her did not take sick days is because they simply couldn't, not without risk of losing their jobs. Even if the HR policy at the newspaper or wire service where my mother was employed said that there were so many paid sick days each year, no one thought that a woman would actually take them. And if my mother had even suggested that she would need to take her own sick time to care for a sick child, she would have been laughed at, or worse. It wasn't that her employers in the 70s and 80s were "bad," it's just that that's the way it was for working mothers. Women still felt kind of lucky to have a good job in the field, and they didn't dare risk drawing too much attention to the fact that they were also "just moms."

The combination of my parents' natural disdain for sickliness with the realities of my mother's work environment meant that we kids were not able to very often convince our parents that we needed to stay home from school for any reason. In order to get permission to stay home sick, we basically had to be actively bleeding, running a high fever or projectile vomiting (More than once on the vomiting. Once was considered a fluke.) within the 60 minutes immediately preceding morning school departure. Getting my parents to agree to let me stay home sick was akin to arguing a case before the U.S. Supreme Court. It was hard to get them to listen, and even if they decided to hear you out, your odds of success were dicey. And getting my parents' permission to leave school once I was already there for the day would generally require a level of infirmity along the lines of a period of actual unconsciousness during class, or perhaps a grand mal seizure in the cafeteria.

As a result of my parents' draconian position on missing school for illness, I rather predictably veered strongly in the opposite direction when my eldest started kindergarten. My lax sick day policy with my own kids was certainly reactionary, but it was also based on my carefully considered views regarding the way schools are run. I felt (and still do feel) that American children spend too many hours each week in the classroom, and too many hours doing homework, and that they do not get enough time to play or to explore what they do learn in school on their own, outside of class. So for many years - and this was possible mainly because I worked from home almost exclusively during that period - I had no problem with letting my three older kids miss school for even the mildest expression of unwellness, or even when I simply felt that one of them needed a mental health day. And like so many parenting missteps I've made along the way (and from which I like to think I have learned, and continue to learn) I can only say now that, well, it seemed like a good idea at the time!

H, J and E - all 3 legitimately sick at home with a virus a few years ago, all on the same day. They all passed out on top of each other on the futon, like a bunch of sleepy puppies. Note that E is wearing giant gloves. He swore they made him feel better, so he wore them until he was well.

Today, my three older children are 17, 14 and 11, and let's just put it this way: they never miss an opportunity to try to convince me that they are too sick to attend school. My lax position in their early elementary years sort of created sick day monsters. I believe it would be accurate to say that each of them begs to stay home, insisting that he or she is too sick to even get out of bed, at least once in any given two week period. This is despite the fact that over the years, I've had to seriously toughen up on my earlier approach when it became clear at some point that my liberal guidelines were being grievously abused by my offspring. My views have also evolved because it turns out that my parents were correct: if you don't teach children early on that sometimes they just have to power on through, and go do what they are expected to do - despite a little sniffle or headache - the formation of their nascent work ethic will suffer. I get that now, and I've been trying to play catch up with imparting this important lesson to H, J and E ever since I figured it out.

Also, since moving from being a work-at-home mother to a work-at-a-job-outside-the-home mother almost seven years ago, I no longer have the luxury of simply staying home with a child as often or as spontaneously as I used to. That means that any decision to allow one of them to stay home from school is a big decision. Despite my employer's very reasonable policies regarding working parents and sick kids, I have a very busy job with carefully scheduled workdays involving numerous meetings and deadlines. I can't always just drop everything for the day and stay home with one of them, even if my boss would be okay with me working remotely. When a child who wakes up with a fever on a school day, or other legitimate evidence of illness, I have to immediately scramble to call in reinforcements, like my sister and their grandmother, to assist me with the sick kid's care and feeding during the hours I'm on the job. Obviously, an 11 year old, 14 year old and a 17 year old can stay home by themselves perfectly well when they are sick, and more and more often, that's what happens. But even at 14, J prefers strongly to be with a parent, auntie or grandmother when she isn't feeling well, and I don't feel completely comfortable leaving my 11 year old home alone when he's sick, even though I have no problem doing it when he's well. I try to avoid it.

But even if they can stay home alone now, God forbid that one of them should need to see their pediatrician on the fly during work hours, because that's means major logistical strategy is required. Sometimes Jon is able to handle a last-minute, weekday trip to the pediatrician, but he also works full time, and he has two year old C with him at his office, located 40 minutes away from our house and even further from the kids' schools and pediatrician. This means that his help isn't often the most practical choice.(We are very lucky - knock wood - that C has been the least-sick baby and toddler I've ever met. I can count the number of times she's been sick on one hand, and none of the illnesses lasted more than a day or two, except for one cold when she was just a newborn that stretched out for over a week.)

Because of both the logistical challenges that come with working motherhood, combined with my realization several years ago that I had been inadvertently encouraging flat-out laziness and irresponsibility with my loosey-goosey approach to allowing them to stay home from school, I have tightened up - a lot. Now, I have to be pretty darn sure that the kid in question is likely to make other people sick should he or she leave the house before I allow a school absence. These days, I have a drill-seargeant approach to whiny offspring who decline to immediately get out of bed in the morning. If my now-well-developed spidey senses detect fakery, I have no mercy. Covers are yanked off. My voice is raised. Loud music is turned on. Threats of upcoming weekends spent entirely in bedrooms are freely dispensed. Over time, they have stopped trying to argue about staying home once I make it clear that they won't be doing it, but my earlier parenting error continues to haunt me in the frequency with which they continue to at least try to get me to allow them to miss school.

So what is your position on too-sick-for-school at your house? If you work full time, how do you manage care for a child who really does need to stay home? Is your employer understanding about using your own sick and vacation time to care for a sick child? Tell me how you handle this issue with your own children in the comments below.

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"The Opt-Out Revolution" Has Become "The Please, Please Let Me Opt-Back-In Recession"

2009-09-19T23:22:00Z

In yesterday's New York Times was a story about highly educated women who have been stay-at-home mothers, but who are now being forced by the recession - and specifically by their previously well-compensated husbands' downsizings and layoffs - to seek full time employment for the first time in many years. The story features several women who were able to find jobs in their fields (law, banking) relatively easily, even after as much as a decade away from their careers. It also features an interview with one longtime homemaker - a woman who previously had a successful legal career - who has been forced to start her climb back into the workforce with an unpaid internship at a law firm.

Ouch.

The story's tone is generally positive, tacitly assuming that most women who want to get a paying job can do so without too much trouble. The piece focuses more on the hardship of having to get a job at all, rather than on the more realistic hardship of being unable to get a job when one is needed, much less a well-compensated job in a super competitive field like law or finance. The story also references a much-discussed 2003 New York Times Magazine, Lisa Belkin-penned piece titled "The Opt-Out Revolution," which profiled a group of women in this exact same, rarified demographic who were "opting out" of the careers for which they had trained in order to be at-home wives and mothers. (I'm a Lisa Belkin fan; so don't take my essay questioning the wisdom of her interview subjects' decision to "opt out" as criticism of her or her writing.)

When the "Opt-Out Revolution" piece came out, I was newly divorced after almost a decade of being a mostly at-home wife and mother myself. I was 34 years old, unemployed, a mother of three, and for all intents and purposes, I was completely penniless. The divorce ate up my share of whatever modest property and savings my ex and I had managed to accumulate by that point in our lives, and I found myself starting over with literally nothing. I didn't even have a real bed - I slept on a futon on the floor for the next three three years. Family help sustained me until I was able to find a real job with benefits, which took several months, even in that very good economy. Thank God, I had done quite a bit of home-office-based, high-profile freelance and contract work over the years, which made it possible for me to land that first job, because if my resume had been blank for the past almost-decade, I would have been in a world of hurt.

After the experience of finding myself starting completely over at age 34, I had a sort of Scarlett O'Hara moment,in which I promised myself that I would never, ever again depend so much on anyone else to provide financial security for me. I had always been hardworking and ambitious, but I found myself with a new, very intense drive to succeed in having a career that would protect me and my kids. I was completely traumatized by that first Christmas season after my break-up, when I found myself unsure how I would both eat AND buy even the most modest of gifts for the kids during my half of the shared-with-their-dad holiday break, when they would be home full time with me. Never again. I thought to myself. Never, ever again.

And then I read that New York Times Magazine piece, about all of these smart, successful, well-educated women making what I now realized to be an extremely risky choice to simply walk away from their own incomes and careers, and place their total financial futures - including their health care access and their ability to retire with dignity one day - into the hands of other people: their husbands. So I penned a response to the "Opt Out Revolution" piece, which appeared in a couple of online publications, offering the perspective of someone (me) who had done a version of the "opt-out" thing. In this rebuttal essay, I shared my thoughts on why women should be very, very careful about making such a weighty decision.

I ended my essay, titled "The Case Against Opting Out," with this:

"As I read Belkin’s article, I shook my head sadly as I applied current divorce statistics --including the rise in no-fault divorce and the virtual disappearance of alimony from most divorce settlements -- to her interview sample. Odds are that around half of the happily fulfilled, college-educated, para-homemakers she interviewed will find themselves single at some point in the next decade, at which point their choice to “opt out” of their formerly promising career trajectories may also mean that they have “opted out” of not only the lifestyle extras they seem to take for granted, but also fundamentals like a house, health insurance, and retirement funds.

Let me be clear: despite my current circumstances, I don’t regret the many personal benefits my kids and I gained during the years I worked less and mothered more, but the plain fact is that my choices have left me at a distinct economic disadvantage at a time in my life when I always assumed I’d be “all set.”. What I wish I had known then and what I do know now is that the years I spent primarily concentrating on being a mother and wife didn’t represent anything more than one phase among many in a working life that will, by today’s economic necessity, span my entire adult life.

While Lisa Belkin and her interview subjects may believe that they have “opted out,” the reality is likely to be much less clear cut for them as their children grow and many of their marriages end. Ten years from now, I suspect that we may be hearing from a new group of suddenly single, 50 year old, college-educated women who haven’t held a paying job in a decade about a new and fascinating trend: the “I-was-only-kidding-and-I-really-need-to-opt-back-in Revolution.”

So it turns out that I was kind of right in predicting the boomerang, "I really need to opt back in" trend, only it's been only six years since I made that prediction, not a decade. And as it happens, it's the bad economy, rather than divorce that prompted the cultural-bellwether-that-is-the-New-York-Times to revisit this topic. But divorce (or death of a spouse, too) still matters a lot to this discussion. In fact, since I wrote my essay in 2003, I've had the unhappy experience of watching several women-friends find themselves getting the seriously short-end of the financial stick following marital dissolutions. Prior to their marriages ending, they each had some pie-in-the-sky misunderstanding of how division of property and income would work in the modern divorce system. They believed that they would receive fair credit for giving up their own careers in order to put in years of hard work to be the primary caregivers to their children. They believed that in a divorce settlement, they would be provided with sufficient financial support to cover the time it would realistically take to find a good job after being at home for a long time.

In each case, however, these women's soon-to-be-ex-husbands took the position during divorce proceedings that they - the husbands - had literally begged and pleaded with their wives to "get a job" during the years these women were stay-at-home mothers to these men's children. The men gave this version of the story - instead of telling the truth - which was that their wives did the messy, unpaid, unappreciated home-based work that raising a family requires so that these guys would never miss a day of work for a sick child, and so that they could have the time to build a successful business, or make partner, while still getting to enjoy being fathers (when time permitted between late nights at the office and weekend golf games.) As a result of their soon-to-be-exes sudden disdain for stay-at-home mothering - disdain that only arose when the divorcing men were faced with sharing the profit from the business or law firm partnership they built while their wives took care of home and hearth - several women I know not only did not receive fair compensation for their time on the job as stay at home parents, they were instead explicitly punished in the settlements for the fact that they had "opted out." One stay-at-home mother I know was even lectured directly by the judge in open court for having been "too lazy" to work at a "real" job during her now-dissolving marriage.

These personal, anecdotal observations of friends' experiences since I wrote that essay six years ago have only served to strengthen my belief that mothers need to be very careful about leaving a good career completely behind. And this new twist - women being suddenly forced back into the workplace due to the bad economy's impact on their husband's jobs - offers further support for my view that there is nothing revolutionary about completely "opting out." Instead, for many women, it's simply the best of bad options, and one that won't look very pretty when these women are ready to retire...on nothing.

What would be truly revolutionary would be a real Mother's Movement in this country, in which meaningful grassroots organizing would actually be taken to the voting floor by the women who represent us in Congress and to the boardroom by the female executives in the companies that employ us. Together, as mothers, we should be building support for the family leave, affordable health care, and child care options that would make this entire "opt out" conversation moot. We need universal, paid family leave that allows one parent sufficient time at home to care for an infant, and we need more career-track, part-time jobs with real benefits, so that women with babies and young children don't have to make a potentially life-altering choice between immediate family needs and longterm financial security. Further, we need a well-coordinated system of public and private childcare that allows the many women who "opt out" of paying work altogether following the birth of their children - simply because they can't find or pay for acceptable care - to make their choices based on the bigger picture.

Longterm, total (meaning no paid work of any kind over a period of years) stay-at-home parenting is a wonderful choice for many mothers, but women need to make that choice with a clear view of the longterm ramifications and risks. If I were going to stay home full time with a child at this point, and step completely out of my paying job for any period of time beyond a year or two, I would ask my partner to sign a legally binding agreement that would specifically lay out how my work at home would be valued in a divorce settlement, should the worst happen. Maybe that sounds crazy to some of you, but I suggest that you take a look at the statistics. Is it crazy to have car insurance, even though you are far more likely to end up divorced that you are to end up involved in a serious auto accident? I don't think so.

Have you opted out? Or subsequently opted back in? Have you been forced to start completely over folllowing death or divorce?

Talk about the whole "Opt Out" controversy in the comments below.

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Parents who refused to let their kids see the President's speech are pulling us down a slippery, anti-American slope

2009-09-05T11:46:00Z

I'm an opinionated person, a political person. As someone who blogs, and who writes personal essays and op-eds for various publications - online and off - I express my opinions often, and in a very public way. This may lead to the impression that I don't ascribe any more importance to one issue than another. I just opine, opine and opine, and for those who bother to read what I have to say, perhaps all of these opinions become one big mish-mash of bloviation on behalf of one point of view or another. Which is why today, with this blog post, I want to say right up front that I am more disturbed by the issue I'm about to address than anything I've blogged or written about in a very long time.

I absolutely cannot believe that public school districts all over the country caved in to explicitly political pressure, and declined to participate in what amounted to a 15 minute shared civics lesson for all of our children, delivered live by our President. I am appalled that so many parents took the position that this was a political event, and a political issue, and were willing to deny their kids the fantastic opportunity to hear directly from the President of the United States, in their own classrooms, on the topic of how important it is to set goals, aim high and stay in school. A few years ago, I might have expected a few "fringe" parents - on the right or the left - to take this stance in opposition to a schoolday speech by the President, if that President happened to be of the opposite political persuasion from those parents. But I never could have predicted that I would soon see a day when so many mainstream American parents would take this radical and dangerous position, and when so many public school administrators would so quickly and easily be bullied into submission.

Let me first point out the irony that the same parents who are complaining that President Obama should not have been allowed a platform for his 15 minutes of "socialist propaganda" in the classroom are making this argument as parents of students who attend public schools. If America's taxpayer funded, public education system doesn't offend these socialist-fearing parents to a level that would lead them to inconvenience themselves and strain their family budgets in order to homeschool their children, or enroll them in private schools, then these parents are - in my opinion - displaying a remarkable level of hypocrisy. However, this is not my primary concern about this issue. My primary concern is much more fundamental, and potentially harmful to our entire American system.

In recent years, particularly since the explosive growth of conservative talk radio, followed by Web publishing and social media, many pundits and analysts have decried the death of civil political discourse in this country. I've mostly ignored this commentary, believing that there is actually nothing more American, and generally more beneficial to civic discourse than the ability for more people, with more points of view to express their opinions to, and among one another. The idea that American politics is uglier, or more passionately argued than it was in generations past doesn't really hold up to historical scrutiny. Americans have always been passionate about our politics, and we've never been shy about expressing our views. At least nowadays we don't have members of Congress (or city council members in my hometown) physically assaulting one another during legislative sessions, or challenging each other to duels (although the Hamilton-Burr duel wasn't really over politics, but still...). A guy's finger may have been bitten off at a health care reform rally last week, but other than offhand commentary by folks like Rick Perry , we don't live in a country where there is any serious talk of secession, unlike the country my great, great grandparents lived in. Disagreement, even vehement disagreement, is as American as apple pie. But this thing with parental opposition to the President's speech to schoolchildren is something different.

The parents who raised hell about their kids seeing this speech at school are doing meaningful, fundamental damage to the glue that holds us all together as Americans, and they are contributing to a generational time-bomb of anti-American behavior and sentiment in the children they pulled out of class, or even out of school today. The thing that sets us apart as a nation and a society - what I see as the true American exceptionalism - is the fact that we are able to disagree so very passionately on the issues, while still holding tremendous, shared respect for our democratic ideals and institutions. This balancing act is not an easy one to pull off, but we Americans have done so pretty well for more than 200 years now. Our sense of shared patriotism generally allows us to rise above the things that divide us in respect for the things that unite us. And the office of the Presidency is one of the primary, iconic, uniting elements of American civic life. We Americans will continue to disagree on the issues. That's a given. But if we lose the ballast that our shared civic respect provides to counter our predictable disagreement, we will find ourselves pulled over a dangerous precipice.

Countries where entire factions of the population decline to accept their democratically elected leaders as worthy of general respect, and who refuse to listen to what these leaders have to say on even the most trivial, ceremonial, or everyday topics - such as the topics President Obama addressed today - are countries at risk of a coup, or a miltary junta. Perhaps this sounds farfetched, but honestly, I would have found it farfetched not so long ago that veteran public school administrators would apparently be so fearful of the wrath of individual parents who have apparently already gone over that precipice, and of right wing pundits and commentators, that these educators would simply crumble. Civics education is one of the cornerstones of the shared American experience, and when we start to factionalize and politicize the way basic civics is presented (or not) to our schoolchildren, I truly believe we may be headed down a slipperly slope.

What's next with all this? Will Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck begin calling for schools named after Democrat presidents of the 20th century to have their names changed? And if they do, and parents take this idea and run with it, straight to their local school boards, will school board members cave in, like administrators and teachers did this week? How will the generation of children who were prevented by their parents from seeing President Obama's speech today be able to serve as members of our military in the future, having been raised to believe that it's optional as to whether they show respect for the Commander in Chief?

I am far more concerned about the fundamental unraveling of the American civic fabric via the types of behavior we saw from parents today than I am about any single policy that any single president might sign into law. This is the same reason I support constitutional protections for scumbag criminals who are obviously guilty of doing terrible things; I am far more concerned about protecting the constitutional underpinnings and ideals of American democracy than I am about the risk any individual criminal may pose to society, should he be released on some sort of technicality related to constitutional requirements for investigators and police officers.

I happen to be a Democrat, but I make a point to teach my children that the President of the United States, OUR President of the United States - whether he is a Democrat or a Republican - deserves respect, no matter what I may think of his policy positions. I am very worried by what I saw from other parents and so many educators today. And I am even more worried about the message that these adult Americans' behavior sent our children.

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Who wears short shorts? Not my kid, not to school

2009-08-29T11:30:00Z

Last week, on J's first day of her freshman year of high school, we had one of our lately-not-uncommon clothing "discussions." Her new public high school has a standardized, rather modest dress code, but because this was a special orientation day, the kids could wear whatever they wanted, and what she wanted to wear was shorts. Now, I'm not sure whether those of you who do not have tweens or teens yet, or who do not yourselves shop at Abercrombie, Hollister or American Eagle know this, but shorts for teenage girls in recent seasons have staged a 70s hotpants revival - only shorter. (Think of those shorts Jodie Foster wore as the 13-year-old hooker in "Taxi Driver," and then mentally lop off an inch or two from their length. You get the idea.) At the moment, the shorts teenage girls favor are little more than bikini bottoms made of demim, khaki and madras. My mother was lucky, I guess, because during my own teenage years, the 80s preppy thang was in full flower, so when I wore shorts, they were almost knee length, covered in whales or ducks, and looked more like something Thurston Howell, III would have worn, rather than the Mary Anne-esque, barely-there shorts favored today.

And so J and I had a disagreement that first morning of school about whether I would allow her to wear her teensy, tiny denim shorts to school. I said no way, and she was extremely miffed, telling me that everyone would be wearing shorts that day - ones just like hers - and that if I denied her request to wear the shorts, she would be both swelteringly hot all day, as well as socially ruined. But I held fast. No shorts like those for school.

In all of these disagreements over clothing that we've had lately, what I am trying to get her to understand is that there are times and places where things like super short shorts are appropriate, and times and places where they are not. The shorts would be great for a three hour cruise around the Hawaaian Islands, for example, but I am just totally uncomfortable with her wearing them to school (or church or out to dinner at a restaurant with a friend's family....) She was annoyed, but she found something else to wear, and off she went for her first day, ready to face her certain fate of heat exhaustion combined with social damnation,

Later that day, when I mentioned to friends on Facebook that I had disallowed J from wearing shorts to school, most of the responses I got from people, including other parents, disagreed with my position. Some said I shouldn't try to be so controlling of a teenager's clothing choices, while others said there simply isn't anything wrong with wearing short shorts to school because that's what girls are wearing at the moment. The fact that people mostly seemed to disagree with me on the issue (which kind of surprised me) forced me to think through my views more carefully. Why did I say no to the shorts? And it's not just that pair of shorts; why do I occasionally put my foot down and disallow her from wearing what I consider to be excessively low cut tank tops when she goes to the mall, or extra low rise jeans when she goes to a movie with friends? These are all clothing items she bought at mainstream stores, meaning they are what teenage girls are wearing these days. I know that I do see other girls J's age wearing these things - and other stuff I also don't let J wear in public - all the time. Am I just really different than "all the other moms," like J says?

I don't think I am a prude. It's not like I am forbidding her from wearing about 95% of what's in style, or forcing her to wear a long denim skirt and prairie blouse. No, I think that if you saw my daughter anywhere, anytime, you would have no idea that she considers her mother's clothing guidelines excessively strict, because she looks adorable and fashionable and wears things that are - as most clothing for teenage girls has been since time immemorial - designed to take advantage of the fact that when we are adolescents, our bodies are rockin' in a way they really never will be again. So no, I am not weird or uptight in general about her clothing. I mean, she wears a bikini at the pool, and she wore a white eyelet, strapless sundress to her eighth grade graduation. She wears skinny jeans and big hoop earrings, and I let her start wearing makeup sooner than many of her friends' mothers. But sometimes, I draw the line at a certain item of clothing, or at a particular way of wearing something. What are the things that provoke my maternal veto? Well, I don't really have hard and fast rules about what those specific items and styles are, it's more of a "I know it when I see it" kind of standard. In parent-ese, that means the only reason I am able or willing to give her on these clothing disagreements is, "because I said so." And as years go by, I am completely comfortable with saying that.

This clothing issue isn't necessarily just a parenting-a-teenage-girl thing, either. I have already parented J's older brother, H through his high school years (he turns 18 next month) and I dealt with different clothing issues with him. And frankly, I now believe that I made some mistakes with how I allowed him to dress, and wear his hair. Poor H has, as most first children are, been a bit of a parenting guinea pig. So I've learned from trial and error in mothering him, and his three younger siblings are now the trickledown recipients of my enhanced, evidence-based maternal judgment. In short, I have always let H wear pretty much whatever he wanted, and in his case, by about age 14, that became the standard jam-band-following-Phish-loving-neo-hippie uniform, with the occasional thuggy item (I am speaking specifically of a brief flirtation with the sideways trucker hat) thrown in for good measure. He also, until recently, wore his hair very long and kept it mostly in his face. I realize now that I should have laid down the law on allowing H to dress like a cross between a homeless person and a deadhead when he started doing it, because this look did not serve him well in all kinds of ways. But even though my gut told me I needed to get more comfortable with pulling a Ward Cleaver and simply tell him to "get a haircut," I didn't do it, believing that his personal autonomy was more important than my personal opinion of his clothing and grooming choices. However, I was wrong. The way he dressed created a perception in others that was no good for him, and by dressing like that, he both attracted and was drawn to kids who were not a good influence. The "look" these kids all wore - including my son - was like a secret handshake, and it gave them an instant, visual organizational schema, just like gang colors do.

( H update: he is now in his senior year at boarding school, doing great, and he has his sights set on graduating early, this semester, and starting college in January. I am really proud of him. The campus we chose for him to finish high school does not allow students to wear any sort of identifiable "look," instead asking the kids to focus on who they really are, rather than what they are attempting to project through a certain fashion persona. Same reason so many schools - public and private - require uniforms.)

Teenagers are trying to find and express their identities through their clothing. I get that, and they need some freedom to do play around with who they are through their sartorial excesses. That shape-shifting through fashion experimentation can be an important part of the growing up process, and completely harmless. On the other hand, when the identity teenegers are expressing through what they are wearing is one that truly contradicts your values as a parent, or celebrates things that are dangerous or illegal, or that compromises their reputation among other kids and adults because it says something about them that people find negative, well, then, I think parental discretion and judgment trumps their need or right to have complete freedom of choice in what they wear. That's where I am with this these days, but that's been an evolution over time.

For some teenagers, dressing a certain way is nothing more than play acting, but for other kids, adopting, for example, a Goth fashion sensibility actually supports and encourages their descent into depression or drug use or other kinds of self-harm. Dressing like the guys in gangsta rap videos might be a big nothing for some kids, who just like to play around with costuming themselves, while for others, it's part of a very meaningful and dangerous interest in a criminal lifestyle. And even if the kids themselves aren't actually doing any of the things commonly associated with whatever specific clothing styles they are sporting, they can be creating an impression in their schools, neighborhoods and communities that is unhealthy and self-defeating. As parents, we have to protect our kids' from their own lack of experience and underdeveloped judgment unti l they "get" this stuff themselves.

When it comes to my 14 year old daughter, one of the things I want to protect her from is the increasing "pornification" of our youth culture. When Miley Cyrus is pole dancing on a TV awards show designed for a target audience of 13 year olds, and the wall-sized ads inside teen shopping haven, Abercrombie features groups of barely legal, barely dressed girls clearly engaged in sex acts with their stripped down, shaggy haired "boyfriends," it's no wonder girls feel pressure to start wearing thongs and push up bras in middle school. I honor and respect the fact that teenagers are indeed sexual beings, and I want my kids to feel positive and confident in themselves as they grow into the adolescent bodies that are biologically destined to be at least a few years ahead of their brains and judgment. I never want my daughter, or her little sister when the time comes, to feel that she needs to be ashamed of her body, or that she needs to "cover up" when choosing clothing. But I also know that there is a balance between parenting in a way that is sex-positive, while also protecting my daughter from the pressures that descend on her to "be sexy" before she's even done growing. I also want her to develop her OWN idea over time of what "being sexy" even means, rather than simply blindly accepting the current cultural zeitgeist that tells her that it necessarily involves dressing like Kim Kardashian and her sisters.

Maybe if all the teenage boys start wearing the male equivalent of the midriff-baring tank tops and short shorts that adolescent girls today seem to believe they are expected to wear (What would that even be? Speedo swimsuits? Assless pleather chaps?), I'll reconsider my position that the items I disallow my daughter from wearing in public are less about fashion than they are about sexist objectification of this generation of girls. But I just don't see that happening.

But beyond these high concept, feminist issues, I also say no to things like short shorts at school in order to teach my daughter that there are simply different dress codes for different times and places. I mean, I wouldn't wear the cleavage-baring, little black dress and heels I wore for New Year's Eve when I go to work the next day, and in the same way, teenagers need to learn about context when it comes to choosing their own clothing. I know my teenagers cuss when they are talking with their friends, but they understand context well enough to realize that those same words aren't appropriate or helpful for use when conversing with their teachers or grandparents. Along the same lines, I say wear shorts-like-a-bikini-bottom to play volleyball with friends at the beach, but don't wear them to stand in front of your high school civics class and talk about the lessons of Brown v. Board of Education.

So there you have it - my shortie shorts parenting manifesto, still a work in progress (talk to me when my two year old daughter starts ninth grade and see where I am with all of this then). Take what's useful and leave the rest. And also, be sure to leave a comment below, letting me know your own thoughts on all of this..

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Apparently, my college-age neighbor isn't interested in any maternal intervention from me

2009-08-23T12:10:00Z

Having grown up in a big, old house full of people and activity, I seem to have inherited the extreme party-throwing gene from my mother. My brother got it, too. My idea of a quiet evening at home optimally includes extra people eating, drinking or just hanging out with us. (Jon and I have that in common, thank goodness) I like to have folks just drop by, and have a glass of wine or a meal with us, and while I am not at all domestically inclined (terrible cook, not crafty, etc), I do take a lot of pleasure in composing a home that is the kind of place where people feel welcome and want to come hang out. All kinds of people. And I think my kids learn as much from lively debate from smart people around our dining room table or fireplace than they do just about anywhere else.

This summer, we've had a lovely run of impromptu house parties in the evenings. We turn on the twinkly lights strung up on our big front porch and VOILA! Instant party. Various neighbors and friends and family and extra children seem to appear, as if we had turned on a neon "OPEN" sign. It's been fantastic. Low fuss and planning, great fun. These events have lately included guitar or mandolin playing, political debate (health care reform in particular), bowls of fresh figs from our tree, and produce from other people's yards.

On Friday night, we had just such a spontaneous gathering, and a particularly entertaining one, with our neighbors K and E, A, Dr. Neighbor, T and J (and by the way, y'all need to go check out J's gorgeous, just-launched handbag collection, which is already getting great press and national showroom placements), and a few others I may be forgetting. Plus, all of the assorted, adorable offspring of visiting adults were also in attendance.. The evening finally ended at 3:30 am. (3:30 am!!!!) when Jon and I hit the sack after the last visitor left for the night (obviously C had gone to sleep many hours earlier, and the big kids are at their Dad's house this week. Some of our friends' children had gone to sleep much earlier on our living room couch while watching a movie, allowing their parents to continue socializing on our porch with the childless folks who could stay as long as they liked without worrying about anyone's bedtime.)

Along with the fantastic many-directional conversation taking place, and the adorable children running around, this particular edition of "Flash Porch Party at Casa HickJu" also included some oddball twists that made the evening perhaps the most memorable of this season. The first came sometime just after midnight. All children were either gone or asleep by this time, so it was just us grown-ups chatting on the veranda. I was trying to convince my next door neighbor that we should fence both our back yards into one single, large backyard, thus creating a mini-urban farm, where we would have chickens and maybe two miniature goats.

I was having absolutely no luck convincing her of the sheer genius of this plan when rather suddenly, two of our newer neighborhood residents - a guy and a girl - appeared at our front doorstep. These folks don't live on our actual street but nearby, and I'd stopped by their house earlier to welcome them to the neighborhood. I knew their house was a rental, but wasn't sure who had moved in. It turns out that they are several college/grad school students, and two of them had come to our house to say hello when they saw the people and activity on our porch. The two of them were very polite and friendly, and they and I chatted for a few minutes about what they were studying, and whether they liked their new house. I introduced them to some of their other neighbors and they were quite charming with everyone. After a brief conversation, however, it became clear to me that the girl was actually really drunk, something that hadn't been apparent at first. She had seemed coherent and just fine when she arrived, but over a very brief span of time, she began slurring her words. She asked to use our bathroom, so I took her inside, but then she didn't come out of the loo for a looooong time, during which period her housemate - who seemed completely sober - explained to me that he was really worried about her, and that she has a serious drinking problem. He told me that the problem is so bad that she has actually been taken to the ER two times in the past year by concerned friends.

This was Not Good.

My overdeveloped, nurturing mom antennae immediately went up when I heard about this sweet young girl's drinking "issues," and I asked her friend why her parents weren't involved in getting her some help. The housemate explained that the girl's parents pay absolutely no attention to her, and don't seem at all concerned or even interested in this issue, even though all of the girl's friends are terrified that she's going to die if she keeps drinking, and so they all take turns sort of "babysitting" her at times or events where they believe she might drink. Basically, he described a situation of "designated friends" trying their best to prevent their 22 year old housemate from pulling a Janis Joplin.

At this point, I was very worried that this poor, motherless, sick young woman had maybe passed out in our bathroom, so I just went in there without asking to check on her. She was sitting on the floor, weeping. I asked her when she had last eaten (she was very tiny) and she couldn't remember, so I fixed her a plate of cheese and crackers (protein!) and a glass of orange juice. She ate like she was really hungry, and then I took her arm and led her out to the porch where everyone else was (they all had no idea what had been going on with this inside, or even that this girl who had showed up less than an hour earlier was that inebriated.). I figured I would see what Jon thought we should do, and then proceed from there. But as soon as we got to the porch, she passed out cold. One minute she was sitting on the porch step, and the next, she was just...out - flat on her back and surrounded by concerned guests at my house.

At this point, I was very, very worried, and so I again asked her housemate about how I could contact her parents. He told me he had no idea. My friend K took her pulse and listened to her breathing and said she seemed fine, just asleep. We debated calling an ambulance, but decided that wasn't the right course of action. Finally, I announced that we needed to just take her upstairs to our guestbed, and tuck her in. I didn't want to send her back to her house in that condition, and besides, she couldn't walk. I didn't know how to contact her family, and I didn't want her to get arrested or something, plus I felt that she needed some mothering. My mothering instinct was in overdrive, and I wanted to try to take care of her, and maybe talk to her in the morning about getting some help. I also imagined how I would feel if - God forbid - my own college-age child ended up passed out on a stranger's porch; I would want a fellow mom to do what we mamas do and just take care of him or her in my absence. Maybe it was the wrong way to handle it, but at the moment it seemed like the best of bad options.(I welcome your thoughts on how you would have handled this one)

So I asked Jon and another male guest to carry her upstairs, which they did, trailed by me and her housemate. I got her all tucked in, and she didn't wake up. Her housemate seemed very relieved that he wasn't going to have to drag her back to his house in that condition, and he announced that he was now going to leave, but before he did, he wrote down his phone number for me, and gave me a piece of information to which I probably should have paid more attention, saying, "She never throws up when she gets like this. She just pees on herself." Then he left, and we all went back downstairs to rejoin the rest of the party. Every 30 minutes or so until I went to bed myself at 3:30 am, I went up to check on her, and she seemed to be comfortably sleeping. I figured I'd talk to her in the morning and see if I could interest her in getting some help.

Almost as soon as I was resettled on the front porch with Jon and our guests after getting inebreiated neighbor settled herself - at maybe about 1:30 am - a mle stranger appeared at our front gate. It wasn't anyone we recognized, and it was very late, so two of my male guests walked up to meet him there before he could come into our yard, to tell him that he needed to leave. We assumed he was a late night, transient panhandler, but he wasn't. It turned out he was a lovelorn, very cleancut, preppy fellow who was stranded on our street. He asked if any of us planned to drive to the suburbs, where he lives, but none of us did, so I offered to call him a cab, which I did. For the next 30 minutes, until his ride arrived, this guy, Jamie. sat with all of us on the porch, practically weeping into the drink we gave him, and telling us his tale of woe, which was equal parts hilarious, bizarre and really pathetic.

The reason he was stranded 20 miles from home in a strange neighborhood in the middle of the night was that he had decided to "surprise" a girl with whom he is madly in love - a law student who lives in a house one block away - by appearing at her doorstep uninvited with what he repeatedly described very specifically as, "a $429 Kate Spade bag!" He had bought her the bag on his trip to NYC, from which he had only returned that day. He called her repeatedly all afternoon and evening to ask if he could bring her this extravagant gift, but she never answered, so sometime after midnight, he got the bright idea to have a friend drive him and the bag to her house, and drop him off. He figured that without any means of transportation to get home, and bearing this wonderful Kate Spade bag, she would immediately declare her love for him and invite him to spend the night. It sounded like a sure bet.

Unfortunately, it didn't play out as he had hoped. When he arrived, he found the object of his affection flagrante delicto with another guy, a fellow law student. Horrified and stunned, he dropped the bag on her porch and took off down the street like a wounded puppy, unsure where exactly he was headed, or how he would get home. And then he saw us, sitting on the porch with the twinkly lights. We looked friendly, so he decided to stop and ask if maybe one of us might be headed in the direction of his apartment across town at some point.

As he told his story, the men all commiserated with his heartbreak, telling him that he could certainly do so much better, and that he should just write off this unappreciative law student and her obviously low morals as unworthy of his affection. But the female contingent - mostly me and my friend J the handbag designer - were more focused on the truly important things.

"Let us go back and get that $429 Kate Spade bag off her porch for you!"

He kept saying that he never wanted to see the bag again, that the very sight of it would cause him too much pain. J and I attempted to assure him that it would cause neither of us ANY pain to go get the abandoned Kate Spade bag, but he was too focused on his thwarted, borderline stalkerish plan ro hear us. And soon enough, his cab arrived, and off he went.

The next morning, I woke up to a text from Jamie, the Kate Spade bag guy, thanking me for our hospitality. This was gratifying, so I next headed upstairs to indulge my fantasy that anything I'd said the night before had had any impact whatsoever on the hispter neighbor girl asleep in our guest bed. I imagined I would awaken her, offer to take her out to IHOP and once there, over pancakes,we would connect in such a meaningful way that I could convince her to go to rehab that very day. I felt quite self satisfied as I walked up our stairs toward our guest bedroom, imagining how the neighbor girl would one day consider me her surrogate mom, perhaps naming her firstborn child after me.

Alas, she was gone. She had apparently made her Walk of Shame before sunrise.

But she didn't leave my guest bedroom before thoroughly and, ummm..... aromatically drenching all the bedding, including the pillows (still not clear how she pulled THAT off). Apparently,s she wasn't interested in having me as a surrogate mom, or in any pancakes or rehab I had to offer.. In fact, several days - and numerous launderings of blankets, sheets and pillows later - we haven't seen hide nor hair of her.

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Working Mother's Guilt: the Back-to-School Edition

2009-08-17T23:26:00Z

As I've mentioned in other blog posts, I grew up with a working mother. She was a journalist, with a very demanding series of progressively more responsible, high pressure jobs, and she also had a lengthy commute. Her mother was also a working journalist, so she knew the drill. While there were a lot more employed mothers when I was growing up than there were when my mother was growing up (when she was a kid, her mother was pretty much the only mom-with-a-job she knew), I was still unique among my friends in the demands of my mother's job. I know that there were lots of American moms in the 70s and 80s who were grappling with the mother-employee balance in the way my mother did, but none of them seemed to have children who attended my school, church or 4-H Club meetings.

In my juvenile milieu, my mother's work made her an anomaly. None of the kids I knew personally had mothers with the kind of high-octane, super competitive, no-summers-off, always-on-call career like my own mom's, where breaking news sometimes meant a 15 hour day, or where "election night" was actually "election week," and where we might not see her for 48 hours straight. If an interview she had been trying to land for months suddenly became available at 9pm on Sunday night, she went out to do the interview at 9pm on a Sunday night. (My father was also a working journalist, and between my 7th and 10th grade years of high school, he attended law school at night, after work, eventually graduating with honors. So both of my parents worked at a supercharged pace throughout much of my childhood.)

And as far as flexibility on the job for my mom, the working mother of three? Forget about it. In the 70s and 80s, there was no way a woman who wanted to keep her job in journalism, much less be taken seriously and move up the ranks could suggest to her male boss that she might, say, work from home two afternoons a week, or negotiate a special schedule in the summer months when her kids were out of school. If one of us became sick (something our family discouraged to a degree I never truly understood until I became a working mom, and experienced for myself the moment of panic that comes when you realize your 6 year old has a fever of 102 degrees at 7:30 am on a Tuesday morning, and that you have a cannot-be-missed meeting scheduled with a client at 9:00am), there was no way at that time that she could have asked to use her own sick leave to take one of us to the doctor. It simply Wasn't Done.

As a child and teenager, it wasn't hard for me to see that many of the other 4-H, Brownie, Little League, and PTA moms simply didn't grasp the concept of a mother with a job like the one my mother had. Some of these other moms worked, but they worked part time, or in jobs that allowed them to be free in the summer, and after their kids came home from school each afternoon. Their jobs were not highly competitive or male-dominated like my mom's was, and their husband's jobs were obviously primary in the family priority structure. While my mother never, ever judged these women for choosing (or being able to choose) a different path, I know she could see what I saw, which was that a lot of the other moms at my school and around town actually felt sorry for my siblings and me, what with our absentee, women's libber, "career woman" mother. While I might have been a-okay with the fact that my mom wasn't at school for the 4th grade Christmas presentation - which fell at 11 am on a weekday - I very clearly remember how other moms would pointedly ask me where she was, even though they knew perfectly well that she was at work. They wanted to make a point by asking, and then they would "tsk tsk" in a way that made their disapproval obvious to me. (For the record, they never asked why my father wasn't there.)

Basically, these women - who were nice folks in general (and also good mothers, just like my mom) - literally could not imagine the demands of a job like my mother's. A mother of young children with a job like that was as foreign to most of them as if she had an extra eyeball in the middle of her forehead. Because of this, I always got the sense that they believed she was either exaggerating the demands in an effort to avoid being named "first grade room mom," or that she was simply a failure at time management, money management, husband management (because they all had husbands whose jobs mostly paid the bills)...or all of the above. I could see how guilty this made her feel, even though her income was absolutely crucial to our family, and even though she was damn good at what she did, and loved it. And of course, the value to her children of seeing their muckraking mother bust a slumlord for ripping off poor families, or snag an interview with Ken Kesey, or be named bureau chief for a major wire service had a value just as meaningful and long-lasting as baking cookies for the school's Fall Festival. But if I sometimes felt the sting of other mothers judging her harshly because she never chaired the school fundraising committee or taught Sunday School, I know she must have suffered far more painfully from their disapproval.

I guess I figured that by the time I had kids of my own, things would be different. I was lucky enough to have a rather enviable work-at-home career for the first 7-8 years I was a parent, and it allowed me to have the best of both worlds. But the only reason this was do-able was because I was in a marriage at that time where my husband's "primary" job provided a dependable paycheck, health insurance and other benefits. We both worked, but my "job" was the one where no boss - because, as a freelance writer and editor, I was mostly my own boss - was going to raise a fuss if I needed to spend an entire week doing nothing but caring for three young children with the flu. My ability to do this also meant that their father didn't have to endanger his own job by missing work. It was an arrangement that worked well for all concerned.

But after my marriage ended, and necessity moved me into the full-time, "real world" workforce, I discovered something rather disappointing. While employers' understanding of working motherhood has improved tremendously since my own childhood - meaning that my bosses have been very understanding of my need to sometimes take my own sick days for sick children, or of my very occasional requests to work temporarily modified schedules - I still sense a certain kind of disapproval from an awful lot of other moms.

If the bane of a working mother's summertime existence is cobbling together childcare, the flip side of that guilt and stress coin comes when school starts back up in August, beginning with the very first day of classes, which are usually a half-day. I can't easily just take half the day off of work, so year after year, I've had to get someone else - like my sister or my paid babysitter - to pick the children up at 11:45 am on the first day of school. And what kind of rotten mother doesn't even have the time to pick her own kids up on the very first day of school? Well...me. I am that kind of rotten mother, because like my own mom, I also have a very demanding job. And 30 years after I remember being made to feel bad as a child because my rotten mother didn't show up for the elementary school cookie bake-off - because she was at work - I find that I am judged in much the same way as my own mother was by those moms who CAN do the 11:45 am, first-day-of-school minivan run.

One would think that by now, the idea of mothers with competitive, time-intensive careers would be old-hat. To watch TV, or movies, or read modern fiction, one would certainly come to the conclusion that even the most career-driven and ambitious mother is an everyday thing in our culture. But that's not been my personal experience. I find that a not insignificant percentage of the other moms I meet still don't seem to grasp the concept of one of their own having the kind of job that actually requires 40-plus, demanding hours a week. There seems to still be a widespread assumption that "mom jobs" are always kinda, sorta part-time - even if they are "full time" on paper - and that they are generally structured around school hours and calendars (Surely you can make the 10am weekday school fundraiser planning meeting! You're a mom!).

But that's not the way it is for a lot of us working mamas. Our jobs are not full-time in concept only; they really are full time, for real, just like men's jobs. Only we're moms! Just imagine!

No matter how accomodating and family-friendly my employer is (and she is), the fact remains that I work a lot of hours in an industry that simply isn't conducive to regularly popping out of the office for an extra few hours here and there to chaperone a school field trip, or to consistently make it to soccer practices that start at 3:45 pm on weekdays. I remarried a wonderful fella in 2006 (lucky me!), and for several good reasons - and by agreement - my job is actually the primary one in our family, rather than his. Additionally, I am working in an economy where jobs are hard to come by, and where all of us who are lucky enough to have them are hustling doubletime to develop new business.This is not a "part time, soccer mom" kind of economy for those of us who are our family's primary wage earners. I haven't always worked at this level of intensity, and I certainly won't always need to work at this level of intensity, but for now, I am at a place where I have to kick it up a notch. That's what I have to do, and frankly - when I'm not feeling guilty, or worried that a neverending meeting is making me late picking one of my kids up from a playdate - I am loving the challenges and pace of my work these days. But apparently, my situation rubs some other mothers the wrong way. What I see as a strong work ethic, and a desire to build a better, more secure and independent financial future for my family and myself, they see as selfishness and a yuppified form of child neglect.

Let me be clear that I am not suggesting that every mom I know or meet who works part time, or who doesn't work for pay cops a judgmental attitude about my status as an employed parent. I feel blessed to have many stay-at-home mom friends who are tremendously dear to me, and with whom I share the ability to connect as mothers beyond our different lifestyles. We support each other and laugh with each other and commiserate together over the hard parts of our lives, whether those are work or family-related. I am forever indebted to a few of my stay-at-home mother-friends (particularly my sister) who always have my back when I do need help with afterschool pick-up. They never judge, they just step in to help. And I love them for it, and know how lucky I am to have them in my life, and my kids' lives.

Additionally, I am sure that some of my perception of judgment stems entirely from my own internal guilt and conflict about whether I am failing my children, my husband, my employer or myself by attempting to do too much. And no one can make you feel guilty like you make yourself feel guilty, especially when honesty compels you to admit that there are certainly times when my kids really do wish I were more available for things like field trips and bake sales. I know they do, and thus arises my self-inflicted flagellation. But I am equally sure that a fair portion of my sense of being judged is indeed coming from the Good Moms, the ones who, unlike me, managed to marry (and stay married the first time!) to someone with a good-paying job, with health insurance, thus allowing these Good Moms to work part time, or not at all. These Good Moms manage to communicate their distaste for my situation with a certain look, a certain tone...and sometimes, by pointedly excluding me from the non-work-hours, mom-centric activities and social events that I likely COULD attend, if I were asked. And I know for a fact that a few of them sometimes ask my poor, neglected children why their mother is not in attendance at a particular event or activity, even though they know very well that I am at work.

Sometimes, when I get "that look" from another mother, after I've sheepishly explained why I can't come to the coaches' appreciation luncheon, much less help organize the flower arrangements, I want to blurt out an explanation of my financial reality to her. I want to tell her about how I got divorced when I was 34 years old, and then had to start all over, from scratch, just like a 21 year old college graduate at the very start of her career, except with shared custody of three kids, no savings, no health benefits, and with bills to pay. I want to tell her how intense the world of billable agency hours can be, and how competitive. I want to ask her if she ever lays in bed at night, silently going over her office to-do list for the next day, and hoping she can somehow get to work an hour early, just to get caught up. Sometimes, I feel like defiantly declaring that I actually LIKE my job, and that I am, by nature, a competitive person who is a better mother at home when I am challenged at work.

But I don't ever say anything. I just silently feel guilty, wondering whether she's so obviously disdainful of me because she feels like she's having to pull more than her fair share of the classroom cookie-baking weight for all of us slacker, non-cookie-baking, working moms, or because she truly believes I don't care enough about my own children to have made the "right" choices, like she did. Maybe it's some of both. But while I may not be sure exactly why she's judging me, I know that she is. Just like my own working mom was judged, 30 years ago.

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The hardest decision I've ever made as a parent, 14 years later

2009-08-15T21:56:00Z

Today is my daughter Jane's 14th birthday. She and I spent the day together, shopping, eating Krispy Kreme donuts and hitting the salon so she could have her nails done. We had a great time. On Monday, she starts high school, which for some reason feels like a much bigger milestone with her than it did with her older brother, who started high school three years ago. She's a lovely, confident, thoughtful, kind, funny, amazing girl, and I feel so privileged to have had the chance to mother her this far, and I can't wait toi see what the next 14 years bring.

Every year on Jane's birthday, I republish this essay, below, which I wrote when she was a toddler (and which was published in this anthology in 2007). Every year, when I read it again, I am reminded of what might have been, and of how much I struggled with my decision. I feel profoundly grateful that I made the choice I did, but also profoundly grateful that I am raising Jane, and now her baby sister, in a country where the choice was MINE to make.

I love you, Jane - Mama

THE DECISION

I began to suspect that something was very wrong the day I could no longer walk across the library at the law school where I was a first year student. Ten weeks pregnant, I had been fighting excessive fatigue, loss of appetite and night sweats for almost a month.

"Relax," my midwife told me. "You're just having a rough first trimester."

I was inclined to believe her. At age 27 and in perfect health, I had no reason to consider that anything more than extreme morning sickness was plaguing me, and that was no big deal. Heck, with my first pregnancy, three years previously, I had felt so good that I had even wished for a little first-trimester yukkiness so that I could feel "really pregnant."

Still, the nagging feeling that something other than just the pregnancy was going on grew stronger with each wretched day. The afternoon when I found myself collapsed in a chair in the law library brought the situation to a head. A classmate had to practically carry me to her car so that she could drive me home. There, she insisted on taking my temperature: 104'.

Within hours, I was admitted to the maternity floor at a local hospital, where I spent the next eight unhappy days. Each afternoon, just to make sure that all was well, the obstetrician would perform an ultrasound, showing us the tiny "beep, beep" of the fetal heart and the jerky movements of a glowing human jumping bean. We began calling the baby "Peanut." My doctor was puzzled as test after test failed to determine what the cause of my illness could be. He brought in an infectious disease specialist, who tested me for everything from HIV to Malaria.

On the sixth day of my confinement, as I was lying miserably in my hospitalbed, watching a rerun of the Andy Griffith show, both of my doctors suddenly entered my room, closed the door and turned off the TV without asking. Now I knew for certain that I had been right; something was terribly wrong.

They had come to inform me that I had an acute, primary cytomegolovirus infection, popularly known as CMV. The disease is not generally something to worry about....unless you are immunocompromised, which I wasn't....or pregnant, which I was. CMV, we were told by the obstetrician, is very dangerous to a fetus, particularly in the first trimester. It is a leading cause of congenital neurologic impairment, severe physical anomalies, devastating mental retardation and infant fatality. Really, we were told, we should consider our "options".

Suddenly, I, a person with all her grandparents still alive, a person who had never even been to a funeral, was faced with death. Not only was I faced with death in the abstract, I was faced with The Decision. In consultation with my with my sweet, 26 year old husband, a man similarly unschooled in the ways of mortality, I was charged with handing down a judgment as to whether Peanut would continue to leap and hop about in my womb and ultimately, be born alive. With a somber face, the doctor uttered the words that were to become so familiar to us over the next weeks, "Now, no one can make this decision for you. Only you can decide."

Only, I couldn't. Not without more information. And maybe not even then. We immediately became experts on CMV and its potential sequelae. I stayed up all night for days after the diagnosis, reading medical literature and searching the World Wide Web for answers. None was forthcoming. The best information available told us that if we carried the pregnancy to term, there was approximately a 1 in 4 chance that an infected baby would be affected by the CMV in some way. I was paralyzed with grief and indecision.

As an ostensibly pro-choice woman, I realized that I was not actually "pro"- anyone ever having to make a choice like this. Although no one wanted to offer an opinion as to what we should do, everyone had an angle. My doctor answered my questions honestly and told me that if his wife or daughter were faced with a CMV diagnosis in the first trimester, he would definitely encourage an abortion.

The minister whom a friend sent to see me was gentle and kind. Yet, she assumed that I was crying because I had already made the obvious decision to have an abortion and was grieving. She offered to set a time for a memorial service after the abortion to "celebrate and remember". She even showed me the feminist liturgy she had photocopied for just such an occasion. I found her point of view strangely repulsive and without intellectual honesty. If the life I would be taking was worthy of religious remembrance and ceremony, how was it possibly mine to take? There are no memorial services for appendectomies or squashed bugs. Only for people.

I was hesitant to share my dilemma with a certain close relative because I feared her unbending anti-abortion stance. Of course, she immediately realized the decision with which I was faced after someone told her of my diagnosis. She telephoned me to instruct me that, although abortion is wrong, sometimes God realizes that the time is not right for a particular soul to come into this world. Considering the circumstances, she opined, no one could blame me for whatever decision I felt was right. Her stunning hypocrisy angered me. Despite her stated views, she was conveniently able to allow for choice in this issue when the woman in question was someone she loved.

As days passed and I wrestled with my conscience, I realized that I was petrified of the physical procedure itself. My doctor assured me that he could perform the abortion at the hospital. I wouldn't have to go sit in a waiting room at a clinic. I told him that, although I realized that most first and early second trimester abortions are performed under local anesthesia, the only way I could face this would be knocked out cold. He agreed. I knew that I could be admitted to the hospital, drift gently off to sleep and wake up, relieved of this problem forever. I would never have to think about it again if I chose not to. Variously, this sounded tremendously appealing and completely horrifying.

When I envisioned the actual opening of my womb and suctioning of its contents, the same primal instinct kicked in that would allow me to single-handedly rip the lungs out of any man who laid a hand on my little boy. What kind of terrible mother would allow her defenseless offspring to be taken from the very bosom of maternal safety and warmth? I felt sick, and wept yet again.

My father tried to reason with me, pointing out the lifelong ramifications of my decision. He was terribly worried that I would be forever shackled to the responsibilities of caring for a severely ill or disabled child. He fretted that his big plans for his own child would be sucked away forever by a draining responsibility from which I could never escape. I too was seized with these fears. I secretly believed that I simply wasn't up to the task of mothering a child with serious health and developmental problems. What would that do to our other child, whom I already knew and loved? What would it do to my career goals? Our marriage? And what about the baby? The thought of seeing our tiny baby, suffering, perhaps hooked up to tubes and wires in a neonatal intensive care unit, caused me almost unbearable psychic pain. I imagined a future in which our mentally retarded and physically handicapped 13 year old child would endure the cruel taunts of other teenagers.

I began to wonder if I was being selfish in even considering giving birth to this baby. Would anyone choose for herself the life that this child might face? Were my own fears about a relatively minor surgery and future guilt good enough reasons to bring forth a human being who would have to live with the consequences of my own cowardice? I tentatively decided that motherhood is full of tough calls and hard decisions, both in the name of love and in a child's best interests. This must be one of them, I thought. I would do what was best for all concerned.

I telephoned the hospital, as instructed by my physician, and weakly scheduled the procedure for the next day. The admitting clerk who took the call easily misunderstood my vague instructions and thought that I was coming in for labor induction of a full-term, healthy pregnancy. "Congratulations," she said brightly. I corrected her mistake and her tone grew dark, almost menacing. She told me to meet my doctor at the labor and delivery wing at 6:30 a.m. sharp the following morning. She abruptly hung up.

There, I thought to myself. I have done the right thing. No turning back. I felt like someone had drained all the life from me. I sat in a darkened room for the next several hours, absently rubbing my still flat belly and murmuring maternal expressions of comfort to no one in particular. Later that evening, my husband and I discussed the choice that had been made. I attempted stoicism. He reminded me that we had a friend coming over to bring us supper, as many kind people had done throughout my illness and convalescence at home. I roused myself enough to get dressed and out of bed.

Our friend arrived and we all ate supper together. I told her of my decision and the reasons behind it. She listened quietly and then asked if she could tell us a little about her brother, who had died recently at the age of nine. She recounted a tale of extraordinary courage on the part of her parents, her sister, herself, and especially, on the part of a little boy with Down Syndrome named David. This child and this family had lived through all of the things I feared when I considered birthing my own baby, including David's eventual early death. Still, the joy and love of his brief existence canceled out all of the pain, fear and hurt. No one who knew David had any regrets. Our friend showed us his photograph: a beautiful and smiling tow-headed little boy, obviously mentally retarded.

Neither do I have any regrets about the decisions I made after that discussion. I never arrived at the hospital the next morning. I canceled the abortion and after a pregnancy alternating between exhilaration and despair, gave birth to my daughter, Elizabeth Jane Chevillard Granju on August 15th, 1995. She was born ten days early weighing 6 pounds and eleven ounces. She was born infected with congenital cytomegolovirus and had two seizure episodes in her first year. Since that time, however, she has been physically and developmentally normal in every way. She is also a strikingly beautiful child, with shiny dark hair, olive skin and a lithe, elfin figure.

Jane's epilepsy could conceivably worsen and she is at risk for other neurologic problems and progressive hearing loss until she leaves childhood behind. Still, she is remarkably healthy. Many people want to extract a moral from this story. Pro-life friends tell me that Jane is my gift from God for making the right choice. They want to hold my baby up as their own personal anti-abortion poster child.

Those who are pro-choice attempt to use the tale as a cautionary parable for why choice should be the focus of the debate, rather than abortion itself. After all, I was able to carefully consider each of my options and ultimately, have the final say. This wouldn't have been possible in another political context. My own views have become less reactionary and more cognizant of the complexity of the abortion issue. I continue to fear the slippery slope that we head down when we deny women the right to choose when and how we bear children. On the other hand, I no longer attempt to repudiate the fact that the graphic posters displayed by anti-abortion activists are real photographs of what really comes out of the uterus during an abortion. Many abortions do indeed "stop a beating heart," as the bumper sticker says.

However, I will not allow Jane to be used as a crucible for the views of any person or group. I know that I would love Jane just as much if she had been born severely disabled. I do not, however, deny the relief I feel that she is so radiantly well. I am deeply aware that I was graced with this experience, which has allowed me to see that the blessing is sometimes as much in the struggle, from which I have learned so much, as in the outcome.

------------------------------

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Video Blogging a Real Live Cute Attack

2009-08-08T03:38:00Z

I also shared this one on my personal blog, but I just had to post it here, too because it's just so damn adorable. It's a video of C, who turned 2 years old this week, singing her ABCs. The video clearly proves two things about my child:

Thing #1 – She is unlikely to ever win American Idol, or land a starring role in a Broadway musical.

Thing #2 – She’s a TOTAL GENIUS!

Confessions of a proud breastfeeding zealot

2009-08-05T13:36:00Z

Lately, I've noticed what can only be described as something of a "breastfeeding backlash" in the media, and among some mothers. The message of this backlash can best be summed up as something like this, "the health benefits of breastfeeding have been wildly exaggerated by a bunch of weird and nasty breastfeeding zealots who get their kicks from harassing bottle-feeding mothers in an attempt to make them feel guilty."

There are variations and nuances on this theme, depending on the medium and message-bearer, but that pretty much covers all the bases. The most prominent recent example of the breastfeeding backlash was Hanna Rosin's much-discussed piece in The Atlantic, provocatively titled, "The Case Against Breastfeeding." Jennifer Block already wrote a definitive and specific rebuttal to Rosin's piece, so that's not my intent with this particular blog post. Instead, I want to explore the current reaction to perceived breastfeeding "zealotry," and offer some context that I think might be helpful when considering how and why we are seeing this bubble of contrarian commentary at the moment.

The current breastfeeding backlash is a reaction to a certain intensity surrounding the issue of breastfeeding that did indeed gain currency over the past decade or so. But what today's mothers - the ones who are fueling the breastfeeding backlash with their criticisms and complaints - don't appreciate or maybe even realize is that the activism and advocacy they are slamming was actually an important, grassroots women's health movement that managed to fundamentally change the way our culture views and treats breastfeeding within only about ten years (!!!). And any time you have a movement that erupts out of a sense of frustration and oppression, and manages to turn that frustration into the kind of power it takes to create meaningful change on a big issue, that movement is going to have to be both pushy and loud.

The group of people on the leading edge of most social change movements are often later criticized as "too radical" by the very people benefiting every single day from that radicalism. Example: 20 and 30-something female executives who today speak with disdain about those "radical, bra-burning feminists," without appreciation for the fact that they are trashing the very women who effectively blasted open the doors of corporate America's steno pool so their daughters and granddaughters could instead take up residence in the c-suite. So if these younger women are defining "radical" as "assertive, unrelenting, outspoken, political and visionary," well then, yeah, I guess the objects of their criticism qualify for the label. But really, they should be thanking the feminists who preceded them into the workplace instead of criticizing them.

Sort of like those women who casually enjoy the obvious fruits of second wave feminists, even as they criticize them, I suspect that many (most?) of today's mothers of babies and young children are completely unaware of how different our cultural landscape is when it comes to breastfeeding than it was only a very brief time ago. They take it for granted that their hospital has a lactation consultant, and that their insurance company will help pay for the breastpump needed to express milk for their premature baby. They can't imagine a world where ALL breastfeeding mothers (and there weren't that many) excused themselves to a cloistered location every time the baby needed to eat, or where the idea of continuing to nurse into toddlerhood was seen as pathologically bizarre. New mothers today can't imagine these things because, before becoming pregnant or having a baby themselves, they never even thought about the topic of breastfeeding, so their only context is Right Now, Today. As a result, far too many women fail to appreciate the "zealotry" that gave birth to the readily accessible breastfeeding resources, support, protections, acceptance and information they now have available; they just don't get why anyone would feel the need to engage in activism or advocacy on a topic that seems so mainstream. I meet many current moms who have this opinion because I, too, am currently the mother of a toddler, just like them.

But I also happen to be the mother of an almost-18 year old, a 14 year old, and an 11 year old. So I remember what it was like when I gave birth to my first baby, in 1991. Things were very, very different even that recently for mothers in this country who wanted to breastfeed, which I did. But finding out HOW to nurse my baby wasn't so easy. Aside from local La Leche League meetings - which I only knew existed because I happened to see a flier on a grocery store bulletin board - along with a few boring, well-worn books that you could only find at the library - I wasn't able to find any good information about breastfeeding my baby in advance of his birth.

But I gave it a go anyway, struggling along on my own. Then, at my very first postpartum pediatric appointment, the baby doctor looked disgusted and horrified when he came into the exam room and found me nursing my newborn, and he quickly turned on his heel and walked out. His nurse then came in, and carefully explained to me (while averting her eyes) that the doctor would wait until I "finished doing that" before returning to speak to me or see the baby. When he did return, he firmly recommended supplemental bottles of formula to "help with his weight gain," and he told me that the information I'd read about how pacifiers could cause breastfeeding problems was "complete nonsense." I did as he instructed. He was the expert, after all.

When I developed a not-unexpected case of mastitis two weeks later - mostly because, at my pediatrician's recommendation, I wasn't nursing my now partially-bottlefed baby often enough - the doctor I then went to see (at the urging of my worried grandmother, who kept insisting I'd developed something she rather charmingly referred to as "childbed fever") immediately hospitalized me for three days for a course of IV antibiotics. The doctor told me that I needed to pump and dump my "infected breastmilk," and that my baby could not come to the hospital to see me.

Yes, this is a true story. I was hospitalized and separated from my newborn for several days because I had...MASTITIS. And this was in 1991, not 1951.

Fast forward to 2009. Today, American women have access to a huge volume of excellent and accurate information about the hows and whys of breastfeeding. State laws support the right to breastfeed in public, and businesses offer lactation rooms and support. Today's pediatricians are far better informed about how to help mothers successfully nurse their babies, and hospitals/medical organizations are beginning to take a hard look at the ethics of their relationships with infant formula manufacturers. We still have a long way to go in all of these areas, but the significant changes that have taken place just since I gave birth in 1991 are pretty remarkable.

As my personal story illustrates anecdotally, today's wealth of information and support for breastfeeding is actually still quite a new development, even though the seminal feminist health organization otherwise known as La Leche League had been conducting a tireless crusade to educate women and doctors since the 50s. LLL's work was groundbreaking, and its importance can't be overstated, but breastfeeding still really hadn't really "gone mainstream" when the 1990s dawned. Sure, many women at that time did nurse their babies for at least a short period, and certainly among some specific demographic groups, breastfeeding was more common. However, the situation for the majority of American women was one in which information was faulty or absent, and support was almost non-existent.

Enter the "zealots" who are now the subject of the breastfeeding backlash.

Beginning in the early-to-mid 90s, La Leche League finally got reinforcements for their tireless, yet always gentle and polite campaign. The help came in the form of large scale, cross-demographic, mother-powered organizing and information-sharing, made possible for the very first time by the advent of the Web. Suddenly, mothers could for the first time ever, quickly and easily ask OTHER MOTHERS about breastfeeding issues and concerns! And as mothers talked to each other online, and gained access to information we had never had access to before, we realized how much flat-out erroneous info was being propagated by the healthcare establishment at that time. We got a clearer picture of the longstanding advertising practices of the infant formula industry, and gained an understanding of the impact those practices had on women's infant feeding choices in our country, and all over the world. We were able to educate ourselves in a way our doctors could not or would not - using the medical libraries and peer-reviewed journals that we could now access online. We learned about the health risks for babies who are not breastfed, and the health benefits to women that come with nursing our children. Lactation consultants, often isolated as the only person doing their job in a particular community or hospital, could for the first time easily communicate with one another in a setting that allowed case sharing and professional development.

Wow! Talk about radicalizing!

There was certainly a period, during the second half of the 90s and the early part of this decade, when the discourse regarding breastfeeding was somewhat reactionary. What I mean is that after many decades of information suppression and misrepresentation, a lot of women were, well - for lack of a better way to put it - kind of pissed off when we realized that as a group, we'd been misinformed, manipulated, dismissed and even lied to regarding this important and meaningful element of infant-maternal health.

We were really irritated to find out that, despite what we, our mothers and grandmothers before us had been told by the "experts," we actually COULD breastfeed our babies successfully, and that we DID make "enough milk." We found out that infant formula ISN'T "just like" human milk, and that women all over the world DO nurse beyond infancy. (That was a real eye opener.) In short, we discovered that the medical profession we trusted, along with infant formula manufacturers and marketers, had sold us a bill of goods about something that really mattered to us, and to our children.

Our generational response to this discovery came in the form of an unprecedented tidal wave of new articles, books, websites, online communities, organizations, and academic/medical research on the topic of breastfeeding, all within a period of only one decade. Our frustration became consciousness raising, which became empowerment and productivity, and I think it's fair to say that those of us who were among that particular group of "lactivist" moms fundamentally and forever changed the dialogue on breastfeeding in America.

Some of us played a role as writers, while others of us were Web developers, doctors, nurses, academics, midwives, peer counselors, lactation consultants and activists. In the course of only about one decade, this group of women - early adopters and very effective users of what is now called social media - built on the pioneering work of La Leche League and others - and in doing so, we successfully reclaimed an important part of motherhood for ourselves, and for our daughters. We changed laws, we changed workplaces, and we sparked a process of significant and ongoing change in the way medical practitioners learn about breastfeeding. (Hells yeah, we did!)

It is this group of women, the ones who instigated such a powerful, fundamental and important change for the benefit of all American mothers, who are the "zealots" now being criticized.. And I can't deny that as we got our movement to create this big, messy social change underway, we might have sometimes come across as excessively outspoken or a wee bit hyperbolic. Let me be clear that I am absolutely, 100% opposed to anyone at any time being rude to, or questioning any individual mother about her individual feeding choices. To wit: it's not okay to offer one's unsolicited view directly to a bottle-feeding mother that she should have "tried harder" to breastfeed, and it's also not okay to tell a breastfeeding mom that she needs to leave a public place and find a more private one in order to feed her child.

Unfortunately, I am now unhappily aware that on occasion, in years past, my own outspoken activism on behalf of a public health topic about which I remain very passionate did sometimes, completely unintentionally come across as personally rude or intolerant to individual women. If, for example I responded to a new mother who mentioned to me in an offhand way that breastfeeding "has been really tough" with something like, "I'd be happy to hook you up with a local lactation consultant!" - without being ASKED to help that person find a lactation consultant - my intent might have been to be helpful, but I have come to realize that the recipient of this "helpful" suggestion probably heard it as intrusive, judgmental and rude. And when a discussion among neighbors about a magazine article I was writing on the ethics of the infant formula industry was held within earshot of a mother who was quietly bottle-feeding her 4 month old nearby, I wasn't sensitive enough to realize that the discussion I believed to be totally impersonal, and not in any way directed at her, could be perceived as unkind, thoughtless and hurtful. I have - over time, and after talking to many women who have shared their experiences with feeling judged and criticized for their decision (or need) to bottle-feed - come to appreciate the imperative to be EXTRA careful never to allow public health activism at the 30,000 foot level to create the perception in any individual woman that I am judging or second guessing HER, personally. But I know I screwed that up sometimes in the past, and for that, I want to offer a genuine and heartfelt mea culpa. I hope any woman whom I ever hurt in this way - no matter how unintentionally - can forgive me.

But if I did manage to step on some toes (again, I am truly sorry) via stridency on this issue, I also know - because I hear it from people all the time by email, through my blog and in person - that the book and the numerous articles I wrote about topics related to breastfeeding between about 1996 and 2002 helped a lot of women decide to breastfeed, and to keep breastfeeding. Knowing that I truly made a difference to more than a few women in this way is an accomplishment that means a lot to me. And I also feel proud when I hear from a medical student that he took something I had published on this topic to his obstetrics department head as "ammunition" to ask for more evidence-based teaching on human lactation. I feel like I made a difference when a state legislator tells me that something I wrote inspired her to introduce a bill to protect breastfeeding mothers from harassment or discrimination. And I feel honored to have been part of a grassroots, mother-led public health campaign that will mean healthier babies and women for the generations that follow.

Why am I so passionate about breastfeeding? Well, because despite some of the criticisms about "exaggerated health benefits" now being made as part of this whole breastfeeding backlash, the amount of well-accepted, peer-reviewed evidence that breastfeeding is one of the most important factors affecting infant mortality and morbidity continues to grow. It's also becoming clearer that breastfeeding provides some level of risk reduction (a level some researchers believe could turn out to be quite significant) against breast and ovarian cancer in mothers. And breastfeeding is emerging as an important environmental issue, as well. Last, I believe the tactics of the infant formula industry, and the way they have continued to influence the health care profession, the WIC program, and the entertainment industry on this issue, represent one of the most egregiously unethical situations in the history of American business. It's bad stuff, and is beyond worthy of assertive and outspoken activism.

Sure, there have been some faulty studies among the many hundreds that now exist on the topic. And yes, sometimes evidence has been twisted to exaggerate what some individual study actually says (I would argue that's mostly been done by the mainstream media, however, and not by the lactation science or breastfeeding advocacy community- you know, us "zealots.) Yes, some individual breastfed babies are sicker than some individual bottle-fed babies, and yes, I know that your mother bottle-fed you and you "turned out just fine." Breastfed babies can't jump higher or run faster, and no, your breastfed baby will not grow up to have x-ray vision or ESP. Finally, it is certainly true that the risks from not breastfeeding are far, far lower for a formula-fed baby living with his lawyer-parents in Brooklyn than they are for a formula-fed baby living with his low-income mother in inner city New Orleans, or in a refugee camp in the Middle East.

I freely concede all of these points, but I am frustrated when they are trotted out by the breastfeeding backlash brigade as meaningful evidence that in general, breastfeeding doesn't really matter that much to infant-maternal well-being. These individual points are being used as red herrings and distractions by the anti-breastfeeding campaign. And if you don't believe that such a campaign exists (and that many doctors and mothers unknowingly have their views and opinions and actions with regard to infant feeding choices manipulated by this campaign), you are dead wrong.

The appropriate way to consider whether breastfeeding matters as a public health and societal issue, and to understand why activism in support of breastfeeding matters, is to consider it from an epidemiological, population-wide perspective, not by looking at individual babies, or by picking out individual pieces of the whole picture. When you put on that wide angle lens, the view is both clear and dramatic. It also becomes clear why some "zealotry" was both necessary and acceptable from the women on the leading edge of an important movement.

So here's my proposal to the mainstream media, and to bloggers and writers and individual mothers who have fueled this little breastfeeding backlash we have going on at the moment. How about this week, maybe in honor of World Breastfeeding Month, you take a minute to look around, and survey the landscape, circa 2009. Look at that entire row of great books on breastfeeding that now sit on your favorite book store's shelf. Be grateful for the huge amount of informative and accurate information on breastfeeding that is now easily available to women online. Check out that mom happily breastfeeding her baby on the park bench without anyone batting an eye. Take a look at that lawyer striding down Wall Street carrying her breastpump in her briefcase. Consider making a donation to one of the new human milk banks that are saving premature American babies every single day. Or how about sending a little cash to UNICEF so they can counter the massive advertising by infant formula companies in the less-developed world, where whether or not a baby receives breastmilk literally means the difference between life and death on a daily basis.

Once you do those things, maybe you will be a little less likely to criticize, and a little more likely to praise the activists and advocates who got the issue of breastfeeding to where it is today in such a short period of time.

As for me, if you had tried to tell me back in 1991 that breastfeeding would be so mainstream by 2009 that it could possibly even generate its own "backlash," well, I wouldn't have believed you. It would be like if I tried to tell a new, first time mom today that within ten years, there would be a "backlash" against all the mainstream cultural pressure to do what's considered best, and have a homebirth. But the fact that 1991-me would be wrong in my prediction makes this breastfeeding zealot pretty happy.

La Leche League's great work of the past half-century can be viewed as "first wave" breastfeeding activism, while the second wave movement (those damn zealots!) - got us to where we are today. And now, I see this current cultural breastfeeding backlash as a sign that American women are at an important crossroads with this issue. We are experiencing a sort of group cognitive dissonance as we attempt to deal with being simultaneously shoved in the direction of breastfeeding our babies, while at the same time jerked back by miserably inadequate maternity leave, along with continued bombardment with the marketing of breastmilk substitutes. It isn't surprising that this schizophrenic, "damned if you do, damned if you don't" place in which we now find ourselves has spawned a desire to blame someone for the conflicts we mothers are feeling. Unfortunately, however, the blame is being directed at the activist women who have worked to support and inform breastfeeding mothers, instead of where it really belongs: in the direction of our business and political leaders, at big pharma, at some (not all) healthcare institutions and organizations, and at the relentless marketing campaigns that continue undermine breastfeeding success for so many of us. The current irritation, even anger directed at the breastfeeding advocates whose intentions are very honorable - even if they sometimes accidentally offend in their eagerness to help - is completely misplaced, and pointless to boot. When we spend our energy worrying about individual instances where someone said something rude to an individual bottle-feeding mother, it dilutes and diverts the community energy we should be directing at systemic and institutional problems.

So this is where we find ourselves in 2009. And now, the challenge for the third wave of breastfeeding advocacy is to find a way to continue to be clear, frank and unapologetic in the message that breastfeeding really does matter - and that the breastmilk vs.formula decision isn't simply a neutral lifestyle choice, akin to picking a nursery color - while accepting and respecting the choices that individual women make as right for them, and for their babies. To paraphrase this very smart blogger's take on this, we need to work together toward a breastfeeding culture, instead of worrying so much about how any single mother decides to feed her own baby. But while we must be sensitive, kind and respectful of individual choices, we can't let that sensitivity and common courtesy impede big-picture advocacy. It's a tricky balance, and one we have not yet achieved. But I am an optimist, and I think we can figure this out, together.

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Let me tell you about my c-section

2009-07-30T22:26:00Z

Two years ago tonight, I threw in the towel and prepared for a c-section.

After three full days and nights of active labor - some at home and some at the birth center and some in the hospital- I was exhausted and demoralized. Pregnant with my 4th baby, I'd begun having contractions while at work one afternoon. A coworker drove me to the freestanding birth center where I planned to have the baby. When I arrived, the midwife hooked me up to the machine that confirmed to her what I already knew, that I really WAS having contractions, despite being only 36 weeks and 4 days pregnant. My husband arrived. I fretted. The midwife examined my cervix,and told me it was closed up, tight as a drum. By this time I was having to breathe through the contractions and rock back and forth to deal with them.

The midwife administered a shot of brethine, and then another, sure that the drug would stop the contractions. It didn't. I was then given an IV of fluids to see whether dehydration was the culprit. By now I was hurting, for real. The midwife assured me that even though she saw no actual progress from the contractions, I would likely be "having a baby later that night." But since I wasn't yet at the magic 37 week mark, she would have to send me over to the hospital, where she would meet me later. That was because the birth center isn't allowed to deliver babies earlier than 37 weeks. Honestly, I didn't really care that much, as I'd given birth twice at that hospital previously, and had been with my sister as she gave birth there twice (both without drugs, and once in a birthing tub which she brought in herself), and I liked everyone there and pretty much everything about it very well. The main reason I was attempting to give birth at the freestanding birth center was to try to avoid an epidural (more on that in a minute).As long as I didn't have an epidural, the rest was sort of gravy, as far as I was concerned.

So off Jon and I went to the hospital, which was less than five miles away. On the way there, the contractions slowed, but we did hit a big bump that jostled me really hard. I felt a bizarre and huge FLIP in my belly, like my innards were being turned inside out. I thought nothing of it, assuming it was just a weird contraction. When we got to the hospital, they were expecting us, and the maternity floor triage nurse immediately suggested a quick ultrasound, to see how things were looking in there. That was fine with me, so she began running the ultrasound wand over my belly.

"They didn't tell me that your baby was breech," she said matter of factly.

Jon and I both looked at each other. The baby had NOT been breech 30 minutes previously, when the midwife clearly felt her little noggin, positioned where it was supposed to be, below my belly button, ready for what we hoped would be a speedy and low-pain exit. I immediately realized that the freaky, flippy feeling I'd felt on the way over must have been the baby reversing herself into a head-up position. I couldn't believe it. Neither could the nurse, who told me she believed the midwife had been wrong, and that the baby hadn't been head down at all. Whatever the case, however, she was no longer head down, and my contractions had picked back up again according to the monitoring belt positioned around my giant belly. Of course, I could have told them the contractions were starting back up, even without the aid of the machine, but independent confirmation appeared to be the order of the day, both here and back at the birth center.

The nurse told me that if I wanted to avoid a c-section - which I did (don't they involve someone inserting a needle into your back?) - I would need to have an immediate "version," where the doctor presses on your pregnant tummy from the outside to try to flip the baby back around. Not too many doctors have the mad skillz to do this little trick any more, but as it happens, my very favorite OB - the one who had delivered two of my previous three children - DOES still do manual versions. So he was called to the scene, and he explained to me that I would need to have an epidural in order to give his work the best shot at succeeding. The epidural would apparently relax my uterus, slow the contractions temporarily, and allow him to work his obstetrical magic. Once the baby was head down, labor could progress at the same rate as the contractions.

This news - that I would have to get an epidural - was the worst I possibly could have gotten. I was TERRIFIED of having an epidural. Ten years previously, when I'd had my last baby in this same hospital, I had been administered an epidural-gone-wrong that left me with horrible, debilitating back pain for almost the next three years. I knew the back pain had been caused by the epidural; for at least a year after getting it, I could even feel a painful lump on my back where the needle had been inserted. But I could never get any of the back-doctors or neurologists I saw in hopes of fixing my injured back admit that it MIGHT have been the epidural during childbirth that did the damage. Eventually, the pain went away after I bought a TENS machine to use at home. The relief was like a miracle after the several years of post-birth back agony. But I was terrified at the idea of ever again having a needle inserted into my back. And yet, here I was, a decade later, being told by a doctor I trusted that I would need the epidural in order to attempt to avoid major surgery.

I weepily agreed, and I got the epidural. Maybe it was my fear, but the feeling of having that needle and tube threaded into my back made me absolutely ill. Still, it seemed to do the trick. The contractions stopped temporarily, and my doctor was able to flip the baby back head down. They turned the epidural off, I was sent to a room, and we waited for the contractions, which slowly picked back up, to begin to do their work of actually dilating my cervix and moving the baby along toward daylight. Everyone assumed, given the fact that I was clearly in active labor, that we would see some progress soon, no matter how minimal.

By the next morning, the midwife and nurses seemed totally irritated with me - or at least that's how it felt to me in my exhausted, revved up, sore, and hormonal state. Despite the constrant contractions, coming every 2-8 minutes, my cervix was like that of a woman who wasn't even pregnant. There was NO sign of anything happening. So they sent me home with some pregnancy-safe tranquilizers, and told me to try to sleep, and to return when I felt like "something was happening." This felt so dismissive to me, as I knew my body was working just as hard as someone who was actually seeing some labor progress. These were real contractions and they really hurt. They were not pre-labor, and I was not some inexperienced drama queen. This was my fourth baby. I knew what real labor feels like, and I knew this was it.

But we went home, where I tried to rest. And we returned to the birth center several times over the next several days, only to be sent back home after it was determined that my cervix was still beyond unready to do its appointed job. I tried walking, warm baths, squatting, a birth ball, herbs...you name it and we tried it in hopes of my next "progress check" showing some sign that I was actually getting somewhere. And throughout all of it, I kept contracting, steadily and with gusto. It was like my uterus was completely disconnected from my cervix - like they weren't even located in the same body. The constant, pointless and increasingly unbearable contractions felt a bit like my belly had been possessed by some crazy demonic force that only wanted to cause me pain without purpose. By the third afternoon, I was back in the hospital, alternately weeping and stoic, and tired in a way I can't even quite describe. I felt beat up and beaten down, and my wonderful, amazing husband was also trying to hold it together. He was completely worn out with stress, sleep deprivation and dealing with a wife who had been in what appeared to be absurdly useless agony for the past severakl days. We tried a pitocin drip to no avail. My cervix remained stubbornly uncooperative. Apparently, I was by now, something of a medical anomaly, as nurses would wander in and out, chatting about "three days of labor, pitocin, and she's still completely closed up."

Sigh.

In case you've ever wondered, this is what three days of completely unproductive labor looks like: Not Pretty.

I knew I was headed for a c-section at this point, and honestly, I no longer cared. I didn't want another epidural, to be sure, but as far as the surgery went, I just no longer cared. As we waited for the doctor to come in to tell us what we knew he was going to tell us, Jon asked the attending nurse whether most women in a situation like this would end up with a c-section.

"Honey," she said. "I can't compare this to other women because NOBODY does this for this long without something happening."

Sigh again.

They gave me something for pain in my IV, so I could rest some before the surgery the next morning. The relief was amazing. At that moment in time, I loved intravenous narcotics more than close friends and family members. My sister, a professional childbirth educator, assured me that I shouldn't feel guilty for feeling like I actually wanted the-c-section at this point. My oldest friend, an obstetrical nursing professor at a major university, told me the same thing. Still, I felt this odd mixture of relief that it would all soon be over, gratitude for the wonderful and complete pain relief I was now getting, and guilt-embarrassment that I had started out hoping for a waterbirth and was ending up like this. How was it that so many friends could get this whole natural birth thing right, and I never seemed to be able to?

They checked my progress one last time before the surgery, early the next morning, and no one was really surprised to learn that nothing had changed. So they wheeled me in to the operating room.

This is what relief looks like. After three days of labor, several IVs, two epidurals (the second one was inserted just before the c-section) and multiple, painful checks of my cervix, I was being taken in to surgery, where my suffering would finally end, and I'd get to meet my baby.

Although I was relieved, I was also a little scared as they took me in, I have to admit. I felt breathless and detached from my body. I remember almost nothing about the surgery because I was so sleep deprived that I could barely recall my own name by that point. I don't remember seeing C for the first time after they took her from my body, but I do remember Jon looking stunned and very freaked out as they carried her over to the examining table. Everything was very quiet, and for a brief moment, I thought something was wrong. But it wasn't. She was tiny, but healthy and perfect. And PRAISE GOD ALMIGHTY, it was over!

The big payoff finally arrives.

Clearly, newborn C was also exhausted by the whole ordeal.

I've had four very different birth experiences. None have turned out quite like I imagined, and I've yet to have that blissful, drug-free, earthy crunchy, bragworthy birth that my sister and so many friends have had. But I really, truly never expected to end up with a c-section. Each time, I've started my pregnancies with the goal of midwife-assisted birth - maybe even a homebirth - but now, I've sort of decided it just wasn't meant to be for me. I am effectively crying uncle on the whole natural birth thing. Despite my stated intentions, I realize now that I don't think I ever really had the dedication that it takes. My heart just wasn't ever really in it, even if my head was, and then this happened.

If we are able to have another baby - unlikely, but still not 100% out of the question - I think that I'd just let go of any expectations that I would have anything other than a repeat c-section. I know I could probably convince my OB to let me try for a VBAC, but I think that my last birth experience, two years ago this week, took all the "fight" out of me. I don't really want to "try for" anything. Seriously, I feel exhausted just writing about my labor and birth experience with C.

I never again want to hear the words "no progress" from a disappointed-looking nurse or midwife. I never again want to stay up all night in my bath tub, weeping in pain and frustration as wave after wave of pain ripples through my midsection, even as I know in my gut that nothing's actually being accomplished. I never again want to have TWO epidurals in the space of three days, as I did with C's birth. If we do it again, I just want to get it over with. The birth "experience" is no longer that important to me. That may be wrong on a number of levels, but it's the truth.

Please don't misunderstand, I have always been and will always be a staunch and vocal proponent of birth options for women. I support complete parity for midwifery care when it comes to insurance payment, and I believe that many women are pushed into surgical birth, which absolutely carries certain risks not present in natural birth. I am privileged to be friends with dozens of women who have loved giving birth at home and in birth centers, and the experience of being with my sister for her unmedicated water birth remains a highlight of my entire life.

But as for me, personally - I've got to be honest here - I just don't think I have it in me to work that hard to have a baby ever again. I feel some guilt at this admission, because I am sure there are many women who could have powered on longer, and maybe ended up avoiding the surgery. But the c-section was truly a blessed relief for me when it finally came, and I have to say that my recovery wasn't any harder or easier in any significant way than my three previous non-surgical, generally uncomplicated births. And on the bright side, they do load you up with some extremely helpful percocet after a c-section. That's a plus!

Really - and I know this makes me sound tremendously shallow - the very worst part of the c-section has been what it did to my belly. Before the surgery, my weight could go up or down, but my belly was firm, intact. Now, it's different. There's a mushy little continental shelf of sorts, and it juts out before dropping precipitously over my scar. This c-section belly bothers me a lot, although I continue to try to make peace with it by telling myself it's a well-earned badge of honor. These pep talks mostly don't work though. I secretly dream of a tummy tuck.

So that's my c-section story. And tomorrow morning, when C wakes up, my precious, surgically extracted girl will be two years old. I can't believe it.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, SWEET MISS CHARLOTTE!

So as is my habit, now I am interested in hearing from y'all about your c-section experiences. Did you know you would have the surgery in advance or was it an unexpected finale to a surprising labor like mine? Have any of you chosen an elective c-section? How was your c-section recovery?

And I just gotta know whether any of you have any tips for getting rid of that horrible c-section belly flap that you're left with after the surgery.

Tell me about your own c-section in the comments below.

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My struggle to find the elusive work-life balance

2009-07-27T11:27:00Z

I've been giving a lot of thought in the past week or so about how to do a better job balancing my family life with my job, because lately, I haven't felt like I've been getting the balance quite right. In fact, I feel like my family has kind of been getting the short end of the stick, and I haven't had any time to see many of my friends for months, which is no good. So I am actively considering strategies and solutions to help me get this figured out.

With my still relatively new job - where I've been now since April - my time and attention are consumed to a degree I've never before experienced as a working mother. Essentially, I am responsible for growing a rapidly developing area of business for our company, which is both incredibly exhilarating and fun, but also a tremendous amount of work and responsibility. Because I take this responsibility so seriously, and because I am so energized by the challenge, I find that I am always, always thinking about my work, including in the middle of the night, when I have been known to suddenly hop out of bed and go find my laptop to jot down some ideas that inexplicably popped into my head mid-snooze. And much of the networking and relationship-building aspect of business development that I do - both online and off - necessarily takes place outside of "regular" work hours, so there's that.

The fact that I can be connected to my work 24/7 via Blackberry and laptop - no matter where I am or what I am doing - makes my job easier to do in a lot of ways, but it also means that I can never really turn it completely off. I know this is true for most of the working mothers I know, but some of them just seem to do a better job managing that urge to let 24-7 access to work turn into 24-7 work than I seem to be doing. My brother told me recently when we were visiting his family for the weekend that I have become downright rude of late with regard to continually checking the Blackberry when I'm supposed to be relaxing with the family, and I told him that I couldn't really disagree. I know I need to find a way to sometimes step away from my omnipresent handheld gadget, but whenever I try to do it, I feel rather anxious that I am missing some important email or text that requires a speedy response. And actually, a few times, I actually have failed to respond to something that needed my quick attention when I left the Blackberry behind for a few hours. So that reinforces my Crackberry addiction.

This is also the first job I've ever had where I am working entirely within a billable hours framework, which is standard in the world of PR firms. I know that those of you who are lawyers, accountants or consultants know all about this already, but it's new to me. It's important that I never waste even 15 minutes of my clients' time, as they are being billed for it, and it's also important that I take good care of our company's bottom line by meeting my goals for billing. So while I like to think that I have been a productive and hard working employee in my previous positions with other employers, I now feel a specific and rather urgent accountability to be UBERproductive. This, too, drives my inability to turn my work brain off when I need to. It's really too bad I can't bill for the overnight hours that I end up dreaming about working, because if I could, I'd be a billing machine.

I've always done, and continue to do freelance writing (you are reading some right now) in addition to my "real" work, and some might suggest that I should just cut that "extra" out of my life as unnecessary. However, even though I love my day job, I am, at heart, a writer. Blogging and writing essays and articles not only helps pay for Christmas and orthodontia, it also keeps the creative, writerly part of my psyche happy. I honestly don't think I could quit writing if I tried, and I know many other people who feel that way about the painting or jewelry-making or knitting they do in addition to their jobs. It's just part of how I function. With the freelance writing at home, as well as the job-related work I do outside of my office, my children are very accustomed to seeing Mom pounding away on the laptop at odd times and in odd places. In fact, E spent a good part of his first year hanging out in a sling on my chest or in a bouncy seat at my feet as a wrote my book. I definitely think it's good for my kids to see that I am a wage earner, and that I am eager to do a good job at work that I really enjoy. So I don't think my work should ever be completely segregated from my family life (I know some children who don't seem to even know what their parents do at their jobs when they leave for that 8 hours each day). On the other hand, there has to be some sense that family time is family time, and that my work doesn't end up being an unwelcome guest in our home who interrupts at meals, overstays her visit and won't leave when asked.

My husband is an incredibly patient person, and he's proud of everything I do, but I know I've been leaning on him too heavily lately to pick up the slack at home so I can send "just one more email" on the weekends or after dinner. Because my older children alternate weeks between their father's house and mine, I feel a special need to be even more focused on them on our weeks together. I miss them so much when they are away that I have what I can only describe as a physical longing for them, and I can't get enough of them on our weeks together. I find myself trying to innoculate them with an extra dose of my mothering when I have the chance, to carry them through the next week when they are away from their mama. I know many parents who share custody with an ex-spouse who say they have totally adjusted to this part of their lives, and that it feels completely natural. This isn't the case for me. Even seven or eight years into it now, it continues to feel totally unnatural and bizarre to be separated from my children half the time. This is the case even though I completely accept that it's the best option in order for them to have the most time with both parents, which they need and deserve. But for me, as their mother, it's kind of like going through life with a missing limb. And because I do want to spend as much time as possible with the big kids on their weeks with me, I find myself trying to cram all my extra work into the alternate weeks, when they are at their Dad's. Of course, this isn't really fair to Jon or to C, who live with me all the time. This is the sort of very specific and slightly weird dilemma that I face as a working mother with four children, three of whom have another home in addition to the one they share with me, their stepfather and their toddler sister. Not only is this a challenge to get figured out so that everyone gets their needs met, and I get my work accomplished, I can also tell you it isn't a problem I ever could have imagined dealing with when I held my eldest child in my arms as a baby, and looked ahead into the future, imagining how I would parent him and any siblings he might eventually have. It's a tough one.

So I've decided to make a concerted effort to figure this out in a way that works for everybody. The new strategy I plan to try is one I've had to develop over time when I am actually at work, since my natural tendencies, without consciously applied discipline on my part, can lead to hyperfocus or disorganization, as well as poor time management (I truly am a classic adult ADHD person. I'm textbook.). At work, I set a timer when I start a task so that I do not allow myself to become hyperfocused on one task to the exclusion of other things. If I allot 30 minutes to working on a proposal, I set the timer for 30 minutes, and when it goes off, I force myself to move on to task #2 on my list, even if I am deeply engrossed in the proposal and wish I could keep at it for the next six hours straight until I completely finished every detail. I think I am going to allow myself windows of specifically designated work time while at home, and then force myself to confine ALL work-related activity - including thinking about it or talking about it - to those blocks of time. But when the timer goes off, I will make myself turn the mental channel, as it were, and give my full attention to reading a book or folding laundry with the children. Or even to paying focused attention to my sweet husband, whose very patience with my workaholism too often leads me to assume I can catch up with him later, after kid needs and work needs are met.

So that's my new work-life balance resolution: I will actually schedule some work time at home, knowing that I am going to do it anyway, instead of having it continually intrude into family time in a scattered and unpredictable way. We'll see how it goes. And since I know myself pretty well, I may have to include as part of the plan that I literally turn the Crackberry over to Jon during the times when I am not supposed to be working. He can then hide it somewhere, locked up, until the timer says I can have it back for an hour or two.

I'd love to hear from those of you who are also working parents with really demanding or all-consuming work lives what strategies you use to make sure your work doesn't intrude to an unhealthy degree into your family life. Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Save the babies, not the crib-snatching dogs

2009-07-24T02:36:00Z

Since so many people are going to disagree with the opinions I am about to express, let me preface my remarks by offering up my official dog-lover credentials. You see, I am a huge fan of dogs. Adore them. For several years I did a lot of dog rescue, and we often had 4 dogs at a time staying with us, as I attempted to teach them manners and help the rescue groups place them in good homes. I have a soft spot for all stray dogs. and I love watching the Westminster Dog Show on TV. I've even been known to watch multiple episodes of "Breed All About It," back to back, as one of my own three beloved canine family members is nestled at my feet. In fact, I am such a bonafide dog geek that I have even attended weekend dog obedience competitions, just for the fun of watching the action. And to top it off, just last week I was invited to an actual pug wedding! Would someone who doesn't love dogs ever get invited to a pug wedding? I think not. So you see, I very clearly love dogs. I really do.

No, really.

But you know what? As much as I love dogs, I love baby humans a lot more, which is why I am utterly astounded that anyone believes that the family pet who this week snatched a Kentucky newborn from his crib, dragged him out of the house and into the woods, and fractured the baby's tiny skull as he literally gnawed on his head, should be allowed to live. If you haven't seen or read anything about this case, it's just as horrifying as the facts I've laid out above. There are no meaningful mitigating circumstances, really, although the dog was apparently part wolf, which makes him not exactly a dog, but not exactly a wild animal either. Quite a few people argue that this part-wolf angle should offer absolution for the dog's actions, instead of just a possible explanation. But I don't. The bottom line for me is that the animal, whatever his specific DNA profile, was a canine pet in a human household.

(The good news is that this very young baby - his parents had only brought him home from the hospital on the very day of the dog attack - may actually survive, which is downright miraculous. I will continue to pray for his complete recovery.)

I basically have a "one strike" rule when it comes to dogs and young humans. If any canine pet bites a child in a purposeful way, much less drags a baby out of his crib (!!) and into the woods like some horrible, unsanitized version of a Grimm Brothers' fairytale, that animal just bought himself a starring role in All Dogs Go to Heaven #32, as far as I am concerned.

Obviously, there are all kinds of reasons dogs bite, and there are all kinds of levels of bite seriousness, but I prefer not to split hairs when discussing this issue because, c'mon now, we all know a real dog bite or attack when we see one, the kind where the animal's obvious intent was to injure, kill, or in this case, possibly even eat a child (shudder). But the reasons why a dog bites a child are meaningless to me after the fact. Maybe the dog was scared. Maybe he was hungry. Maybe he had been abused. Maybe the child was pulling his tail. Maybe his adult owners had stupidly and cruelly bred and trained him to be aggressive. These factors may be interesting as we discuss the story, or helpful in offering veterinarians, dog behaviorists, public health officials and animal trainers new insight into how to prevent future dog bites and attacks, but I don't accept them as a mitigating factor when it comes to whether the specific biting dog in question needs to be put to sleep. And I am not just saying this, either, I've actually had a biting dog put down before, something that I am sure will make many canine activists even unhappier with me.

About 10 years ago, I adopted an elderly German Shepherd after her owner could no longer afford to keep her. Since we had small children in the house, we did a carefully observed trial run to see how she would do with kids. She seemed just fine, beyond fine. She was a total sweetie with lovely manners. All of my kids have been taught to treat dogs with respect and observe certain safety rules around dogs, but several months after the dog came to live with us, my toddler niece was visiting, and she innocently stuck her hand in the water bowl while the dog was having a drink, and before I could prevent it. What happened next came so fast that I didn't have time to do anything but watch in slowmo horror; in the blink of an eye, this previously gentle dog snarled at the baby and viciously snapped at her face just as my niece recoiled in fear. It was a miracle that the dog's teeth did not connect with my niece's cheek, where the dog went in for the bite, because if she had succeeded, my niece would have been seriously disfigured, possibly blinded or worse.

The next morning, I stood by the table at the vet's office, petting the dog and weeping as she gently drifted off to sleep for the last time. While I was genuinely torn up about having to do this - it still makes me very sad - I have no regrets, and I have never second guessed myself.

Once I knew it was possible under certain circumstances (and maybe others I wouldn't even have been aware of until something terrible happened) for the dog to purposely bite a child in a way clearly meant to inflict harm, I couldn't keep her in our home, and I could not in good conscience risk it happening again to some other child down the road. No matter how carefully I might have chosen a child-free home with experienced large dog owners in which to place her (as if such a thing is that easy to find for a 10 year old German Shepherd), I simply couldn't be sure that some child visiting the new owners, or accidentally straying into their yard to retrieve a ball or something, wouldn't be attacked.

Perhaps, you say, I was able to bring myself to do this only because I really hadn't known this dog more than a short time; I wasn't bonded with her in the way I am with one of the dogs who have shared my life for many years. While it's true that she wasn't a longtime member of our family, I know that I would make the same decision even if I'd raised the dog in question from puppyhood, and developed a deep attachment. It might be more painful for me to have a beloved dog euthanized, but I know I would still do what I consider to be the right thing.

Of course, responsible dog ownership means assuming to some degree that ANY dog is capable of biting, so it's important to keep an eye on all dog-young kid interactions. I get that. But again, in my way of thinking, if the worst happens, and a dog does hurt a child, human safety trumps dog's right to life. Always. However, a lot of people clearly feel otherwise, including all those who have now signed this petition trying to prevent the crib-snatching dog from being put to sleep. Astonishingly, the father of the injured baby tells the media he hopes the dog who nearly killed his newborn can be adopted out to a dog-savvy, childless owner, instead of euthanized. This is just hard for me to fathom. Could this father really live with himself if something like this happened to some other man's beloved child? Maybe the risk would be very low if the dog actually were living with a responsible owner with no children in the household, but could this father really feel secure that there was NO chance the dog wouldn't come into contact with a small child ever again? I don't think so.

The idea that it's ethical or safe to simply pass a dog who has shown himself to be capable of biting a child off to an owner who has no children himself strikes me as being similar to feeling okay about selling a car with unpredictable, intermittently faulty brakes to someone who claims to be a "really great driver," and who promises to avoid all steep hills as long as he owns the vehicle. Or like selling a gun that occasionally fires itself at random moments to a new owner who "really knows guns," and who offers assurances that he will never actually point the gun at anyone.

I also find it odd that many of the Americans who would argue passionately that humane euthanization of a single biting dog is cruel are the same people who routinely eat meat and wear leather. Because I'm pretty sure that the cow who gave up the Big Macs that many of those petition-signers had for lunch today never hurt a fly, and I know for a fact that Bossy the cow didn't meet her end by going gently into that good night while resting comfortably on a kind vet's examining table, with another compassionate human being patting her head. That's just not how they do it down on the factory farm these days.Objecting to the occasional euthanization of one animal when one routinely supports the wholesale salughter of other kinds of animals seems mixed up to me. (Yes, I eat meat and wear leather.)

So there you have it. I have laid out my zero tolerance policy when it comes to dogs biting children. Now I will steel myself for the inevitable onslaught of disagreement, as well as accusations that I don't understand dogs, or that I hate them altogether.

So let's get this party started. Oh, and has anyone called PETA yet to tell them of my heresy? If you do, please also let them know that I still refer to fish as" fish," rather than as "sea kittens,"

plus, I secretly believe that the whole PETA schtick is actually a long-running, brilliantly played piece of performance art...

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Our experiment in gender-neutral parenting

2009-07-19T02:21:00Z

For a variety of reasons, my three older children (now ages 17, 13 and 11) spent their early years in a household with a fairly traditional gender division of parenting labor. I was a work-at-home mom during most of those years, meaning I spent most of my time with the kids, day and night. I rarely left them for more than short periods until they went to school, and they liked it that way. I was the primary parent. As a result, if a very young H, J or E were sleepy or tired or sick or had a scraped knee, they wanted Mama first and foremost. Now, of course, they are just as close to their Dad as to me, but when they were little, they were - as we call it in my family - pretty "mamafied."

Although I had grown up with a very hands-on Dad myself, I still assumed, based on my experience with my older children, that there was something almost magical about the mother-child bond in those first few years that was somehow rooted in gender. My observations had been that babies and young children generally always prefer mothers to others, even when fathers were actively fathering. Was this sexist of me? Perhaps. On the other hand, my anecdotal survey of the parenting landscape leads me to believe that fathers-as-primary-parents during the early years are still a pretty rare breed, despite the fact that they are certainly far more involved with their young children than they were even a generation ago. But is it all window dressing? Are moms still doing most of the heavy lifting when it comes to parenting babies/toddlers/preschoolers, while Dads get pats on the back for donning a Baby Bjorn and attending the occasional Mommy and Me class?

Fathers who actually "mother" their little kids may be rare, but I happen to live with one,

C, last week, hanging out with her Daddy at his office.

With C, who will be two years old this month, Jon and I have taken a fairly UNtraditional approach to gender roles in our parenting. This was partly due to necessity, since I returned to full-time, very demanding, outside-the-home work when she was only eight weeks old, and it's partly because Jon has been determined from day one to be just as involved with his daughter in every single way as I am. Aside from the fact that I breastfed C for the first 13 months (but even then, he gave her bottles for 8-10 hours each day they were together), he has done absolutely everything I have done with her on a day to day basis ...and then some. He never has to be asked or encouraged to pitch in; he just does it. This is in contrast to most fathers of babies and young children whom I observe, who - despite their obvious adoration for their young'uns - just don't seem to notice on their own when a diaper needs changing.

To be honest, my husband does more than I do when it comes to parenting C; Jon is that rare father of a young child who actually the "primary parent". In fact, if we were to divorce, he could honestly lay claim that title in court. He changes C, feeds her, bathes her, gets her to sleep for her naps, reads to her, dresses her, washes and dries a load or two of cloth diapers each day, prepares bottles and washes rubber nipples...you name it. All without any prompting from anyone.

And this is in addition to the fact that she accompanies him to work most days, where she hangs out in the offices of Jon's family's small accounting firm, being cared for by Jon's mother, and by Jon -- all day, every day. So when I get home from work at 6pm, Jon and C have already spent the entire day together, both at home and at Jon's office. But even in the three hours or so left before she goes to sleep for the night, he continues to do at least 50% of her care, while I get supper ready and help the older kids with homework, etc. The only thing that I do with C that is mine alone is get her down to sleep at night, with a story and a snuggle. I lay (lie?) down with her until she's out (she sleeps with Jon and me, in our bed). Often, one of her older siblings "helps" by joining us in the bed until C falls asleep. As a working mom, I treasure this quiet, one on one time each evening with the kids, and I think Jon treasures the scant 30 minutes each day of childless freedom that it gives him.

Because Jon is so hands-on with C, she is not "mamafied" at all. When she gets clingy, she is equally happy with me or with her Daddy, and often she prefers Daddy. He can soothe her just as well or better than I can. And while I know many amazing, wonderful, very involved and loving fathers, they all mostly fall within the continuum of traditional gender parenting roles. Jon is my first experience observing first-hand a father who truly "mothers" his baby in that organically attuned, completely proactive, attached way for which moms are better known. I had heard of fathers like this - it's not that I didn't believe they existed - but I'd just never actually seen one in action. (Addendum: I have known one other mothering father; my friend Steve K is that kind of father with his adorable son, even as his wife, who works full time, is an awesome, hands-on mama as well.)

So for those of you moms in hetero relationships who have babies and toddlers, how does the division of parenting labor in your house break down? Has it worked out like you thought it would? Do you feel like your partner pulls his weight without being asked? Would you feel uncomfortable ceding some of your mothering to your child's father? (I did at first) Have you tried to get your partner to do more? Discuss.

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Guns, sons & the good old days of parenting

2009-07-17T14:07:00Z

I've always found it sort of annoying how adults generally seem to believe that the childhoods they enjoyed were safer, cleaner, and more wholesome than the ones their kids are having. But there are some very specific elements of childhood from even 25 years ago that have changed a great deal.

This is the photo I ran across in an old photo album that got me thinking about this stuff this week.

This is a photo of my little brother, Robert, when he was about 15, so that would have made it 1987 or so. The photo was taken in his bedroom, in our house. In the photo, you see the usual (and still pretty much standard) accoutrements of a teenage boy's bedroom: books, globe, band posters, electronics (I'm digging the funky little black and white TV on the bookcase)...and guns.

Yes, there on the wall behind him, you see - GASP, THE HORROR! - two guns hanging on his wall. I think one was a rifle and one was a shotgun. Hanging below them is an antique powderhorn that he'd inherited from some familial male predecessor. But the guns were not antiques. They were not just for show. They were real guns, that really worked. They were my father's guns, although he rarely used them. And they hung unlocked in our house through my entire childhood. Occasionally my father would take one down to shoot at rabbits that got into our garden, and once we're pretty sure he took out an obnoxious colony of feral cats that had taken up residence in our barn, and had begun pouncing on us kids when we would try to eat our peanut butter sandwiches out in the yard (My father never did own up to shooting those cats. He took that secret to the grave.)

So the guns were just there. All the time. It was no big deal. They hung up high, much too high for us to reach them or touch them as young children. But after we hit middle school, they were just above a 12 year old's eye level. Within easy reach. And at some point in his teenagehood, Robert apparently asked if the family guns could be relocated to his bedroom, and my parents agreed. I do think that Robert took and passed a Hunter Safety course at some point during high school, because he thought about trying some hunting with friends. Even though the interest in hunting passed, the guns remained on his wall.

We kids never got the guns down just to mess with them, but no one would have freaked out if one of us had touched them as teenagers. Once, though, when I was in high school, I did get my brother to come out to the barn with one of the guns and shoot a snake sleeping in my horse's stall. Why we thought that SHOOTING the snake was the way to handle this dilemma is beyond me. But we did. And we told our parents about it when they got home from work that day. If memory serves, they just reminded us to always be careful if we ever used a gun. And then, back to household business-as-usual.

Yes, we did grow up on a farm for much of our youth. But as I recall, that really wasn't the determining factor in the likelihood of whether or not we would have had a gun in the house. While it's true that all of our rural neighbors with kids did have guns at home, I'd have to say that a fair number of my friends' parents who lived in nearby towns, cities and suburbs also had gun racks somewhere on the walls within their homes. And actually, the photo above, the one with the teenage boy in his bedroom with guns on the wall was taken after we moved away from the farm, and were living in a small, prep school village.

Yet...yet...despite the easy access to guns in our homes,none of us were shooting each other - accidentally or otherwise (obviously that statement is hyperbolic in nature, because there have always been and will always be tragic accidental shootings, as well as gun violence in homes. I'm just saying it wasn't a widespread, endemic community problem, certainly not relative to all the guns to which we teens had access.). And none of the parents I knew cared one whit whether the households of friends their kids visited had "guns in the home." It just wasn't something on the list of parental worries at that time. And remember, this was only 25 years ago. Not that long ago.

Nowadays, however, most parents - including me - would be incredibly freaked out if one of their child's friends had unlocked guns in the home, not to mention hanging on the wall of a child's bedroom (!!!). But why? I struggle with this question. On the one hand, I do believe adolescent males are biologically inclined toward impulsivity and unfocused aggression (I once wrote a blog post about this, following a local school shooting, about why teen boys and free access to guns are a bad mix. I titled the post - for dramatic effect - "Teenage Boys Are Stupid," and I was immediately besieged by hundreds and hundreds of commenters accusing me of hating all boys, and especially my own sons.) But on the other hand, teenage boys have lived for many generations in homes full of unlocked weapons, but we didn't assume that teens' developmental and age-related impulsive tendencies would necessarily lead todanger and tragedy.

So here is the question: what is different between my childhood, only 25 years ago, and the ones my kids have today that makes us so much more afraid of guns in particular? I don't know the answer to this question, but something HAS changed. Many more kids commit suicide today, often with guns. School shootings are real (and there are many near misses that don't make the news - where a student gets a gun into the school but then doesn't pull the shooting off for one reason or another.) And I am going to tell you right now that while I have allowed my sons to have some highly supervised exposure to real guns (and H has completed a Hunter Safety course, just because he was interested), I would never, ever have unlocked guns in my house, nor would I be comfortable with my child hanging out in the bedroom of a teenage friend with guns hanging on the wall.

I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on this one.

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Are sponsored reviews and endorsements on mommyblogs getting out of hand?

2009-07-15T16:03:00Z

Apparently one momblogger aggregation site is challenging the rest of us to a "PR Blackout Week."

From August 10-16, the PR Blackout campaign will encourage mom bloggers to go back to basics.

"We want to see your blog naked, raw," wrote MomDot. "Talk about your kids, your marriage, your college, your hopes, your dreams, your house and whatever you can come up with for one week."

No mention of PR or products will be permitted during the blackout. The rationale for this stance was described thus:

With the allure of giveaways, reviews, and blog trips, Mom Bloggers have turned from what they love the most, their family, into working directly as public relations for their captive audience. It boils down to knowing your worth and then standing up for it.

The movement comes amidst growing concerns that prominent bloggers in general have become vessels for advertisers eager to appear on their sites — sending them free products, gifts, coupons or financial compensation in tacit expectation of a write-up.

My position on this issue is mixed, and I come at it as both an old-school blogger (I've been doing the personal mommyblog thing since 2002), as well as a working mother. On the one hand, I do think that a lot of momblogs have become nothing more than an exploding collection of sponsored product reviews, making the blogs dull and less-than-credible. This has nothing to do with the whole FTC-disclosure thing. Even if a blogger clearly discloses her sponsorships, if she's overloaded with content about products for which she's receiving compensation (almost always meaning that 98% of what she says about the products is positive), the whole power-of-word-of-mouth factor goes out the window for me as a mother and a consumer. I don't end up putting much stock in anything she says.

Me, blogging from Bonnaroo. My favorite, paid blogging gig, evah.

What's odd to me is that marketers don't seem to recognize this credibility gap in deciding who qualifies as a true influencer among the mombloggers. Obviously, pageviews and audience engagement (number of comments on the blog, etc), as well as the blogger's effective cross promotion across other social networking sites help to determine whether a momblogger is a "social media influencer." But there's a less tangible credibility factor that should be pulled into the formula as well. It's my belief that bloggers who do an excessive number of product reviews and endorsements likely don't wield the same kind of meaningful influence with their audience as the ones who do very few or more judiciously chosen paid reviews and endorsements. And some mombloggers may have a smaller audience, but within that audience, they have more credibility, meaning that their reviews are theoretically more valuable to sponsors. That's why, in my job as a social media strategist with a PR firm, I don't automatically go for the "big" blogs with lots of flashy reviews and endorsement deals when I'm putting together a list of mommyblogs for one of my corporate clients to approach.

Having said that, however, I absolutely DO think it's great to see so many women building their own businesses via blogging. More independent, home-based, mom-run businesses is a good thing for women, children and society in general. And as a writer, I say more power to any woman who isn't afraid to demand actual compensation for her creative work. And make no mistake about it, blogging, as well as actually building an audience for a blog IS work. (Which is why there are ads running on my personal blog. Mama's gotta pay the bills, you know?)

What's your opinion of the growing number of endorsements and product reviews running on parenting blogs? Do they annoy you? Do you love them? Do you rely on reviews from mombloggers in making your own buying decisions? Are you less likely to trust the opinion of a momblogger who clearly accepts lots of swag for review as opposed to someone who only does it occasionally?? Do you see ads on blogs as more or less acceptable than sponsored reviews? Have you stopped reading any blogs because you feel the number of reviews and endorsements has gotten out of hand?

Lots of questions. I'd love to hear your answers.

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Stepmoms: Avoid "Gisele Bundchen Syndrome," and other advice from moi

2009-07-13T13:04:00Z

I've deleted this post after comments became highly (and inappropriately) personal in nature. My children read what I write, as well as the comments.

I look forward to the day when I can openly and safely write about this important and sensitive issue in the same way I have always written about other parenting and family life topics. It's clear that that day is not here yet.