So, this party that I’m going to have. It’s coming together.

But it hasn’t been easy. You can’t just get materials for a Kittens, Firemen & Tequila Party at your local party supply store, because they tend to not keep kittens and firemen in stock. So as I’ve already made clear, the fireman is going to have to have a virtual presence. Which is fine, I think. He’s not nearly as important as the kittens.

The kittens, however. I have to admit that I may have difficulty acquiring the kittens. Live kittens just aren’t practical, you know? And kitten plushies just aren’t as compelling as real kittens. So I may just put cunning little French berets on my two aged Siamese and try to pass them off as kitten-ish.

The tequila, though? That’s the easiest part. I even have a Very Special Tequila Drink that I will be serving, and I usually don’t do Very Special Drinks. I’m usually an on-the-rocks kind of girl – yes, even with tequila – or a margarita on the rocks with salt. But this drink? The one that I’m going to share with you now, so that you can practice making it and drinking in advance of The Kittenish Cats, Virtual Fireman & Tequila party? It is AWESOME.

So, behold:

Catherine’s Very Special Super Awesome Tequila Drink That Will Totally Make You Think That An Aging Siamese Is Actually A Himalayan Kitten (aka Cucumber Lime Martini,  Reverse-Engineered From One That I Once Had In Austin, Texas.) (You can totally drink this on Cinco de Mayo, by the way. In fact, I encourage it.)

Ingredients:

Sauza Tequila (duh)

2 cucumbers, peeled and sliced as thin as you can get them (see-through thin, not cucumber sandwich thin)

4 cups water

Quarter cup of sugar

Tablespoon or two of lime (with some lime left over to squirt)

Chili-lime powder (or cayenne)

What to do:

In small saucepan, bring the water and the sugar to a boil over medium heat. Simmer the mixture until the sugar has dissolved into a sugary liquid. Set it aside to cool for a minute. Resist doing tequila shots. Or don’t.

In a blender, combine the syrup (melty sugar water mixture), cucumber, water, and lime juice until smooth. Strain the mixture into a pitcher. Add a quarter cup of tequila and mix well. Fill a martini shaker with ice and add about 1 cup of the mixture, which you shall heretofore regard as the nectar of the gods. If you like a little spicy garnish, rim your martini glass in chile-lime, or cayenne (I like cayenne.)

Shake well and serve. And enjoy. And it you’re inclined to share your favorite drink recipe, I would not be averse to that.

(This post is sponsored by Sauza. As I said last time, I was invited to visit the set of this video – with this lovely lady – which invitation I did of course take advantage of, and so got to meet the fireman and the kitten and it was really pretty awesome. And caused me to think that I should have a Fireman & Kitten & Tequila party. As one does.)

Here is something that you may not know about me, unless you’ve met me in person, in which case it is very possibly the first think that you think of when you see me: I have a shoe obsession. A serious one. The kind that involves many, many shoeboxes. So many, that I still have some in storage in Canada. That’s right: I have so many shoes that they cannot be contained in one country.

I’m not going to deconstruct my love of shoes here – there’s a whole semiotics of shoes that I could, and someday probably will, explore – mostly because such deconstruction is secondary to more important questions. I could tell you why I love my shoes, but isn’t better that I tell you where I get my shoes?

That’s what I thought. So, herewith, my philosophy of shoe acquisition:

Care ye not whence thy shoes came. Be ye catholic in thy tastes. Fuss not o’er labels or designer names. Embrace ye the vintage shoe, the Topshop shoe, the Barney’s Warehouse sale shoe, and the shoe that the Internet doth proffer.

Being indiscriminate in sourcing shoes is really the only way to amass a awesome, conversation-starting collection, unless you have a gajillion dollars and a warehouse-sized shoe closet, which I – and probably you – do not. You do not need – nor, I would argue, do you want – a collection that is entirely comprised of super-expensive, high-maintenance shoes that you will rarely wear because you are worried that you will get a scratch on the heel. I mean, do acquire those shoes if you want (I have some such shoes myself, just because), but also acquire the kinds of low-maintenance, got-it-on-sale-so-whatever shoes that you can wear on the subway, kick off in the sand, and leave in a jumble on your closet floor.

Also, order them from the Internet. The Internet has AWESOME shoes, and it totally wants you to have them.

This was a revelation to me. I knew about ordering shoes online, but it had never occurred to me to try it myself, mostly because I just couldn’t wrap my head around picking the right shoe just from picture. Shoes are three-dimensional, and require three-dimensional analysis. You need to see what they look like on your feet, in movement. That’s why they have those crazy tilted foot mirrors in shoe stores. So you can see what shoes look like ON FEET.

But if you go to a site like ShoeMint (an online membership-based shoe subscription service, and – disclosure! – sponsor of this post), there is video! Of shoes! On feet, being worn in a variety of ways, so that you can visualize what your feet would actually look like in said shoes, and also how you would wear them! Which goes a long, long way toward helping you figure out whether the shoe in question is the shoe for you. (And way more efficient, I might add, than doing that thing where you try on heels in a shoe store and pull your jeans up to your knees and squint at your lower legs in a desperate effort to visualize what those heels might look like with a dress.) And the shoe selection is curated for you based on a style questionnaire that you fill out, which is a fun exercise in itself (I am WAY more Kate Bosworth in my tastes than I am Olsen twins, if you must know.) And then you get shoes delivered TO YOUR DOOR, which, if you ask me, is just a bonus, because, packages! Of shoes! In the mail!

I ordered these:

 
…. and I did so almost entirely on the power of the video, which made them look so fun and tall. (I will totally skip through SoHo weraing these, and I will totally fall on my face, but I will, for one shining moment, believe that I am just like that girl in the video, and it will be AWESOME.)

ANYWAY. A Shoe-A-Month program may prove to be my undoing. Or it may take my shoe collecting to ever-greater heights of awesome. STAY TUNED.

Posted by Jason.

Here it is. The one thing that will make your next portrait, landscape or holiday snapshot a whole lot better.

Get closer.

Closer.

Zoom in. Walk up. Scootch nearer. Whatever it takes, fill that frame with your subject. Too many picture takers stay too far away whatever they’re shooting. That distracts from the image. Your eye doesn’t know whether to look at the cute face your son is making or the miles of extra headroom around him. Getting close allows you to focus on the emotion and on the moment. There are technical reasons for this we’ll talk about in future blog posts, but for now do everything you can to get nice and tight on your subject.

A couple of pointers to help out…

Get even closer:

Think you’re close enough? Take one more medium step closer if you can (just watch out for that cliiiiiiiiiiiifffff). That extra push is often all you need to turn a good looking pic into a great looking one.

Cut off faces and places:

Don’t be afraid to crop out part of the face of a building to get the shot. Getting pieces of the image can often make what you’re zooming in on more powerful and interesting to look at. I got in nice and close on my daughter is the shot up above.

Turn off the digital zoom:

Your camera promised you 24x zooming capability. That’s a bit of a marketing whitewash. Most of that zoom is often something called “digital zoom.” That’s when your camera uses software to zoom in on your image instead of relying on the lens to do that. You’ll often get fuzzy, blurry shots when you zoom in all the way here. Turn this “feature” off for better pictures. And hey, if you decide you need the feature, know that you can accomplish the exact same thing in just about any digital editing program.

There will be a lot of times where wider is better, but for now get ready for the close up – you’ll gets instant oohs and ahhs.

Oh, hey! FRAME ONE IS GIVING AWAY A SHINY, SHINY NEW CAMERA. “Like” Frame One on Facebook and you’re entered into the draw for a Canon S95 camera.

You know how every year, thousands of North American bloggers – mostly the female ones, but also some of the not-female ones, and also some babies – converge upon a city to talk about social media and blogging and stuff? That’s happening this week. I’m already hoarding Xanax.

Because, seriously:

BlogHer is like Comic-Con, except with more women and babies and fewer Trekkies. It vibrates at about the same geek frequency, though, which is something that too many people forget, I think. It’s a conference for women who write and socialize and make their livings on the Internet, which is to say that it is the very definition of geek. But for many people, it’s an event that triggers severe social anxiety and bad flashbacks to high school. Which is surprising, for what is, as I’ve said, a gathering of geeks, which is to say, a gathering of people who are disproportionately more likely than other members of society to have limited social skills and so who should not be even remotely socially threatening.

Babies are also not supposed to be socially threatening, but they totally are.

That said, I find BlogHer scary, too. I’ve gone every year since 2006, and the scary doesn’t go away. It’s big and it’s loud and it’s unrelentingly social. It can feel like high school, if you went to a high school with thousands of networked peers armed with smartphones and Twitter feeds. They might be geeks, but they’re a lot of geeks.

You can read more about my hand-wringing over at MomCrunch. I do a lot of hand-wringing. BlogHer makes me hand-wringy. In a good way, but still. If you see me there, know that my hands will be chafed, you know, from all the wringing.

I love this guy. More than I could ever put into words. And it’s his birthday, which means that I really should try to put it into words, but then again, how many words do you need to say I love you? Just those three, really. Just those three.

Happy birthday, guy. I love you.

Sometimes, you’re just hanging out at a luau, trying to get your toddler to eat some pineapple, when all of a sudden some man in a loincloth grabs you by the arm and throws a lei around your neck and pulls you up onto a stage where a lady in a coconut bra wraps a sarong around your waist and says to you, now, you will hula.

And so you hula. And it is awesome, and not as embarrassing as you might expect — that is, until the man in the loincloth comes back and thrusts his hips at you – on stage! in front of everybody! and also the Internet! – and you think, oh god, are my children watching? and you blush, hard.

But it’s still pretty great, because you get to cross one more thing off your life list, and, also, you get to keep the sarong. Sarongs are awesome.

Many, many thanks to Loews Hotels, for arranging for the surprise hula lesson (and for reading my life list and spotting item #17 in the first place) and to Universal Orlando Resort, for bringing us to Orlando so that I could learn to hula and also drink Butterbeer and stuff. Have I said? SO AWESOME.

(Disclosure! This content series and the giveaway below is brought to you by Old Navy. Check out the Kids & Baby Sale in store with great deals starting at $5. And maybe take the opportunity to apply Emilia’s Ten Rules Of Fashion, outlined below.)

Last week, I let Emilia be my stylist. It worked out well, all things considered.

But even though I threw myself wholeheartedly into this little experiment – I wore socks with heels, for pity’s sake – I didn’t end up wearing one of her fully-conceived outfits into public. I thought about it – I thought about it hard – but I came to the conclusion that a) I could better pay respect to her sartorial vision by adapting that vision appropriately to my needs than I could by making public appearances in a bedazzled pink cowboy hat, and b) I really didn’t want to make a public appearance in a bedazzled pink cowboy hat. So I took bits and pieces of her style advice – some skull socks and black patent heels here, a Hello Kitty sweater there – and incorporated them into my day-to-day look. And I think that I’m going to continue doing this – asking her for style advice and using it with my own grown-up tweaks and amendments – because, seriously: it’s fun and it’s awesome and I’m actually learning from her.

I’ve learned ten things, actually. Emilia calls them ‘Emilia’s Ten Sweet Rules About Fashion’, although she insists that they’re “not actually rules, Mommy, because you can break them and not get into trouble. They’re just really good suggestions.” NOTED.

1.) Wear it if it feels good. Is it soft? Would you sleep in it? Have all irritating tags and extraneous ribbons and clips and such been removed? Can you take scissors to it and have it be more comfortable? (All scissor use in this household is supervised, by the way. Okay, most scissor use.) Is it pajamas? Who ever said that pajamas couldn’t be worn in the daytime? If it feels good, it is worth wearing.

2.) Unless it’s so awesome that it doesn’t matter if it feels good. No armhole is too small, no pant too short if said shirt or pant is much-beloved and/or looks fabulous. Sizing is only a suggestion, and it’s up to you to decide whether those suggestions apply to you.

3.) Wear it if it makes you happy. Sometimes, you just love something so much that you have to wear it, even if it doesn’t fit/doesn’t match your pants/you wore it to bed last night. Love conquers all fashion rules.

4.) Wear it whenever you want. You’ll notice that ‘pajamas’ have come up more than once already on this list. That’s because pajamas are awesome. Pajamas are soft. Pajamas are comfortable. Pajamas usually have fabulous prints and designs that you don’t find on so-called ‘daytime’ clothes, presumably because pajama designers assume that pajamas will only be worn at nighttime, when it’s dark and no-one will be able to see their crazy cherries-and-rainbows print. But who says pajamas are only for nighttime? Why NOT wear them out of the house? And, for the matter, who says that costumes are only for costume parties and Halloween? Or that evening wear is just for formal events? THINK OUTSIDE THE CLOCK, PEOPLE. Emilia does.

5.) Wear it with whatever you want. Who ever said that dresses don’t go over pants, or that shorts don’t go over over tights, or that shorty wetsuits don’t go over pajamas (they maybe shouldn’t, but that’s beside the point), or that Snow White costumes don’t go over skateboard gear, or that tutus are only supposed to be worn with tights and leotards and ballet shoes? How can you know if any of these combinations don’t work if you don’t try them?

6.) So, yeah. EXPERIMENT. Try any combination of clothing that you want. And throw some non-clothing in there from time to time, too, just to keep things interesting. After all, that wrapping paper is so pretty, and just think of what you could do with some cardboard, a head lamp, some leaves and discarded doll parts?

You could do awesome, that’s what you could do.

7.) Accessorize like it’s the end of the world and you’ll never accessorize again. Accessories are your opportunity to really have fun with an outfit. Go crazy! Think outside the closet! Discarded doll parts make good epaulets. And bedazzled cowboy hats go with everything.

8.) And then accessorize some more. That old rule that after you’ve put an outfit together, you should look in the mirror and assess and then remove one accessory? Nonsense. There is nothing in this world that isn’t made better by more shiny things.

9.) Wear it if you like the color. Not, if the color looks good on you or if the color matches your pants, just if you like it. Because, as Emilia likes to say, “colors are pretty; that’s why there are rainbows.” And have you ever seen a small child dress themselves entirely in black?

10.) Nudity is a perfectly appropriate style choice under certain specific circumstances, and also, is awesome. This is not to say that you should embrace naturalism and go about your daily errands without pants. It is to say that there is something awesome about being so comfortable with your naked self that you would be quite happy to abandon your clothing whenever an appropriate opportunity presents itself. For Emilia, clothes serve a number of different purposes, none of which include covering up her body just for the sake of covering it up. Clothes are for decorating one’s self and for enjoying the feel of soft fabrics and for surrounding one’s self with color and sparkle and for indulging the imagination and for protecting one’s self against the elements (this last one is often only admitted grudgingly. Rain boots only get between bare feet and puddles, and can’t you make better snowmen with bare hands, and ‘I like the wind on my bum, Mommy!’) Clothes are not for concealing parts of ourselves that we don’t like, they’re for celebrating everything about ourselves – and everything else, including unicorn stickers – that we do like.

And that, I think, is the most important lesson for me. When I look in the mirror, I want to not see my perceived flaws and think about how I am going to overcome those flaws with cotton and Spandex; instead, I want to look at myself and go, oh, hello, you! How are we going to express ourselves today? Or, good morning, Self! Do you feel like being super duper comfy today? I sure do! Or, oh, hey Missus! Today feels like a good day for PINK! I want to look in the mirror in the spirit of love and self-satisfaction and play. I want to look in the mirror like a five year old does.

I’m going to make a concerted effort to do that. You should, too.

I’ve already asked you what the lessons are that your children are teaching you about personal style? And I’ve asked what you think your kids would dress you in, given the opportunity? Now I want to know: what do you want to be able to say to yourself when you look in the mirror? How do you want to feel about your relationship to clothes and style and expressing yourself and how your self – and your body – which, let’s face it, you’ve probably just been ‘covering up,’ haven’t you? – relates to clothes and style and expressing yourself? And: do you feel more ready now, like me, to introduce more glitter into that relationship? Leave a comment and you’ll be eligible to win a $150 Old Navy gift card, with which you can go to Old Navy and have your kid pick out his or her own outfit, and also one for you. (Full contest rules here.) (You can also just follow this link and get a pretty sweet coupon.)

(Oh, and if you entered by leaving a comment at the last post? You get another entry by commenting again! There will be three winners in total, one selected from each of the comment threads to the posts in this series. So, if you haven’t already, be sure to go weigh in on the first post, and the second one, too.)

CONGRATULATIONS to Diane, Mary and Julie – you’re the winners of the gift cards. Check your email!

Here are some things that Jasper and Emilia love: crayons, art paper, paints, marshmallows, bubble wrap, trains, books, the iPhone, the iPad, video cameras, regular cameras, Toady, me, Kyle, the cats, skateboards, anything Disney, Scotch tape, cardboard boxes, stickers, the piano, and cookies. Only cookies with chocolate, though. They know their baked goods.

Why they love these things, I don’t know. I’ve never really thought to ask that question, except in regards to Toady, who is so unusual (and whose continued existence Kyle interrogates daily: ‘can we get rid of him, PLEASE?‘) that his very presence demands that variations on that question – why are you here? what need or want are you fulfilling? – be asked of him, constantly. (Notice that I fall so naturally into calling Toady a ‘him.’ This is disturbing.) The presence of, and my children’s preference for, all those other things goes unquestioned, I suppose because those preferences don’t read as unusual. Who doesn’t love the iPhone? Crayons? Cookies? I mean, really? So, no, I never asked.

Then I sat down with Genevieve Bell, who is a cultural anthropologist and Director of Interaction and Experience Research (awesomest title ever, by the way) at Intel, at the Consumer Electronics Show, and she said that she and her research team ask themselves that question all the time. Why, they ask, do people love the stuff that they already have?

Oooh, I thought. Love and technology! This was thrilling. I might have knocked over a lamp. (Not might. Did.)

She called it ‘the love landscape.’ “It’s a matter of asking, why this?” she said, picking up my iPhone (which was, I am only somewhat ashamed to admit, wrapped in a Cookie Monster skin at the time.) “… why do you love this?” And then it becomes a matter of asking that of everything. Why do people love what they love? What’s the love landscape that is the sum of the things – the technologies – that people cherish? She used the example of the Princess Phone (which, for those of you who are less than a hundred years old, is exactly what it sounds like, and was extremely popular a few decades ago), which, she said, was the very antithesis of ‘sexy’ or ‘edgy’ or even extraordinary (it was just a phone, marketed to women. It was small, and the dial-pad – ! – lit up.) So why did people love it so much? If you can answer that question – establish an understanding of why and how people love the things that they already love (why, for example, someone like me sleeps with her iPhone under her pillow when she has only a very limited ability to check email or play Angry Birds in her sleep)  – and you can get a better sense of what new things people might grow to love. Or not. Did anything ever really replace the Princess Phone? Was it the iPhone? What about the stuff that can never be replaced/supplanted (like, for example, old, scribbled-upon books and real sketchpads and pencil crayons and vinyl records and the like)? What is it about that stuff?

(About love for the iPhone, Genevieve offered this explanation – I’m paraphrasing  – ‘it holds the promise of you never having to be alone or without diversion.’ The iPhone IS MY TOADY.)

That’s what’s so interesting about the question – apart from its usefulness for a scholar and developer of technology whose job is to search for what might be next – it demands that we interrogate our stuff and our relationship to our stuff, and that we do so by paying attention to our very real affective feelings for that stuff. It acknowledges that stuff matters. It acknowledges that stuff shapes us. It acknowledges that, sometimes, when we grab on to something and whisper, I love this, we really, really mean it. And so do our children. And that matters for how we understand their stuff and their relationship to it. We don’t have to believe that that stuff loves them back, a la Toy Story. We just have to recognize that there can actually be -with some things, not all things -  relationships there.

Surveying the ‘love landscape’ of our lives – and our childrens’ lives – might, in other words, be a useful means of gaining a better understanding of our own environments and how these environments both reflect and shape our (and our childrens’) emotional lives. Which would, I think, put us in a much better position to shape and reshape our environments to more positively serve our emotional lives.

It also (and, yes, this is kind of obvious) facilitates a different way of talking about consumption, with our children and with each other: since I returned from CES, my conversations with Emilia about why she wants the things that she wants have taken on a more interesting character. When she said the other day that she wanted – WANTED, HAD TO HAVE, LOVED – a particular thing (a Dora castle) that she saw in an ad, we discussed why she thought she would love it, really love it, and how that compared to what she knew that she loved, and where that thing might fit among the things that she already loves; that is, whether the space that it might occupy in her ‘love landscape’ was already filled or not (it was – by, as it happened, a cardboard box adorned with princess stickers). The same interrogative principle can be applied to any technology or object (why do my children love the iPad, really? Is it the tablet form – with its graphic, touch-intuitive interface – that they ‘love’, or is it the games, the virtual storybooks, or all of the above? In which case, might we consider other tablets – like the Intel-powered one that I described in this post – or a Kindle or other reader, instead of, say, a Nintendo DS type thingy, when we consider acquiring shiny new electronic toys?)

But mostly, I think, it applies to how we understand our surroundings, generally. Are we surrounded by things that we love? It’s a trope of the discourse around getting organized and keeping a nice home (edit! edit! edit!) that we only keep the stuff we love, but when/if we follow that rule, are we really being mindful about what it is that we love, and why? So are we really surrounded by stuff that we love? Most of us are surrounded by things that we like – we wouldn’t have acquired and kept them if we didn’t like them (and ask any child in any playroom whether she ‘likes’ the stuff there. Of course she does. That doesn’t mean that she loves that stuff in the sense of having an engaged, affective attachment to it) (maybe some day I’ll do a whole post on this issue in the context of the argument laid out in Heidegger’s The Question Concerning Technology and bore you all crazy-senseless, just for kicks) – but is it stuff that we love? And – this is important – what it is about that stuff that we love? Why do we love it?

Because, shouldn’t we love the things that surround us? Like, really love those things? Shouldn’t the landscape of our lives be a love landscape, whatever that looks like? Whether that means rooms filled with beloved books or Kindles or sketchpads or musical instruments (real or XBox-mediated virtual) or plates filled with cookies (none with raisins) or craft detritus or televisions or iPads or notepads (the old-school Moleskine kind) or kid-friendly laptops (Emilia has this one – Intel Inside! – and adores it) or LEGO (real or 3D Interactive) or shoes or loveys or all of the above and more… if it’s what we love, and in loving it we’re engaged with it, and we’re really reflective and mindful about the fact that that’s why we have it, that’s why it’s there, then, really, we’ll have our love landscapes, and we’ll inhabit them with joy.

And we’ll probably also get rid of some of really useless crap in the process. So there’s that.

What objects/things/technologies do your children love? Do you love? Like, really? Do you ever really ask yourself why you love the stuff that you do? Do you have interesting answers? Share them – share the stuff, and your answers to the question of why do I/my children love this? in the comments.

*Disclosure: I was a guest of Intel Canada at CES. I like Intel Canada, and not just because they introduce me to cultural anthropologists who make me think about love and technology and don’t kick me out of the room when I start knocking over lamps. You can sometimes find me over at their Facebook page, chatting people up.

Before Emilia was born, I had a very clear plan about what kind of mother I was going to be. I was going to carry her with me everywhere in designer slings, I was going to hand-blend my own organic baby food, I was going to shun pacifiers, I was going to teach her sign language before she was six months old, I was going to lose the baby weight before she was four months old, I was going to forbid any and all toys that were not hand-crafted by Swedish artisans from entering my house, I was going to swaddled her bottom only in cloth diapers hand-laundered in eco-friendly detergents, I was going breastfeed her until she was two, I was going to not let her watch television until she was three, I was going to clothe her only in garments woven from pure cotton by Tibetan monks or, at least, certified Disney-character free. I was going to be master of my maternal domain! I was going to be the very best mother ever, and nobody would be able to deny it!

Then Emilia was born. You know where this is going. There was a pacifier in her mouth before we wrapped her bottom in some Huggies Little Snugglers, bundled her in a Winnie-the-Pooh sleeper and took her home from the hospital.

She refused to be carried in slings or Bjorns or Ergos or anything, really, other than arms or strollers, and even arms were usually disdained in favor of moving-moving-always-moving. She self-weaned just shy of nine months. She wouldn’t nap or sleep unless she was left to fuss it out for a while, or unless she was put in a stroller and walked around the block eleventeen times. She was bouncing around in a hideous red-and-blue plastic Exersaucer by the time she was six months old, and she never learned sign language. I never did get around to making my own organic baby food, and almost five years later, I still have the baby weight.

I agonized over all of this – all of these failings, as I saw them – for a very long time. I wanted to do motherhood right. I had very clear ideas, most of them conflicting entirely with the others, about what was involved in doing motherhood right. I had read all the books, was reading all the magazines, had found all the blogs. Angelina carried her baby everywhere. So did Jennifer Garner. And Dr. Sears was adamant that I breastfeed as long as possible, and that if it hurt, I was doing it wrong. Harvey Karp told me that there was no reason why my child shouldn’t sleep on a reasonable schedule, if I handled her properly (what was it again? Swaddle-Soothe-Swing-Swagger-Swill-Something?), and Christy Turlington was on the cover of Cookie Magazine showing off what yoga had done for her mom-bod. And don’t even get me started on Gwyneth Paltrow. Gwyneth Paltrow, it seemed to me, had her shit down. Everyone else could be a good mother, dammit. Why couldn’t I?

I eventually found a way to let all of that go and accept – finally, and with difficulty – that not only did I not need to conform to somebody else’s idea of a good mother, there was no such thing as a perfectly, universalizably good mother. But that was – and, if I’m honest, sometimes still is – a hard road to travel. We’re so invested – as we must be – in doing this motherhood thing right that we forget – we overlook, we are misled about the fact – that there is no one universal ‘right,’ that there is only ‘right for us.’ In forgetting/overlooking/being misled about the absence of a universal ‘right,’ we are left open to anxiety, panic, fear about falling into the vast pit of universally wrong. If we do this wrong we will harm our babies! If we do this wrong we will destroy lives! THERE ARE WHOLE UNIVERSES BALANCED UPON THE TIP OF OUR DECISION WHETHER OR NOT TO BREASTFEED/CO-SLEEP/HOME-SCHOOL/SHUN-DORA!

It’s this, I think – this anxiety about being a good mother – that traps us and imprisons us, and not, as Erica Jong argued the other day in the Wall Street Journal, the dictates of specific styles of parenting (her specific strawman: attachment parenting.) Whether you attachment parent or Ferber-parent or Von Trapp-parent (you know, where you dress them in starched pinafores and make them sing at your parties), if you’re driven by anxiety to follow a style or adhere to a quote-unquote philosophy, and/or if you persist in following that style or philosophy regardless of whether it works for you and your child, you will be imprisoned. It will be hard. It will suck. Maybe not desperately so, but enough, and when it comes to parenting, even moderate suckage is too much suckage. Why must we be so hard on ourselves? Why is it so hard – why does it seem so hard – to just follow our instincts and experiment and allow ourselves to fail from time to time without beating ourselves up and to just, you know, simply do what works? Which, no, is never going to look exactly like what works for your neighbor or your sister-in-law or that mom who you’ve heard about who works full-time and has ten children and yet always has her hair perfectly blown out and her nails manicured, but whatever. You are not that mom. Repeat: YOU ARE NOT THAT MOM.

You are you. You will only and can only have your own style. What makes you a good mother is whatever it is that you bring to mothering your own children, whose needs and preferences are always and necessarily going to be different from the needs and preferences of other children. Emilia was independent from the get-go: attachment parenting didn’t work with her. Jasper was and is the opposite: he wants and needs to be fully attached. The strategies that I worked out for Emilia – for comforting her, for getting her to sleep, for boosting her confidence, for distracting her – simply did not and do not work for Jasper. I’ve adapted my style, and I’ve adapted my style to him. There is, I think, an underlying consistency (for lack of a better word) to my style, which was informed by my experience with Emilia and by my beliefs about parenting (yes, I do have some), but it is, let’s say, a flexible consistency, one that’s more akin to thread running through fabric than steel girding a building. And at the core of all this, there resides this one idea: that only determining factors in whether or not I am a ‘good’ mother are whether I meet their needs – their basic, general needs, and their unique, idiosyncratic ones – and love them well.

Erica Jong is right that we trap ourselves and imprison ourselves with unnecessarily rigid ideas about parenting. But it’s not, as I said, the style of the parenting that necessarily forces that rigidity: it’s our attitudes toward those styles, and the spirit in which we adopt them. Attachment parenting is only restrictive if it doesn’t work for the parent or child being attached; for some it works, for some it doesn’t, and there’s no right or wrong about it, except inasmuch as we try to impose the beliefs gleaned from our own experiences onto others, which is what gets us into trouble in the first place. Erica Jong and that too-French-to-be-believed French woman who wrote that book on le conflit! de la femme et le mere! (merde!) recoil at the idea of carrying around babies and giving up coffee and what have you; that’s their prerogative. As Jong herself states, there’s no one right way to do parenting that’s been handed down through the ages and shared across cultures. Which means that – apart from obvious cases involving abuse and neglect and the withholding of love – there’s also no wrong way. Attachment parenting is only wrong (or restrictive or oppressive or whatever negative term one wants to apply) for those for whom it is wrong. That might be you. That might be me. It is not for anyone other than you or me to say. It is certainly not for Erica Jong to say.

As I’ve said before, that we even debate and dither over these things is a marker of our privilege, and something that we shouldn’t take for granted. We do, many of us, have the luxury of choosing, of surveying the parenting landscape spread before us and debating and deliberating over which roads to take, of wandering down one path and then veering off to another if the first is too rocky or too steep, or of forging our own paths in between the established roads. Parenting, for most people in most of the world, throughout most of human history, has only ever just been parenting, with no qualifying adverb – just whatever works, whatever is necessary, whatever is possible for best ensuring the survival (and, in the best case, thriving) of child and family. We are fortunate to have choices – those of us who actually do have such choices (it is important to remember that not all of us, even in the so-called developed world, do) – and those of us who would condemn any of these choices – regardless of whether we are condemning on the basis of what we think is good for mother or what we think is good for child or what we think is best for feminism or whatever – are doing all of us a grave disservice. We are the lucky ones, we who get to define the terms of our own motherhood. Why on earth would we – do we – get in each others’ way, try to prevent each other from doing so?

The answer is obvious, of course, and obvious even in Jong’s own argument: because this motherhood thing is so loaded, and we are so anxious about it, we get sensitive about it. We are afraid of doing it wrong, and so we look to each other, constantly, asking ourselves – sometimes asking each other – is she doing it wrong? Is SHE doing it wrong? Is SHE? Or is SHE doing it right? If she’s doing it right, and it’s different from how I am doing it, does that make me wrong? I MUST ASSERT MY WAY AS RIGHT. Jong herself admits, quietly, to worrying over her choices. “I hired nannies,” she says, “left my daughter home and felt guilty for my own imperfect attachment.” But, she adds,  “I can’t imagine having done it any other way.” So why could she not leave it at that, admit that she did it the only way that she could, that she did the best she could, and sure, maybe she made some mistakes along the way – one cannot mother without making some mistakes along the way – and maybe she wished that there had been other alternatives for her, but end of the day: she did her best, full stop. Isn’t that what we should all aim for? Isn’t that what ‘good’ motherhood should be about? Not about how or why or what are the socio-cultural-politico-economic implications of how everyone else is doing it – just about how you are doing it, and whether it is serving you, and your children. FULL STOP.

That’s what I’m aiming for. As best I can, anyway.

My One Word, wordled. Or rather, my 49 One Words, as decided by you (duplicates were eliminated) and then transcribed into Wordle for the purposes of making a word cloud, which is so last-month-media, but still. Note that I opted to include the word ‘moist,’ despite my deep aversion to it, for the simple reason that a) it was suggested, and b) human beings are 98% water, so it’s probably accurate.

There were some words that were suggested a few times over – open, honest, impassioned/passionate, smart, strong – and I love those words. I also love Catherine J‘s suggestion of ‘Catherine Wheel‘ – which strictly speaking isn’t one word, but two, unless you hyphenate it, which I think that you can do with any words, really – and Annie‘s coinage of ‘philoso-activista,’ which I – being a transliteration-of-ancient-Greek geek, tweaked as ‘philosopho-activista’ – and Alli‘s sensible insistence upon ‘complex’… I love all of these words, really, with the obvious exception of the word ‘moist,’ and can see using all of them. But after reflecting upon all these words, and the ones that I had jotted down, secretly, in my Little Black Notebook Of Words That Don’t Go On The Internet, I settled upon this:

Searching.

Just that. Searching. Searching my heart, searching my mind, searching love, searching (for) hope, searching (for) reason, searching (for) whatever it is that lays beyond reason. Searching for ways to make things better, searching for understanding about the things that don’t lend themselves to conversations about ‘better.’ Just, you know, searching.

Which, yes, I know: ‘searching,’ like ‘authenticity’ and ‘connect,’ is a word that might cause cavities if you hold it in your mouth too long. But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t the best word, or, at least, the best word for now.

That, and ‘moist.’

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Random addenda:

- I was interviewed by Technorati for their State Of The Blogosphere series. I said stuff.

- Babble named me one of their top mom bloggers, again. I’m sandwiched between the inspiring Karen Walrond and the seriously just-so-lovely Rebecca Woolf, friends both, and that – and the rest of my company on that list – makes this, for me, a real honor. If you check out their list, though, be sure to check out their nomination page and get to know some of the amazing blogs that are cropping up there. And nominate someone who deserves to be known a little better, or a lot better, because, really, there’s room enough for bajillions of us in any celebration of who and what we are. And we’re all better off for making that room as open and inclusive and welcoming as we can. (Also, check out the Canadian Mom Bloggers list that we did last year at The Bad Moms Club for some of the Canuck blogs you should be getting to know. Maybe we’ll do it again this year. If I ever catch up on my sleep.)

- I wanna help this mom, and her boy. Please help me help this mom, and her boy.