It was too late. I’d already ridden in from the airport on a short bus full of hipster boys, who had asked me what I was there for, and whether I was in film or tech (the fact that I did not sport an ironic mullet tipped them off, I suppose, to the fact that I was not there for music), and I had felt compelled to explain that I was kind of in tech, if by ‘in tech’ he meant ‘writes about frankenvulvae and Ativan-dependence online.’

“I’m what’s sometimes referred to as a mom-blogger,” I said. “Oh,” he replied. “You’re a mom? Do you know anyone who buys animated shorts? Like, say if they were kid-friendly?”

It could have been worse, I suppose. It could have been like the now-infamous-in-the-very-small-circle-of-hundreds-of-thousands-of-mom-bloggers-and-friends New York Times article. They could have said something like, oh my god, that’s so cute that you do that! How nice for you! I hope that you don’t forget your children while you’re drinking margaritas out of sippy cups and pimping out their stories in exchange for dish detergent! They wouldn’t have, though, because hipster geek-boys don’t speak like that. That the New York Times does speak like that, and in those terms, is making my head explode.

It’s not exploding because (or, just because) it belittles mom-bloggers, or even because (just because) it belittles moms generally – these are grounds for head-explosion in themselves, and my head has already exploded more than once in consideration of these – but because that belittling threatens to shape how I view myself and how I present myself and determine whether or not I say things like “I’m a mom-blogger” to buses full of hipsters at SXSW or identify myself as ‘Her Bad Mother’ to Darren Rowse or John C. Reilly or anybody outside of my own community of, you know, moms. It threatens to bend my psyche in such a way that when somebody tells me that I shouldn’t identify myself as a mom-blogger outside of women-centric conferences, I listen.

To say that that sucks is to understate things to an extreme.

(That the Times article described my project for Tanner without naming it or linking it and more or less dismissed it as a) a “perk” of being a popular mom blogger, and b) a project that should be looked upon with suspicion because it was such a “perk” and dependent upon corporate sponsorships – the sponsor duly linked, of course, just so no-one missed the point – caused not only my head to explode, but my heart, and summoning the words to take that on right now is beyond my ken. Tanner is dying. You fuck with how I’m handling that it and it causes all kind of damage.)

I’m proud that I’m writer who writes about, among other things, motherhood. I’m proud that I’m a mom. I’m proud that I have integrated my motherhood and my writerhood, that I am able to bring my motherhood to bear upon my ideas and my ideas to bear upon my motherhood and that I am contributing, in a very important way, to opening the space of discourse for mothers and for motherhood and raising the discursive veil on the important work that we do – the art and craft and joy and brilliance of what we do – and that I sometimes wear a McDonalds bag on my head and sometimes throw nursing bras and sometimes engage in boot smackdowns while I am doing it. And I don’t want to not be proud, or feel stifled in expressing my pride, or be made to feel as though retaining that pride requires me to never do the sort of silly things that a New York Times writer might seize upon and use to support her implied argument that these women are not to be taken seriously. I don’t want to read an article like the one that I read this weekend and say to myself – as I did, as I totally did -  I don’t want to be associated with women drinking margaritas out of sippy cups and writing about coupon-clipping. Because even though I don’t clip coupons, I would totally drink a margarita out of a sippy cup and I don’t think that that makes me any less interesting or powerful or awesome. I think that it actually makes me more interesting and awesome and I look forward to the day when I and my fellow moms – and women everywhere – can do silly things and not only have that not invalidate our power but perhaps even bolster it.

South by Southwest was full of random eruptions of silliness. In fact, if I had to summarize SXSW in 140 characters or less, I’d say that it was a whole lot of silliness held together by networking, wisdom-sharing, connection-building, and awesome. But nobody ever writes articles about how cute it is that the boy-geniuses of teh internets get drunk and make awesome asses of themselves doing karaoke. Men are allowed to be silly and still be taken seriously. Men are allowed to make silliness part of how they build their communities and – yes – how they do business. Women are not. Moms especially are not. I hate that. I hate that a lot.

I hate that a lot not only because it pressures us to not be silly (which is, self-evidently, not a good thing, inasmuch as silliness, as everyone from Bugs Bunny to Ashton Kutcher to every single individual in attendance at SXSW knows, silliness greases the wheels of everything from creativity to community-building to connection-making to cash-and-carrot-finding), it pressures us to not color outside the lines in any meaningful way when we go out into the world and declare ourselves. If we are moms, we must comport ourselves according to established stereotypes, so that the world will know how to receive us and read us and understand us. If we are to be public – if we are to take mothers’ lives, womens’ lives, out into the public square so that we can be accepted as part of that public – we must behave well, so that we will be taken seriously, so that our presence there can be justified. If we become too silly – or too sexy, or too subversive – we will just prove what many men (and some women) have always known: we do not belong there. We are too unpredictable to be public. Our place is behind the veil, where our complexities will not cause confusion. We should know our place. We should expect to be made fun of – to be belittled, to be scorned – if we do not.

Fuck that. We need to insist that our presence in the public sphere is good – is necessary – regardless of how we act, regardless of whether we, as women (not just as moms, because we are not only moms, we are not even primarily moms), comport ourselves in ways that are serious or silly or sexy or salty or in any manner subversive of what the public (which includes us; we mustn’t forget that; we are too often party to this) expects of us. We need to insist that, to proclaim that, and to demand that that truth be accepted by – embraced by – the public, by all our publics, by everyone, by us. And we need to start by not denying any part of who we collectively are, not only as moms, but as women – not the coupon-clippers, not the margarita-slurpers, not the yummy mummies or the cougars or the power-suit-wearers or the table-dancers or the tattooed hipsters or the home-schoolers or the scenesters or the lactivists or the nursing-bra-throwers or the philosophers or the shoe-lovers or any combination of these – and by demanding that all these parts of who we collectively are be taken seriously. Not necessarily or exclusively taken as serious – it is the unseriousness of so many of these parts that provides so much of the color and movement of our collective whole – but taken seriously. There’s a difference. That difference matters. We need to demand that it – and we – be recognized.

We can start by telling the New York Times to go f*ck itself, and by doing so with wit and intelligence and humor and maybe a bra-toss or two. And then toasting ourselves with a margarita.

Sippy cup optional.

*****

UPDATE: The writer of the New York Times article has written a post in which she expresses her sadness that the piece was taken as dismissive of mom-bloggers. It was, she says, meant to be “light” in tone, a description of a “cultural trend,” and that the details she’d cited – the mimosas (not margaritas, as I’ve written above) in sippy cups, among other things – were, she thought, charming. Which is fine and all, and I respect that she stood up and explained herself, but still, as I said in a comment at her post:

Here’s my problem: the idea that mom-blogging is just a cultural trend, that it is something that warrants a light “trend” piece. We’d never see a light “trend” piece on how men are making careers out of blogging, on how geeky guys who love tech are turning their hobbies into business. Never. Nor would we ever see the antics of men at SXSW or BlogWorld being characterized as cute or charming. These things can only be characterized as such with reference to moms/women because that is how the culture views moms/women, and there’s a real problem there.

That, and the whole dismissal of the Tanner project, of course. Still pissed about that.

That said – this was true when I originally wrote this, and is still true now – my primary frustration is with the New York Times for continuing to push these kinds of ‘light trend’/Style section pieces about moms and mom-bloggers, and with other mainstream media that do the same, rather with the writer of this piece. So. Just wanted to clarify that.

“There is not much to say except the following universal truth: when loving someone unrequietedly (sic), remember this; while to you, he is a juicy steak, to him, you are a moldy wiener. I will be back.”

Everybody, write that down.

(On my way home from SXSW today. I would very much like to sleep for days when I get there. That’s not going to happen.)

This makes me cry. With joy. With grief. With gratitude.

(You can join in too. I’d love it if you would. So would Tanner. Because it’s silly, and happy, and fun, and because it’s for him.)

You burned him, didn’t you? she asks. How could he fly after that?

Explaining death is one thing. Explaining the cremation, the afterlife and Divine resurrection are something else entirely.

We’ve had a lot of these talks. We’ve been having them since my dad died, since she watched me collapse and shatter into a million tiny pieces and wanted to know why. They’ve been good talks, but I fear that they’ve been better for me than they have for her: she has grounded me with her questions, and given me solace with her answers. Because she has her own answers, she pulls them from the sky or the stars or the spirits or her soul and she lays them bare and shares them with me, her stories, the stories that she weaves to make sense of all this mysterious loss, this loss that I can’t explain, lapsed, struggling Catholic that I am, groping for a faith that eludes.

This is why I am failing at this: I have no answers for her. I have no answers, only wishes, only hopes, only deeply held hopes that I ache to grasp with certainty, but which remain – for me, who is grasping at that lost faith, that faith that once upon a time held answers – ephemeral, evanescent, faint. So when she asks me, where did Grandpa go, I say, I think that he went to a place called Heaven, a wonderful place full of love and light where we will someday see him again, and I cry as I say it, because I don’t know for sure, and I wish with every particle of my soul that I did know, that I could know, because I would give anything to know, anything. And she says, in the softest of voices, I know where he is. He’s in his Death House, the one that I made him, and someday we will go there.

– Oh, sweetie…

I know that you think he’s in that box, but he’s not, he’s in his house in Heaven, and we’ll go there someday, and you’ll see, and you’ll know.

And my heart expands, and breaks.

******

My friend Kate, who has known terrible loss, wrote the other day about thumb-wrestling with Death as she prepares for the death of her grandmother. She didn’t like doing it, she said, not least because he has longer thumbs, which I imagine is true. She asked her readers to not leave condolences, but, instead, memories, of their mothers, whose flour-dusted hands wiped tears and whose lipsticked mouths left kiss-marks and whose warm arms were the safest place in either earth or Heaven, so that we might reflect upon motherhood persisting against and beyond death, and I said this:

I have nightmares, about losing my mom, about losing my mom after losing my dad and being left, alone, without them, an orphan, my longest and most deeply held fear. I have nightmares, about fighting with Death, about begging him to stay away.

I’m sorry. I wanted to say something lovely, about my mom’s belly laugh and her twinkling eyes and her perverse imagination, the one that conjures alligators in closets for my daughter to hunt and her ability to bake a lemon cake, right on the spot, just because you asked. But I’ve been having nightmares.

I have been having nightmares, nightmares wherein my dad is already gone and then my mom goes too and I am left to suffer the pain of my greatest fear, the fear that drove me to sleep on their bedroom floor at night, the fear that kept me from sleepover parties and sleep-away camp, the fear of losing them, of being left alone, an orphan. When I was child, my good Catholic parents would comfort me and soothe me and brush my hair from my tear-dampened cheeks and tell me that they would never leave me and I clung to that, even as I knew it to be false, I clung to it, and when I flew west to deal with my father’s death some months ago (an eternity ago, a second ago) I sat in my seat on the plane and cried and cried and cried like the little girl that I had suddenly become again, having flashed backwards in time to that experience of knowing that it would happen and that it would hurt, bad, worse than anything else I could imagine, and then flashed forward again to discover that yes, yes, this is exactly how it feels, and it is terrible, horrible and bad.

And so now I am terrified of having the loss compounded. And I am terrified of communicating – directly or indirectly, intentionally or not – this terror to Emilia, who is too astute, who knows too well when I am sad or afraid and who knows the difference between my sadness and my fear and wants to understand them. But I don’t want her to understand them, I don’t want her to think about losing me, because I want to forestall this pain for her, even as I shudder at its inevitability.

I have nightmares. And my only solace – my lifesaver, my heartsaver, the backbone of my soul armor – is, really, my daughter and her kindergarten theology, her insistence that it will all be okay, that we will all end up at happy place, that she knows this, because we must, because it is true.

I hold her to me tightly, and weep for this, in gratitude and shame.

Are there horses in Heaven? — I don’t know; what do you think? — Did Grandpa love horses? — He did. — Then there are horses there. Someday, I will ride them.

– Me too, sweetie. Me too.

******

This post was inspired by a discussion that was shared between me and some very good friends – Lindsay, Loralee, Julie and Devra – at Mom 2.0. We curled up on the floor of the bedroom of the Four Season’s Presidential Suite during the CheeseBurgHer party and talked spirituality and faith, grief and loss, prayer and meditation and all variety of confused and confusing things. And then Lindsay decided that maybe we should explore some these questions (like the one I’m struggling with above, talking to kids about death) together, on our blogs. So we are. You’re welcome to join in. Leave me a link if you do. Or just speak your piece in the comments. Talking, maybe, will bring enlightenment. Or maybe more confusion. Either/or.

So: how do you talk to your children about death? Do you talk to your children about death? If they ask the hard questions, how do you/will you answer? Or do you, will you, like me, seek their answers, and look for comfort there?

PS: I offer another, somewhat less morose reflection on navigating the waters of loss with children over at Their Bad Mother. Because once I start talking, I can’t stop.

]]> http://herbadmother.com/2010/03/if-prayers-were-horses/feed/ 111 http://herbadmother.com/2010/03/angels-with-dirty-faces/ http://herbadmother.com/2010/03/angels-with-dirty-faces/#comments Wed, 10 Mar 2010 18:43:56 +0000 Her Bad Mother http://herbadmother.com/?p=1720

Shiny, happy, smudgy-faced baby, all jacked up on Disney’s Animal Kingdom safari. Kinda hard to be angsty and sad, looking at that face. This is, I suppose, the function and purpose of angels.

*More shiny happy faces can be found over at Happy Face Central.

**And also here, where maple syrup and skateboards collided to create an alternate parallel Tennessean universe of awesome.

***Not here, though, because it’s a discussion about parenting and judgment and nasty things like spanking, and I might have been called “disgusting” in the comments, so. Fill up on angel faces at the other links first, maybe.

]]> http://herbadmother.com/2010/03/angels-with-dirty-faces/feed/ 1 http://herbadmother.com/2010/03/princesses-never-give-up/ http://herbadmother.com/2010/03/princesses-never-give-up/#comments Tue, 09 Mar 2010 17:40:27 +0000 Her Bad Mother http://herbadmother.com/?p=1712 This past weekend was a weekend filled with tremendous, heart-busting joy. It was also one of the most personally disappointing weekends of my entire life. My head is spinning a little from the existential contradiction that this represents.

I took the brood to Disney World, and one of the objectives of the trip was, of course, to have a good time, and having a good time at Disney World is not a particularly difficult thing to do, what with the spinning teacups and fireworks and pirates and flying carpets and pixie dust and all, and so to say that we – and more importantly, our coterie of pixie-loving badgers – had fun is to understate things dramatically. But having fun was not the only objective of the trip, nor even the primary objective of the trip. The primary objective of the trip (which saw us drive from Toronto to Florida in a vehicle provided by GM Canada) was me tackling the Disney Princess Half-Marathon, aka the Tiarathon, as the first race in my year-long quest to run 100 miles for Tanner. I’ve been training since last year to do this run and all the other runs – runs that will cover a total distance, I hope, of 100 miles – to follow. I had my tiara and tutu packed and ready.

I never got the chance to wear them.

The night before the race I had a series of dizzy spells, the last resulting in a nasty fall while carrying Emilia – herself a little broken from falling on the monorail off-ramp – across the resort grounds. I wasn’t badly hurt by the fall – just sore knees and neck – but the fact that I’d been dizzy enough for black spots to distort my vision and skew my balance and send me careening to the ground, child in arms, was enough to sound the warning bells. “You’re not running,” Katie said, as she helped me back to the room. “I will stop you.”

So. I did not run the Disney Princess Half-Marathon.

In hindsight, I can speculate that my dizzy spells and my fall and my consequent failure to run was due to a lot of things that were more or less beyond my control. Doing a week-long long-distance road trip with small children who do not sleep prior to running a half-marathon is, perhaps, something that I could have controlled – simply by not doing it – but then we wouldn’t have had our adventure, and who’s to say that it was the seven nights without sleep that brought me down? It also might have been the Florida sun, or the food (Mickey-shaped waffles have been proven to cause light-headedness in tutu-clad lab rats), or the fact that I’m only about a month past a bout of pneumonia and have bad lungs and ignored all of that when I resumed training a few weeks ago and didn’t pay any of that any mind while carrying a 35 lb toddler through the Magic Kingdom and Animal Kingdom and Epcot Center under the decidedly un-Canadian sun for two days. It could have been due to a lot of things, most of which were almost certainly my fault.

Which is why I’m having a hard time clinging to the joy from this weekend. The smalls had a deliciously wonderful time, chasing Space Rangers and splashing down mountains and racing race cars and goggling at pixies zipping through the sky, and their joy was contagious but still: we were supposed to do all this – we were supposed to be pursuing joy and chasing pixies and princesses – for Tanner. I was supposed to do this for Tanner. And I f*cked it up before I even got started.

It’s kind of hard to not hate myself for that.

(I ordinarily close comments for this kind of post, because I hate being sucked into the temptation to seek reassurance and back-pats from the Internets for my own twisted issues, but you know what? This shit sucks so bad that it is taking all of my limited self-restraint to not out-and-out beg everyone, everywhere, to tell me that I am not, in fact, all total fail and a disappointment to humanity. So. If you feel like telling me that I don’t suck, I will totally take that. Please excuse my neediness.)

Mr. Jasper, being assisted in the luge by his sister Miss Emilia, at the home of Mrs. Fussypants.*

*This is how we road trip. On skateboards. Etc.

**Actually, we’re in a Traverse, courtesy of GM Canada. But still.

Please enjoy. And pass it on. The husband doesn’t ask much of my Internets, so it’d be nice to indulge him.

(We’re road-tripping right now – this post comes to you courtesy the free Wi-Fi at the Hampton Inn in Louisville, Kentucky – and to say that my attention span is crunched almost flat is to understate things dramatically. So.)

(We’re road-tripping because I’m going to run the Princess Half-Marathon, aka the Tiarathon, at Disney World this weekend. I’m doing it for Tanner. You can read more about here.)

(Also, puppies.)

It’s courageous because it represents an overcoming of a terrible grief, a grief that comes at you like a baton to the knees and the gut and the mind and the heart. It’s not a defeat of such grief – there is no defeat of such grief – but it is – it represents – a willingness and an ability to power through that grief and to keep moving, keep persevering, keep living, in spite of that grief. And more than that, perhaps: to take that grief and let it move through you in a way that carries you forward, to feel its battering force and take that force and bend it to your will and make it dance, to dance with it, to take the lead and turn the struggle into something beautiful.

I would like to do that. But I still feel, more often than not, that the grief is moving me, leading me, directing our steps. We’re dancing, I know, and it’s not always terrible (that is one grief’s secrets: that it is sometimes welcomed, that it is sometimes embraced, because the grieving soul does, sometimes, just want to give in, to fall back into the deep curve of those arms and yield to the bending and the tipping and to just let its fingers graze the floor as it sways and drops) but it is not controlled, I am not controlling it, I am just being led, and I wish, sometimes, that I were not.

Jeannie Rochette will have her moments, I know; moments in which she will no longer feel in control, when she will not be able to stand, let alone skate, because this kind of pain – no matter what anyone says – is terrible, terrible, beyond measure. But she will always have this moment of triumph, this overcoming, this demonstration of the force of life and love in the face of death. For that she should be proud. To that we should all aspire.

I do.

I say this because I know. I know because, I have had short hair. As a child, even:

That’s me, age two and a half. Just a little bit younger than Shiloh Pitt-Jolie, and with a slightly shorter and slightly dodgier haircut. (Parents didn’t worry about their daughters having mullets in the seventies, I’m just sayin’.) And I’m pretty sure that, notwithstanding the short, bemulleted hairdo, I was a girl. I also wore pants a lot, but you know what? STILL A GIRL.

So the idea that anyone – anyone – gives even a passing thought to the claim that because three year old Shiloh Pitt-Jolie has short hair she has or is developing gender identity issues kinda makes my head explode, which is inconvenient, because the sparks from my exploding – non-longhaired! – head might cause my pants – non-skirtlike pants! – to combust.

I know. It’s confusing. Also, so stupid that I can hardly believe that I felt compelled to address it, but there you go. I AM COMPLICATED. It’s because I had short hair as a child, obviously.

(I dare you to post your best tomboy picture – you, or your daughter. If you do, leave the link over at the Bad Moms Don’t Give A Shit About The Length Of Their Daughters’ Hair post at the Bad Moms Club. I totally want to see it.)

(And yes, I know that there’s something vaguely ironic about the fact that I am championing haircuts for girls just days after flipping out over haircuts for boys, but that had nothing to do with gender and everything to do with OH GOD MY BABY IS GROWING UP SAVE ME. In any case, as I told you: I am complicated. And it all, clearly, goes back to the hair.)

(Oh, and, because I know that you are totally wondering, and if you’re not, you should be: yes, there is a resemblance.)