Reading this NY Times piece on last week’s 90th anniversary of the 19th Amendment (the one that gave women the right to vote) stopped me in my tracks. Ninety years, really? Is that all? And had it been that long? It seems like another world, doesn’t it? Floor-length skirts, bustles, corsets. Not voting. So much has changed.

But has it?

I’m a child of the 70’s. That was Women’s Lib time. Bra-burning time. I was dimly aware of all that, but not from my mother. She was wearing cat’s-eye glasses and taping little swoops of her dark brown hair to her temples at night with pink tape to create curls the next day. Instead I learned about the feminist movement from reading contraband copies of my older brother’s Mad Magazine. I’m still a little miffed that Mom wasn’t out there marching with signs.

We take our mothers with us to the births of our own children. I’m more like my mother in this than I wish to be. At 7 I wanted to be a hippie, but I still ended up following many of my mother’s size-six footsteps.

I was embarrassed and chagrined to notice, when attending a particular Buddhist meditation sangha for the first time this week, my surprise that the leader was a woman. After all, this is 2010! 40-plus years after bra-burning and Women’s Lib! 90 years after women’s suffrage! Why am I still entrenched in Mad Men-style gender roles?
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A year ago, I joined an improv class. You remember improv: the TV show with Drew Carey and the tall guy Ryan Stiles (who happens to live in my town) from ten years ago? Remember that? “Whose Line Is It Anyway?”

Yeah, that. I did that. And it’s my kids’ new favorite thing, too.

Improv, short for improvisation, teaches us to think quickly, to react spontaneously, that mistakes are okay and that things are fun. These are the lessons that our kids seem to know instinctively. It’s only we grownups who have forgotten how to play and think that mistakes should be avoided. My kids love improv and are pretty good at it (most kids are). Yours will be too, though the beauty of this is that everyone is on an equal playing field — kids and adults alike. Here are some easy games that older kids (about age 7-8 and up) can play as a family:

Warming Up

Start by getting moving and loosening up.

Ball. In class we stand in a circle and toss a light beach ball around, counting each toss in unison and aiming to keep the ball moving (without being dropped) at least 20 times. You could do this with a beanbag as well. The idea is to become a cohesive group in the counting and supporting one another to keep the ball moving.

PingPong. Stand in pairs, facing one another. One member of the pair initiates. That member says either “ping” or “pong,” and the other member of the pair must counter with the appropriate “pong” or “ping.” Try to keep it going quickly — no stopping to think! This is harder than it sounds, and adults have no advantage. After a minute or two, reverse roles and the second member now initiates.

Games

One Word Story. Every member plays. Taking turns and with each person saying only one word at a time, tell a story together. Start with a story title or premise to make things easier (like “Robots on Mars,” or “The Bear Went Fishing”). If one member flubs or takes too long to come up with a word, everybody throws their arms up and yells “Again!” and you start over with a new story title. The story doesn’t have to make sense — it’s more fun if it doesn’t.

Emotional Nursery Rhyme. One at a time, each person is secretly given (or chooses) a basic emotion (anger, sadness, fright, happiness, etc). Coming into the “stage” area, they repeat a simple nursery rhyme, over and over, but with the given emotion, for one to two minutes. After each performance, the audience guesses the emotion. This is a great one to help you see how your children perceive emotions, and for you to practice showing emotions in front of them.

Rhyming Couplets. Make a group poem. Each person says a line of the poem. Each group of two lines must rhyme. Keep going until you feel you’ve finished the poem. Like One Word Story, it’s easier if you have a premise or title for your poem. Hint: it’s actually easier to be the rhymer!

Questions. The rule here is simple: you may only speak in questions! It’s easiest if you start with a place, and know who you all are to one another — play a character and have fun with it. (Examples: you’re back stage at a dog show; you’re planning to rob a bank together; you’re competing in the Olympics.)

Toss and Tell. This is played in pairs for an audience. One person will tell a story. Start with a story title to make things easier. The other member of the pair must “toss” words to the teller at appropriate intervals. The teller must then incorporate the tossed word into the story. This is much easier than it sounds, since the tossed words help drive the story and give the teller what they need to make a story. As soon as the teller uses a tossed word, the tosser should supply the next word, speaking clearly and loud enough for the teller to hear. Words should be random and shouldn’t have anything to do with the story.

One, Two, Three, Four. Depending on the size of your family, this one can be wild! Each person is assigned a different number of words: one, two, three, four, and on up to the size of your group. For example, if you are assigned “three,” then you may only speak in sentences of three words. Again, start with a premise, play characters, and have fun playing with words.

Lots of these games translate well to long car rides, waits at restaurants, and other places that don’t require actual space. And there’s really nothing better than laughing with your kids.

What are your favorite family games?

Photo: Karen Murphy, lightspring on Flickr

It’s not like my kids are picky. Well, maybe they are a little, although I’d call it explicit. They know what they want. And I know what I want. But the vacationing world, the one that caters to families? Ugh. It’s a different world entirely.

I thought I’d give my kids a taste of the Pacific Ocean so yesterday we drove from my home in northwest Washington State to the coast. And, as my older son Nathaniel observed, in that four hour drive we somehow entered a portal to the Jersey Shore. We have simple tastes: a clean hotel room, maybe overlooking the ocean, and some good-tasting and healthy food that hasn’t been through a deep-fryer and maybe includes something green. Is that a lot to ask?

Apparently, in the travel world (that caters to families), it is.
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Two of my kids are flying — alone — across the country today. Flying alone with a change of planes usually isn’t a big deal for kids flying unaccompanied, because airlines insist that (for a fee) an airline employee take most kids to their next gate and make sure they get on the plane. But my kids are flying standby (their dad’s a pilot), which doesn’t guarantee two seats together for my two (14 and 10) and doesn’t actually guarantee any seats at all.

I’m about 85% okay with this, for a lot of reasons: they are seasoned travelers; they’ll be equipped with a cell phone for emergencies; they’ve been prepped with what to do if they get stuck at DFW; they did this once before; and last but not least, it’s what they need to do for us to see one another this summer.

I’m 15% not okay because, well, I’m a mom. I worry about things. Things happen in the wacky world of air travel. Kids get sent to the wrong destination. Or they’re forgotten, stranded.
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What a relief. We can give up our working-mom guilt hats once and for all now and get on with our lives. How do I know this? A new study, of course. Not because I base all my parenting decisions on studies (what? don’t you?), but because, well, because. I’m the mom and I said so.

Apparently, working moms “don’t damage” their kids by working. Well then! Let’s break out the party hats! And! Working moms are less crazy! How do I know this? Because I’m the mom. And I said so.

But there is something to be examined here. The fact that a) mothers have been working outside the home for a LONG TIME NOW and that b) this is the first grudging acknowledgment that it might actually be a GOOD thing — for the whole family — is worth celebrating. Even if it’s sort of lame because this isn’t really news to people who have been living it. But honestly, do you turn down a Cake Occasion when one slaps you in the face like the side of a wet fish?
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Mad Men is back, and I was prepared to love it. Primed with new-season promises of the glamor of 1960’s New York, with miniskirts and rising feminism, I tuned in Sunday night with high hopes.

Instead I felt icky, and I blame Betty Draper.

Have you been following the first three seasons? I confess it’s one of the few TV shows I watch. The characters are complex and finely-drawn. They seem like real people. Maybe too real: I hate Betty Draper.

I hate her in her petulant blonde perfection. I hate how she treats everyone around her, including herself, with disdain. I especially hate her apparent indifference to her children. Watching her telling them to “Go upstairs” or “Go watch TV” makes me squirm. I want to climb into my 32-inch flat screen and hug her children.

Betty Draper hits a little too close to home for me.
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Sorry, men, you’re becoming obsolete. Ladies? It’s your turn now.

At least, it is if you can believe this post in Monday’s Vancouver Sun, which claims that gender roles are changing (we knew that already, especially looking at Sweden’s new baby daddies) and that women in industrialized nations wield the purse strings, leaving men to chew hungrily on the frayed ends of the apron strings (if their beer-swilling compatriots not yet on the Mr. Mom bandwagon don’t laugh at them too hard).

Consider these statistics cited in the Vancouver Sun post:

• Parents visiting North American fertility clinics are choosing girls, not boys, when they are given free choice of the baby’s gender.
• In South Korea, 85% of women claim they want girls. Not boys.

(Girls are better, nyah nyah!)

And also these statistics:

• In Canada, twice as many young men are unemployed as young women.
• In the US, more than half the management positions are held by women.

While I could beg to differ with some of the above, coming as I do from a 70’s and 80’s feminist standpoint when the glass ceiling concept was real and when bra-burning was making way for power suits with big pseudo-man bow ties, I think the post is on to something. Things are changing. Slowly, maybe (and too slowly for the underpaid women whose “management” jobs are more than likely low-paying, under-appreciated positions in fast-food restaurants or discount stores rather than as CEOs of multi billion-dollar companies), but changing nonetheless.

How do I know this?

I’ve done my own research. Rudimentary, perhaps, but effective in illustrating what I mean. It’s this:

The number of seen pushing strollers has skyrocketed.

Oh, go ahead. Look around you. They’re out there. The New Dads. And while you’re at it, how about a look at mainstream popular culture? TV shows are filled with fathers who are actively engaging in the lives of their kids. Yes, they’re awkward and unsure about it, having few decent role models besides Atticus Finch, but they’re doing it. Meanwhile, women are prospering. Engaging. Letting go of the 80’s Supermom ideal and the 90’s soccer mom role. If men are out pushing strollers, presumably women are … what? Bringing home the bacon? One might think so, yes.

It’s a beginning. I’m not suggesting any of this change is across the board, or that it’s a simple role-reversal. I think it’s far more complicated than that. But we are beginning to make room for change, one family at a time.

Things were fine until I read the New York Magazine piece called “All Joy and No Fun” that has people like my friend and fellow writer Madeline Holler talking about it over at Babble.com. But I read this piece (synopsis: Parenting is work! Unless you live in Denmark! Which you don’t so boo hoo! But all these statistics — statistics! —tell us how unhappy we parents are! So hello, why would you even be one??) and everything got quiet.

They were talking about my life.

Examination of the Road Not Taken. Life Before or (God/Goddess/Whatever forbid) Without Kids. Oh, c’mon. We’ve all had those what-if thoughts. Like, What if we could just jump on a plane tonight and go to Paris! (Without worrying about passports, diaper bags, babysitters, or whether Paris has the ONE brand of yogurt that is the only thing your two-year-old will consume besides bananas and bread, which you are pretty sure Paris has.)

Some recent encounters:
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I still remember it like it was yesterday. I went home from the hospital with kid #3 the afternoon after her birth. Her father left for work that night, to be gone for 2-3 days and leaving me alone with a newborn, a 4 year old, and a busy teenager. From baby Serena’s two-day doctor visit we were sent home to nurse round the clock to wake up this sleepy, dehydrated baby and avoid the ER. The next day — at this point I’m going on three days without sleep and still not recovered from an intense birth — we returned to the doctor (a 40 minute one-way drive): me, Serena, and Nathaniel, 4.

Relieved that my all-nighter was going to keep my baby from the ER, I strapped the kids in the car and we drove home. After about 20 minutes Nathaniel piped up. “Mom, I’m not seat belted!”

I had forgotten to buckle his car seat. I was driving around with a potential human cannonball inside my car. Any sudden stop on this high-traffic road filled with bad drivers would send my son hurtling through a window to his death. Shaking, I pulled over and fastened his belt, but not without a big hug first.

It could happen to anyone. That’s one of the main things I took from this New York Times Motherlode post about kids dying in hot cars. But the issue is more complicated than that.
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Recently I had cause to re-read almost every entry in my old (now defunct but still standing) blog, Lion and Magic Boy. I wrote there near-daily for three years, choosing to leave it behind when I left Pennsylvania to move west two years ago this month. I was surprised to remember that there is some great writing there (and a lot of near misses and wild swings). But most of what I found there was heart.

I wrote about my kids, mostly. Heart.

Kids, cats, riding my bike. And a lot about me, of course, but always there with my kids. My heart.

And the overarching theme? About my kids? Was that I wanted, more than anything, to see and know that I was making the right choices that would help make their lives good. And happy. I questioned myself constantly, not out of self-doubt but out of soul-wrenching love for my children. More than anything, what I wished then was to know they were going to end up happy.

(I think that’s what we all want.)
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