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.
Read the rest of this entry

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:
Read the rest of this entry

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:
Read the rest of this entry