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

Once upon a time in our Mad Men-esque not-too-distant past, a non-traditional family was one where the mother worked outside the home. Later, bucking tradition meant single professional women having children, a la Murphy Brown, alone and husbandless (anyone remember Dan Quayle? Anyone?). Who needs a bicycle when you’re a fish, anyway?

Where is the traditional North American family headed now? Does your family fit the norm? Do you care if it does?

My situation is admittedly non-traditional. Am I alone in my non-tradition? Nope. There are two million non-custodial mothers in the U.S., with no two stories alike.

But this post isn’t about my family, it’s about yours. The New York Times says that despite feelings to the contrary we’re spending more time with our kids now than ever. And that’s quality time in activities like helping with homework and playing backyard catch. Memory-making time.

Couple that wee factoid with the facts that we’re sick of Jon and Kate’s endless bickering (not to mention Kate’s robotic performance on DWTS, did you see that?) and that we yawn over “news” that Michelle Duggar is leaving the hospital with her gazillionth child, and it clearly shows where we are pointing as the Family Of The Future.

My prediction:
Read the rest of this entry

It’s a slow news day when you Google “mother” and come up with 237 stories about cheese made from breast milk, but there you have it. My lactation inspiration for today’s post.

Breast milk cheese. Mmm. Daniel Angerer, a Manhattan chef, is making cheese from his wife’s extra breast milk. No, the cheese isn’t on the menu at Klee Brasserie, Angerer’s restaurant, though at customer request after reading Angerer’s blog about it, the cheese has been offered as a canape (with figs and Hungarian pepper, for those wondering how to serve a breast milk cheese). Yes, Angerer’s baby has plenty of breast milk otherwise. No worries there.

What’s interesting is the response this gets. Breast milk cheese, or in other words cheese made from milk that humans are designed to consume, causes humans to respond in ways that vary “from mild yuckiness to sheer revulsion” according to The Guardian.

Yuckiness? Revulsion? I’ve tasted breast milk. Hey, you’re there all day with a baby and a bag of Baked Lays, and you’re deciding between Regis and Kelly or reruns of Little House on the Prairie — what else can you do to liven things up? The baby drinks breast milk, right? Poisonous? I don’t think so. Why not check it out?
Read the rest of this entry

I was appalled to read the story of Zachary Christie, the Newark, Delaware first-grader who was suspended last week for bringing his Cub Scout spork-type utensil to school so he could use it to eat his lunch.

A six-year old Cub Scout, who frequently wears a shirt and tie to school because it’s a way to express his excitement about being there, is now suspended and sentenced to reform school for 45 days while his mom scrambles to provide a homeschooling alternative. All because he was excited over his new combination fork-knife-spoon and wanted to use it at school.

Zero-tolerance weapons policies have been established in schools all over the U.S., set in place to protect kids in large part as backlash from the Columbine and Virginia Tech shootings. Guns don’t belong in schools, and I think we can all agree on this.
Read the rest of this entry

When my older son was 7, he decided to relieve me of the 30 minute each way country-lane commute to his school every morning and afternoon. After all, he reasoned, surely I could do something else with the two hours-plus I spent every day in the car, taking him to school and picking him up again. A train. A nice friendly train. Yes, our community really did need a train that went from exactly our house to exactly his school.

So he decided to raise money for the train — by making felted wool balls at home and selling them in his school’s store. It all made sense. So he got to work. After the first day he decided that it would take a LOT of felted wool balls to buy a real live train.

Remember those days? Kids are relentless optimists. Who else expects to make a zillion dollars from a sidewalk stand selling cups of warm lemonade? I know I had high hopes when it came to selling magazines or greeting cards or sending in my Can You Draw This Pirate? artwork and winning a trip to art school.

But kids really do make a difference. Kids like yours. And I think we parents have an obligation to support them.
Read the rest of this entry

…and boy are my arms tired!

Oops, wrong punch line. Actually, I am wishing there was a punch line, or at least that I could punch somebody (not really, but sort of) because my kids didn’t watch President Obama’s speech yesterday. They attend public school in a blue-state county where five years ago I saw way more Kerry-Edwards signs than I saw Bush-Cheney signs, and where the vote last November was predominantly pro-Obama, so I assumed they watched. Nope, neither kid who speaks knew anything about it. Huh. A non-issue.

Frankly, it only became an issue for me because over the weekend I heard what an issue this speech was for many parents all over the country. I don’t think it was particularly appropriate that the President, any President, speak to my child at his school via a television screen, but hey, this sort of thing doesn’t happen every day. The message was innocuous: stay in school, study hard, life is kind of tough but you’ll be okay. What’s wrong with that?
Read the rest of this entry

Oh my, the Duggars are at it again. Don’t get me wrong: I sort of like them. Who doesn’t admire the assembly-line precision they must have had to create just in order to, say, get everyone’s teeth brushed in the morning? Plus, they allow us to say to ourselves, “OMG, that could be me. But hello, no. No way. No way would I have EIGHTEEN KIDS.”

And then we can all breathe a sigh of relief and go about our day and maybe enjoy one of the other parenting train wrecks on TV, like Jon & Kate or Octomom.

That’s not me.

Since we’ve agreed that having 18 kids is probably unlikely for most of us — sheer logistics and, well, sanity tells us that — how many kids IS enough for one family? One? Two? Three? How do we decide the size of the perfect family? How big is your perfect family?
Read the rest of this entry

Ooh. Just reading that title, “What kind of mother could give up her kids?” has an emotional sting, doesn’t it? It gets you right here — in the heart, in the gut. After all, whyever are we mothers, anyway?

There’s a provocative article in this month’s Marie-Claire that’s been making the internet rounds this past week. Yesterday it made the New York Times. I’m fascinated by the gamut of response to these pieces, often thoughtful, but just as often the response of what clearly hit a nerve. Motherhood is being threatened.

[insert bias here: a year and a month ago I moved 3000 miles away from my children. They now live full-time with their father after two years of joint custody and ten years of stay-at-home motherhood. You can read more about my journey over at Literary Mama.]
Read the rest of this entry

Abuse. It’s a dirty word, one most of us would prefer not to hear or think about. But the media spotlight is on abuse lately, with the Rihanna and Chris Brown situation. But he hit her — how could she go back to him?

What do you do? It’s your friend, or a neighbor, or a coworker, or maybe just one of the moms at school. But you notice something … different. You think something is going on that shouldn’t be. You see her with her spouse in public together, and it doesn’t feel quite right. Something’s off. There’s a strange sort of tension there. You can’t quite put your finger on it, but something’s wrong. You think there might be abuse.

What do you do?
Read the rest of this entry