I was once a Sanctimommy. I had high ideals about how I would raise my children and judged others for failing to toe my self-imposed line. Especially about what my kids ate. My kids would not eat junk food, I vowed. Processed foods would not cross our door. I would cook everything the Little House on the Prairie way, if you didn’t count my electric stove, my Vita-Mix superblender and my All-Clad pots and pans. Sugar would not pass my children’s lips unless it was unrefined organic Rapadura cane sugar home-baked into organic whole-wheat cookies or nutritious carrot muffins. My children would adore broccoli and all green vegetables. They would blissfully pass by fast food McRestaurants, never knowing what was inside.
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I was all set to publish a post on Rebecca Black’s “Friday” when I saw this post at The Achilles Effect on gender stereotyping in toy advertisements, and well, I couldn’t let it go. I had to write about how we treat our sons — the men of tomorrow — versus how we treat our daughters.

I am a mom who would totally let her son wear nail polish so perhaps I am not the best judge of what influences are best for the boys of today, but I am appalled at the messages aimed at the tender hearts of our boys. Crystal Smith, a social media ad marketing writer who blogs about pop culture and gender stereotypes, evaluated Canadian television ads aimed at boys and girls, noting what words were used and with what frequency. She fed this information into the online app Wordle. (Her results are here.)

Number-one, most-used word on the boy’s ads?
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My 15-year-old son Nathaniel is having trouble with a person in his life who has been saying unkind things. We’ve talked about it several times. “It’s not what he says, it’s how he says it,” Nathaniel says. True enough, the words by themselves, taken out of context or written nakedly on a page, often don’t show much. But they hurt just the same. It’s how you say it.

I was thinking about this and what Nathaniel can do about it when I read this post this morning at Love That Max. Max has special needs. Max’s mom, Ellen, decided to take it upon herself to call out anyone on Twitter saying the R-word. You know … retarded. Retard. Tard.
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I am one of the lucky moms. My daughter talks to me. Every Friday, or over the weekend if it’s a school holiday or she has a sleepover or something, my 5th grader phones me and we spend at least an hour talking about the things that happened in her week, my news, and the things she thinks about and worries about. I love that she shares so much with me, and I love our sense of connection despite the 3000 miles between us. I know her friends’ names and personalities, their little peccadillos. I know what she loses sleep over. I know what her dreams are.

Two weeks ago, we missed our Friday talk because of the school dance. For 4th and 5th graders. What the — ? And also:  the hell?
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By now you’ve likely heard the story about Natalie Munro, the Philadephia-area high school English teacher who was suspended last week for blogging rants about her students. She is said to have characterized them as “out of control” and “disengaged, lazy whiners.” I should also point out Munro was blogging on her personal blog, didn’t identify herself by her full name, and didn’t mention the name of her school or any individual students.

If you read the only post on Munro’s blog that is still standing — the other 84 posts have been removed — you can see more of the story. You get a picture of a teacher who became frustrated with the nature of things. Who among us wants to give 110% all the time when it consistently falls on deaf ears and seems unappreciated? Some of her students likely are disengaged lazy whiners. And many are amazing people who care about their future and the futures of all of us, but it’s the students who appear not to care who make things harder for everyone else.
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Last time I went through security at SEA-TAC — just a few months ago — all was pretty much as it has been for ten years: shoes off, laptop out, liquids in a bag. Now the new full-body scanners are in place. I’ve been thinking about my options when I fly next. Hm. Naked scan or “aggressive” pat-down. And then I remembered. My kids. They fly at least once a year. What about my kids?

A friend of posted recently on Facebook about her concerns over her 12-year-old daughter’s upcoming school trip that involves flying. The comment thread grew lengthy as other parents weighed in, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. Media furor over the new scanners, some of it fake and some of it very thought-provoking, hasn’t helped. What’s a parent to do?
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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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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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Don’t get me started about Lois. Lois was the secretary I shared with two peers and our collective boss. She was awesome. She scheduled my life, reminded me of stuff I had forgotten to do, took my messages, typed all my correspondence and reports, ran interference when necessary, and DID MY FILING. Plus she gave me advice on my single-mom status (whether I wanted it or not) and even invited me to join her bowling league. We all loved her and knew that she ran the place.

Lois was maybe 5 years older than me. But we all called her “Mom.”

Is there an Office Mom in your office? (Is it you?)

I read this blog post at Mothering21.com recently on how we shouldn’t mother younger colleagues. At first I thought, Okay, point taken. Reaching across the conference table to wipe a bit of jelly off somebody’s chin with your spit-wetted napkin IS a bit much.
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By now you’ve heard the news of what was cleverly hidden among the voluminous folds of the recent health care bill: working nursing moms get a break at work. To be specific, they get a break ROOM; that is, a place that’s not a bathroom, where they can pump in private. Yay?

One halfhearted hurrah from me. Gimme a B! And an O! Another O! And another B! Gimme an S! … oh well.

While this is most definitely a step up from having to pump in a cramped (and, *cough*, spotless) bathroom stall or, worse, have no privacy at all, and I have to applaud the fact that maybe this will keep some moms who want to breastfeed nursing longer, it still begs a very important question:

Why don’t U.S. mothers get paid maternity leave?
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