Wet Feet

Trio

1. Naomi has a thing for Rilo Kiley. Also the Cat Empire, Dolores O'Riordan, and Feist. I only mention this now because she's singing Moneymaker "uh, uh uh, OH YEAH" and it's really funny. And when we are feeling low, we sing Dolores O'Riordan's "Ordinary Day" to each other, and we feel better again.

2. I'm taking them to see The Cobbs in the park tonight. One of the things our fair city does in its most overlandscaped patch of "nature" is to have weekly summer concerts. Until this year, I've never recognized any bands. This year is the first year I've heard of a band that's playing there. Not only have I heard of them, I've liked one of their songs enough to play it on the myspace profile. Indeed, according to myspace, they are my "friend".

3. I'm rereading Henry and June, found it in a forgotten stash of books in the basement. I had forgotten what an interesting person Anais Nin was, outside of the whole reputation for erotica. (And you know, if I had a time machine, Henry Miller would be in trouble. Big trouble. Fun trouble). I thought Tropic of Cancer would be in the same box, but no. Tropic of Cancer is still lost. I haven't read it since I was 19, and I can't remember if it was truly brilliant, or egotistical misogynistic trash. After re-experiencing Henry and June as a grown-up, I want to reread the other stuff too.

MotherTalk Blog Book Tour: Writing Motherhood

Writing Motherhood, by Lisa Garrigues, is a great book for those of you who would like to write about motherhood, but feel intimidated by the process and the time it takes. The book is filled with prompts for getting started and strategies to grab little bits of time.

I share Dawn's dislike of prompts, and my process is very like what the author proposes in the book already. I have a notebook that is with me at all times, I never called it my Mother Notebook, but that's what it is. My notebook is filled with the Stuff of motherhood, reminders and doodles and schedules and endless ruminations on the sleep habits of my babies. Frustration and joy that would have been lost to the memory laspes of sleep deprivation are saved in those pages. It was a surprise to see how much I found in those pages that I had forgotten.

The author is inpsiring when she writes about the intrinsic worth of writing about those details of motherhood that seem too mundane to record. Especially in the early years I never thought I was writing much of substance, but a quick look back at spent notebooks revealed my life as it was and is. When my daughters are old enough to read back through my pages and pages of scribblings, they will get a vivid picture of what their babyhood was like from my perspective.

The book is thoughtfully written, with short chapters that get to the point quickly, so you can leave this book in your bathroom and grab little nuggets of writerly and motherly wisdom as you attend to your most basic needs. It's an easy, cheerful read and a great gift for that mother you know who is in the thick of transition to motherhood and could use an easy, simple structure to get her expressing, in her own words, what motherhoood is like for her. Mother's Day is coming; I'm sure you can think of a mom this would be a great gift for. It might be you.

Green Eggs and Ham Cookbook: the Virtual Book Tour

Once upon a time, I tried to make green eggs and ham. I did green food coloring in scrambled eggs, and the result was very green and kind of disgusting, with the changes in texture that resulted from excessive droppings of verdant inkiness. Ham was harder, green food coloring only succeeding in turning the pinky ham into a browny ham. Ew.

Naomi and Miriam will know no such dissapointment, because I have in my hot little hands a copy of the Green Eggs and Ham Cookbook. In another league entirely from my bumbling experimentations with the teardrop shaped squeezy bottle, the definitive Dr. Seuss delicacy is made with scoops of guacamole over normal fried eggs. The ham is greenified with a glaze of mint jelly and tomatillos, and rolling it in cilantro.

Other recipes include Who Roast  Beast (roast chicken with mushrooms under the skin) and Pink Yink Ink Drink, made with milk, honey and berries, which looked so freakin yummy I wanted to drink it off the page. Naomi will appreciate the Truffula Fruits (yogurt dipped long-stemmed strawberries) and I'm sure we'll make a joyous mess tossing them into each other's mouths like in the book.

Best of all was that the book featured recipes using natural, fresh, healthy ingredients made into fun configurations that will appeal to Suess loving kids everywhere. What better way to sneak avacado into your child?

Blog Book Tour: The Complete Organic Pregnancy

As a reference for those of us who aspire to live in harmony with the environment, The Complete Organic Pregnancy is indispensible.

Everything you wanted to know about the chemicals in your beauty products to how to make organic ginger ale as a treatment for morning sickness, it's in this book. This is the first complete manual on living organic geared toward mothers that I've seen, and they don't miss much.

There is a downside to that, of course. Such a complete compendium of modern dangers can inspire much fear in a woman already feeling the vulnerability of pregnancy and motherhood. While reading this book I eyed my household with new suspicion: my wall to wall carpeting was sure to harm my kids. If that didn't do it, my tap water surely would. And because I was a swimmer, I am more likely to get cancer, because of the chlorine fumes I inhaled daily during my childhood.

The authors must have known the effect on the reader, because they interspersed the dour content with personal essays about living organic that were truly inspiring, as was "My Organic Coming of Age" by Lisa M. Hamilton. She writes of the evolution her views on eating took, from strict veganism as a political and nutritional statement to eating only locally produced, seasonal food from farms she could personally visit. Her moment of epiphany about the tofu she was eating in Hawaii  sums it up perfectly: "I could eat tofu and boycott death, or I could eat ahi and support a local food system. How to make sense of that?"

Even though this information can be scary, it's important that it's out there in an easily readable format. I hope this book is followed by The Complete Organic Baby, and the Complete Organic Child. Because even though it makes me crazy, I want to know about the dangers lurking in our sidewalk chalk and sippy cups.

PS- I know, I know, I was supposed to ask three questions of the authors. If I had been more on the ball this week, I would have thought of three very insightful, intelligent questions. Instead, when I thought of three questions, I could only think of the guy at the end of Monty Python and the Holy Grail: "what... is your favorite color? what...is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?" I don't think that's quite what they had in mind. So, um, sorry about that.

And I thought I had no time for reading

1. Why is it, on the days when you wake up UTTERLY DEPLETED, your children decide that this would be a good day to throw innumerable tantrums, come down with a wicked cold, and forsake all naps? WHY? How, exactly, does this make evolutionary sense?

2. I have a thing for young adult lit. Like Paul Zindel. And Judy Blume. When I was in high school, I started with the A's and read every single young adult paperback in their collection. Even the Lurlene McDaniels (which I came to adore, eventually. Especially the one about the girl with Cyctic Fibrosis. And ESPECIALLY the one with the girl who got Leukemia.)

Anyway, at my local independant bookstore for kids they had a box of advance copies of young adult novels that they were GIVING AWAY FOR FREE if you bought something over $10. So I bought For the Kids (since I meant to anyway) and dove into the box salivating like a dog. I haven't read anything like this since going on that shameful Caroline B. Cooney bender a few years ago.

I was richly rewarded. I found this book, about an honors student good girl who gets photographed in a very compromising position and the hell that ensues when the picture hits the digital landscape of a modern high school. I loved it so much I emailed the author with my effusive admiration.

I bet she thinks I'm a big dork.

Maybe I'll write juicy young adult lit when I grow up. Screw this serious stuff for grownups.

Read It

Come Back: "An unflinching true account of a teenage girl’s dizzying, drug-fueled descent into society’s underbelly and a mother’s desperate and ultimately successful attempts to bring her back. Riveting, lively and often humorous, it is a testament to the enormous power of love and its miraculous ability to heal."

I love mother daughter stories. This one especially. It put me in mind of my own spiral out of control in my teens and what I must have put my mother through when I ran off with her car, her money, her sanity.

I started Come Back completely identifying with Mia when she said "I need to experience real life..." I remember feeling that way in my lily white suburb, where the only grit I was exposed to was on TV. It makes me wonder if we're doing our kids a favor when we create protected, predictable, ordered lives with them at the center when real life is nothing like that. It's the unarticulated feeling that haunted my early teen years: the yawning disconnect of the world I expected and the real adult world that was opening up to me.

As I read on the mother in me overpowered the angsty teenager. While I will never say my mother was blameless (she is human after all), I finally thought about what it must have felt like for her to have her baby dye her hair black and cut her arms and talk about suicide on Prodigy. I've thought about it before since having kids, but Claire's eloquence made me stop and really feel what that must have been like for her.

Mother-love is something that no teenager in the throes of painful self-discovery can seem to understand. We are so self-centered as teenagers. That liability seems to be part of the package for most of us. This book made me want to call my mother and apologize, even though those terrible years are far behind us.

Reading on, the most interesting part of the book to me was Mia's treatment and recovery. It made me long for Landmark, which uses similar "technology" as what's described in the book, with its focus on accountability, integrity, and authenticity. Claire and Mia do a great job at describing the process of transformation, step by step, without descending into hokey self-help talk.

On a more personal note, Come Back could not have come into my life at a better time. This book contains a powerful message that saw me through a rather dark moment. Read it. Seriously.

It's a GIRL! Blog Book Tour

As with It's a Boy, and Literary Mama, Andi has put together a collection of essays perfect for reflection on our lives as mothers and quick reading in the bathroom little chunks of time. I even love the cover of It's a Girl: a little girl in a tutu, wearing untied sneakers and carrying a basketball. It's the kind of femininity I like to promote to my girls: wearing a dress and getting dirty need not be mutually exclusive. It's possible to be both feminine and tough.

Today Andi is blogging about Kim Fisher's "Shining Shimmering Splendid", about her triplets and their princess power. Kim Fisher is also a neighobor of mine, so I've seen her triplets playing out on the street in their dress-ups many times. They are fabulous.

The Disney princesses make me uneasy. Naomi has her own fixation with Belle and Ariel and her own basket of princess themed dress-ups. Yesterday, when making wishes with dandelion fuzz, she said "I wish ...to marry...a prince!" Ugh. My mom thought it was funny. I did not.

I am hoping to hook some other association to the princess with the powerful, heroic princesses of Miyazaki*. Princess Nausicaa brokers peace between warring species, all while flying through the air on a glider. Princess Mononoke savagely defends nature from human invasion. They are the absolute inverse of the Disney falling in love in a pretty dress mold.

It's amazing what little girls can do: they can turn the Disney Princesses into something powerful, as in Kim's essay. I will remember that when Naomi hikes up her Belle dress to chase a soccer ball barefoot across her cousin's backyard. Princesses don't have to be weak.

*Just a warning: Miyazaki's movies tend to be a little scary.

Will Blog for Books

I got immediately sucked in to Literary Mama. I read the site, of course, so many of the pieces were familiar to me, but something about reading them in bed, or on the couch in front of a blazing fire, made them new again. You can blame my bad parenting moments from the last week on this book. I loved it, I couldn't put it down.

Literary Mama gives voice to the creativity of mothers, and our unfliching, unapologetic view of our daily lives. This is not a Hallmark world of happy, triumphant parenting moments, this is a world where our frustrations are as accepted as our joy, our sorrow is as real as our gratitude, and our vulnerability is ever-present.

As important as writing about mothering is, reading about mothering provides insight and compassion toward other mothers and toward ourselves. We are lucky to be mothering in a time when Literary Mama is publishing such great content, and when "mommybloggers" are chronicling their lives.

I got a treat at the end of the book. Andi Buchanan's piece, The Plant, was something I read a long time ago, before I knew Andi or her work. It stayed with me, and I often thought of getting a houseplant, like the teacher in the story says, to gauge how kind I am to myself, to learn how to nurture myself. I never did, and if I did I would probably kill it. I didn't realize it was Andi who wrote it until this week when I read the book.

It's a BOY! Blog Book Tour

Andi's introduction

Dawn's Q&A

I have learned to love essay collections. They can be funny or profound and they can be read in the short unexpected spurts of free time that I find myself with since becoming a mother. It's a Boy doesn't dissapoint.

The theme of women writers raising sons intrigued me as soon as I heard of it. I enjoyed and identified with Ann Lamott's ambivalence about having a son in her classic book Operating Instructions. Harboring a gender preference myself, I wondered what these intelligent, feminist mothers would have to say. It's a Boy, especially the first section of essays, is a peek behind the standard "healthy baby is what's important" line that gets trotted out when we are all being polite. What happens when we just can't keep ourselves from wishing for one gender or the other?

I have always wished for girls. In my childhood fantasies of motherhood, I always pictured myself as the mother of daughters.

When I was pregnant with Naomi, I convinced myself I was having a boy. I was afraid if I got attached to the idea that this baby was a girl, I would ruin the moment of his birth with my shallow dissapointment. Expecting a boy and getting a boy would be much easier to handle than expecting a girl and getting a boy. Even though I spent much of my pregnancy trying to imagine having a boy, the ambivalence did not go away. I knew I was programmed to love whoever was born to me, and I trepidatiously waited to see how it would come about.

In the past, I have been drawn to men that enthrall and overpower me. This kind of love, if you can call it that, simply doesn't translate to the love between a mother and child. Would having a son encourage healing, or would he trigger my defenses? Considering my baggage with men, could I be an adequate and healthy mother to a son?

As this pregnancy is drawing to a close, I am again facing the possibility of having a boy. There is much more curiosity this time, much less fear. I know better how mother love works now. This is a child I will love to pieces, differently that anyone I have ever loved before, no matter what the gender turns out to be. I am curious about how mothering a son will change me, will change how I feel about men in general. For the first time, there's a part of me that's rooting for the Blue Team. I want a son. I want to experience that.