YOU ASKED FOR IT: Advice for New Moms

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NOTE: In the early years of BlogHer “virtual baby showers” – posts on a topic new moms might like – were frequent. This, one of the first, sought advice for new moms. In honor of two new grandchildren, here’s what I wrote then, in April of 2007.

That’s me with my older son, Josh, in Muir Woods outside San Francisco — pretty many years ago. I don’t know if you can tell but I’m pregnant with his brother. Happy to join the virtual shower although despite my adoration of and respect for both Liz and Catherine, I’m from the generation that put their babies to sleep on their stomachs and so may sound a little old-fashioned.

1. Don’t do anything that doesn’t feel right no matter whose advice it is.

2. Trust yourself.

3. Remember that everybody makes mistakes and anyway a child is not a product, she is a person. You’ve heard that kids are resilient. They are. Do your best with love and if you don’t dwell on your mistakes neither will they.

4. You can’t turn a child into someone. You can only help them become the best somebody they already are.

5. Don’t be afraid to say no. Parents who don’t set limits and help their kids learn self-discipline are selfish. It’s easier but it’s not right.

6. No experience is wasted on a child. Maybe they’re too young to remember, but if it happened, it had an impact. So share as much of what you love as you can – music, museums, trips to Timbuktu or Target — poetry, cooking, washing the car.

7. No child ever went to college in diapers.

8. Listen to experienced people you respect, preschool teachers, friends, even, God forbid, your mother. Experience really is a great teacher. Then, though, think it through and then do what you think is right.

9. Everything is not equally important. Pick your fights and win them.

10. Leave time to just be. Lessons are great but quiet time is where imagination and a sense of self emerges.

11. LISTEN to your kids. They are smart and interesting and wise and if you respect them you have a far better chance of having them respect you.

12. Did I say trust yourself?

With love, admiration and the joy that comes from knowing all you wonderful, poetic and caring, committed and in one case, very new mothers on the occasion of this lovely virtual baby shower.

On the Arrival of a First Child

Six years ago I wrote this piece to honor the pending birth of a friend’s child. It’s about the first days after the birth of a first child. Right now, each of my sons is expecting a child, so one more time, here’s the memory – with gratitude and love.

What an emotional shock it has been to write this. I need to start with that; the feelings, years later, are still there. Since this baby shower is for one of my favorite bloggers, and friends, I’m grateful to be part of it. Our task is to share those lovely early moments with our brand new children. That’s why I’ve added this, which may be the most perfect photo I own, because it says just what we all know.

The connection of a mother and newborn is so complete that it’s almost
impossible – even with writers as remarkable as this community — to describe.
At least I can’t find words that say what I know this photo says.

This is actually my second son, very soon after he arrived.

He’s almost 33 now and more extraordinary than even I, proud mama, could have imagined
that cold November day in Roosevelt hospital in 1979. He and his brother
both started off with beautiful souls though. They are beautiful still.

When I think of those early days, it isn’t all the getting up at night (although it could be) and it isn’t that I had so much trouble nursing that I needed to supplement (although it could be) and it isn’t the absolutely perfect terror that I might do them harm that accompanied the first days of their lives (although it certainly, indubitably could be.)

Nope. Here’s what I remember, and what I wish for the two of you and all you other moms and moms-in-waiting: it’s a cold winter night, maybe after about a week as the new parent of son number 1. It’s dark, but out the window you can see the boats going up and down the Hudson River (even though our windows leak so there’s ice on our windows, on the inside.)

You hear a cry and struggle out of bed, grab a robe, go retrieve this new little person from his crib, change him and move with him to the bentwood rocking chair (of course there’s a rocking chair) facing the window. And you hold him in your arms and you feed him.

The dark envelops you, the dim skyline across the river in New Jersey is the only light you have, except for the tiny pinpoints of light on the tug boats and barges as they make their way. And it’s silent. Not a sound. And, with this new life in your arms, you rock gently back and forth. The gift of peace of those nights in the rocker was so intense that as I write this, I can feel it. If I let myself, I could cry.

I remember watching my mother with each infant – can still see her face as she responded to them, thinking to myself then “Oh. This must be the way she was with me. How beautiful. How beautiful.”

And I remember this. My parents came to us very soon after our first son was born, helped put the crib together, celebrated with us. Late one night, as I stood with our baby in my arms, my dad walked into the room. Looking at the two of us, in perfect peace, he said to me “NOW do you understand?” Of course I did.

Ferguson, Bloggers and Race in America: Even if We Think We Know, We Don’t

One of the bloggers I admire most is Kelly Wickham, who writes Mocha Momma. I “met” her online 7 years ago because she was a reading specialist and, as the parent of a dyslexic child, I was so grateful for the committed, loving, determined way she wrote about her work. I kind of stalked her in comments until we met at BlogHer in 2007. (Actually I also stalked her after that, too, but at least by then she knew who I was.)

She writes, with honesty and rage, about race. About family, and love, and education and whatever else occurs to her, but also about race. I’ve learned a lot from her, including how much I didn’t know. As the years have passed, and more women of color have joined BlogHer and Kelly’s Facebook feed, I’ve learned from others, too. The BlogHer community grew and widened, and with it the gut understanding of the whole community. On our blogs we tell the truth, and the different truths shared by the bloggers who are now a part of my life have been an immeasurable gift.

Of course it is beyond wrong that, in 2014, we still have to seek diversity, to go out of our way to learn lessons we should have learned long ago, and that those most in pain still experience so much that we haven’t figured out how to learn.

The trouble is that there hasn’t been nearly enough intersection between us and those experiencing the harshest emotions that emerge in response to American racism.

I remember once talking with author Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, who said to me “Don’t you see, we black mothers must be lionesses to protect our sons.” I thought of her statement often as I was raising my own.

I remember a colleague describing to me, when we were both pregnant, her fear of the first time someone called her not-yet-born child a “n*$%#&r” – of what she would say to him, what she would do.

But despite having African-American colleagues and friends, I’m not sure I ever, until these past days, completely heard the depth of anger and despair that lives within so many.

It’s not that I didn’t know; most people I know care about and have seen plenty of racial injustice and have worked, in our own ways, to change it. But that’s different from opening someone else’s door and walking in. It’s on fire in there. And it should be.

Listen to these:

Everyone can’t stand up the moment something pisses the off and we’re all different in how we react. Some people shut down because they don’t even know where to start. Some people just need a nudge to be emboldened to speak. Some people need to know they’re needed before they speak.

Well if you need that nudge, here it is. If you’re afraid because you don’t want to say the wrong thing, push past that fear. Because right now, your silence about the continued devaluation of Black lives is wrong. Your lack of acknowledgement is not ok. If you need tips before speaking out here’s 3: don’t blame the person who was killed. Don’t say you’re color-blind. Acknowledge the racism at play.

Speaking up when it matters is usually when it’s also the hardest. When your voice shakes, that’s when you’re standing in truth. But that’s usually when it is most needed. And when you do it, someone else might be encouraged to do the same. Do not be silent. Awesomely Luvvie

I am outraged but I do not know what to do with my outrage that might be productive, that might move this world forward toward a place where black lives matter, and where black parents no longer need to have “the talk” with their children about how not to be killed by police and where anger over a lifetime of wrongs is not judged, but understood and supported. Roxanne Gay

Black bodies matter. Black bodies matter. Black bodies matter. Say it with me: Black bodies matter. This isn’t a question. This isn’t a euphemism. This isn’t an analogy. This is a fact. Black cis and trans boys, girls, men, and women and non-binary folks, they all matter. Until that fact becomes a universal truth due to the precise liberty and justice the Constitution of this country promises, I won’t stop fighting and neither should you. Jenn M. Jackson

But it wasn’t what I could see and hear as Ferguson residents fled and were pursued into residential areas that gave me chills. It was what I couldn’t see. Because behind the walls of those smoke-shrouded homes were parents comforting their frightened children. I couldn’t see them, but I knew they were there. They could have been me. They could have been my children.Kymberli Barney for Mom 2.0

This is what I need, dear friend.

I need to know that you are not merely worried about this most tragic of worst case scenarios befalling my son; I need to know that you are out there changing the ethos that puts it in place. That you see this as something that unites us as mothers, friends and human beings.

My son needs me, as much as yours needs you. Sadly, my son needs me more. He needs someone to have his back, when it seems that the police, the men he’d wave to with excitement as a little boy, see him as a being worthy only of prison or death.

I need you, too, because I can’t do this alone. Keesha Beckford “Dear White Moms” on BonBon Break

This is where the story gets tricky. This is where our son paced up and down the stairs—in his under shirt, gym shorts and crew socks—telling us about the police who came to our door and handcuffed our son and pulled him outside. “Why?” It was the only question I could come up with — “why?”

His hands ran over his face and found each other behind his head. I knew this look too. The one of lost words—of previous trauma—of discouragement.

“I don’t know. There’s some robberies in the area? I guess? And they saw me here—I don’t know. They thought it was me. They thought it was me and wouldn’t listen. They didn’t believe me that this was my house.”

He shook his head and looked at me. “It didn’t even matter that I had a key, moms.” Elora Nicole

For each of these there are dozens and dozens more. No more to say.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/20/white-people-black-people-michael-brown-death-ferguson

Thanks to the Man Who Sent Me to BlogHer ’06 and Now It’s ’14 and I’m Still Showing Up

In 2006, I was working with David Aylward and the National Strategies firm. He doesn’t know this but there’s a story (If you know me you know there’s almost always a story.) We had a client who wanted to reach parents. David hired me to help and I had this big idea about making a parent website to promote them. Well.
David sort of said “What about these blogs I keep hearing about? Would that be better?” I knew so little about blogging that I had to go look it up online. I found a story about this little conference in San Jose called BlogHer, meeting for only its second year. David and I convinced our client that I should attend this mysterious event and off I went along with fliers for our product and real curiosity about who these women were and what they were up to.

Here is what I received – from BlogHer 2006 and every one since:

1. Access to an entirely new world of remarkable women (and men too.) Including ( a little bit of a yearbook list) Elisa Camahort Page and Lisa Stone and Jory Des Jardins and Morra Aarons-Mele and Cooper Munroe and Emily McKhann and Liz Gumbinner and Kristen Chase and Asha Dornfest and Jennifer Burdette Satterwhite and Mary Spivey Tsao and Danielle Wiley and people I haven’t mentioned here (Sorry – some I’m not completely sure who I met in 2006 and who later.) Feels like I’ve known you all forever as well as Sarah Granger and Kelly Wickham and Jill Miller Zimon and Joanne Bamberger and Stacey Ferguson and Cynthia Liu and Anita Sarah Jackson and Jenn Pozner and Cheryl Contee (and and and) And that doesn’t count the new (to me) folks like Sharon Hodor Greenthal!.

2. An entirely new way to communicate and create.

3. More fun than a barrel of groovy blogger women knew they could deliver. And – here’s the reason I’m writing this post at all:

4. Another decade at least of being part of and participating in the new parts of the world – online and on screens, instead of watching from the bleachers.

Lots of boomer women have joined me and the other early birds each year and I am certain they feel the same way (I’ve asked several and besides they’ve written about it.) At a time when many of our friends are settling into a more and more peer-centered life, we have the gift of having broadened, rather than narrowed, our world and hearing the voices of women we never would have known about, much less known for real. So David, thank you for the gift of my entry into this universe and for the imagination and vision that opened your mind to its possibilities. It’s a beautiful place to hang out and I’ll always remember who sent me through the door.

Margot Adler Sang at My Wedding

Margo in the foreground; that's me in the back. — Margo in the foreground; that’s me in the back.

It was 1971. The song – no surprise to anyone who was young then, was Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream, Ed McCurdy’s anti-war anthem. We knew we couldn’t get married in the middle of the war that had defined much of our lives without acknowledging it, and the song was the perfect way. Margot was amazing, her voice clear and passionate; people even cried as we two 20-somethings stood, mid-ceremony, and Margot sang. She had a great voice, had actually been a music person forever, and attended the famed Music and Art High School in Manhattan.

We met cute. A friend brought her into the Senate Radio-TV Gallery, just off the press balcony overlooking the Senate. Reporters wrote their spots there, and there was a small studio where Senators could come and make statements for the cameras. I didn’t know Margot, but her Pacifica Radio friend knew she had a question that any pal of Margot’s would have loved.

“Pacifica (the progressive, listener-supported NY-based FM radio station) wants to hire me to cover the White House. I’ve just come back from Cuba where I was helping the Venceremos Brigade harvest sugar cane. Will that be a problem?”

This was Richard Nixon’s White House she was asking about. You can imagine my answer.

It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

From then on, until I left Washington with the man who is still my husband, our adventures were many, and varied and intense. The moment that rises to the top though, is a small one, very Margot – precise and painful.

We had seen Love Story, the shameless, sentimental, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry” Love Story. (Yeah, I know, but everyone went – even politicos like us.) She was quite upset, more than I would have thought – and I never go by Mt. Sinai Hospital on Fifth Ave without remembering it. “What I hated most” she said, “was the scene on the street outside the hospital where my mother died. It was like they threw it in there to make the whole thing extra painful.”

It’s a small story but it always stayed with me. Along with the time we came to NY after we had moved to Palo Alto so Rick could finish school. We were staying with her and we walked in and there in the front hall was her altar. It was the first time we learned of her decision to follow her Wiccan self and it was such a weird way to find out. She kind of said “Well I couldn’t just put it in a letter, right?”

She was, of course, a brilliant reporter and writer and thinker. She was fun and alive and full of curiosity and political brilliance and personal warmth and charm. I hadn’t seen her in a long time, but this week, she’s very much with me, along with the memories of that day, and of course, this song.

Obvious Child: So Much More than an “Abortion Movie”

My hands were shaking as I left the theater. Obvious Child is not traumatic, exactly, it’s just so real. There’s even a line about “old men in black robes.” You already know the story. What you don’t know — can’t know — until you see the film is that the story is just a frame upon which to hang a remarkable set of truths, some painful, some still painfully true, some funny and touching and surprising.

At first I wasn’t even sure I liked our heroine, Donna. She was careless and immature (but also lovable and self-deprecating) and — funny. Of course in some ways she had to be. These circumstances can’t be picture-book or the movie is propaganda instead of the affecting work of filmmaking that it is.

I am closer to her parents’ age than to hers, so the role that they, particularly her mother (SPOILER ALERT) played was especially moving, as she told her “kitchen table abortion” story and, when it counted, flattened the wall that had kept mother and daughter apart for so long. It was a stark reminder not only of the realities that all women share, but also of what women my age knew to be true when we were young: termination of an unintended pregnancy was a risk to our lives. A risk many of us fear has returned.

Right now, today, we face assaults on all sides: contraception, equal pay, voting rights, civil rights and of course, abortion. The quiet, sometimes funny, sometimes incredibly sad, journey through this film evokes grief over the threats we know are emerging with more and more power. It’s one woman’s story from one wild night to shock to truly loving families and friends who can’t quite compensate for the crisis to the inevitably sad, lonely moment as the procedure unfolds to the life that lies ahead.

The difference, the reason Obvious Child is so much more than “that abortion movie” is that it offers characters we come to love, a crisis we all recognize, a family clearly a product of the open child rearing that many of us chose over the stratified parenting we experienced as well as loving, truth-telling, strong friends and fully-developed principal characters with depth and, under all that irreverent Millennial camouflage, deep sensitivity and honor.

The Statue and the Synagogue

This is what the women saw. There are few sanctuaries more beautiful and moving than this 1675 Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue in Amsterdam, and here the women, while separated, were still able to share its beauty. In fact, in many ways, they saw more.

The service, certainly, but also the outside world for which they prayed. It was a hike to get there, of course, but the dignity and faith that infuses the place was more available to them than in many other observant synagogues. It’s difficult to describe the peace and beauty of this place, even with a photo. Or two. The black and white one is a wedding photo taken in the synagogue.

So where you ask is the statue? Well, he’s right here. Baruch Spinoza, whose ideas wreaked havoc in religious communities of Europe. Here’s what Wikipedia says:

Philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel said of all contemporary philosophers, “You are either a Spinozist or not a philosopher at all.”^[8]

Spinoza’s given name in different languages is Hebrew: ברוך שפינוזה‎ Baruch Spinoza, Portuguese: Benedito or Bento de Espinosa and Latin: Benedictus de Spinoza; in all these languages, the given name means “the Blessed”. Spinoza was raised in the Portuguese Jewish community in Amsterdam. He developed highly controversial ideas regarding the authenticity of the Hebrew Bible and the nature of the Divine. The Jewish religious authorities issued a cherem (Hebrew: חרם, a kind of ban, shunning, ostracism, expulsion, or excommunication) against him, effectively excluding him from Jewish society at age 23. His books were also later put on the Catholic Church’s Index of Forbidden Books.

A powerful figure in Jewish history and history in general, he stands just steps from the Synagogue, there – and not there; a compelling figure of faith — and doubt.

We are currently sailing through the Kiel Canal, an engineering feat that cut northern Europe in half and created a pathway that reduced isolation for many. Tonight we stop in Helsingborg, Sweden and Friday night, in Copenhagen.

Farewell to Friends

This is me with my new sister Ramona. We met when we were looking to share a car to Mont-Saint-Michele and she and her amazing husband decided to join us. We have had the best week. Remarkable how quickly relationships form in a travel environment.

Now she is returning to her home in Beirut with her husband to await a new grandchild due within days of ours. We had a wonderful time with them. Thanks my friend! And send pictures.

“There’s not a word yet, for old friends who’ve just met.”
― Jim Henson,

The Heathers Would Love American Blogger (at least the trailer)

First, watch this and see if you notice anything odd (other than the SNL-ish narrator)

When Sheryl Sandberg launched her Lean In Foundation, I noted the homogeneity in looks, age and (not literally but almost) hair on their Who We Are page. It’s gotten a little better over there, but the coming documentary American Blogger (or at least its trailer) … hasn’t.

I wish I were as temperate as Be Blogalicious co-founder Stacy Ferguson , as thoughtful as Katherine Stone and others on the #americanblogger Facebook thread or as enthusiastic as some of the film’s participants and their friends, but I felt like I was watching Charlie’s Angels Build a Blog..

The rest of us seemed somehow excluded — unworthy, almost. Because life online, and blogging especially, can be such a naked experience with such power to build deep relationships and tribes, the unfortunate, beauty queen/Martha Stewart Home nature of the two minutes we saw seemed a personal assault, suggesting that the women in this film are the women we need to know to understand and appreciate the online world the rest of us have come to rely upon and love.

For me, this world is better represented by the tribe that surrounded the last journey of Susan Niebur, the infertility quest of Melissa Ford, Laurie White’s transformation, Kelly Wickham’s tales about life, The Cuban and the kids in her school, Erin Kotcecki Vest’s fight against lupus, Morra Aarons-Mele on business and on politics, Joanne Bamberger on women and politics, Jill Miller Zimon on politics and running for office (right now!) or Liz Gumbinner about almost anything.

I know the women chosen here also have deep feelings about blogging and they are in no way responsible for the choices made by the film’s creator. The film is the sum of its parts and it seems that each individual participant joined in good faith because of their love of what they do.

But this trailer, as it introduces us to the project, is so exclusive and exclusionary that it’s hard to remember that if you know it and hard to discover if you don’t.

Take a look at this perfect response: The Real American Blogger, where bloggers across the web post less airbrushed versions of the women who write here, who are of course as diverse and generous and cranky and skinny and large and messy and neat and coifed and barely head-covered and patient and pissed and happy and sad and lonely and not as the rest of us – except, apparently, the women chosen to promote this film as it moves toward release.

That Was No Commercial! That Was My Dad

I really loved my dad. So did my kids. Our first grandson carries his name. There’s a reason for that, and the magic of this commercial is that it understands and validates that reason.

Every great ad is supposed to tell a story, but this one doesn’t have to; instead, it validates our own. For any daughter whose dad believed in her, listened to and argued respectfully with her opinions and loved her unconditionally, especially a daughter whose dad is no longer here, the magic of this small moment is that, for 30 seconds, it almost brings him back, allows us to feel again the warm embrace of that love.

Of course its main mission is to sell something, I know. But I’m grateful that this one, as it sold, gave us something lovely in return.