My children went back to school today. My son woke me at 6:20 to say goodbye with “Mom! Get up! It’s time to go back to the angst.” “You have angst?” I asked. “All teenagers have angst, Mom,” was the reply.
I am working on several things at the moment: today’s blog post, my professional website and a memoir. Today’s blog post could well wind up being tomorrow’s blog post. The professional website is an ongoing nightmare. I wish Le Clown would do it for me, but I have no money. The memoir? It makes me giggle to even think of it as I have the worst memory in the history of history. But, my husband has a Ph.D. in history and knows me pretty well, so he can help me remember the stupid things like dates.
So, if y’all don’t mind, I’m going to enjoy the three more hours of freedom I have before the boy comes back to regale me with tales of angst. I’m going to run then get my butt in the kitchen to crank out my traditional first day of school cookies.
During my student teaching assignment, I stood every morning with my students and recited the Pledge of Allegiance. Every morning, I managed to cough during the “under God” part. I’m sure the kids thought I had a cold or allergies, but the truth was, I couldn’t say the words without feeling like a hypocrite.
See, I don’t believe in big-G god. You know, the white guy on the cloud dispensing justice. The creator of the Universe, the guy who put dinosaurs and people on the Earth together then decided to kill off the dinosaurs and cover that little slip up by making it look like dinosaurs died ever so much longer ago than they really did. I like to think of God playing a little prank on archaeologists. Just his way of having fun. Immortality’s gotta be boring as (wait for it) hell.
I also don’t believe that the United States of America was founded as a Christian nation, but that’s a discussion for another post.
So, my saying “under God” is not going to happen without a fight. I know I could just say the words as if they don’t really matter. Who really knows what all those words mean, anyway? Certainly the children who say them have no idea what they are really saying. But I do. And I can’t make myself say the Pledge the way we currently say it.
But Americans, by and large, love their flag. They love their flag so much that they even get kind of snotty when someone—say, a politician or an athlete—doesn’t wear the flag.
Back when Barack Obama was running for President the first time, some media pundits decided to pick on him for not wearing a flag pin. Everyone else was wearing a flag pin but Barack wasn’t wearing a flag pin. That meant he wasn’t proud of his country. He said some stuff about living American values that didn’t really get anyone to settle down so he started wearing a flag pin.
Recently, some unnamed pundit-y guy on Fox (“unnamed pundit-y guy” means I can’t remember his name) decided that the TeamUSA women gymnasts weren’t American enough because they didn’t have little flags on their $500 custom-made leotards.
Photo: buzzfeed
Now, I watched the gymnastics. I watched a lot of the gymnastics. There were white leotards, red leotards and blue leotards. All of them were encrusted with white Swarovski crystals that twinkled like stars. If you paid even a little bit of attention, you could see that the top of the “V” in their uniforms was actually the top half of a star and radiating out from the star were stripes. Get it? Red. White. Blue. Stars. Stripes. Sounds like the American flag to me. I guess the pundit-y guy missed that ‘cause he was so distracted by Gabby Douglas’ messy hair.
The American value I am most proud of is our freedom of speech, speech in all it’s forms. I am free to not say “under God.” I am free to call my President a spineless wienie if I like. I am free to say that George Bush was not the brightest bulb in the chandelier. I am free to protest anything my government does that I don’t think is American or even humane.
One of the things I am free to do is to burn my flag. When my country does something so heinous—say, expanding a war from Vietnam into surrounding countries—I am free to protest in a way that clearly shows how angry I am. The Supreme Court has ruled, more than once, that constitutionally okay to burn the flag in protest because the burning is protected political speech.
While the Supreme Court would have my back should I decide to burn the flag, there are plenty of Americans who would likely shoot me in the back. Or at least want to.
I understand where the whole idea of pledging allegiance comes from, thanks to reading “Game of Thrones.” Way back when, before anything, kings didn’t have armies. When they needed to go to war, they gathered up other nobles and influentials to “pledge” to be on their side. Every body had their own flags to indentify their group of warriors, so an army might have lots and lots of flags in it, but everyone was pledged to fight for the big guy and gather under his flag.
Wearing a flag doesn’t make you more or less American. Acting like an American—choosing our own leaders, defending the right to free speech and the pursuit of happiness—these are what make us American.
We can imagine no more appropriate response to burning a flag than waving one’s own, no better way to counter a flag burner’s message than by saluting the flag that burns, no surer means of preserving the dignity even of the flag that burned than by – as one witness here did – according its remains a respectful burial. We do not consecrate the flag by punishing its desecration, for in doing so we dilute the freedom that this cherished emblem represents.
— Justice William J. Brennan, from his majority opinion in Texas v. Johnson (1989)
I’ve been watching the Olympics this year much more than in the past. My daughter does gymnastics and I run. She also did a track camp this summer, so we’re grabbing the highlights every night and watching the things we missed OnDemand. Last night, we watched Mo Farah win the men’s 10K, then do the happy dance with Galen Rupp. It was awesome.
Loved watching the women’s gymnastics and the swimming. We even watched a little women’s boxing, a match between a Chinese woman and one from Kazahkstan. We’ve seen Brits, Romanians and Russians win and been inspired by South Africans, Germans and Jamaicans.
All that good feeling goes out the window when the medal count begins. Is it only my country, or does every country keep count of how many medals they’ve won? Sure, my country wins a lot of medals, but my country is huge. China wins a lot of medals, too; they invented huge along with noodles and fireworks. I know it’s very American to want the best, to want to be the best and to think we are the best, even when we aren’t. After Mckayla Maroney landed on her butt in the vault and the gold medal went to Sandra Raluca Izbasa of Romania, the US announcers were still proclaiming Maroney the best gymnast in the world on vault.
Well, Maroney may be the best in the world on most days, but at the Olympics she sat down and her competition didn’t. I would have liked a little more focus on the winner, a little slow mo’ on her performance. But I got shots of a stoic Maroney and then a break-away to the anchor desk for a recap of my country’s race to win the most medals.
What’s it like in your country? Daily medal counts? Or do you get to savor the Olympic moments of all the champions? If you’re American, do you care about how many medals “we” win? Just wondering.
My son likes to think that being born in Chicago at Prentice Hospital for Women makes him a city boy. Never mind that he spent fewer than 24 hours outside of my womb in said hospital. He thinks he’s a city boy and really shines the closer he gets to concrete and smog. So, yesterday we escaped our tract house on the prairie and went into Chicago for lunch. Along for the ride were my nephew, visiting from New York, and a friend of my son’s.
We’re a burger eating bunch and, all pizza aside, Chicago is a great town for a burger. I took a peek at the Chicago Burger Bible website and selected The Lock Down Bar and Grill in Ukrainian Village for our Summer Burger Adventure. I’d never been to Ukrainian Village, though my niece recently moved there. The Lock Down reports showing a different live rock concert video every day and the Burger Bible puts their burgers among the top 10 in the city. It’s a pretty freaking big city, so it’s gotta be a pretty freaking good burger, I thought.
I was right. The burgers are good and they are big! This is not a restaurant review so I didn’t pay much attention to the names of things. I did take pictures before we decimated our meals. Everyone liked their food, but only one of us finished: the quiet, shy guy from the ‘burbs. It was fun to watch my son and nephew, both guitar players, try to name the music playing inside the bar.
Dill Pickle Chips…deep-fried slices of pickle, not potato chips that taste like dill pickles. Tasty, but a little goes a long way.This is “The Bootleg” burger with bacon, kimchi and a fried egg. Reportedly a little on the salty side.
The weather was great—beautiful blue sky and not too hot with a cool (lake?) breeze. The location was perfect—far enough off a busy street to be able to chat but not so far we lost the urban vibe. The company was stellar—people I love who I rarely get to just sit and hang with.
This one’s not on the website menu. Onion rings stacked high over a pile of Gorgonzola. Definitely not edible without a flip-top mouth.For the petite appetite. You can get these babies plain if you’re a kid, otherwise they come in a “flavor of the week.”
My idea of a perfect summer moment. What’s yours?
A rare glimpse behind the scenes at Snide Reply. That’s me in the middle. My nephew, a future Oscar-winning animator, is on my left. Click on his link in the first paragraph to see his work, then hire him. The Viking Lord on the right is my son.
It’s Father’s Day. I’m sitting with my Dad on the patio.
“How are you, Dad?” I ask.
“Not very good,” he says, looking down at his hands. I’ve never seen him this sad.
“Your mother rejected me,” he says and tells me, through tears, that my mother left him.
I start to cry, not knowing which is worse, telling my father that my mother died nearly four years ago or letting him believe she’s still alive and left him.
“Dad,” I say, as gently as I can, “Mom’s dead. She died almost four years ago. She would never leave you.” He looks up, confused. He’s confused nearly all the time now.
“You took such good care of her, do you remember that?” He’s trying. “She had emphysema and you took such good care of her. She was just too sick. We had to let her go, Dad.” I wonder if he remembers making the decision ending life support. He believes me. He believes and he’s sad, but he’s calmer.
I visit my dad every week these days, but I never know where it’ll be. Last week, it was Denver. He was waiting at his hotel, while my mother and grandmother shopped for houses. They’d come to Denver for a convention, something they did a lot. Traveling to conventions, that is, not traveling to Denver. He seemed anxious about buying yet another house, but he’d never really been able to say “No” to my mother. I told him I knew the feeling.
Another visit saw us in Hong Kong, having dinner with a group of executives my dad clearly didn’t like because they’d kidnapped me. Yet another visit saw us in Rochester at a bicycle factory. There was our visit in an undisclosed location in Romania, where my dad told me he was forced to sit on a minaret to escape the men trying to capture him in Saudi Arabia. Recently, my sister married the Shah of Iraq, so we have an Arabian theme going lately.
My dad’s delusions are nothing compared to the other residents. There’s the woman who gathers all of the baby dolls and stuffed animals and arrays them on a table. She dresses them all and sets them down to sleep then complains about how she has so many babies to care for. There’s the 105-year old woman who was once a singer. She still tries to sing but it comes out as screeching wails. There’s the woman who sits quietly and, when she catches your eye doesn’t say “Hello,” but “I’m afraid.” “Afraid of what?” I asked. “Of dying,” she replied.
It’s hard not to make the leap to The Snake Pit or One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest or whatever look-inside-the-loony-bin movie was popular in your particular generation. This, after all, is what crazy people are and do.
But I know better. My father and his housemates aren’t nuts. They have a terrible disease that literally eats at their brains, destroying the web that connects a lifetime of accumulated memory and leaving them with a stew of thought they continually try to make sense of.
No. They are not crazy; I am. At least, that’s what my society says. I have bipolar disorder; I am bipolar. I never know which description to use, so I use both. But no matter how I reveal my condition, I get a universal reaction, spoken or no. “That chick is crazy.” Someone even told me, “Wow. You’d never know to look at you!”
I suppose that’s a compliment; the self-harming, judgmental thoughts, over-spending and insomnia don’t show on my face. Of course, the medication helps. More likely, it’s an indication of how crazy Americans are about mental illness.
I happen to come from a family of crazies. Alcoholism, schizophrenia, drug abuse were things I learned about early. None of the crazies looked crazy. Well, ok, the schizophrenic lived in another state, so I didn’t see him very often and can’t really say he never looked crazy. Still, “you’d never know to look” at any of them that they lived with demons.
So, I don’t usually tell people I’m bipolar, though I’ve been doing it more often lately. Maybe it was the “you don’t look” it comment; maybe it’s my own growing acceptance. I’ve been more active in the blogosphere lately and the anonymity it affords makes it easier for crazies to hang out and connect with each other.
In America, you can pretty much tell who’s a flag-waving conservative by, well, the flags waving on their houses. I decided, some time ago, to take back the flag. This is my country, too, I thought, and hung the flag on our porch.
So, I’m taking back crazy. I’m a mom, a writer and a teacher. I have two great kids and the obligatory pets that go along with living in one of America’s most famous suburbs. I’m happily married.
One look at him and I knew he wasn’t done. Brow furrowed, mouth turned down, eyes wide, he was half an inch from starting up again and I had no idea how to stop him. Then the tears started.
“Why are you crying?” I asked as gently as possible.
“Because of the lump in my froat,” he said, still too young to get the “th” sound right.
“The lump is in your throat because you’re crying,” I said. “So, why are you crying?”
“Because of the lump,” he said. I sighed. The physiology behind tear production apparently isn’t part of the public school kindergarten curriculum.
“Well, when we are sad, we cry and the lump means that you are thinking about something sad and then you cry because of the sad thing, not because of the lump,” I explained. Then, he cried in earnest.
“Why are you sad?” I asked.
He cried.
“Are you thinking about mommy?” I asked.
He cried harder. Ah, I thought, something to work with.
“Well, stop thinking about mommy,” I said.
The crying paused, as he considered whether it were truly possible to stop thinking about mommy when he was sure that mommy had abandoned him at math enrichment class. He began to cry again.
“Think about math,” I said. Well, I thought, that was the lamest thing you could have said. Sensing the lameness of my advice, he continued crying.
“Wait! Wait!” I said. “I have an idea! Let’s try this!” He paused.
“Take a deep breath and pretend you’re smelling a big bunch of flowers.” He inhaled.
“Now, blow it out and pretend you’re blowing out the candles on a cake.” He exhaled.
We inhaled and exhaled for a while ‘til he calmed enough to think about math. We got through the lesson. He never knew I learned “smell the flowers, blow out the candles” while helping care for my own mother, who died of emphysema.
I didn’t cry for my mother in public other than those dainty little trails so insignificant that they barely need to be wiped away. I remember holding my daughter’s hand as we walked down the aisle behind my mother’s casket. I spied a friend in a pew toward the front. Tears came to my eyes. I took a deep breath and closed my eyes until the tears passed, not in time to keep one from trickling down my cheek but before my mascara suffered any damage. My mother would have approved.
I’d like to tell you that my aversion to public crying is based on aesthetics. Runny, ruddy noses and red-rimmed eyes are unattractive at best. But I know that I really do think crying is for sissies and I am no sissy. No, I don’t think this is a particularly healthy stance, but it’s the one I’ve got. And, yes, I do know that big girls, and big men, do cry.
It’s not that I don’t feel like crying. I feel like crying so often I might be able to cry a river. Between hormone fluctuations and bipolar disorder, my brain chemistry is pretty much primed to turn any amount of pathos into a bawl. Remember that Coke
(ok, so it was Pepsi) commercial with the little boy being pounced on by a pack of puppies? Had me in tears every time I saw it. Now, I’m not talking little sniffles. I’m talking about tears that lasted way past the commercial break. That Procter and Gamble spot with all the moms dragging their sleepy kids out of bed so they (the kids, that is) can become Olympic athletes? Wrings sobs from me. Is it no wonder I’ve trained my tears to stop on command?
My kids, particularly my daughter, have picked up on my propensity for becoming maudlin over recorded fare ranging from the sentimental to the insipid. We’ll be watching a movie, say We Bought A Zoo, and everything will be going along swimmingly until the dad-figure and the son-figure have a touching moment that begins to heal the rift they’ve felt between them since the mom-figure died. Only seconds after my eyes begin to fill up, my daughter says, “You’re crying, aren’t you?” Doesn’t even have to look, she just knows it. My sister suffers the same schmaltz-induced weeping. Her kids are far less kind. “Look!” they say, “Mom’s crying! You’re crying, aren’t you?” I believe I’ve seen my sister stick her tongue out at them.
My daughter may have taken a page from my niece and nephews. Recently, she and a friend were cleaning up the family room. By that I mean they were listening to music, dancing and performing gymnastics amidst a myriad of books, stuffed animals and craft supplies. A particular Selena Gomez song came on; I’ve written about this song before. My daughter knows it makes me cry. So, in consideration of my tender feelings, she said, “Watch this! This song always makes my mom cry. See! There she goes!”
There, indeed, I did go. My daughter’s friend’s mother apparently does not cry at sappy Selena Gomez songs. Friend looked at me as if I were some exotic creature. “Why does this song make you cry?” she asked, cocking her head to one side like a scientist. I resisted the urge to hand her a clipboard and pencil.
“Well,” I said, “lots of women have a nasty voice inside their heads that tells them they are ugly or fat or stupid. It makes me sad that I have that voice in my head and I hope my daughter never does.”
She nodded her head and went back to turning cartwheels. Yes, in fact, I did cry writing that last paragraph—in the peace and privacy of my office.
Read this! It’s a post from a blog I read, sweetmotherlover. Take my word; just read it. You’ll get all ticked off and isn’t that a great way to start the day?
When I started blogging, I didn’t read other people’s blogs. I was new; what did I know? Frankly, it never really occurred to me that anyone beyond my immediate family would care what came out of my fingertips, unless it was Dr. Pepper. Quite a few people in my family would be impressed if I could shoot Dr. Pepper out of my fingertips. Or lasers. It’d be pretty cool to shoot lasers out of my fingertips.
While my list of followers is not that large—I know people who’ve had more guests at their weddings than I have on Snide Reply—it’s far more than my gene pool alone could supply. I learned pretty quickly that you gotta spread the blog love. If you’re writing blogs, then you should be reading them, too. Blogosphere tit-for-tat.
I discovered that there are certain blog posts that are de rigueur. As I write, I have a headache otherwise I would remember all the different kinds of posts I’m supposed to write. There’s the Search Terms post; that’s the one in which you write about all the crazy search terms people used that brought them to your blog. When I wrote my search terms post, “penis” was in all of the top five terms. Today, I am pleased to report there is not a single “penis” in the top five. Ok, there’s a “dick,” but I’m not counting it. Could be someone is looking for their Uncle Dick, not their uncle’s dick.
The other kind of post that I can remember is the Goodness Gratefulness Post. I did do a gratitude post some time back; it got Freshly Pressed. But it pretty much thumbed its nose at the idea of being grateful ‘cause, really, must we be grateful all the time? I think not. Still, I’ve been kinda down and thought maybe focusing on what’s good might help. So, here are the things that strike me as good today.
My son earned a D in American Studies.
Asian parents abound in our neighborhood; for many of them, the only achievements worth celebrating are As. Then there is my family, whooping it up over our son’s D. We are celebrating the fact that a D is not an F. We are celebrating the fact that our son seems to finally understand that it doesn’t matter if you think your teacher is a douche bag bad teacher nor does it matter if you can get an A on the final without doing the homework. My husband and I now understand that grounding is far more effective when there is something at stake, like driving around aimlessly with one’s friends.
There is no wolverine in my garage.
Garages and basements are the same thing in my mind, except that the garage has immediate access to nature. Creepy, cluttered, spider-ridden, dark and dusty, basements are the stuff of horror shows. Mine would be a blockbuster. But as scary as basements are, they have the advantage of being rather more difficult to infiltrate than, say, a garage. While my garage is no Taj, it would make a commodious abode for any wandering wildlife. So, I always step gingerly into the garage, particularly at night, despite six years of venturing there without incident. I shall remain vigilant. Hell, there’s an opossum living under our deck; why wouldn’t there be a wolverine in the garage?
Coyote pups are really cute.
Early in the spring, a coyote crossed my path as I ran through the prairie preserve near my house. Feigning disinterest in devouring me, he stared me down then slunk silently into the reeds ringing the marsh to the north. Feigning nonchalance, I reversed my running course and fled—I mean, jogged calmly away—resisting the urge to run forward while looking back.
Approximately two months later, a pair of coyote pups crossed my path while running through the same preserve. Looking more like teddy bears than predators, they scurried into the grass at the side of the trail, barely hid their fluffy little faces and watched me jog calmly by. They were gone by the time I had doubled back, headed toward home. Hunting, I supposed. With their dad. Far from me.
There are lots of baby bunnies this time of year.
I spied a baby bunny in my yard this morning. He looked so much like the fiend that devoured my roses when we first moved here that I gave an involuntary cringe. I shooed him away, toward the prairie preserve and the darling coyote pups. Hey! Circle of life, people. It’s a bitch.
There’s bacon in the fridge.
I have a friend who doesn’t get bacon, as in “Bacon? What’s so special about bacon?” I try to understand her point of view by remembering that she loves beer. Now, I like beer. Lately, I’ve been drinking beer on a semi-regular basis. I even have some in the fridge right now. But I won’t drink just any beer. My dad would drink any beer, especially any cheap beer. My friend and I are far more discriminating. And that’s where the beer and bacon comparison falls apart. There are bad beers. There are spectacularly bad beers. But there is no such thing as bad bacon. There is bacon that is a little too salty, or too fatty or not cooked exactly the way you like it. But it’s all bacon and it’s all good.
There’s a really ugly battle going on, one that I witness every single day. It’s a battle that’s been going on for years, but seems to have gotten particularly evil recently. It’s not in Afghanistan, Pakistan or Syria. It’s right here in the United States. It’s the one between the least likely set of combatants: American moms.
Every single day lately, I hear something hateful come from the mouths (or computers) of moms. Moms criticize moms for working. Moms ridicule moms for not working. Moms look down their noses at moms for using formula. Moms secretly envy moms who can breastfeed their babies. Moms hate moms and I’m freaking sick of it.
I’m particularly sick of the battle between stay-at-home moms and moms who work outside the home for pay. I call them Work-Away Moms. I don’t think there’s been a time when the battle has been so filled with vitriol. The Ann Romney/Hilary Rosen thing is only the tip of the iceberg. Recently, I read this from a SAHM regarding a WAM who asked what the SAHM does all day. “I wanted to shove my fist up her *ss.”
The Gallup organization recently released a study noting that stay-at-home moms are more depressed than other women, including work-away moms. Twenty eight percent of SAHMs report depression; only 17 percent of the work-away moms report depression, the same percent of women polled who have no children. The real news here though is that this is old news.
Betty Friedan wrote about stay-at-home moms and their unhappiness in 1963 in her pivotal work, The Feminine Mystique, which became a foundational writing in feminist literature. Nearly 50 years ago, Betty Freidan already knew what Gallup is reporting as the latest news: mothering is difficult work that is undervalued by our society and that pisses moms off. It’s not very PC to get mad about caring for your offspring, so Angry Mom becomes Depressed Mom. It was true then and it’s true now. Of course, today we’ve got a happy pill for Sad Mommy.
Let’s be careful when we look at these statistics, though. Most of the moms slinging mud at each other—staying at home, working at home or working away—are middle- to upper-class white ladies. When we talk about stay-at-home moms, though, we are most often talking about women living in poverty. Women who are at home because they can’t find work. Women who are the sole parent in their homes. Women who could work at Burger King, but then couldn’t afford the childcare. We’re not talking Ann Romney here, though I wouldn’t begrudge her a depressive episode, being married to Mr. Dignity Of Work.
Don’t be too quick to applaud Ms. Freidan for her prescience. Being a feminist is as uncool these days as being…well, I can’t think of anything that’s as uncool. Feminists are responsible for the bind we find our mothers in. If it weren’t for the stinking feminists, SAH moms wouldn’t feel so damn bad about themselves and we’d be celebrating the glory that is being home with your children 24/7. If it weren’t for the stinking feminists, all those women who chose their careers over their kids would get their butts back home where they belong.
Wrong. In fact, there couldn’t be a more twisted, deceitful interpretation of what the Women’s Liberation Movement attempted to achieve. Gloria Steinem and her feminist friends envisioned a society where “the American child’s classic problem–too much mother, too little father–that would be cured by an equalization of parental responsibility.” In other words, Mom and Dad share the parenting—equally. Think that happens already? Who signs the kids up for summer camp? Who makes the doctor appointments? Who washes the sheets the baby puked on?
Steinem saw a world where “there will be free access to good jobs–and decent pay for the bad ones women have been performing all along, including housework.”
How would that happen? How could it be possible? If we could get past our rugged individualism, we could get to a world where we put our money where our mouths are. You can yap about family values all you want, but a Family and Medical Leave Act that doesn’t include pay of some kind is a joke to the majority of workers who can’t afford to go without pay for six weeks. According to Forbes magazine, in 2009, the United States and Australia were the only developed nations without some form of paid leave. I’m Danish, but didn’t have my kids there. If I had, I would have been able to stay home with my son for a full year at full pay. Instead, I pieced together four months of leave by adding all of the vacation and sick days I had to my six unpaid weeks. I saved like a demon so we could get by while my husband worked on building a business. Then I went back to work so we could keep our house.
Feminists didn’t make the world worse for women. Do you like being entitled to half of your marital property? Thank a feminist; it wasn’t yours until 1969. Are you married and use the last name you were born with? Thank a feminist. You couldn’t do that until 1972. Did you use birth control before you got married? Thank a feminist; you couldn’t do that until 1972. If your husband treats you like crap, you can divorce him. Couldn’t do that in 1969. In fact, until 1976 your husband could legally rape you. I was a senior in high school; we’re not talking ancient history here.
It’s hard for me not to see the trash thrown under the bed in the mom-on-mom battle. White moms—the ones who have the greatest access to political and monetary power—need to be kept busy with stupid crap like whether or not Rush Limbaugh is a pig. If we weren’t, we might get together and work toward healthcare coverage that recognizes hormones are used for more than just birth control.
I’m sick of hearing that work-away mothers chose their careers over their children. I’m sick of hearing that women who can’t breast feed just aren’t trying hard enough. I’m sick of hearing that stay-at-home moms sit around scrapbooking. I’m sick of hearing that work-away moms take advantage of the PTA moms. I’m sick of hearing how hard stay-at-home moms work. I’m sick of hearing how hard work-away moms work.
It’s all distraction, distraction aimed at keeping us from joining together to fight for paid family leave so moms and dads can be home with their kids. It’s a distraction aimed at keeping us from fighting for equal pay for mothers who work away from home—for whatever reason. It’s a distraction that keeps us from fighting for the right to make our own reproductive choices and not be humiliated because of them.
My children went back to school today. My son woke me at 6:20 to say goodbye with “Mom! Get up! It’s time to go back to the angst.” “You have angst?” I asked. “All teenagers have angst, Mom,” was the reply.
Snide Reply 