How Honest is Too Honest?

In the Fall issue of get born magazine, we published a list of “Truths” spoken by us, by other moms, overheard at the book club, etc. Truths like, “I regularly drank wine during my pregnancy,” generated some buzz, both good and bad.
Where is the confessional line in the sand? How honest is too honest?

We will print selected answers from your discussion in the Spring issue of get born, as well as give you our response to one vocal critic’s opinion.

Here are some answers to get you started. To see how the spread looked in our Winter issue, you can go to: http://getbornmag.com/2010/01/too-honest/

[Yesterday] the boys and I went into the bathroom at Whole Foods and met a woman who shared that she has 17 year old twin sons. She told me “this is the best time” (meaning having kids the ages of M&R). I said, “Sometimes.” She looked at me as though I was ungrateful and really missing out on something. I felt guilty for being honest. I haven’t been feeling especially fulfilled (or fulfilling) as a mother, for that matter. I would have loved for this woman with older kids to hug me and say – “You know, I remember a few times when it was really hard to be at their beck and call.” But instead, I got the message that having school-aged twin boys was 100% treasure. Honesty…by Keri-MK

Posted by Jenae Huffman Proctor:
I was talking to my step-monster (step-mother) a couple months ago and I was crying while telling her how overwhelmed I had been feeling with two young boys who are always touching, hugging, sitting, nursing and sleeping on me. I thought I was at a breaking point. She looked at me with a very sarcastic grin and voice and said, “Ya, Jenae it must be really tough having so much love all of the time.”

That is exactly what I needed to hear….that is when the guilt stabbed me in the back and I completely shut down.

Sarah Lancaster said:
Older parents only look back on these days so fondly because THEY FORGET ALL THE CRAPPY MOMENTS!!!

Registry Revisited

Registry Revisited
Copyright by Michelle Fried

Four years after giving birth, I’m still pregnant with all the useless junk I received at my baby shower. Pathetically, most of this stuff I actually asked for. Yep, that was me, waddling aimlessly through the aisles of my local baby store, laser gun cocked, attempting to blast away my parenting insecurities. Naive like an overblown puffer fish, I bought the mega-baby marketing claims hook, line and sinker. Today, with the gift of a good night’s sleep and steady hormones, I have a few ideas about the gifts I wish I’d actually received:

✓ A Jumbo Book of Deluxe Car Washes – While conducting research under the seats of my Honda minivan, I recently uncovered these treasures: moldy french-fries, a grasshopper (legs plucked free), an old (and possibly used) pull-up, a carton of chocolate milk and ten thousand Happy Meal toys. A book of ten car washes is number one on my revised baby shower wish list.

✓ A Custom-Fit Bra – After a forty-four month-long marathon of pregnancies and breast feeding, I’m in dire need of some major remodeling up top. Since my husband refuses to cough up the cash for a new set of hooters, a custom bra would be just the thing. Say goodbye to frayed, saggy maternity bras, nasty lesions across your shoulders and church mom style. Say hello to strategically placed padding, a pajama-comfy fit and red-hot candy trim.

✓ A Hot Personal Trainer – Despite the propaganda, those ten (or thirty) pounds don’t just melt away with breastfeeding. If possible, my trainer would look a bit like Robert Downey Jr. and have a thing for women who are a little thick around the middle. Robert would come to my house each week, whip my butt into shape and drink mojitos with me by the pool (unfortunately, since we don’t have a real pool, we’ll have to lounge in the yellow dinosaur blow-up one out back).

✓ Sex for my Husband – It may take a special girlfriend to give this gift, but honestly, if I could have outsourced sex for my husband legally, I would have done it. Lucky for me, he was delirious from exhaustion and easily conned into believing we were making the rounds every week. After about a year, when I began to muster up enough energy to give it up—I got knocked UP. So, with this cautionary tale in mind, I strongly recommend farming this one out until you’re ready to have more children.

✓ Spanx –If only I had known. If only someone had shared the dirty little secret of mothers everywhere, taken pity on my post maternity muffin top, and shown me the cellulite squeezing powers of spandex. Ahhhh…just to feel once more, the pleasure, the bliss, the satisfaction of squeezing into my favorite Lucky jeans without splitting the back-side seam. But I’m in the know now, and I want to share this fat sucking miracle of the modern world with you. If you haven’t put this on your registry, do it—now.

✓ Cold Hard Cash – With mounting bills for soccer uniforms, tutors and anger management classes for me, I now realize the folly of diaper wipe warmers and monogrammed socks. Today I’d request greenbacks, gold bullion, or stock in Exxon. Skipping the fluff and investing the savings at 7%, our college fund would have grown to over $5000. A good start on a college education or a week in Tuscany –whichever comes first.

✓ Tidy Troops – Not a week goes by that I don’t find myself crawling around on the floor sticky with Cocoa Puffs looking for my car keys. Like a good soldier, I clear zones of toys and trash, only to return a few minutes later to find them infiltrated again. A clean house is almost as good as Prozac, so send the reinforcements, send the girls in the short skirts holding the feather dusters, send someone to dig me out of this mess!

✓ Nourishment – There’s a reason meals pop up on every new mother’s wish list: food is comfort, food is fuel…food is not the BBQ chips and coffee ice-cream I limped through my first few months of motherhood on. Please make us food. Please bring us food. At the very least, send over a Domino’s pizza with a six pack of Bud.

✓ In-house Spa Call – During those first few months at home, a caviar wrap with dark chocolate detox would have done just the trick. Sadly, the only place for all this pampering would have been in the middle of my toy-strewn living room surrounded by shrill cries, leaky breasts and my husband asking where the diapers are. Ask for it anyway—your stabbing sciatic nerve demands it.

✓ Peace and Quiet – Watching me pound Excedrin Migraine with Coke all day, a close friend with a gentle spirit once shared the secret of her Zen-like parenting skills—earplugs. Happily oblivious, she wears them while toasting frozen waffles, carting squabbling siblings to school and during a certain playgroup run by an annoying vegan mom. And so now, while still keeping my eyes peeled for any signs of blood or broken glass, I’m a believer and a founding member of VoDMAP–the Voluntary Deafness Movement of American Parents. Let there be peace on earth–or at least in my own head–give me a lifetime supply of earplugs.

I’m a writer mama who spends her days at her desk making light of the sometimes heavy job of mothering and her nights mopping floors and reading Goodnight Moon. I have two boys, six and four, and I’m very grateful there are magazines out there like get born that tell it like it is. You can write Michelle at contact@michellelynnfried.com

To read more of get born’s provocative, funny content, subscribe to the print version at http://www.getbornmag.com/subscribe

Dreams–unrealized, new, and old

A facebook fan made the most gorgeous statement in the comments today. She said, in response to the question, “Which songs are “your songs for your kids?”: “I used to sing Rascal Flatt’s “God Bless the Broken Road” to my oldest every night. It helped me come to terms with letting go of some of my dreams as I became a mother so that my hands would be free to gather new dreams. I don’t know that it’s “her” song per se, but it definitely speaks to me and brings me back to that time of my life.

What are your unrealized dreams? Which have you let go to pursue new ones? Which are you still hanging onto? What gives you hope that your dreams will eventually come to fruition? When do your dreams sometimes feel so far away that it pains you to even dream them? Do you dream? Speak up, we’re listening.

Which fictional mom are you?

Which fictional mom are you most like? Roseanne? Peg Bundy, perhaps? June Cleaver? Name her and tell us why.

Fabulous Quotes from get born fans

From Anne Murphy: It has always been clear that we cannot “have it all”, at least not at the same time. Still, I would say I am ambitious in that I want to do things well and deeply. I am also ambitions is the sense that there are many, many things I would like to do, and I despair that I am squandering my time. (Yes, I suppose that I do consider drop-offs, pick-ups, dishes and laundry to be a poor use of my time.) This is my struggle: how to cobble a meaningful individual life out of the bits and pieces that remain after my kids have taken a weed whacker to my day. Color me a mosaic.
Join the conversation at http://www.facebook.com/getbornmag

get born BACK TO SCHOOL promotional!

get born goes BACK TO SCHOOL

The Buzz about get born (from mothers who read and write)

get born is as close to truth in Motherhood as I can come. Why are people so set on painting motherhood as all soft and fuzzy?

get born provides an unvarnished (and therefore comforting) view of parenting.

get born fills a connection to a woman’s spirit

get born IS THE ONLY MAGAZINE AROUND THAT GETS PAST ALL THE WONDERHOOD OF BEING AN PARENT AND GETS TO THE NITTY GRITTY.

get born fulfills a need for the messy side of parenting to be aired and normalized.

get born talks about the experience of motherhood.  I love its voice (and am proud to have contributed once to that voice.)  I don’t need a magazine to help me potty train or to choose trendy vacation clothes for my baby.  My children are no longer super-small, but the reality of owning a mother’s (sometimes broken) heart is everlasting.

Writing for get born provides me with empathetical participation in the honest, and let’s face it, insane world of parenting.

I write for get born because I am a mother and a writer and being both isn’t always pretty – get born looks at the underbelly of motherhood.

WHAT DOES get born DO FOR YOU?

My Post-Cancer Goals

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After the shock of the trauma of my initial diagnosis abated somewhat, I began to ask the inevitable, “What now?” question.

So far, I’ve come up with three goals to accomplish post-cancer. They’re in no particular order.

Learn to sail

Be in a community theater production

Get into a fight with a girl

I’ve got one down.  This morning, amidst scattered cloudy skies, my husband and I took our brand-new-to-us sailboat out onto Bodecker Lake (a monster feat, I must say) and caught some gorgeous wind.  Our sailboat is made gorgeous by the brightly colored sails that, when filled with wind, conjure up images of Nantucket or the Hamptons, I suppose, though I’ve only ever gotten as close as Martha’s Vineyard.

When the wind is good, sailing is a beautiful thing.  When the wind dies, it’s like being in a canoe, so we, as our 5-year-old says, use the paddle and “Oar around.”

I think I’m starting to understand when people have those bumper stickers on the back of their cars: “A bad day fishing is better than a good day at work.”  I think mine will say, “A bad day sailing is better than a good day wiping butts.”  Yep, I do love my children, but not so much the wiping butts part.

We decided to christen our boat “Hope” as a way to express our post-cancer optimism.  We waited, however, until our first successful sail.  Just in case the thing sank.  I’m just saying–it’s practical.

We have two evergreen trees in our backyard that I bought for our Christmas wedding, draped with lights and put up front in the church.  After the wedding, we planted them in the hard winter ground, and, miracle of miracles, they’ve both survived and are even starting to thrive.  Early on, one of them looked rather pekid, and we’d joke with one another about which tree would live, and which one was him and which was me.  When I was diagnosed, it wasn’t so funny anymore, but given my propensity for gallows humor, I’ve brought it up several times anyway.  So it seemed prudent to sail the boat once before we gave her such an auspicious moniker like “Hope.”  She is sailworthy, and hopefully, less flighty than her Days of Our Lives namesake.

My attainment of the other goals is in the works.  I’m working up my margarita-induced mouth to prepare for a good girl fight, and I auditioned last week for “Birth,” the play  The Family Journey‘s bringing in, sponsored by yours truly, get born.

Writing Workshop

I’m directing a Writing Workshop tonight on behalf of my friend Keri, founder of The Family Journey.   For those in the area who want to attend, it will be at Catalyst Coffee on the corner of Shields and Drake in Fort Collins.

As I sit planning this workshop, I realize how passionate I am about giving people the confidence and tools to communicate through writing. I’m reading Julia Cameron’s “Right to Write” and love her assertion: “Writing is like breathing.  I believe that.  I believe we all come into life as writers.  We are born with a gift for language and it comes to us within months as we begin to name our world.  We all have a sense of ownership, a sense of satisfaction as we name the objects that we find.  Words give us power.”

I’m downright evangelical about this words being power belief.  I publish get born because I believe writing is so powerful.

For the very daring among you, I encourage you to pick up pen or open laptop or whatever you do when you write.  If you never have, here’s a starter.  I hope that you find, as I have, that in the process of writing for your most important audience, you, a sense of peace, a more definded self, and purpose.

Close your eyes and breathe.  Take three deep, cleansing breaths.  Imagine your mind is a giant word swimming pool.  Everything that happened today can be described in words.  Take the pictures of the events of the day and “write” them in your mind.  Watch as the words swim around the pool of your mind.  Some words will dive and swoop in and around each other like playful otters.  Others are floating at the top of your consciousness like leaves fluttering from a nearby tree.  Some words sink all the way to the bottom weighed down perhaps by the emotion within them that’s packed like a leaded sphere.  Others fill with water and slowly sift to the bottom, teasing you to dive down and squeeze them out.  Now sit quietly and watch.  The word pool is closed—no other words are allowed right now.  Sit on the nearby pool lounger and watch your words.  Breathe.

Now, find one of those words and pull it out of the pool.  Write it down, and begin to follow where it leads you.  Don’t be afraid to let it pull you down whatever road you’d like–fiction, non-fiction, a simple anecdote.  No path is wrong–all lead to discovery.

When you’ve written three pages (yes, three pages,) put it down and treat yourself to chocolate, a glass of wine or the latest installment of the Twilight Series (no teen-novel snob here!!)  Visit your pages again tomorrow and see where else they’d like to take you.  When you’ve found your rhythm, submit something to the magazine so we can all share it.

Happy writing,

Heather

The Other Side of the Look

In her essay, On the Defense, Cindy Strandvold mentioned “The Look” that people give her when she tells them she is a stay at home mom. I have given that look many times. It isn’t that I was looking down on people. Rather, it was purely a deer in the headlights reaction to a complete conversation stopper. I haven’t always been very successful at meeting new people or starting a conversation. I feel awkward and desperately grasp for more questions to ask in order to avoid that dreaded silence. As soon as the words, “I am a stay at home mom” leave someone’s mouth, I can’t think of what to say. I stand there willing my jaw to keep from going slack and hoping no one can tell that my sweat has broken the deodorant seal in my armpits. For whatever reason, I can’t think of what to ask next when someone tells me they are a stay at home mom. I stare at her and desperately try to think of what to say next… and nothing comes to me. Sure I ask about names and ages, but that is where it ends. I’ve got nothing.

Add onto that the fact that until recently I didn’t want to hear about other people’s kids, let alone be forced into an uncomfortable and impossible conversation about staying at home with kids. As much as these women may have felt I was judging them based on their choice to stay home, I felt they were looking right back at me wondering why the hell I didn’t have kids. I never viewed staying at home as a cop out or being free from the rigors of work. I was impressed that people could make that choice in a world where I had no choices. I couldn’t be a stay at home mom, because I couldn’t be a mom, period. And it killed me that some of the people I met thought that was a choice, because it wasn’t.

Finally, after several years, here I am a stay at home mom of four month old twins. There I said it, I am a stay at home mom! I’ve been telling people I am taking the year off. Maybe it will be longer and for now, my job is being a mom. It is hard to say though because I worry what is on the other side of that conversation. Will the other person feel awkward? And what if I still don’t know what to say?