August 24, 2005

Alpha Mom

I'm sure many of you by now have read, or at least heard discussed, the Alpha Mom article in New York magazine a while back. It featured the kind of upper-stratosphere wealth and uber-working-mom gawking/stereotyping that would make Caitlin Flanagan salivate (or at least want to kick herself for not getting to skewer this woman first). I read it half resentful at the way the article seemed to manipulate the knee-jerk impulse to judge mothers with this whopper of an easy target to judge, and half sympathetic, in a sad way, to the article's subject, who seems to be doing what many mothers try to do during that intense period of early motherhood -- try to explain it all to herself in a way that fits her worldview -- albeit on a scale most of us would never consider. I'd meant to bring up the Kallman piece on this blog (and my own) a while back, when we were posting about mom-on-mom judgment and how easy it is to be judgmental of mothers, and then, of course, life got in the way. But this thread on Metafilter today reminded me just how torn we are when it comes to judging other mothers, and how divided we are on what is required of mothers to be considered "good."

Posted by Andi at 02:41 AM | Comments (0)

Words fail me...

So I'll share with you here the words of Elise at After School Snack by way of the always wonderful Bitch Ph.D.:

    Vaginas are scary!
    Giving birth: it's a traumatic process, long and drawn out, often resulting in scars and emotional trauma that can make it difficult to be interested in sexual intimacy for some time after the child is born.

    Not for the woman, mind you. For the man.

    Or at least that's the situation according to Dr. Keith Ablow, in an article he wrote for the NY Times titled "A Perilous Journey from Delivery Room to Bedroom." Where many of us might be tempted to focus on the difficulty of, say, the expectant mother squeezing something the size of a watermelon out of a hole the size of a dime, Dr. Ablow wants to remind us that there's another person suffering in that delivery room: the male partner forced to view his woman's cooter in a way he never wanted to see it.

Read the whole thing here.

Posted by Andi at 02:41 AM | Comments (2)

August 16, 2005

Round up the usual conflicts

I'm not going to the writing conference I was thinking about in the spring. I'm not sure about this. It's expensive but I was hoping the investment would be worth it to get me all inspired and stuff. But then I was thinking that what with buying a new house and all the homeschooling activities coming up and then the high holy days and then the regular old American and Christian holidays, I'd be lucky to get any extra time to write before the New Year. So I came to the conclusion that ambition and inspiration is not something I need more of right now since what ambition and inspiration I have is actually a terrible burden that makes me feel put-upon and bitter.


But I'll admit to a good bit of yearning.


All of this is to lead into this month's Your Commentary at Literary Mama. Please weigh in over there!

Posted by Dawn at 03:42 PM | Comments (0)

August 07, 2005

LM makes the front page of THE STATE

The State published the following article on Literary Mama on the Sunday edition's front page. We have the wonderful Claudia Brinson to thank!

From the article:

This is a new generation coming to terms with the demands of motherhood, says Cassie Premo Steele, 38. A mother and stepmother, Steele edited nonfiction for Literary Mama, teaches at Midlands Technical College and most recently published the chapbook “Ruin.”

Steele says women of the baby boomer generation believed working was required for liberation. She adds, “I think we’re having different lives than our mothers thought we would have.”

Among those differences is the opportunity to write about motherhood, without an office or office hours, and hear back from thousands of mothers in other time zones, in other lands.

“This is the first generation to gain such a strong voice — in depth, breadth and loudness,” Hudock says. “This is the first generation online.”

That, and Hudock’s 3˝-year-old daughter Sarah, create a sense of mission.

“The writers I work with have never read Adrienne Rich’s ‘Of Woman Born’ or Jane Lazarre’s “The Mother Knot.’ They think they are the first. But I can trace mother-writing back to Anne Bradstreet, 1650, America’s first poet, a mother of eight children.

“Each generation of mothers has to retell the story. Because, who keeps it alive? Not the publishers, reviewers or literary critics, the professors or librarians. The mother-writers of past generations aren’t passed on.

“My goal is to keep this generation alive and to reclaim previous generations so we don’t have to keep reinventing the wheel.

“We want to make it different, so this generation of mothers isn’t forgotten.”

Check the whole article out here.

Posted by ahudock at 09:55 AM | Comments (0)

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