Iowa Radio, Friday 5-6

Anybody checking in from Cedar Valley, Iowa? I'll be on the Mike Bunge show, from 5-6 pm, TalkRadio 1540 on the am dial. That's me following the author of a book called "Undressing Infidelity," about women who cheat on their husbands.

Friendship Lessons from North Carolina

I had lots of fun in Durham. The reading at the Regulator Bookshop was well attended, but more important, we had a very spirited conversation that really gave everyone a chance to talk about motherhood issues in a more political and cultural way. No weaning advice from me! And you know I firmly believe that we must talk, and talk hard and long about these issues, that contra the New York Times' cavalier assertion of "issue fatigue" on motherhood, real parents out here are struggling to make sense of the worlds we face, and we need to talk, and put our experiences in context, and find explanations that make sense and help us move forward.

Also at the reading I met the viviacious Amy Tiemann, aka MojoMom. In an act of friendship, she brought me a copy of her book, and a mojomom.com hat, which I've been wearing around my neighborhood. Her book will be available in May, and I will write more about it later. Some writers are competitive with each other and unsupportive. I'm not like that, that's not my model, and neither is it hers. She autographed her book for me "Let's kickstart this revolution." This woman has smarts and spunk--and then, it turns out, I learned yesterday that she went to middle school with Susan, whose daughter is in first grade with my daughter. It's a small world spread out over many years and many states.

I have much to think about as the result of my visit, especially as I spent the days with Jean O'Barr, my graduate school mentor and muse. The themes that pervaded the whole weekend were 1) how do we keep talking about the motherhood issues that are falling so heavily on women's shoulders, and 2) what does it take to help mothers see our issues as not just individual, but as communal, and as political. We live in a culture that tells us that individual responsibility is key, and we believe this, to an extent, but there's a limit, and that limit is reached when we mothers need to see how our lives fit into policy, when we realize that we can be responsible all we want, and we still can't control the limitations and inequities of the workplace, for example, and when we realize how much we must learn to help each other more.

It was a very provocative weekend, and I'll have several posts as I assimilate the many discussions I was involved in.

Here's one, with thanks to Vivian Robinson, a woman I knew years ago when she worked for Duke Women's Studies, and is now a therapist in Durham, so if you live in the area, and want therapy, Vivian's office is where you want to go.

Several of us were at dinner, at Jean's house. One woman said that she's realizing that friendship in adult life is not really about finding kindred spirits and soulmates, as we used to think, but rather, about being there, about going to the Y three times a week and talking to the same people, or, for many parents, going to the playground, or the schoolyard, and suddenly, those people become your friends even if they're not who you thought you'd be best friends with.

We all talked about this for a while, and agreed, but the conversation held a bemused tone, as if to say that we didn't quite believe that being there is enough to build friendship on. And then Vivian made a comment that being there is an expression of trust. That when five mothers or fathers see each other five times a week at the playground, there's a level of trust that builds up. They are showing each other that they are present, that they can indeed be counted on. It doesn't have to be spoken, but that's why playground friendships build so strongly, even among people who have little else in common. She took something that seemed trivial--making friendship on something so silly as being in the same place at the same time, repeatedly--and linked it with one of the most fundamental of human desires and qualities: trust.

Second Edition, on it's way!

Thanks to everyone who's buying The Truth Behind the Mommy Wars (and if you haven't and want to, the quickest route is through the amazon button on the right hand side of this blog, it really works).There are still lots of books out there, if you want to share it with friends and family, at bookstores, and online. I'm here to report, though, that just two weeks after publication, and even before our formal launch, the warehouse is empty and Seal Press is sending it back to the printers for more. Hooray, thanks for the support, dear readers, and enjoy the book!

North Carolina/Bathroom Talk

If anyone stops by my blog from North Carolina, I'll be reading at the Regulator Bookstore, in Durham, this Friday (the 8th. The Regulator is on 9th Street, and the event will be starting at 7 pm. I'm excited to see who shows up, and also excited that I'll be seeing my mentor Jean O'Barr, mother author Faulkner Fox, of Dispatches from a Not-So-Perfect Life fame, and blogger and mother author Amy Tiemann (you can check her out at MojoMom.com; she's emailed to tell me about her new book on motherhood, and I'm particularly excited by the Mojo Mom caps she sells on her website.

On the Kevyn Burger show last week (see below), the discussion of motherhood turned to how mothers cooperate rather than compete, ie, the times that we're not stuck in silly Mommy Wars. Since then, I've been hearing and seeing even more than usual the ways this is true. Kevyn mentioned how a friend made sure she knew about the local girls' softball league, and that reminded me to make photocopies of the announcement of Wild Things softball expanding into the 1st and 2d grade set, and give them to the school teachers to hand out to all the girls, so that everyone knows the schedule.

Sometimes modern parenting turns so petty. People withhold information because somehow they think this gives their kid an edge; they get their own private cool activity experience which will set them apart from the pack and assure that they will happy and successful the rest of their life. As if. And as I write in the book, parenting should not be an Olympic sport. Cooperation, fellow mothers and fathers, cooperation. Even when it's hard. We must trust that cooperative parenting will help build the support systems that all of us need.

Here's a story I want to pass on, told me by a friend. It was summer, and their family was at a pool, or perhaps a beach, and it takes place in a large bathroom, which means my daughter will automatically love this bathroom's-r-us tale. His wife was in a bathroom stall when an eight year old girl came in. She was very sunburned, and in much pain. Her mom came in with the spray to help, and the daughter just lost it and started to tantrum and yell out "You're the worst mother in the world."

The tantrum continued for a bit, and when there was finally a moment of silence, as she caught her breath, my friend's wife hears a woman a few stalls down said, "No. I'm the worst mother in the world."

There's silence. And then, from a few stalls down the other direction, another woman raises her voice into the conversation. "No way. I'm the worst mother in the world. By far."

My friend didn't relate what happened next. It's at this point we all start to laugh. I can't help think of this as a behind-the-stalls act of womanly solidarity. One can easily imagine the mother of the sunburnt girl cringing, feeling mortified that her daughter's hurting body was her fault, and waiting for others to judge her. Instead, the women defused it all, and supported the mother, who I'm sure was feeling bad enough that her daughter was in sunburn pain.

Send me more stories like this, that's all I can say. When do we cooperate? When do we act in solidarity?

ps. thanks for all the messages readers are emailing to me. Feel free to respond on the blog, too.

First Radio Show

This morning I was a live guest on Kevyn Burger's morning show in the Twin Cities. "Perky, Quirky, and Smirky" or something like that, the tag line kept calling her, but no matter, she trashed on Dr. Laura as the only person she ever really felt judgement from for her status as the working single mother of two kids, so I knew I was generally in the right place (the Dr. Laura show follows hers later in the day.) Anyway, I was excited to do the first radio show for my book, and enjoyed her questions.

Kevyn was most interested in why mothers judge each other, and in how my book argues that mothers actually cooperate a lot more than they compete. During the break, Kevyn told a lovely story about how the mother of one of her daughter's friends made sure she had all the softball sign up forms, that she got whatever the at-home mom network was passing around. Whereas in the popular eye working moms and at home moms never help each other, in real life, this division isn't as active as some would have us believe.

The point she kept coming back to, and the topic that listeners called in about after Kevyn hung up with me, was whether they'd felt judged and attacked as mothers, either because they worked or they didn't, and on other grounds too. She asked them how they reacted, did they lash back or not, and what worked for them for dealing with mother judgement when it happens. Unfortunately, I was off the air by then, and couldn't get the fm107 streaming to work on my mac, so I didn't get to hear the discussion. I remember when we did Mothertalk (see below) that many mothers galvanize when offered the chance to talk about how they've felt judged. What's your response?

Wife Swap Update

Check out Raising WEG, who actually watched the Wife Swap episode I wrote about below, and blogged about it. This is a great post, so don't miss it.

The Book is Out!

Breaking news: Though official launch isn't till April, the book is out. Our friend Rob called tonight to say that Amazon is shipping his. So order your copies, read it, and then, please tell me your stories. Last week, Mother Shock author Andi Buchanan paid me a wonderful compliment. She read the book, and said it made her want to call me up right away and tell me her work-and-parenting stories. I was thrilled to learn that the book felt like a conversation to her. So please, tell me your stories. I want to hear them.

Mommy Wars/War against Mothers aren't Going Away

One theme of my book is that despite not representing the real truths about our parenting lives, the Mommy Wars model continues. Over the last month or so, it's became popular for media reports to say, oh, the mommy wars are over, the new problem is hyper mothering, and both at home moms and working moms share in creating that problem. That was one theme of Perfect Madness, and the media quickly forgot the parenting publishing sensation that preceded that one, Home Alone America, which roundly critiqued mothers who worked. Despite our desires, and unfortunately, the Mommy Wars model hasn't yet slithered away.

There's a long chapter near the front of my book, called "Do Real Women have Mommy Wars?" that looks at how newspaper and magazine articles, and marketing firm trend reports pitch mothers against each other. The real Mommmy Wars are a war against mothers, and in this part of the book I show how it's done, specifically, again and again and again.

Today's NYTimes has an article that shows how it's done, too. Jacques Steinberg, on E1, the Arts, writes "One Show's Unexpected Lessons in Reality." He describes how tonight/wednesday's ABC's "Wife Swap" episode falsely crafts narrow stories about each mom, so that they perfectly fit the Mommy Wars model. One mom lives in the Philadelphia suburbs, and her family has a nice, large house. She's pitched as the working mother who puts "success before family life" and is a high achiever who runs her family like a business. The other mom is an at-home and home-schooling mother who lives in a rustic cottage in Vermont.And Vermont mom is described falsely as not leaving her house on a daily basis. It's "coldhearted working mom versus nurturing stay-at-home mom." Where have we seen this before. Meanwhile, of course, we learn almost nothing about the fathers, as if men don't take part in family life, as if they too don't make creative decisions about how much they want to work, and parent.

In recreating the classic working mom vs at-home scenario, here's what the Wife Swap producers left out, and here are the details Jacques Steinberg puts back into the story, bless him, and that's why we need good reporters.

As it turns out, Philly suburb working mom was a stay at home mother for five years when her kids were little. During the end of that time, her husband was working such insane hours to support they family that they made life changes. He took a job with more normal hours, and she went back to work. To me, this sounds like a family that's thought hard about work and family life, and that was willing to make big shifts in their habits. Like many moms I know and have interviewed, Philly suburb mom has carouseled in and out of the workplace. The reality show I'd like to see is what it took for her to get a job after five years away, how much of a wage hit she took, and whether her boss accommodates her family responsibilities. Produce that show and I'll tune in on wednesday nights, believe me.

And Vermont rustic stay at home and teach the kids mom? She too, works, it turns out. Like many stay at home moms I know and have interviewed, she works. About 20 hours a week outside the home, doing property management. That sounds like work to me. Vermont mom says she tried to tell a producer about her job, but was discouraged from doing so. Another episode I'd like to see would feature part time working moms and the challenges they face. is she being paid fairly for her work? What's her wage hit, the lower wage paid to mothers who take time out of the paid workplace? Does she get prorated benefits? Make me a show where mothers trade places with bosses, and bosses get treated like working mothers. Make me an episode where the moms all get together in a big consciousness raising circle and then take their insights to the guys and gals in the corner offices, and then to the streets. Make that show, and it'll get high Nielson's in my house, believe me.

There was no mommy war in real life, yet that didn't stop the show's producers from creating it. Thanks guys. All us moms and dads in America love you for that one.

Feminist Depression

Now I know we're not supposed to use the dread F-word anymore, despite Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner's excellent efforts at revival (in her book The F-Word, which my 6-year old daughter can't believe is a serious book about women and not just a book about how to say curse words without getting your mom's eyebrows raised at you). But I am feeling a great deal of serious feminist depression lately.

First, even though I swore off the marriage announcements in the NYTimes style section, I did read today, since I was in NY, attending the wedding of a younger cousin I rarely see and barely know. She and her new husband were passing around a framed picture this morning with their wedding invitation on one side, and their TImes announcment on the other. I'll leave you guessing who they are, except to say that it wasn't Andrew and Kyle's event.

Close friends know that weddings annoy me, but it's not even the wedding that got me down. When I checked out the announcement later this evening, I saw my cousin referred to as Mrs. Her Husband's Last Name. Yes, at this point, I'm supposed to be all liberal and tolerant and say that of course we all get to choose our names, even if some women choose to give theirs up for their husbands. Whatever. These days, though, I'm tired of being tolerant. Tolerance is usually the word invoked to tell people with progressive opinions to stay quiet. Be tolerant. Don't raise a fuss. The only people who still believe in tolerance are liberal feminists, and believe me, anything goes tolerance is not helping us.

It's just that my cousin is now the anonymous Mrs. Her Husband's Name, 27. It's that her mother doesn't even appear in the announcement. They all live together. They're a happy enough family. My aunt even has a fancy PhD behind her hame, though she's been a homemaker for decades. In the space of those few paragraphs, paraded around so happily this morning, and available forever on the Times archive, two women's identities were shifted, and one disappeared all together. What happened to my aunt's contributions from the home front? Am I allowed to be depressed about that? What is happening to us women, to us mothers. Are we all just going to fade away and disappear from public life?

Bright spot: young teen city girl, flamboyant daughter of an old family friend, comes to babysit. I'll call her Martine to protect her identity. Martine thinks the formal wedding is bullshit. While I'm culturally confused by an event filled with 20-something bankers and young doctors, little Martine is whispering comments in my ear and telling me how she thinks her grandmother was a drag queen in a former life. It's a moment of cultural queerness that I appreciate, since this wedding looks remarkably traditional, and similar to a wedding I attended at the Plaza in 1972, only then I was 6 or so and curled up to sleep on a lounger in the ladies room, the attendant looking out for me, and this time I was able to make it through the event, happily drinking many glasses of my own and everyone's champagne.

In the midst of all this musing, I read the bit piece, "Mr. and Mrs. Bothofus," that runs alongside the wedding page. We're told that fewer than 5 % of married women in America keep their names or hyphenate. Now, readers, friends, know that I'm not doctrinaire on this. There's more to life than a name, and though I bear my full birth name, I use my husband's name sometimes, and my daughter carries his name, unlike our more culture-challenging friends who do give their kids the mother's last name, or switch off. It's not about purity, or correct practice. But 5 percent? That's all? Only five percent of married couples even try to resist the old trend in which married women just fade away?

It makes me sad.

One last comment, before I sign off and take this weary body to bed. On the writing front, I do love Maureen Dowd's column today. "Dish It Out, Ladies" asks Where are all the female newspaper columnists, and not just the sex-family-relationship-gardening columnists, but those whose bylines appear on our nation's prestigious and well-read Op-Ed pages? Yes, where are we, indeed. Thanks, Maureen. I even wrote her a fan letter, thanking her.

New Mothers Movement Online

Check out this months' MMO by one of my favorite online writers, Judith Stadtman Tucker: new features, links to media on mothers, and the archives of Judy's articles.

The W's

It's really happening: the mailman just dropped off an advance copy of Truth Behind the Mommy Wars! As I tore off the envelope, not quite believing I was holding the real book in my hand, going through my mind was: it really looks like the picture on Amazon! For weeks I've had a copy of the bound galleys on my desk, with it's dour gray cover, a shadow of the glossy red and white that has now appeared. My daughter especially was very excited, and asked to take the copy to school today to show her first grade friends. Of course, after I studiously avoid writing about her, because I am committed to her privacy, her first question to me was: where am I in your book? Good thing I mention her name here and there, so I had something to show her, and of course, the book is dedicated to her, and to my mother both.

Okay, the W's, as promised. Warner and WEG, as in Judith Warner, author of Perfect Madness, and Raising WEG, the fabulous blog of a mother of triplets. Everyone's been asking me what I think of the Warner book, and I have actually read it. Honestly--and I believe in honesty about things maternal and gendered--I'm a terrible person to ask about this book. My book on a similar topic is due out in there weeks, and it won't have the marketing prowess/Newsweek cover/New York Times review cover that launched Perfect Madness. I'm not exactly the person to offer a good review. So, for anyone who wants good commentary, check out Raising WEG's reading and collection of blogosphere reviews of Warner's book. Personally, I like Raising WEG so much, I'm adding her to my linklist, and wishing her luck with the trips.

For those who still want me to answer, my book is different. When I set out to solve the mysteries of motherhood, I didn't get stuck on only talking with the most affluent mothers. Those aren't the mothers I meet on my daily rounds. I'm also really committed to moving motherhood from the style page where it seems to be stuck, to front and center where we belong, and that means not getting lost in the details of how we mother. I'm keeping our eye on the rigid workplace that makes it so hard for us to mother and work at the same time, well, and with relative sanity. And I'm always looking around for mothers who are resisting, organizing, and speaking out for change. They're out there, they're fabulous, and there's an incipient mother's movement happening. That's the playground revolution of the last chapter, and of this blog.

Join the MotherTalk phenom

We're trying to get a certain New York Times reporter interested in the MotherTalk energy (see below) .... Untill it hits print media, if you want to be included on the MotherTalk list for future events, contact Andi or me. One person already emailed Andi from Rhode Island to say she's so hungry for this kind of talk between mothers--real talk, talk about change and improvement---that she'll travel all the way to our fair city of Philadelphia. Can we make Mother Talk into a Mom's Night Out cultural destination? Shall I turn my guest bedroom into a B and B to support my writing habit? Stay tuned!

Is it the first LiteraryMama.com Mother Talk event, or a Consciousness Raising session, or Both?

Last week our pal Faulkner Fox, author of the wonderful Dispatches from a Not-So-Perfect Life was in town. She read at the first ever MotherTalk session sponsored by LiteraryMama.com. Mother Shock author Andrea Buchanan was there too, and she blogged about it, beating me to it, and quoting my part of our long email exchange after.

It's all posted on Mama's Ink, our group blog.

Okay, if it's the end of a long day and you're just too tired to tramp over to another site, I'll copy it in here, but visit Mama's Ink some time (tag line: Enough Dishes Already,) and Andi's blog too.

"Mother Talk" salon evening

The salon evening the other night, "Mother Talk" with me, Faulkner Fox, and Miriam Peskowitz, was so much fun. My friend Maureen hosted it at her house, and about 30 women came. We milled around for a bit eating and drinking, and then gathered to talk about our books and hear Faulkner read a funny and thought-provoking paper she had given at the ARM conference about mother-judgement and feminism. I functioned kind of as a moderator, prompting questions or jumping in with something, but mostly the discussion just evolved on its own as the women there began talking. I didn't know which way the evening would go -- a lot of people who'd said they were going to come couldn't make it, and there were a lot of people there I didn't even know, or barely knew, and it was one of those things where I just didn't know until we started talking whether or not people would be totally put off by the conversation we were going to have.

But it was great. The discussion ranged from playground judgmentalism to how hard it is to be honest with your old friends vs. the honesty you can have with other mothers who are strangers, to what our work means vs. what our husband's work means, to what it feels like to always be the one initiating the conversation about ambivalence and motherhood, to people's reactions to our books... There was a wide range of opinion, and a real willingess and excitement to talk about this stuff -- it felt like one of those 1970s "consciousness-raising" meetings, and I mean that in a good way.

I checked in with Miriam afterwards, and she had this to report:

Last night was fabulous! I'm just settling down to think about Faulkner's talk and about all that happened last night. I would have loved to stay much later. Her talk was all about women talking, about moms talking honestly, and delving into what's intimate. I was thinking back to when I lived in Atlanta, and was introduced to the whole phenom of women's book clubs. No one ever read the book, but everyone wanted to be in a book club, or two, or as many as they could be. That it was literary meant it was okay to say to their spouses, Honey, you watch the kids, I have something important to do. It's more lofty than saying, Honey, I'm meeting my girlfriends at the local pub to bitch about life as a mother and wife. I even knew women who formed Bible Studies. They would invite me, even though they knew I was Jewish, because it wasn't exactly about reading the Bible. Like book clubs, Bible Study is a socially acceptable reason to leave the kids and spouse and head out to a bottle or two of red wine and the company of girlfriends. What husband could object to the Bible, or to The God of Small Things, or a rereading of Moby Dick?

What happened last night was extraordinary -- in the largest sense -- because it combined the excuse of getting out of the house with real thoughtfulness about what change, or revolution, would look like. With her writing, and with all of us there, Faulkner was able to create the consciousness-raising group she wanted. I think we need to keep doing these -- for any excuse -- our books coming out, our friends coming to town. Something important happened. Mothers were really talking -- and [the discussion] had a chance to get to structural issues, to something larger than the usual venting we do. There was Faulkner, sitting in a stranger's living room and talking about feminist revolution. It seemed historic. It seemed like what happened a million years and several decades ago.

My book begins by saying that we mothers talk all the time, but we don't really talk. Not about what truly matters, because it's just too hard. But last night we created the space for mothers to really talk. And I think we need to take this on the road. When Faulkner started to talk about revolution, in her calm voice and her perfect prose, I remember thinking, are we serious? Here we are in this lovely brownstone, in our own ways, well-coifed and stylishly dressed, articulate when we speak. From the outside, we look like all those privileged women the media always writes about. Yet there's Faulkner, saying the word revolution over and over and over again. Talking about Antonio Gramsci, and about how people can be critical of the status quo, and conformist at the same time. Faulkner's saying that word.

Revolution. I can't stop myself from thinking: Are we serious? Is she? Are we playing the part? Can we convince ourselves that we can do this? That we can stop critiquing other women for things that don't matter, like whether for the moment her kids are running wild because to save her sanity she's talking with another mom at the playground? Like whether she's feeding her toddler a Philly pretzel -- doesn't she know that it digests to sugar immediately, and sugar is bad, bad, bad?

As we're all saying to each other now, it's us moms we need to worry about, to figure out lives that are rich and rewarding and human. Revolution sounds so silly. So strange. So old-fashioned. And so feminist. Yet my eyes wandered around the room, and all the women were listening raptly. The hour was late but the room was hushed, attentive, even when Faulkner turned to Gramsci. Italian Marxists? At 9.30 after a day of work and childraising?

Can she be serious? Can we?

"Issue Fatigue"/Even Uma Thurman can't make the problem go away

Here's me, I send my daughter off to school and take five to browse through the trashiest newspaper articles I can find. In my case this means the NYT intrigue on A5 about why the Queen won't attend Charles and Camilla's wedding, and the Philadelphia Inquirer's article about Uma Thurman in her new flick.

Writer Hugh Hart is a sight for a tired mom's eyes. Stuck in the middle of the article, on E4 is where Uma's a mom who can't do it all, and who feels the same damn struggles we all do. Even movie goddess Uma can't get the rules of the game to change. She hasn't been working much, and she's divorced Ethan, too.

"I've just needed to be home. Having children flips the game from being about you to being about what you can create in a home and what your responsibilities are. Actually, my ex-husband said to me the other day that I clearly wanted to be a full-time mother and still wanted to be an actress, and that I kept insisting I could do both, but I can't. [My note to Ethan: thanks for the support; perhaps that's why the marriage is over.] So I'm fighting to keep my foot in the business and still take care of my kids--it's the big conundrum of my life."

Ah. I couldn't handle being a mom and dealing with the stresses and demands of a full-time professorial job. Now I'm working here and there, cobbling it together like a million or so other moms in America, doing our best to work and mother in a system that DOES NOT SUPPORT US.

In last weekend's NYT Book Review, Judith Shulevitz wrote a review of the latest motherhood phenom and said that we have issue fatigue. That's what she called it. Issue Fatigue. She claims that in her circles, mothers don't talk about this to each other anymore. It's passe. Issue Fatigue. Of the entire review, that's the phrase that stuck.

Issue Fatigue. Yes, I too am tired of talking about this. Mostly, I'm tired of living it. I'm tired of the struggle. I'm tired of making dinner every night.And I'm tired of being tired. Furthermore, I'm fatigued by earning really low wages for my work because I can't see a way to decently work fulltime, parent well and stay sane. And what really fatigues me is hearing versions of my story repeated by nearly every mother I know and meet.

That's what fatigues me. And you know what? I'm fatigued my a media that continues to present this as only about affluent moms from tony suburbs. I'm fatigued by reading the same old, same old. That's why Uma's brief tell-all helps. We read constantly about our celeb moms, and finally, the celeb moms are beginning to speak out. Because celeb moms too, want to work. At least a little bit. They want to keep a foot in the door. Just like, well, the rest of us more ordinary folk.

Issue fatigue. Can't we at least call it Injustice Fatigue?

Have a great day everyone.

Dads at the Cafe

I'm doing some work at Infusion, my neighborhood coffee shop. Some days I just can't stand writing at home, and I need the background buzz. There's a large group of moms with very young children in the back. When another mom comes in with a large stroller, everyone helpfully moves the chairs so she can join her friends in the back.

My friend Dave walks in, with his youngest son. Dave's not a stay-at-home Dad. He has an important job, as does his wife. His son is sick, and I was impressed that Dave had taken the day off. Statistically speaking, mothers are 70 percent more likely to take time off when the kids are sick (you can find these numbers on the New America Foundation's website). Go Dave!

Also, Dave brought his computer and was checking email via wi-fi while his son played at the table. I was writing about an event I went to last night, the first ever author's night sponsored by LiteraryMama.com. Author Faulkner Fox talked about judgment between mothers. I couldn't help but think about the casual judgments a mother would get if she sat at a cafe, with a computer, and a three-year old across from her at the table. Perhaps I'm wrong, perhaps I'm remembering one mean thing someone said once and making a generalization. But I don't think I'm entirely wrong. I think women get judged more viciously when we publically combine work and kids. More later on Faulkner's energizing talk on mother judgment and why it's a political issue and we need to stop doing it.

Meanwhile, while I write the reading group guide for my book's website, and jot down my thoughts about last night, take a look at Faulkner Fox's website and her book, Dispatches from a Not-So-Perfect Life.