Silicon Valley Moms Blog

Suicide is Not Painless

It has been in the national news, 2 instances of Palo Alto's Gunn H.S. students committing suicide by stepping in front of a speeding train. And then, just a day after the second one, a third kid tries, but is thwarted by his mother and a passing motorist. The police started sending a car to stand guard by the tracks after the last incident. They were there at least until the end of the school year, I'm not sure if they remain.  I think everyone is relieved its summer.

What's going on at Gunn? Everyone is asking. Gunn is a big school and it is very competitive and filled with high achievers. But so are thousands of other high schools in the area and across the country. I have two kids that will be seniors next year, and another one that graduated from Gunn three years ago. For the oldest, his high school story was dominated by athletics, for the ones going now, its all about theatre, performing for one, working backstage for the other. They both have a lot of homework and have to work hard for their grades, but I don't think Gunn is an unusual pressure cooker. And I don't think the 2nd suicide was any kind of copycat of the first, although that third attempt might have been. 

Not Quite a "Twitterati"

I got the email before I left the house Friday morning. "Do you know you're in Gawker?" My first reaction was terror. What did I do, did I anger someone with a bad PR pitch and now it's out there for the world to see? Please no, I don't want to be ridiculed.

Holding my breath, I went to the home page and slowly scrolled down. I enjoy reading all the snark on Gawker, but I certainly didn't want it to be about me. In tiny type, I could read my twitter handle. The headline was about the media publishing a photo allegedly taken by the police after the singer Rihanna was beaten by her boyfriend, rapper Chris Brown. Clicked on the post, and there, larger then twitter size, was a tweet I wrote the night before, expressing my disgust with both the photo itself and the release of the image. Nothing brilliant or especially pithy. My picture too.

A Special Sunday Wedding for "the girls across the street"

There was no post-Halloween slump, candy crash in our house this weekend.  We were all very excited to attend  the hastily put together wedding of our across the street neighbors, our good friends for about 15 or 16 years. We refer to them by their names, or just as "the girls across the street"

It all came down to the most practical of reasons - with Shelley's very promising startup desperately in need of a fresh round of funding in a tough economy, the Cobra payments she had been making to keep the health insurance from her last "real" job were getting difficult to manage. The smartest thing to do is to add her to Jill's plan that covers the rest of the family ( 2 sons in HIgh School). And then of course there was that troubling proposition on the California State Ballot that could take it all away if the vote goes tragically wrong on Tuesday..And maybe, just maybe my husband with the terrible politics but a big heart, who planned the whole dinner celebration and a had the biggest smile on his face all evening, just maybe he'll change his mind.

2 Births, 4 Children

Here's a riddle - how do you have 4 kids but only 2 pregnancies, 2 childbirth stories to tell?

The answer is easy, once you consider twins and an adoption.

I've already written about how my family came together, how I don't even really remember sometimes which kids arrived biologically (never say natural to a parent who's adopted!) which didn't.  But to sum it up, fertility attempts, failure, adopt first child. Fertility attempts again, but simultaneous to trying for a second adoption.  We didn't really care which way, we just wanted one more. Took nearly 4 years but we got two when the 2nd round of in-vitro succeeded. OK, now we have 3 - 2 boys and a girl.  Sounds like a nice sized family, we figure we're done. But we get to that 4 year point, and guess what? Surprise, I'm pregnant.  Have no idea how or why.  It takes me a while to get over the shock, but my husband is elated, walking around flexing muscles because no matter how much he may have convinced himself that our inability to conceive on our own had absolutely nothing to do with his sexual prowess and masculinity, he suddenly feels more powerful than ever.  He (not me) still has that positive pregnancy test stick stashed in a drawyer nearly 12 years and 9 months later. It's a girl, now we have 2 and 2, 4 year age-gaps in between.

So all the stories are so very different.  With #1, WHO TURNS 20 this summer, we started the adoption process with an agency in February, finished up all the classes, home studies and paperwork in June. He was born on August 4th, 2 weeks after we met the birthmother (who we still are in contact with). I can almost hear the phone calls - she's in labor, then it's a boy. We went to the hospital the next day. It was a real whirlwind both logistically and emotionally when we took him home. He happens to physically resemble his brother and sisters which just tells me this is something that was meant to be. Although we joke he's much taller, much more athletic and much handier than our Eastern European Jewish genetic heritage would have let him be.

With #2 and #3, now 16, it was a relatively easy twin pregnancy even though I'm now in my late 30's. Dr. made me stop work at 6 months, then put me on full bed rest with a monitor and drugs to stop contractions at 32 weeks. That was miserable, stuck in bed with a 3 1/2 year old boy running around the house, taking medication that makes your heart race.  At one point I even got up in an odd way, pulling an abdominal muscle and added pain to the mix. Then at 35 weeks, I go to the hospital for some tests, they decide my daughter is not thriving because my son is basically hogging all the nutrients (some things don't change). So I go from labor-stopping to labor-inducing. They made me (no protests, believe me) take an epidural early because with twins they don't know if it's going to be a c-section or not.  It wasn't. The babies are born the next day, healthy but small and they have to stay in the hospital for just under 2 weeks. That was hard, going back and forth every day, caring for my older one, but eventually we all got home, even though I don't think my big guy ever really got over the shock of being king of the world to big brother of two.  To this day.

Fast forward another 4 years, to the surprise pregnancy when I'm over 40.  Again, a fairly uneventful pregnancy and I work until they have a baby shower for me that really means "Stay home now, Martha" 10 days before my due date, which turns out to be the birth date. I remember waking up that morning thinking I had my period and really bad cramps, which of course turned out to be labor. And then comes my second daughter 12 years ago and I go home still stunned that I now have 4 kids. 4 kids who have fill our house with love but are so very different in terms of interests, academics, athletics and temprament.

And it never feels boring to tell these stories.

Bookmark Me!

Maybe I'm a little late to the game here, but I've just noticed that the Wall Street Journal's online edition is carrying a new (as of May) web site called "Journal Women".  I've always loved the features in the Journal - now if there's any kind of connection to women - you can see them for free! The site includes the parenting blog "The Juggle" , my buddy Sue Shallenberger's columns, and tons of other content from the paper as well as original online articles, podcasts, videos, etc.  I wrote a post the other day for our Fifty-Something blog inspired  by an article titled "Botox for the Resume" and of course that's there too.

The Momforce

It's easy to forget that all of us who are lucky enough to take advantage of flex-time, part-time, job-share, and work-from-home might have not had that choice not very long ago.  I was at a little get-together last weekend with a bunch of my old friends from my TV news days and we were trying to remember who the working moms in the newsroom were in the early to mid-80's.  We could only come up with two, and one of them was actually a freelance reporter.  Fast forward to today, when one of those same friends manages an international television news network's operation right from home.  Have Blackberry - will stay put? Sure, sometimes her days can last extra long when she has to talk to people in Beijing, Paris, Dubai and New York, but she can also go pick up her daughter at school every day.

TV News is full of "on-scene" jobs from producing news shows, to dispatching reporters, to anchoring and reporting.  But the number of working families that are part of it now has really multiplied.  A lot of it is due to technology, but it's also a change in attitude.  When I think back to 1988, I had a job-share with another producer, I do remember feeling pretty revolutionary, and so was my male news director who came up with the idea. He changed stations in a couple of years, the new guy who came in in 1991 nixed the plan which eventually led to me quitting, going freelance and then about 5 years later eventually transitioning into Public Relations to get a little more control of my time (I also had 4 kids by this point).

Running from the Plastic Bag Monster

As Michelle pointed out the other day, we all make the efforts we can when it comes to saving the world and living green. Throw out less, recycle and reuse more and most important, teach our kids not to be wasteful (although they get a lot of that at school, and you'll often find them coming home and scolding you!).

My big hang-up these days is grocery store shopping bags, paper and/or plastic.  I have so many 2nd and sometimes 3rd, 4th, 5th uses for them, I'd be really stuck without them. Then I saw the picture in Fortune of "the plastic bag monster" a person "wearing" the 500 plastic bags each person uses annually. (the story is called "Bag Revolution" and it's not online yet, but should be in a week or so.)

The paper bags are my kitchen garbage bags.  Live under my sink, goes to the big outside garbage can when full or wet.  What would replace that?  A metal can lined with a much less environmentally-friendly plastic bag?

The plastic bags get used repeatedly as lunch bags for my 2 kids that like to bring their lunch to school.

Running on Empty

Why is it always the same story?

If I'm doing well at work, I'm messing up at home.  And vice-versa.

I'm doing great at work, making gains for my PR agency,  getting my clients high-profile, big name media exposure, writing blog posts that people like.  But right now I'm sitting at my desk and I just want to cry.  I know I should take some time off, but it's never a good time, and now is especially bad. On the other side of the coin, if I take too much time off, or spend too many days working from home, I'll fall behind and get into trouble at the office.

Here's what tipped me over. My teenage daughter has been reminding me for WEEKS to sign her up for a particular summer school class, something she really wants to get out of the way before her junior year.  I've told her don't worry, I always sign up late and it's fine.  Well guess what, it's not.  Today was the deadline and when I called to get the number to fax my forms in, they told me the class has been so full for a while, they're not even taking any more names for the waiting list.

Thank you (again) Elizabeth Edwards

Bravo to Elizabeth Edwards for taking on the media in her op-ed piece in the Sunday New York Times. I used to be the political producer for local TV news and I am also wishing that the national folks would just do their jobs.  Edwards rightly points out that the campaign coverage is all so much focused on trivia, the issues have been all but forgotten. I agree with James Fallows that it was the most important story in the Sunday NYT. The op-ed should be required reading in every newsroom, and the graphic of the remote that so clearly demonstrates what political news on TV is all about these days should be shamefully examined.  A day later, it remains the #1 "Most Blogged About" on the list the Times maintains and #7 in "Most Emailed".

I got out of the TV News business in the early 90's, just as it was starting to go almost totally tabloid. I watched the last Obama-Clinton debate in ABC (the network where I worked for more than 12 years) and while I was not quite as horrified as Hendrik Hertzberg in the New Yorker,  I thought it was pretty bad. Not because they were so tough on Obama, but the subject matter and repeated questions on all this "junk news" bordered on the ridiculous.  I don't think all these stories reflect on the character of the candidates as much as the overhwhelming drive in the media to give their readers and viewers what they want , as opposed to what they may possibly need.  It's even more horrifying to believe that the American public could be that shallow.

An original post to Silicon Valley Mom's Blog

Viva Las Vegas. Not.

The other day I learned I may have to go to Las Vegas in a couple of weeks.  As much as I enjoy the escape of the occasional business trip, I cringed.

I hate Las Vegas.

I've only gone there for work, never with my husband or girlfriends and definitely not with my family.

Now I'm sure there are some nice people living there, but it's the strip - the part of the city that never sleeps that I just can't stand. Vegas is just overwhelming to me, and not in a good way. And there are so many things I dislike.