LA Moms Blog

Closing a Chapter...and a Group Blog

I discovered not long after I began blogging three years ago that even though I intended to blog primarily about books and reading, I fit into another niche as well: I was a Mom With a Blog. I didn't see myself as a "mom blogger," really - the "typical" mom blogger seemed to have younger children than mine, as well as more a more intimate style and approach to content and communication than I envisioned for myself. Still, I did want to share some of my personal life with my readers, and I've been a mom for my entire adult life, so I technically qualified.

Many of the other blogging moms I was drawn to weren't typical mom-bloggers either, as it happened...but I knew I wanted to connect with this community somehow. I also knew I was interested in making some off-line connections with the people I was getting to know online. When the Silicon Valley Moms Group prepared to expand its network of regional blogs into Southern California  in mid-2008, I was quick to apply as a contributor, and excited to be among those selected to launch the Los Angeles Moms Blog.

I've gotten a lot out of my two years of association with SVMG and LA Moms, including those "real-life" connections I'd hoped for; I might not have summoned up the nerve to go to to BlogHer'09 if it weren't for knowing people in those groups. I've also had a place to write about things that didn't really fit in so well on my personal blog, and exposure to promotional opportunities I'm not sure I would have found otherwise. All the same, I've felt like a misfit among the mom bloggers for some time, and forging more ties in the book-blog community has only intensified those feelings, so I've been deliberating about my future with the LA Moms Blog for a few months now. But a couple of weeks ago, a decision was made for me.

The Last Family Vacation?

We have been planning this trip for a year, literally. No exaggeration. We've been thinking about it so long it's hard to wrap my head around the fact that we're actually about to go. Last year may have been the year of the "staycation," but things will be different in 2010!

We took a three-generation vacation two years ago - Grandma (husband's mom), husband and me, and his kids: a classic "family road trip" to Yellowstone National Park and the Grand Canyon. It really worked out quite well, especially when you consider the amount of time we spent in the car - and that won't be an issue this time. We'll spend much less time on the journey and concentrate much more of it on the destination(s). The Monday after school lets out, we're getting on a plane and heading to the East Coast for a city vacation - one week in Washington DC, and the next in New York City.

The Controlling Volunteer

"If you want something done, do it yourself."

Unlike my sister, I've never been much of a traditional volunteer (although I have been the mother of a Tennessee Volunteer). I've spent most of my adult life as a commuting work-outside-the-home mother whose workplaces have often been a significant distance from home, so I've tended to guard my non-work time, and volunteering has rarely fit into it. I'm not against the idea of volunteering; I've just been reluctant to give the time to actually do something. I've spent most of my career working for nonprofits, and I've seen first-hand how much they rely on and value volunteers...and yet I seldom join their ranks. I've struggled with guilt over that, and have often tried to make up for it with monetary contributions instead of time.

Lately, though, I've noticed that I've been stepping up as a volunteer much more often, although it's not in the usual context. It's virtual volunteering that I can do from my own desk - although it sometimes has an off-line component - and it usually benefits a fairly specific group that I already belong to, not my kid's school or a charity. I've learned that life's too short to let a good idea languish waiting for someone else to pick it up and run with it, and so lately I've stopped waiting and become an Organizer.

For example, some of my book-blogging friends were talking online (on Twitter) not long ago about the upcoming Book Expo America (BEA) and Book Blogger Convention, which are currently underway in New York City, and lamenting not being able to go. Someone remarked that "we should just do something ourselves," and a few hours later, there was an e-mail list. I offered to create a sign-up form to gauge interest, and shared it with those on the list willing to post it on their blogs. As interest grew, I suggested we set up a dedicated blog to centralize the information and plans; I bought the domain name, chose and tweaked the design, and wrote the first couple of posts. We launched Armchair BEA in just over two weeks, creating a virtual opportunity for nearly two hundred book bloggers to share knowledge and network from their own homes.

Mother's Day without Mother? Meh.

I hope you had a lovely Mother's Day. It was pretty much an ordinary Sunday for me.

Due to certain oddities of the calendar and the custody schedule, it seems that more often than not, my husband's kids have been with him on Father's Day...and on Mother's Day. I feel a little strange about that. In the nearly four years I've been married to their father, I've tried my best not to step on the the toes of my stepchildren's mother, and I'm ambivalent about whether I expect or want any special attention from the kids on Mother's Day - I don't really feel entitled to it. I love my stepchildren - they're with their father and me two nights a week and every other weekend and are a huge part of my life, and I'd like to believe they feel the same way about me. But we all know I'm only "like a mother" to them, and it doesn't seem right to expect the treatment due to the person who is their mother on Mother's Day.

There are some (fun) things you don't outgrow - thank goodness!

My husband and I recently observed our fifth anniversary - of our first date. We're both (several years) past forty, and this is the second marriage for both of us; in many ways, it's still a young relationship. I married a man with a great sense of humor and fun, and that helps keep our relationship - and us - feeling young. I was married (to my first husband) and a mother by the time I was twenty, so I missed some of the aimless fun of the young-adult years. Although my second husband and I are raising (his) children together, they're only with us part-time, and when they're with their mom, it's nice to be able to engage in some of that aimless fun together...and remember I'm actually not too old for it.

We spent our anniversary day doing something that I'd never done before, and that my husband hadn't done since his own youth - attending a science-fiction/comics fan convention in Anaheim. Let's be honest: I've always been a nerd, but I haven't always been out in the open about it. (Most people could probably figure it out, though...) My husband, however, cheerfully embraces his inner geek and lets him out to play pretty often, and that's helped me get a lot more comfortable with my own. Not comfortable enough to wear a costume to one of these events, mind you, but certainly comfortable enough to be seen at one. Then again, if you're not in costume, no one's looking at you anyway.

Parental Guidance Suggested

Tween-hood is a tricky place. My sister and I both have ten-year-olds at home, and she was recently talking to me about how her older son's tastes in entertainment are changing, and shows he loved just a few months ago are "for babies" now. But he has a seven-year-old brother, and he still like those "baby" shows. Since this isn't a house where everyone has an individual TV, my sister has to consider whether she wants her younger son exposed to older content yet.

In our house, the ten-year-old, my stepson, is the younger brother; the older sibling is his fifteen-year-old sister. We don't have individual TVs for everyone either, and since my husband's kids are with us just two nights each week and alternate weekends, they don't really watch much television on their own here. Their tastes have been diverging for a while, and we've been watching TV in shifts for over a year. The list of shows we can all watch together seems to be shrinking every time we turn around - lately, we're down to The Amazing Race, Psych, and Mythbusters. We recently had to drop one show when we realized that the hosts used a lot of double entendres...and my stepson was laughing. We think he was laughing because we were, and he didn't really understand what he was laughing at; we hope that was why, really. We're not ready to find out differently, so now my husband only watches the show when his son isn't around. (Thank goodness for the DVR!)

The reflection of *Twilight* on a teenage girl

Before the Twilight Saga was a movie series, it was books. It was a series of books that I gave to my stepdaughter when she was in the eighth grade. I hadn't read them myself - at that time, I considered myself too old for young-adult literature, and I'd never pre-screened the books my son read, so it honestly didn't occur to me to check them out first. I knew the basics of the story and that it was hugely popular with girls in her age group, and I also knew my stepdaughter had an interest in goth trappings and paranormal stories that also wasn't uncommon at that age, so I thought she might enjoy the books.

She did like the first one, for the most part. But she got rather fed up during New Moon and didn't finish it, and has never even opened Eclipse. She has actively shunned the movies based on the series, although she has lately considered watching them on DVD with her best friends - fellow Twilight-haters - just to snark on them. Based on what I've come to learn about the story over the last few years, I think she has the right idea.

"Bella is an idiot and Edward is a stalker." Not much gets past that girl. I'm not sorry she's turned against Twilight, but I'm also not worried that it would have been a harmful influence on her self-image. At fifteen, she's not pining for a boy's attention - most of the time, she'd just as soon not be bothered by it. And she seems to grasp that a guy's hot-and-cold possession/rejection cycle is less romantic than it is obsessive and creepy. (Given that, I'm hoping she'll share my dislike for Wuthering Heights one day; no one needs a guy like Heathcliff.) But she knows a lot of girls who haven't seen through it all the way she has.

My "friend," my "curse" - girl talk. Period.

I've always struggled to be comfortable talking about some "girly" stuff. I'm OK with reading about it - my comfort level with writing is always higher than it is with oral communication (and so I became a blogger - go figure!), but I'm just not in the habit of talking about it. Marriage at 19, motherhood at 20 (the catalyst for the marriage at 19), a couple of cross-country moves, and full-time work all were factors in my missing out on some prime female-bonding time in early adulthood. I just seemed to spend most of my time around guys then, and at some level I was grateful I had a son and not a daughter. Considering that I had dodged "the talk" with my own mother during my pre-teen years (no reluctance on her part - it was all mine), raising a boy meant that I felt less pressure to tackle the topic from the maternal side. (I doubt he minded very much.)

But my friend Rebecca recently reviewed an important new book that talks about some of the "girliest" stuff there is, Flow: The Cultural Story of Menstruation by Elissa Stein and Susan Kim, and issued a challenge to get a conversation about our periods "flowing." Fortunately for me, the "conversation" is taking written form.

When my first period arrived, I was 11 years old, and despite not wanting to discuss it with my mother, I knew enough about what was going on (because I'd read about it) that I wasn't really scared by it...but I wasn't happy to see it either, and I didn't tell my mom; she discovered it through the laundry. My adolescent periods were frequently heavy, painful, and not always predictable - there were a couple of those "big red spot" incidents during junior high. But it really didn't mean much more than inconvenience to me until I was in a relationship with my first boyfriend - the one I married at 19 and had a son with at 20.

My boyfriend and I were not Catholic enough to wait to have sex until we got married, but we were Catholic enough not to use "artificial" - also known as "effective" - birth control; I kept track of my cycles on my calendar and let him know when it it was "safe" or "not safe." (This was in the pre-AIDS early 1980's, and we were each other's first partners, so pregnancy was really the only thing we were concerned with avoiding.) Getting my period came to mean we were "safe" for another month...until we weren't. For the record, this particular method of birth control works best when a woman's cycle is very regular - and mine never really was. We're probably lucky our method was successful for as long as it was.

After that experience, and six weeks after giving birth, I went on the Pill. I stayed on it for 18 years, and was exceedingly faithful about taking it. Aside from the obvious benefits, I loved the fact that at last I was on a regular cycle. I trusted the Pill's effectiveness, but I'd been caught once by an unplanned pregnancy and had NO wish to have it happen again; I only wanted one child, and even though he arrived sooner than I might have intended, that didn't change my mind about being done once I had him. I'd come to rely on my period as the sign that everything was working according to plan.

Hair, There, and Everywhere; or, True Color

My second husband and I met almost five years ago, and until this past December, he'd never seen my natural hair color. It had been even longer since I'd seen it myself, and I started wondering what it might look like these days. It hadn't had too much gray before...how much had that changed? I'd never intended to become someone for whom coloring her hair was a necessity, and my plan had always been to age gracefully and naturally, which would most likely mean gray hair some day - maybe it was time to take a break from faking it, and see where things stood?

Quite a few years ago, I spotted some chestnuts for sale in the produce section of the grocery store and thought, "That's my hair color." My stylist at the time agreed, and told me that he had clients who paid good money to get it. Despite that, I decided to experiment with highlights shortly after I turned 40. I'd recently lost a significant amount of weight, I'd never played with my hair color before, and a friend gave me a salon gift card for my birthday - it seemed like a convergence of signs telling me to change my look. The fact that I'd moved across the country and no longer had the same stylist meant I was unlikely to be talked out of it, either.

I really liked my new look. However, I never really wanted my colored hair to look too unnaturally colored, so I had the highlighting toned down after the first couple of years. When my mother-in-law asked "Who's the blonde?" when she saw a photo of me that my husband had taken, I decided that perhaps I should scale back the color to a shade more favorable to my dark eyes and medium skin tone, and I did that not long before my wedding pictures were taken in October 2006.

But late last year, between the desire to cut our expense budget a bit and my husband's occasional comments about older women whose faces didn't correspond to their hair color, I started thinking more and more about a break from the color routine, and I nervously asked my stylist how we'd proceed with that.

The Empty Space in the Room - and in My Heart

When my husband and I returned to our house that Saturday afternoon, the first thing we did was pack up the beds and the dishes. We weren't ready to get rid of them, but we also weren't ready to keep seeing them in their customary places, going unused. But seeing the places where they used to be is just as difficult, in a different way. It's still sinking in that after more than eleven years, two states, three cities, and four homes, I don't have a dog any more.

When I met Gypsy at an "adoption event" in Memphis in September of 1998, she was probably about 18 months old - I never knew for sure. but when she and I first saw each other that day, it was an immediate connection. She was very pretty and friendly, and I've always been sure that when she looked at me, she thought "There's a sucker! There's a sap!" She judged me correctly, I must say.