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Sure Is Monday


Been stressing all weekend about the new blogging gig at Care2.

“You should never stress about work,” Rob said when I finally voiced my concern that I wouldn’t be able to find a topic for my first post.

“But I can’t work and not be perfect,” I said.

Herein lies my problem, I was raised with a work ethic and the expectation that if I am being paid to work, I need to be damn perfect in the execution of my job – whatever that might be. I have carried this load of crap since the first paying job I had when I was 12 and I was forced to mow our anal retentive neighbor’s lawn two summers in a row. My father, who couldn’t have loathed his job more, believed that there was no half-assing in employment.

I think this must be specific to my particular generation because I haven’t encountered it in those who aren’t technically considered my peer group to the same extent that we seem to be afflicted with it. Maybe it was our parents or something in the food chain or a freakish configuration of planetary bodies, I don’t know, but we are miserable perfectionists. Miserable because we can’t seem to help ourselves despite knowing what a waste of our time it is.

“The hardest thing I ever did was giving up perfectionism,” Rob assured me, but he is the same “reformed” perfectionist who is busily working himself into a knot renovating our home into someone’s dream home because we have no plans to return here after the overseas assignment he is maneuvering towards comes to its ultimate fruition.

Of course I worried to no end. I stumbled across the perfect article in my old home town newspaper this morning which provided the inspiration and link I needed to write my first post – currently awaiting approval. Working for money again has also supplied me with fodder for 50 Something Moms, so blogging is good all around. It was a silly thing to knot up about as it is about as easy for me to not find ideas for writing as it would be to blank my mind and not think. Writing ideas nearly assault me in their quest to be word on screen. Trying to keep pace is more of an issue than anything else.

Oh really, you say. Then why the blog black out over the last week here?

I’ve been writing. That’s why. Blogging is awesome and I don’t think I could ever give it up, but it is a time suck and the sucking usually comes from my off-line writing. I can’t spare it if I want to meet my deadline for rewriting the beginning chapters of the memoir. And while I am on the topic, writing about the dead husband and other related stuff is rather involving. A time suck on the magnitude of black hole.

Things will get back to daily here once NaNoWriMo begins because I am committed to daily doses of fiction, but after that I can’t say. I am literally a hand’s worth of fingers away from post #1000. That’s a lot of blog. Rob thinks I should do something to commemorate the post. I did make note of #500 when it happened, but I haven’t been much for blogversaries and such. You see 1000 posts and I see all the days I could’ve written something in the past 3 and 1/2 years and didn’t. Damned work ethic again.

Today I am exhausted and still have writing and housewifely stuff to do before putting in time on the Dance Mom beat this evening. I haven’t felt this since I stopped teaching – this Monday thing – this weekend lag. Interesting.

Who Can I Offend Today?


It seems my ranting about mammas who rant got me unfriended on Facebook. Between my pruning and my offensive nature, I will soon be left with just family and that is the realm of the truly uncool.

I think I must have slipped in a whole truth or two about family recently because my sister-in-law unfriended me too. Not the lousy one. The other one.

And in other social networking news, I have greatly annoyed an old high school chum who has grown up to be someone who would have made a great next door neighbor for my parents. Passionately to the right on nearly any topic you’d care to name. My feed must be an eyesore to this friend.

I rated a mention over at Ye Ole Widda Board the other day in the old timers quarters. A friend, thank goodness, who confessed to still peeking at my blog in her five year update. The goddess must have been smiling because no one noticed me and I wasn’t ridiculed or barbecued in absentia – though you can be perfectly present and roasted for the titillation of others while the multitude stands by as silent as collaborators. A recent perusal of the main forum there revealed another posse had run someone out-of-town. And good riddance to non-conforming grief too.

Mostly this week I have been memoir writing. A project that is sure to offend in-laws but possibly my own family too. In earlier drafts/attempts I tried to keep my point of view as non-committal as possible on the subject of those I didn’t care for or when I was recounting events where I was simply left to sink or swim, but in its current incarnation, my memoir is not holding back that much. I am not trying to be mean, but honest observation is sometimes painful.

So four chapters and probably closing to the point of having caught 20,000 words.

Yesterday was the chapter on Will’s final hours. It was ouchie to say the least possible. Another two chapters of widowhood, which won’t sting as much because I was mourning myself more than him rather early on in the process and then on to the rediscovery of joy, love and regrouping. Nicer though not always easy times.

Which brings me to something. While catching up with my bloggy friend as she shared what’s been going on in the last year, I noted that there were several other four and five year updates. So I read them too. It shouldn’t have surprised me but a senior widow or two managed to slip a snarky line in here and there because if there is one thing on the Ye Olde Widda Board that just don’t fly – it’s remarried widowed folk who grieve out loud. Maybe it’s jealousy. There are one or two I might comfortably accuse of that, but I think it is more that they just don’t want to know that there isn’t a magic pill that makes it all go away. They give lip service to the idea that grief is lifelong really, but they don’t really want to believe it. The remarrieds are proof that there is no “all better now”. Who wants that knowledge?

Today is a PD day at Dee’s school, so we are out and about having some of that quality time together I read about on the mommy blogs. Library, shopping for a new skating helmet and lunch with Rob.

TGIF, people!

Condescension


So a while ago now moms blogging in the great ‘sphere were offended by an ad that Motrin put out there that – really – wasn’t all that far off the mark if one has spent even the tiniest amount of their lives reading blogs written by mothers who deal primarily in motherhood.

This weekend Uma Thurman gears up to sell her new comedy called Motherhood which topically is about the totally hot ole “profession” of mommy blogging.

Will the fact that Uma is beautiful and sexy in spite of make up and wardrobe’s best attempts to frump her up by darkening her hair and making her wear really big clothing appease the fearsome lot who took on, and k.o’d Motrin ? Or will it feel like the condescension it sorta looks like? Because it looks like a rather cutesy dismissive pat on the fanny to me. You know, unappreciative of the gift of SAHMommyhood  Mom tries to boost her flagging self-esteem by creating a  precious little writing “career” via blogging, gets too wrapped up in the “business” of it all and comes crashing back to thanks to the epiphany laden grounding realization that motherhood is all – and that passion really does flow up from, and out of, one’s uterus.

Okay, now I am a bit offended.

It looks a bit Erma Bombeck to me. Erma Who? The mother of all mommy blogging. My mother had a copy of her book, The Grass is Always Greener on the Other Side of the Septic Tank. She’s to blame for this. Her and Dave Barry milking his family exploits via a column and then a sitcom. Pre-net one had to write on paper and run it past a publisher. Not like today when any woman looking to reclaim what motherhood has stolen from her show the world what mommies are made of can publish themselves. Which is why mommy blogging and this movie feel dated.

Dee watched the trailer with me and said,

“She’s a writer (Thurman) and you’re a writer. Is that just a movie?”

Think. Think. Think. So much wrong with this picture. Yes, it’s just a movie. I don’t write because of Dee. Writing, the actuality and the need, predates her by decades.

My guess is that mommy bloggers will not see the put down in this film but embrace it as some kind of homage. Comedy is not about paying homage. It’s purpose is to expose.

Saddle up, Motrin Moms? Probably not.