Yes, after forestalling this feeling for so many weeks, the dog days of summer have arrived. It's the last week, I have minimal babysitting (how did I once-upon-a-time stay home full time? I must pull out my journals to see how I was really feeling then). Plus, it's rainy and wet out, for days, so it's all quite disorienting. Samira keeps waking up the baby from her nap. "Mom, it was by accident, I swear," is something I've heard several times today already.


We're trying to keep it positive by organizing and getting ready for the school season. Giving in, I bought one of those "Mom" calendars at the book store up the street (and wondered too, where are the similar "Dad" calendars: surely somewhere in America there are fathers responsibile for getting their family members and themselves to school, playdates, swim practice and dentist appointments). I've given in, yes. I am officially not cool. The Sandra Boynton Mom Calendar now hangs on my refrigerator, next to the magnetic Mom's Phone List, complete with school numbers, plumber, doctor and dentist numbers. I even put my grandmother's number down, since her latest move pushed me over the peak of how many numbers I can remember. Maybe that will help me remember to call her.

And the final, final footnote on Forbes.com and its willingness to publish trashy sexist stuff to boost its ratings: my friend Becky wrote to none other than Steve Forbes about it. She also wrote to a large handful of women authors who often write about women and work and asked them to voice their complaint.

Here's what Steve wrote back:

I want to acknowledge your communication with us on the article "Don't Marry Career Women." Sensitive issues demand sensitive treatment. The piece that appeared on Forbes.com this past week was intended to be part academic and part humorous. Instead, it profoundly offended hard-working career women everywhere. We deeply regret having done so.

Steve Forbes
President and Editor-in-Chief
Forbes

The blogosphere is certainly alive this past week with discussions of the Forbes article. I was most intrigued, though, by an article in the business section of today's NYTimes. In short, Forbes.com charges its advertisers a great deal to appear there, but the website on a normal day doesn't actually get the number of hits it needs to back up its exorbitant rates. Solution: every so often it places an incendiary article on the website to get readers' collective goats. Readers read sexist male writer bashing career women, readers get mad, readers email their ten closest friends and tell them to click on Forbes.com and read. Result: Forbes.com's hits go up, its ad rates stay high. In short, we're played both ways. If no one responds, the awful words stand. If we do respond, we're encouraging their strategy and raising their profits. Talk about putting women between a rock and a hard place.

Advertisers are encouraged to play on the battle of the sexes and the mommy wars as a way to gain attention from women by touching on topics that hit us deep in the heart. I wrote about this in my book "The Truth Behind the Mommy Wars," and I leafed through my copy tonight to reread page 40 and after. What is the best way to stop this callous use of women's attention and energy? Who's phrase was "stop the madness"? How apropos.

When I began writing this blog, the direction I received was simple: write from the perspective of being a "smart mom." Perhaps that's something I take for granted. After all, I live in one of those bubble-like communities where every woman I know is really smart, it seems. Where people make decisions about their lives and the way they love and the way they parent that often resist those offered by the mainstream culture. When last spring a book on motherhood advised women "to marry down" so they won't have to sacrifice their careers when they have kids, I looked around my neighborhood at all the couples I know who, let alone following such horrid advice, probably wouldn't ever conceive relationships in the crass terms of "marrying up" or "marrying down" in the first place. On a daily basis I feel nurtured by being in the presence of caring people who are trying to forge their way through challenging lives, as all our lives are, in whatever human ways we can.

Thus, it's always a bit of a surprise when the rustle of the real world breaks through. Surrounded by such nice people, by moms who think so carefully and lovingly about their work and their children, by dads who are often very hands-on, by women and men who seems to choose spouses out of love and desire, in every combination of gender, I'm always shocked by mean-spirited idiocy like that published in Forbes last week, where editor Michael Noer wrote an article urging men--business men--not to marry "career women" because they're less likely to be happy, more likely to divorce, and we might suppose

By now, every listserv and group of e-moms I know has dissected the piece. The article was retitled as "opinion" and paired with a counterpoint piece by another Forber staffer, a woman, who writes back to say that she's a working, career mom, nicely and happily married, thank you very much.

Our society is still so uncomfortable with smart women, or "career gals" as Noer so lightly calls us, referring back to 1930's lingo.

Articles and dust-ups like this make me realize, too, that we're still made very uncomfortable by the presence of egalitarian marriage. That's what the article goes after, with its odd use of social scientific surveys and numbers and fears about well educated women who cheat on their husbands. Underneath: discomfort, disregard for those of us who still believe in the ideal of egalitarian marriage, of marriages of love, of relationships that don't bear a calculus of who earns what and whether that person's a socio-economic "good catch," and where a potential spouse ranks on the scale of economic and social prestige. I'm glad that what I've heard today is real anger, people writing back to Forbes, demanding better. It is horrible to think that from so many angles, the ideals of relationships of equivalence, of unions that might actually include intelligent conversation with an equally educated and well-read and intellectually matched spouse, the kind of relationship I take for granted, is precisely that which is under attack.

For anyone trying to find new blogs, check out The Mom Salon, which Jennifer James of Mommy Too has created as a gateway to all the blogs in the mom world.

Meanwhile, in the ethereal, late-summer mood I've been in, I spent this morning pruning my mother's garden, literally, while she spent time with the baby. Talk about a win-win, especially since I had the much loved task of harvesting sprigs from her lavender patch to bundle up, hang in a dark closet, and dry so she can have that wonderful smell all winter. I was inspired after visiting a lavender farm several weeks ago (I still carry that soul lifting scent with me). Since then, we've had lavender on the brain. This morning I planted a white lavender plant we purchase while at the farm. Each morning, too, we've been making "lavender toast." The lavender farm keeps bees, to help pollinate the lavender. When the farmers harvest the bees' honey, it comes out tasting like lavender, mild and uplifting. We've been toasting bread, spreading some butter, and lifting some of the most delicious pale yellow goodness out of the honey jar to put on top. Hence: lavender toast, the current favorite food of my almost-eight-year old daughter. Mmmmm.

Yes, I'm giving up coffee, today I had but a wee bit of decaf--that's decaf, iced--at lunch. I'm on my way, and trading it in, apparently, for my new addiction, pandora.com. Admission: I am not usually much into internet music. I don't have an ipod, I don't download from i-tunes. I've never had the time to focus. I'm a former conservatory student, but I've never been able to remember the names of bands and songs that I like. Which is perhaps why I've found Pandora so incredibly wonderful. It's run by the "Music Genome Project." The way it works is that you type in the name of a band or song that you like. This becomes your "station" (and you can have many of them.) Pandora then plays some of that singer or band, mixed with a whole lot of songs and bands and music that sound like it, songs they think you will like. It's so fun, because they're often right. I've been leaving my computer on (and again, I'm usually not the much-admired techno-geek type). Right now I'm listening to Keane Radio, so-called, and am very happy.

Forget about good sleep advice, pediatricians, and finding time to exercise when we're new moms. Today, life is about finding the most excellent soundtracks to parent by.

I think there's a premium/pay service, but I've been listening to the free version and it's been just fine. More than fine. Enjoy.

Late summer stock-taking continues. Today's casualty: coffee. I'm giving up coffee. Coffee can be wonderfully delicious, aromatic, and social, but it's not good for me. I had given it up several years back in order to do a full body cleansing, on the way to homeopathic remedy. I can safely say that six weeks after giving up coffee (and lots of other things to boot, but that's a separate story), I felt 85% better. I stayed off it untill early this summer, when the stresses of life propelled me toward our kitchen coffee pot. Yes, some might be saying, my life perhaps is a bit squeaky clean if the drug I reached for was coffee.

First I poured just a touch of coffee into a tall glass of warm soymilk. It was soymilk with a taste of coffee. Week after week passed, I added more and more coffee, until before I knew it, I could no longer deny that I was, in fact, a coffee drinker. Alas. I entered re-denial. I didn't drink coffee at home. I mixed decaf and regular.

I've come to terms with this horrid, terrible addiction. The one that drains my memory, kidnaps my vocabulary, and makes it impossible to reach the end of my sentences. (I'm not making this up; this really is the effect of coffee on my body.)

Me and coffee: it's over. I realized this the other day. I was out with the baby and we drove by an upscale little cafe. "I need a latte," I thought, and pulledthe car over. Inside, I ordered that latte, and you know what, it cost five dollars. And it wasn't even the tallest size. And it wasn't even that great. Something in me snapped, and I knew, then and there, this was the last one.

This mom has had enough.

Today, I did decaf, half a cup, with lots of warm milk. I'm done. I'm gathering friends and family around me for support. I'm resolute. And here, sitting on the porch while the baby naps, under another clear blue sky and a warm breeze, I know that a future life of herbal teas will be good enough for me. I'm ready.

I read Ghost in the House, the new book about maternal depression, last month. I read it voraciously, not exactly in one sitting, what mother can say that of any book, what with young kids around the house. I kept at it. The book pulled me in, entranced me, and oddly, one might say, for a book on depression, it energized me and revitalized my sense of being a mother. Ghost is being reviewed around the mom-blogosphere lately, and here's a particularly wonderful reading of the book by Heather of Dooce.

While working on the blogroll and resource links, I had to add Craig's List, because Moms-in-the-Know know that it's the best place to find a babysitter. My pal Mary clued me in after my baby was born, when I, the former-stay-at-home-mom asked myself, is four weeks too early to hire a babysitter? The answer is no, and Craig's List is the place to find someone to fit exactly the hours you want, whether it's full time, or as in my case, a few odd hours strewn over the week. If the no-frills site is hard to follow, just go to Craigs List, click your city or town, click on community, then childcare. Follow the directions to post, and because posts scroll down, if you don't find someone in a few days, post something new. That's what I did. I realized I hadn't posted exactly the hours I needed. Once I fixed it, the babysitting goddess brought me the fabulous young woman who is now baby Amelia's babysitter. And the deity this working-at-home mom most worships is indeed, the babysitting goddess.

The Links/Blogroll section is up and running! I've started adding my usual round of blogs. Send me your links--to your blog or websites, and to your favorites, too--I'd love to have them all. Leave a message here, no matter whether you read this right when it's posted or whenever you find the site, and I'll add you in.

I'm loving late summer. The heat spell here broke, and we've been graced by the longest spell of clear blue sky, mid-80's days I can remember. Summer isn't often a catching-up time for me, but this year, both early and late summer have been stock-taking, future-planning times. Only mid-summer, with its rat-race of evening swim meets, provided a very different kind of energy.

The kids are great. My older daughter is having a blast. Camp has ended, and still, she seems to find something and some friend to fill every moment. She's unstoppable. The baby is healthy, sitting up well, babbling, gaining weight after her bout with sickness earlier this summer. She's entirely cute, as babies are, and this morning reached out and gave her big sister the biggest sloppiest kiss known to humankind.

For me, late summer energy usually has some desperation. It's the dog days. Camp is over, school hasn't begun, in fact, it won't start until September 6th, making ours one of the later starts; our old friends in Atlanta have already started school. Late summer is usually a weird time inbetween with no real definition. Maybe I'll feel that way as September looms closer.

For now, late summer feels energizing. Eight months after giving birth, I'm exercising everyday. The baby fits happily into a baby backpack. The baby-who-doesn't-like-the-stroller-when-Mom's-nearby does just fine leaning over mom's neck. We go for walks in the morning, and even in the afternoon, it's much easier to get out and about with her.

After putting the baby to nap this afternoon, I pulled out the computer (crossing my fingers that the house will stay quiet enough for this little light sleeper to have her full nap), and before getting to my work, breezed over to Mamazine. Mamazine was begun a year or so ago by some Sacramento moms who wanted more interesting mom-oriented literature and journalism, they wanted to see the complexities of their lives in writing. They've added a ton of new columnists, including this one, by Rad Dad Tomas Moniz which had a terrific list of radical books for children. It includes one of my favorite follow-your-own-drum books, Daniel Pinkwater's "The Big Orange Splot," and lots of titles I don't know, like: Oh Lord, I Wish I Was a Buzzard by Polly Greenberg and Aliki The Paper Bag Princess by Robert N. Munsch The Pirate Meets the Queen by Matt Faulkner The Pirate Queen by Emily Arnold McCully Punxsutawney Phyllis by Susanna Leonard Hill Rabbit Island by Jorg Steiner Sally Lockhart Mysteries by Philip Pullman There are many more, so click on over . Looking ahead to baby number two's reading, I'm ready to explore the nooks and crannies of children's lit I didn't reach the first time around.

Scene: this morning, at local deli/food store. I am in denial about this, but I am slowly beginning to drink coffee again, even though I know how bad it is for my particular body (I remain a coffee lover, I adore the smell, and love that other people drink it, really I do). Because I am in denial, I don't make it at home. That would mean coming to terms with the new habit. That I head out each morning to a nearby food shop (not even a cafe) for my mixture of coffee and decaf and milk is a prime example of the clash between rationale knowledge and desire.

Anyhow. There I am. Baby in sling. Pouring coffee. Reaching over for milk and a bit of sugar (it could be the entire ritual is a grab for milk's calcium, and a splash of sweetness). The store manager is there, a bit harried.

He looks at me. I must say, I was actually making it all work, as opposed to the other day, when I spilled milk all over the counter.

Store manager's comment to me: I never understood evolution-wise why mothers didn't develop three arms. Seems like something that should have happened a million years ago at least.

Really, truly.

As end of summer approaches, I've been thinking about health, most broadly interpreted: psychic health, body health, economic health, family health, all of what makes life work. I foresee a bunch of posts about this. Today, here's two pieces of a pie. One's the reference to the NYTimes article this Sunday about women who work on Wall Street. Yes, most of us don't work in the financial sector, and few of us live close enough to the NY Metro area to work on the real, actual Wall Street. Still, women in the big finance companies (as women lawyers) are one of the ways we talk about mothers, work, recruitment to high-paying jobs, and to workplace reentry. Plus, these companies are extremely powerful in trendsetting. That's why this article, which suggests that change is happening, that companies are trying to stem the mommy brain-drain caused by offering no flexibility to mothers might be changing. As always, I'd like to hear from women who are on the ground, to see what it really looks like. One of my favorite self-help books of all time bears a title something like, How can you make a difference if you can't find your keys. It promotes the idea of finding enough organization in life to "get you to ready," and enable you to do what you want. When I started reading Tracy Thompson's book Ghost in the House I had a similar feeling: how's a mother to take care of herself, her kids, work, and find her ways to contribute to society if she can't get out of bed in the morning. Ghost in the House is all about health in the broadest sense, of evading depression, of dealing with depression. I've mentioned it before; I read the book several weeks back, but its kernels of wisdom keep coming back to me in odd moments. In part, there's a refreshing quality to it. Thompson is willing to say that some of us moms are not being good moms. She means that when we don't deal with our own health, we can't be good mothers to our kids, and very often, depression and anxiety disorder can turn us into very bad mothers, in quite specific ways. Because notions of who's a good or bad mother are bandied about so often, and so abstractly, I appreciate the way Thompson makes it real.

Here's something wonderfully fun, sent to me by my old and dear friend Susan. When you click on, move your cursor over the blank page to start. If you click and drag the cursor, it will change color!

During the past year on Everyday Mom, and back in the old days of the forum software, every so often someone would write in to ask whether Hylands Teething Tablets work. Others would respond, usually to say yes, sometimes to say no, ocassionally to tell a lurid tale involving child vomit. Now, I'm not paid to push Hylands products, nor to give homeopathic advice. I'm only here to write about motherhood.

That said, I must tell you that the other night by friend L. called. Well, I had called her first to see if I could borrow her baby backpack for some hiking I had in mind. When she answered the phone she was all upset. Her baby was all upset. He couldn't settle down Life was not good. Thinking I should bring something over in return for the backpack, I grabbed my pink and blue bottle of Teething Tablets, and when I arrived, handed them over as a peace offering. Most of the time it's hard to know when a baby is actually teething, but then again, it's always worth a try. All I know is as I was leaving, L's husband could be heard saying something like "let's give him half the bottle" (he was joking....).

The best thing happened. Two days later I got an email from L saying that the baby had slept, two nights in a row. Everyone was feeling much better. They really do work, and I'm just here to repeat the tale.

Last one, I promise. Apparently the Today Show covered this too. I can't get the download to work, my mac isn't cooperating and with a fussy baby this morning I haven't the energy to figure out why. I did get to see the promo picture and it ain't pretty. They contort the face of the woman who wrote the initial article so she looks rather horrid (because of course we know that we can't ever say that motherhood is boring and if we do, we must look like a mean, evil troll).

That's the last of this thread. As with all these things, something new will come along, we'll forget all about this one, and in the meantime, we're still doing our thing, trying to find the good meaning in our hours and days, no matter what we're doing through all the minutes that pass.

Here's the brush-with-network-TV follow-up from my last post:

Five o'clock on Monday, after spending the whole day with my post-day-camp 8 year old daughter, and the baby, who no longer naps very much, amid the terrible heat wave where even a trip to the pool didn't beckon over the pleasures of air conditioning, a producer from one of the networks called. I can't remember which, she introduced herself so quickly.

She had read my blog entry (the one just below) on the motherhood-is-boring article. Would I like to come on television and defend motherhood? she wanted to know.

Hello? Maybe they could send cameras to my house. Maybe they could watch me shuttle between children, hope the neighbor's kids would get home from camp so Samira could play, attempt to do laundry, give up because it's really hard to bend over with a baby in a sling, try to find two minutes to return a phone call, focus on a paid-writing task that would take but ten minutes were I able to sit down and focus. They could watch me give up on imagining what's for dinner, wonder whether it's too late to get anyone to invite us over, jot notes about emails I need to send that evening. For the climax they could watch me get the baby down for a nap--finally--and in my one free hour try to clean up a bit, finish that writing job, find someone to deliver my spring semester student evaluations to one of my workplaces, and put soaker hoses in place so I can water my garden more efficiently in this heat.

And then they could ask me whether or not I think motherhood is boring. In real life: there's a yes or no answer. We all know that. The produer knew it too. And even though as an author I'm supposed to craven for ay kind of media publicity, there's no way I could bit on this one. Not even for network TV and another Lincoln town-car ride to NY. Not even for the fab free make-over and hair-straightening. (I can tell you after June's experience with NBC/CNBC: the stylists at the major networks do know how to keep hair off the face and out of the eyes. They don't just use hairspray: they tease, and they have the most high-end hair irons known to humankind. That's why on network TV, women's hair never moves. Those TV stylists are the queens of hair control.)

In my utopian and politically-engaged world of the future, this is what happens. The cameras roll. They take in my day, ask me to comment on the whole damn ridiculous debate about whether or not motherhood is boring, and I get to tell them that we're focusing on the wrong question. They pay attention and let me have my say. They want to hear the smartest and most insightful points about motherhood, fatherhood and parenting. They ask probing follow-ups, like, "Miriam, what might better questions be? What would an important, productive and humane debate about parenting at this moment in time be?"

Back to real life. The producer realized quickly I wasn't her gal for the show. I repeated that motherhood journalism has much lower standards than most other themes, and that the same patterns have been repeated for fifteen years or more. I tell her how different the May/Mother's Day reporting was: that is was smarter and more politically and policy aware than ever before. I stress that that is the new trend, not this retread "is it boring or not crap." I tell her what I know. After all, how often do I have a network TV person on the other end of the phone? She does ask me for all my contact info. She says she does lots of parenting topics. They always come up. She'd like to keep in touch.

And that was that. Six pm. Baby in my arms, older child near by. My close brush with network fame. Dinner, alas, is still nowhere in sight.