The food issue is really hard given how cheap unhealthy food is and how much these issues, as the Times article suggests are all about class. Wealthy women have more resources all around to worry about food and to police. At the same time, their daughters, especially, are all the more prone to eating disorders as they observe their mother's anxieties around food. It seems hard to let this go and let kids figure out what they actually do want to eat, what their bodies tell them with all of this other stuff complicating the very act of eating.

And, the truth is these habits are formed early--

Yesterday's NYTimes, yes, in the style section, had an article that was both insane and real, about mothers, nannies, and the stress over food. Some of the stories made me wonder, at first, whether they were made up. I couldn't believe that some moms would be so picky about food for their kids, about carving such a staunch line in the sand against pizza and pasta and all other foods of great evil. Then I thought about friends I've known who have outlawed goldfish, say, or only fed their children green pepper for snacks after school, and have pounced on prepared foods in all forms with lionness ferocity. I thought of my own refrigerator. I imagined what their lives, and mine, would look like once committed to words and print, because it can be quite horrifying to see our lives described. Some of the moms came off quite silly and controlling, but that's what this genre is all about, exagerating people's home lives to make a point.

The article's point was to say that class and culture differences between women come to the fore over food, something that profoundly affects our society, and it plays out in mothers' lives, and in nannies lives. Stories about moms who want healthy eating and nannies who subvert them fill the front, but the article ends with two babysitters who push children to eat healthy foods (and less ice cream) than the parents allow, so there's some attempt at balance.

My babysitter and I have been immersed in a series of early morning conversations over food. Not about the food she serves Amelia for lunch when she's here, which is three days a week ending at 12.30, but the bigger issues over being a vegetarian (which she is and I'm not), and why, and whether it matters. Or how we socialize with food, and the labor of cooking and cleaning that's involved in all that, and wouldn't it be nice if we could just go for a walk instead.

One morning, the morning I was cooking up a storm of food to bring to my mom's house, we talked about the relation of internal desires about food--what our values are, how we go about practicing them in our lives--and our desire to fit in and conform to other people's standards--like, if you're surrounded by vegans, or meat-eaters, or whatever, how there's all this pressure to do the same thing, and finally, how all this sorts itself out in our economic lives. It's much cheaper to order bulk breakfast cereal, she learned, from the new grocery site at amazon.com. Yet don't we also feel loyalty to, and wish to support the small groceries and food co-ops that dot our city, even though sometimes the food costs much more?

It all gets very complicated when you unpack the issues.

Nutrition is so tied with our class identities too, and food is so permeated for many of us with issues of control. This morning I was thinking about how for people who are well educated, who are more affluent, the pressure to stay thin, to be in good shape, and to eat the right foods is immense. We have whole networks of stores devoted to pleasing us, stores filled with organic foods, with specialty foods from different parts of the world and different american ethnic traditions, with antibiotic-free meats and free-range chicken, and mac and cheese made by small companies in Vermont.

It's also very expensive. Which is a big bind, and a big difference that sets us apart, especially since it's not easy for most of us to talk honestly about class, economics, and family finance. The debate about eating well is inexorably always about what we can afford to eat. If one is educated and/or affluent, we are supposed to eat expensive foods and keep thin. Yet outside our urban areas, and everywhere that people are poor, we eat very inexpensive foods that make us fat. That's the huge furor right now with all the trans fats in prepared foods, and with high fructose corn syrup, those incredibly cheap forms of making foods tasty and sweet that are so bad for our health.

What a scary and hard-to-navigate world we live in.

Over at MomsRising.org, one of the other places that I blog, there's a great update on two women who, with the help of many others, are trying to push the Pennsylvania statehouse to make it illegal to discriminate against mothers when we apply for jobs, especially single mothers, whom employers consider more "expensive" to employ, since they assume they will be solely responsibile for their children's health insurance. Check out the entry, it will tell all, including a riveting account of Kiki Peppard's attempt to go to Harrisburg and talk with the elected officials who should be taking action on this. I've blogged about this also at Playground Revolution.

Yes, I continue to think about how motherhood should be politcally social, engaged in our world. Of course I know this is easier said than done. Just carving out the time this morning to check a website, to blog about it is hard enough. There's the baby, who's nursing up a storm, so even though her babysitter is with her on Thursday mornings, I"m still on call. There's work, paid work, that claims my time. There's the nagging question of what to serve for dinner that doesn't require a visit to the co-op or grocery store (tuna sandwiches and salad, perhaps And I'm not the easy-to-telephone type, especially after all the work calls are done, who wants to take precious time. I don't want to sound like a scold ("We should all be politically active"). Heavens, no. I really don't want to add yet another thing to my day that can't be done, too. But I did find it easy to read the posting, and send an email. That, I can do. I can email while the baby nurses. I can even carry her to that she's facing over my shoulder and check email, and type a few lines, when needed (now that's modern motherhood, I'm waiting for the first how-to parenting books to come out that include sections on the best positions for holding your infant while emailing). So, my musings. But this morning's time at the computer has ended. Now to grab a quick something for lunch before the baby wakes and its time to catch my older daughter at the school bus stop.

Boy, what a weekend of caretaking! Kids, parents, all around. The first time ever that I arrived with a big box of food--cooked food, at that--for the bedridden. I cooked more. I cleaned. I did yard work, planted lilies that were dropped off from my parents' friend who was fall-cleaning her garden. I hauled trash to the dump, and purchased a new dustpan, and even iced a cake for my dad's birthday (well, I opened the icing container and handed the spatula to Samira).

Heavens, am I tired.

Here's what's on my mind this morning though. At the end of each day, I thought I'd relax by leafing through my home's household magazines. Looking at a collection that ranges from the New Yorker, to Opera News, to Real Simple, I chose the latter, thinking, it's kind of mindless, it's easy, and maybe I'll pick up a usable tip for organizing my life and home. I was really tired, the kind of tired where it's easy to think, "I can't read anything real." I thought it might be refreshing for a change just to leaf through a magazine.

It wasn't, and that got me thinking. Dissatisfied, I put it aside and switched off the light and settled into bed. Often as mothers we think we don't have the energy for real reading. I've heard so many mothers say this. I've probably said it myself: "Oh, I don't have time to read. I couldn't possibly. I'm exhausted by the time I get to bed." Much of that is probably true, except when it's not. I've been musing over what it felt like to read the Odyssey during all those nursing sessions, to read it without pressure to finish fast, without a book group deadline, without anyone over my shoulder, without--in my case--anyone even knowing what I was reading, or caring to know. I'm remembering how refreshing it felt, yes really, and yes, I do feel like nerd-mom coming out of the closet here. Good literature is refreshing, those words strung together so carefully in their sentences, the sentences linked, feeding each other. Even a few pages: I think this would be more refreshing, more spirit lifting than the 150-word blurbs that fill most magazines. Something to bring us into another world, a world of imagination, where care is not about the specific details of homes and children, but about narrating the honest intimacies of daily life and the emotions that fill those days.

Right now, I'm reading The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett, which I'd never read as a child. My daughter's school play this year is A Little Princess, so FHB is very much up right now in our home. A few pages at a time.

Happy week to everyone.

I haven't cooked much for four years, seriously, I used to enjoy it, but we moved, and well, it all seemed harder. That's why it was all the funnier that yesterday morning I woke early, got the baby into her highchair with a pile of cheerios in front of her, and started boiling noodles, browning chicken and emptying the cake box mix into a bowl and adding oil, water and eggs.

My mom's recovering from surgery, and I'm taking the girls to see her and my dad this weekend, and it's the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashana, the new year, and my dad's birthday. My babysitter arrived around nine, and was duly impressed. It's not that I don't prepare dinner each night, I do, and I've written about dinner fatigue, the feeling that if you have to procure, prepare and serve dinner one more time, you will have no choice but to take to bed in the tradition of grand old southern ladies who were known to do so. It's that I've lost the power to think ahead and make sure the needed foods are in the house. I have friends who can do this, who can quartermaster and grocery shop well. It's just that I can't, or don't. Or can't. Or don't really want to, except it is so damn nice to have nice dinners. I'm waiting for personal chefs, or at least a service to drop off healthy, warm food at my door each day at 5.30 pm to become financially available to those of us in the middle class. That's what I'm waiting for.

Which leaves me this morning packing corningwares of food into a yellow cooler that I picked up at from someone's recycling heap, covering them with ice packs, and wondering whether a tray of noodle kugel will last a four hour car trip. (Or, for that matter, whether my attempt to follow my mother-in-law's recipe, told to me as "mix two cups, oh, maybe a cup and a half of cottage cheese, and then a few tablespoons of sugar, and if you have some raisins you can add them, and some eggs, maybe a half dozen, something like that, yes, and salt and pepper, and make sure it's liquidy, it should be liquidy..." which always results in wonderousness at her table will similarly work for mine.

A wonderful few days to all.

Next week, join me as I journey around the mom blogosphere, which has been debating issues like popularity and commercialization as of late, and as I get a report on the premiere of the documentary of The Motherhood Manifesto next Thursday at the U.S. Senate, hosted by Senators Clinton, Obama, Kennedy and Dodd.

Has anyone been in contact with the mothers at Mothers Acting Up? I just learned about them today, realizing that has life turned out differently, I would have been on a panel this October with Beth Osnes, one of the co-founders. I've signed up, I loved their description of what they do, and the tone of their website, with its Whisper, Sing, Yell, and Declare buttons. I've been thinking lately how to be a mom in the world, you know, not the mom I am at home, the mom who cares and cleans and cuddles and does all that, but about how to be a social mom. I don't feel like doing mom chat this time around. I haven't looked very hard for a playgroup, I veer away from discussions with other new moms about the details of sleep and food. I find it too hard to keep at bay the anxieties of other parents of young children, and the occasional competitive glance. I've learned that we all do parenting differently, and as much as I loved the camraderie of playground parenting the first time around, in my new neighborhood, anxiety seems to rule the day.

I'm trying to find a different model for being a mom in the world. One thing I'm doing is taking walks with the baby in her backpack, and using the time to talk with friends on the phone. My friends are scattered, and many that live nearby are working fulltime or parttime. In the forty-five minutes between kissing Samira off to the school bus, and saying good morning to the babysitter, I've been walking, and talking, thanks to the very excellent bluetooth device given me last week by my husband.

When technology's good, it's really good.

The 8 o'clock hour is commute time. Already this week and last I've had soul lifting conversations as I pass through the streets of our neighborhood and my friends wind their way through the morning commute.

The question of models for being a mom in the world really hit me the other day. Cooper Monroe, a mother in Pittsburgh, published a must-read article in the Pittsburgh Gazette, her hometown paper, about maternal profiling, or the way that mothers are discriminated against in hiring situtions. This particularly affects single mothers, due to employers' fears that the kids will make their employee health insurance costs skyrocket. Cooper followed her article with a blog entry at MomsRising and with an email sent out that asks all of us to contact legislators in Pennsylvania and ask them to help get a bill that would make maternal profiling illegal out of committee and onto the floor for a vote.

Mom activism still seems so weird, doesn't it, the idea that instead of going to playgroup we might go to politicians' offices. I've written about this before, and encouraged others. I've even written about how, here in PA, when you're home with your kids and frustrated, instead of yelling at your children, pick up the phone and call Rick Santorum's office, and yell there instead.

Still, when I read Cooper's email, and directions, I understood why it's so hard. I felt that "Oh, I could never do that!" feeling, beginning with how hard it is to even find the phone numbers to call. And the irony, I have no problem calling the offices of Representatives and Senators when I'm working on an article. As if calling as a journalist gives me more entree to their phone lines, their attention and their time than just being a mom. I write politically, but when it comes to doing this basic act of American democracy, I shutter my eyes and stop cold.

Let's see how I can change that. Next time, I'll write about what happens when I try. Maybe all of us can do that, try on the politically engaged vision of being a mother and a woman in our worlds.

I did, and it feels like a true reading accomplishment. I realized how many of the metaphors and mages we have in our culture (like, the bearded god up in the sky) come so directly from these ancient writings, especially as they become foundational for generations and centuries after, as we continued to read them. I'm not quite up for the Iliad, but I did find myself walking around with my head in the Odyssey those last few days, as I sped up my reading process, curious about how the last few chapters would work out. I finished right before my Mom's health crisis, and facing it, I really understood why ancient Greeks were so comforted by the idea of gods and goddesses who were right there by there side, as Pallas Athena was for Odysseus. I was also shocked by the violence. In the final fight between Odyssseus and his side, and all the bad men who were wooing Penelope, the descriptions of how each died were grueling and vivid and awful, and there was little mercy to be found.

This summer I also read Jennifer Egan's The Keep, and A.M. Homes, This Book Will Save Your Life, which I adored. I'm back in love with novels, again, and am waiting for Claire Messud's new book The Emperor's Children, to arrive.

Around our house, it's Disney's High School Musical, 24/7. Samira thinks it's just the tea, and we have fun bopping around the house singing its very singable songs. She also likes that there's only one kiss, and that it's on the cheek, since boy-girl kissing gets a big "Yuck" in her mind these days. The theme of performance is big right now at our house.
She auditioned for the fall play at her school, and it's the kind of school where everyone who tries out gets a part. I'm personally bummed that two days a week I won't pick her up until 5, though there were many pre-new-baby years where late pickup twice a week would have been greeted with hoots of joy. Bad timing on that one, but what can you do? Life really does just give us what it will, I'm learning.

I'm back to my keyboard after a harrowing few days attending to my mother's health. My dad called last Wednesday with news that after back surgery, there were some complications, and my mother was in an induced coma, and facing a possible tracheotomy. Needless to say, I jumped in the car, baby in the backseat, to head to the hospital three hours away and figure out what was going on. I also learned I was my mom's health care proxy, along with my dad. I was in denial that we were in charge of her health care decisions; it didn't seem possible that this strong and competent woman was not in charge. That meant that an ear, nose and throat surgeon with an intriguing eastern european accent got on the phone with me, explained the situation, then pressured me to give my consent. All I could imagine was my dear mom waking up from back surgery and wondering why she has a tracheotomy tube in her neck. In retrospect, she said we definitely made the right decision, that given the choice between not breathing and having a tracheotomy, the latter is the better choice. I did send the doctor to my dad so he could more properly offer consent. My dad, by the way, was petrified, but we got him through the whole experience, with the help of a bottle of scotch later that day; the man needed to relax in his hotel room with a drink, I tell you. Now I feel baptized into the sandwich generation, caring for young children and our parents, too, at the same time.

The good news is that my mom fully recovered--she is one strong woman, and she had a spell of good luck cast her way on this one. After two days of coma sedation, the doctors wheeled her back into the operating room, hoping that they would be able to remove the ventilator tubes from her throat and that all would be well. The best happened, the tubes came right out, her throat was no longer swollen, and twenty minutes later she was in the recovery room. Boy was she surprised when they pushed her bed into the hallway and she saw my dad, her dear friend Norma, me and the baby standing there by the elevator. It turns out she had no idea what had happened. She was very surprised when she woke up and it was Thursday, not Tuesday (the day of her initial operation). Those nurses and doctors had some explaining to do.

She's now back home, resting, glad that all those drugs are halflifing out of her system, and looking forward to the rest of her life. She's excited that her Alexander Method teacher will make house calls, and ready to start physical therapy. My daughter Samira made her grandma promise that next summer, they can go bike riding together and now, that's one of her goals.

Big breath of relief.

It goes without saying that I love books. Only sometimes I don't, actually. Sometimes I don't want to read. I don't want to be in the middle of a novel. I want to hide my bedside table's stack of unread books beneath the bed. When Amelia was born, however, I decided I wanted to read Homer. The Odyssey. We all carry around the sense that we didn't read enough in high school, or college, that we're missing some key knowledge of literature that is certainly holding us back from the full extent of life's pleasures. Looking forward to hours nursing in the rocking chair, I decided I would tackle the Odyssey, especially since the gorgeous cover of the Robert Fagles translation had been peeking from my unread pile for several years.

Disclaimer: I really am not one of those people who think you should be reading classical literature to your babies to make them smarter. Really. I just had a sense that this was the book to read while nursing. I thought that it needed to be read out loud, to make the prose-poetry hum, and what better time and place to do that than with the baby. To pass the time. When I could do nothing else. This wasn't about the baby, but about me. I've always thought that books for moms to read while nursing make the best shower and baby presents.

So I began, out loud. I soon switched to reading to myself, regular grown-up fashion. Where at first silent reading would make my eyes glaze over, a few weeks after I entered the book's fantastical god-and-goddess driven world, I could more easily read silently, I could hear the poetry in my head. My only concern was that my baby's ten-minute power-nursing meant I didn't have nearly the time I wished for to read.

Nine months later, I'm not yet done. I have reached the chapter where finally, Odysseus returns to Ithaca, and so too does his son, Telemachus, aided by the goddess Pallas Athena. They are about to take the palace back from the evil, consuming men who woo Penelope's hand. I can't wait to see how they do it.

I am as entranced by Homer's Odyssey as my daughter Samira was when she read Harry Potter.

Yes, I know it's arduous, but this site in its former incarnation received so much spam. My apologies to those who've been frustrated. Here's the process: to comment, register and login, type your comment and you'll see those funky number/letter combo's for you to mimic. It's a pain, but spammers have made blog life a bit more complex for the rest of us. Thanks!

... and my much adored baby-sitter has returned, and can I say, this overworked, kid-tired mom is very happy this morning to turn her children over to the care of others. Very happy. Mothers, women, all of us need interior time, down time, time to regroup. For me, regrouping comes from being alone, focusing, putting words together. Walking, hiking and exercise is good, but there's something special about word-play and word-work for me. I am one happy mom this morning, having survived the dog days, which did finally come, in grand style, and moved past the Labor Day transition into something new.

Plus, I'm listening to Cat Stevens Radio on Pandora.com, which is music from say, 3d grade for me. Fitting perhaps, since third grade began today for my oldest daughter.

This morning at school drop off my daughter's classroom had no desks. She's in third grade, so they're supposed to be there. The classroom has been renovated, and the new set of desks just hadn't arrived. It was a bit of a shock. Okay, and the area rug also hadn't arrived, so the kids walked into a room with small chairs arranged in a circle, each with a clipboard across the seat.

My first instinct was outrage and frustration. How can this happen? Didn't they plan ahead? Don't our kids deserve real desks, and a seamless start to the school year?

Must be the school's Quaker sensibility quelling my need for order and visual perfection. I mentioned--very, very quietly--my concern about the desks to one of the dads. He agreed. Yes, that's right. The desks aren't here. i told my daughter that that's how third grade sometimes starts. Sometimes they don't put the desks in the room until the second week. BR> How fabulous, how evolved and humane to replace the demand for order with an ability to go with what happens and turn it into a new story. In my head I was ready to call the head of school and complain, and then call the school next door to see if they had an opening in a classroom with desks. I'll wait. Samira's in a class with a veteran teacher with a wonderful reputation. We've talked this summer about trusting school, about buying in, about making it and its demands--even homework--our own. Top on this list is trusting the teacher. I'm a teacher too, and if I had to deal with a room without desks for a few days, I know I would make it work. I'd turn it into something interesting. I'd create a metaphor about furniture and its absence that somehow mimicked the themes of the course. I'd make it work.

I realized I had to walk the walk here, and trust that this good teacher would, similarly, know what to do with a few desks that had gone missing for a few days.

I admit it, I have Seattle envy. It's not New York or LA that claim my heart. It's not charming village in Vermont, or a mountainside in Colorado. It's Seattle. Everytime I visit I think: can I move here? would my entire extended East Coast family move with me? can I afford the real estate/school combinations that we'd need?

So this site, discovered today when a personal email from one of its writers appeared in my inbox, is my new pornography. The Red Triangle "Pint sized news for savvy grown-ups" is my new must-check-out site for my Seattle fantasies. Front page when I clicked on was an annotated list of world cuisine restaurants that are kid friendly. How wonderful to have all these, and have a website and writers that care about sharing important information, both.

In other news, here at home we're in that move from summer to fall, though school won't begin until Wednesday. My older daughter turns 8 tomorrow. Eight seems so, so mature. One of my traditions is to write a letter on each of her birthdays, a letter about her, one that I compose and put away and will give to her, all in a pile when she's much older. I describe what she likes, and whether she's liked school and camp that year. I find some adjectives to describe her, perhaps narrate something funny or poignant that she's done, and I definitely list her friends. I don't look at the letters from year to year. And I try not to overthink it, for if I did, the letter would never reach completion in my search for the perfect words. It's just a snapshot, some words to go with the pictures she'll see, some clues for her future self, should she search, later in life as so many of us do, for the puzzle that was childhood.

Finally, my favorite media paragraph this weekend (yes, for all my media criticism, I'm always on the lookout for eye-stopping good sentences and ideas that make me sigh) comes from the NYT Magazine article on the actress Vera Farmiga, whom I'd never heard of. The article's question was one we've heard before, where are the good roles for actresses now that Hollywood eschews dramas and prefers action movies geared toward teenage boys? Is it even possible to be a young Meryl Streep, say, when there are so few substantial roles for women. Farmiga's been in a ton of indie films, but they have terribly small or no distribution, which is why she's not yet well known.

The part I loved came near the end. The director Anthony Minghella's being quoted. He's directing a film, "Breaking and Entering," with Vera Farmiga, and is a big fan of hers. Here, he's commenting on the lack of complex roles for women, and lamenting it: “Unfortunately, Hollywood is too interested in stories about power and strength. Women’s lives are more complicated: they have to manage private and public lives in a way that men don’t. I, for one, am tired of seeing movies about men damaging each other. I would rather see, and make, films about women.”

Women's lives ar more complicated; they have to manage private and public lives in a way that men don't: it's this line that had the ring of clarity to it, and how nice to hear it from a man, too. It's what women, and mothers, say among each other all the time, and I for one, was quietly cheered by seeing it this way, in print.

With two kids home today I haven't made it to end of this article, but check out the New York Times on nursing mothers, "On the Job, Nursing Mothers Find a 2-Class System." The reporter investigated Starbucks, and compared the conditions for mothers who are executives and get lactation rooms or can pump in their offices (though the picture of a woman pumping in her cubicle after posting a small Do Not Disturb sign did not seem like such a good deal to me) with mothers at the stores themselves, who must pump in the public bathroom, or who stop breastfeeding their babies because it's just too impossible to continue breastfeeding, pumping, and working without better support.

It's odd being the mother of an almost eight-year-old, and a baby all at the same time, but perhaps the juxtaposition opens the way for those life moments, you know the types, where you feel how it all fits together even if not everything makes sense. Today, I am noticing this particular paradox. With one child my eyes are constantly on her, and she's always near me. With the other, I'm learning how to let go, and none of that is easy.

Parenting an eight year old sometimes leaves me aching for the kind of parenting book I hate: those that tell you what a baby should be like at each month, and how exactly you should go about parenting them. Yes, at times, I want the assurance of a roadmap, even though I know it's impossible, and usually more frustrating than the alternatives. Today Samira and her friend J had their scooters out. You must imagine me hanging with two athletic baby tweens dressed in red, looking quite cool in their black skater shoes. Ready to walk fast alongside them, baby in back-pack, peering at the big girls from around the side of my head. Then: the question that stops my heart for just a moment, before opening it wider.

Mom, can we ride in the street?

Can it be possible that I am now the parent of a child old enough to ride her scooter in the street? I remember when she was three, and still in a stroller. I would see older girls and their scooters, and think, they're in fashion now, but I'm sure scooters will be forgotten by the time Samira's that age. Thank goodness.

But here she is. Ready. Today. Asking the question.

And the answer is.....

My answer was yes. On most streets. Stop at the corners. On busy streets we're back on the sidewalk. Still, I was taken aback. There's not yet a parenting consensus in our neighborhood about kids, bikes, scooters and the street, nor on when they're ready to ride alone to each other's homes a few blocks away. It's the wild west frontier or parenting, so far as I'm concerned. So much of parenting young kids is about keeping them safe. Keeping them on the sidewalks. The "don't-let-em-run with scissors" take on parenting conflicts with the "send 'em into the backyard to play in the mud" but where's the spotlight on those day-to-day small questions we face as we balance protecting our kids (those cars! they drive so fast! ) with giving them the confidence to take on the world, starting with the asphalt in front of their homes.

There should be a medal for this, or at least a patch, for moments like this.

ps. I'm really going to need a medal next week when I let her take the bus to school, too. Repeating question in my head: if Samira takes the school bus, will the school receptionist think I'm crazy if I call at 8.15 to make sure she got there okay....