Regular readers:

The press release will go out after the Holiday weekend, but I wanted to let you know first. I am thrilled that this summer, I will be working with my close friend and dear collaborator Andi Buchanan on a new book: The Daring Book for Girls!

Here's the official announcement. You heard it here first.

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Collins Inks Deal For A Book That Gives Girls Their Turn

New York, NY (May 29, 2007)— Collins, the imprint of HarperCollins that published The New York Times bestseller The Dangerous Book for Boys, today announced it has signed a book for every girl with an independent spirit and nose for trouble. The Daring Book For Girls by Andrea Buchanan and Miriam Peskowitz, to be published this fall, strictly follows a no-boys-allowed policy.

Among the contents:

*essential toolkit

*roller skating

*sports

*five karate moves every girl should know

*important women of the last century

*ghost stories, rainy day games

*poems for girls

*famous women spies

*how to make your own comic book

*camp fire songs

*stocks and bonds


And more!


"Amid all of the success of The Dangerous Book for Boys we would occasionally hear 'where is the Dangerous Book for Girls?" says Margot Schupf, Group SVP & Associate Publisher. "We are thrilled to be partnering with these authors to fill this obvious void in the marketplace and to encourage girls to find fun, adventure and learning in their lives as well,"

In addition to being the mother of an eight-year-old daughter and five-year-old son, Andrea Buchanan is the author of Mother Shock, co-founder of the online literary magazine LiteraryMama.com, and co-founder of MotherTalk, Inc., a media agency that connects writers with readers. Miriam Peskowitz is the mother of two girls, including an eight-year-old who climbs trees and leads spy missions in the backyard. Also a co-founder of MotherTalk, she is the author of The Truth Behind the Mommy Wars, writes the blog EverydayMom, is an historian, and appears regularly on television and in print discussing parenting and women's issues.

Today I broke down, carved an hour (it turned out to be much more), and took my totally broken-down cell phone to the store to be, ahem, replaced. This, I suppose, is not the place for a rant about the terrors of telecommunications companies, and the horrid nexus of contracts, upgrade schedules and crazy ways that you end up paying huge amounts of hard-earned dollars for a replacement phone, say, if you've learned the hard way that today's free-when-you-start-service cellphones don't stand up to the combined rigors of baby slobber and a few well-intentioned and apologized-for drops on the floor.

The result is I now have what Samira refers to as a teenager phone. It's red. It can play music. it can do a million other things that I will never figure out, because I so don't have the time to read the book that came with it. I suppose the best thing I can do is find a teenager to explain it to me.

Do you know how I really feel? I feel old. I feel like with this cellphone upgrade I've finally reached the point of not caring about the new and cool things.

An email message from my daughter, to my husband, to be put in the category of "I can't believe I have a child who sends email messages, and from school." Wasn't she just in pre-K? Wasn't she just born?

Here goes:

Dear dad,

I, Sammo was on the "YouTube" website and found a bunch of trailers for Shrek the Third I thought you might like to see them. How to get to them:go to the internet search YouTube no space in between words. When you get to the website

go to where it says : Search. Then, type in "Shrek the Third."I LOVE you, SAMMO

We laughed particularly hard at her wonderful directions.

We've been all enthralled with the now-bestselling Dangerous Book for Boys whether because of all the cool stuff in it, the neat non-fiction tidbits and the way it makes us wonder for those early 70's childhoods of reading through the colorful Child Book series, or musing over what a Dangerous Book for Girls might be. We organized several events for the book over at MotherTalk, so it's been on our minds there too.

In the meantime, I've noticed my 8 1/2 year venturing into the world, and my responses.

1. Last weekend, nay, two weekends ago, she and one of the kids from the backyard (remember, we've joined backyards with several neighbors and the kids roam freely between them) pulled up at the backdoor and asked for a hammer and nails. They'd found in the shed a bucket of wood pieces, and they had a project in mind. I said yes, sure, then stopped, and said, yes, but later when I can help you, then saw the sour look on their faces, then stopped myself, realized that the worst that could happen is one of them ends up with a hurt finger, and sent them off, hammer and large-headed nails in tow.

Result: they weren't terribly successful at whatever they planned to make, but that's because they kept moving venues (should we play in this side-house-alley, or the other side-house-alley, and dragging the bucket of wood, hammer and nails between them. Then they realized they needed longer stretches of wood.) On the upside, though, were no smashed fingers, no emergency room visits, no violin prodigy careers destroyed (not that this is in any of their futures, anyway). And I learned something about pulling back. Next weekend I want to carve some time to explain how to use a hammer, mention some safety tips, and perhaps come up with a small project.

2. Saturday around 5.30 we were preparing for a small party when the phone rang and it was my neighbor two doors down saying "You should come over, Samira's way high in the tree, we've already taken a picture." I left the sink and the tomatoes I was threading onto a skewer, skipped under the fence, and sure enough, Samira was up in the cedar tree. About 25-30 feet up. High enough for the other kids to be impressed. Turns out she had stood on top of the wood fort and reached up and, I'm guessing here, grabbed hold of a branch and started pulling up her legs. The branches were pretty tight, it was easy to climb, and before you know it, she was up high.

There I was on the ground, totally impressed, trying to keep calm so she wouldn't think that nervousness was in order, but still wondering whether we'd have to call the fire department to get her down. I noticed she was barefoot, with chagrin, since we've already been once to the doctor's for a going-barefoot-related set of infected spider bites (and a resulting four-day bout with Benedryl).

Result: She figured her way down. I stayed totally calm and high-fived her when she jumped to the ground. I reminded her to wear her shoes, but agreed that barefoot in the tree was probably better than Target-knockoff-crocs in the tree. My neighbor told her not to climb higher at night, or when no adult was around. I returned to the kitchen feeling in touch with that line of fear/excitement/adventure, knowing that in our little backyard compound she'd scaled her own heights, pushed her own limits, watched the other kids' admiration, and felt the glory of being so high up in a tree.

Can't beat that.

Today's the first time I really felt the pull between two children. Amelia had a session with her physical therapist, and Samira was performing her two-minute skit of Abigail Adams, over at her school. Her dad went, and I had to speak down my guilt/disappointment by listing the number of times that I'd been at an event that he had missed. Doing so, I realized that it wasn't guilt I felt, but actual disappointment. I wasn't worried that she'd be upset, or that I would lose merit points in the board game of motherhood, or that anyone else would notice and think me a bad mother.

I just mourned the fact that I wouldn't be there to see her. That I couldn't change the baby's appointment, and didn't want to cancel it.

Reports after told me she was wonderful. I--and I need applause here--ditched my initial plan to head to the local costume shop and rent her a colonial woman's outfit, and instead took her slightly-oversized black dress, ladies size 6 (okay, it's very big), the same one she wore for The Little Princess last fall and to her cousin's bar mitzvah two weeks ago, sewed a strip of crocheted lace from a thrift-store curtain onto each sleeve, and at the neck, borrowed a bonnet from the daughter of Amelia's aforementioned physical therapist and a walking stick from the boy next door, and dug up a feather quill from last year's visit to Monticello. Voila! Abigail Adams.

It must be love. I am the least costume-crafty person I know. I fear Halloween each year, because it's costume demands fall on skills I don't have.

Apparently Samira in her lace-altered black dress brought down the house with her rendition of Adams' classic suggestion to her husband that he not give to much power to the husbands, lest they become tyrants. That he include women in the vision of the new country.

I swear I did not write her skit. Man, I don't even push feminism on her, figuring that the easiest way to turn her into a republican is to force-feed ideology. She just is who she is.

And performing on stage is her thing.

I can't wait to see the video.

This morning I took the baby for a walk in her stroller, and we headed over to Carpenter Woods, a glorious patch of wooded paths near our home. These woods keep us happy, and often I drop Samira at the bus, and head into the woods with the baby, for the best way to start the day that I know. My neighborhood is often pulled into the dogs-versus-everyone else debate over these woods, with dog owners claiming that they just must walk their dogs off leash, and others saying, well, it's against the law, please don't.

I've never paid too much attention. Dogs never bothered me; my best friend is a dog owner. I figured there was room for all.

Until this morning, when at 50 yards inside the woods, I heard a man screaming at me to guard my baby as his huge monster of a dog rushed our way and before I could get in front of the stroller and block the dog's path he had already reached the baby's stroller, and she was screaming.

Amelia likes dogs. She loves Max, who hangs out in front of the High Point. She likes all the really well trained dogs she meets. Too bad she had to meet this one.

His owner, too. In our neighborhood there's a Town Watch, and we're taught to be mindful of descriptive details of people who break the law, so we can report them to the police. That's the Town Watch strategy for trying to cut down on the break-ins and muggings that happen with more and more frequency here. We're told to call 911 immediately when we see anything happening; even if the police can't get here, it's part of the electronic records they keep. As the attacking-dog event unfolded, all I could think was: middle-aged white male, tall, brownish hair, wearing dull green polo shirt.

The baby is okay. I calmed her down and we returned to the sidewalk to continue our walk, not wanting to deal with a huge array of off-leash dogs, including two others who rushed toward us a few minutes later, only to turn away at the last minute (in the ownership of two men; I told them it was the law to keep their dogs leashed, and they snarled at me too: was this off leash dog protest day? I swear I've never seen this much dog action here before).

The worst part of it: the man yelled at me. Yes, he really did. I couldn't believe it. I told him, as he struggled, to get his dog back onto the leash, as I stood between the dog and the baby, that it was illegal to walk dogs off leash in Carpenter Woods. Maybe he always speaks in a raised, mean voice. He did actually snarl to me that " everyone does it."

And you know what, in a neighborhood that tries to be civil, where people really do try to live together well, to cooperate, and to build community spirit, this man with he off leash dog that attacked my baby's stroller never apologized. Not once.

That's when you have four different types of baby gates, and you can't get any of them to fit the crazy mismatched stairwells of your 150-year-old house.

Which is where I am right now. And I'm the mechanical one in my family.

I need the baby gate fairy godmother, the one who swoops down on your home, measuring tape and drill in hand, get those gates to behave, yes, the ones that come in the box with 5000 screws, and yes, the ones that come in hard plastic that doesn't bend to the whims of this aged house, to the walls that don't quite line up, and makes it all go away.

That's one. We're back to lists.

Two: today, my dear friend, whom I won't name in case her boss reads my blog, which is very unlikely, came over at 9.30, with a coffee and two pastries in hand, and didn't leave till 2.30.

Exactly: we played hooky, did no work, and more amazingly, spent five hours talking. Can I tell you how revived I feel? Can I tell you I haven't spent this long catching up with a friend, enough hours to really get into stuff, to circle back, to cry, to laugh, in I-can't-remember-how-long?

Can I tell you I feel like the luckiest woman in the world?

Three: people I know are chatting about Katie Allison Granju's Babble.com article, The Overparenting Crisis, in which in her trademark voice of Tennessee bombast, Katie reminds us of what many of us know: not to get sucked in to the culture of competition. Not to worry too much. Not to keep comparing our kids to others.

Resisting competition isn't just a politically progressive stance. That would make it out to be too external, although it's a worthy cause to critique the crazy levels of competition out there, and the article has its share of moms who admit they went into debt to buy a high-end stroller (although I often wonder where these moms are, because I've never met one, but perhaps I travel in very different circles, where the competition is not about material objects but about other forms of cultural status).

Resisting the competition is important because it's the only way to stay sane. If you're sucked in to social competition, you can't win, you're always unsteadily in the game, you're always waiting to be upended since of course, there's always someone with more. Always.

I've always believed this, but with a delayed child, I'm learning all the more to keep my eyes on my own mat, as they say in yoga. I'm learning not to look at other children and compare, because it only makes me sad. It takes my focus off the amazing micro-strides that the baby is making. She can bend her knees. She made a "mmm" sound today. She's a tad closer to pulling herself up to sitting. Perhaps having a child who lives at one far end of the spectrum makes it easier to opt out of the craziness. Maybe that's a really good thing.

Four. My resolution, after rereading: call in some reinforcements on the baby gate situation. Now. Will report back.

Cross-posted at MomsRising. So glad I squeezed in a moment to scan the NY Times Op-Ed page this morning, in between puring cereal, warming up soup for Samira's lunchbox and handing the baby a sippy-cup of milk (and let me tell you, if the NYT were based on mothers' reading it over busy morning routines, they would not publish on those hug oversized pages).

Lucky me, because I got to start my day by reading Gwen Ifill's response to Don Imus's racist and sexist remark about the Rutgers women's basketball team (which for anyone who doesn't follow the NCAA, rose from near obscurity and a roster of younger players to play the championship game and claim the #2 spot).

Here's the link, for as long it holds.

I'm posting it here because I believe in the need for vision, big vision, humane vision. We're doing political work as mothers. We're seeking policy change to help those who care for women, men, families, workplaces, and children, and from that, we end up reaching though the breadth of social and human issues. Part of what happens when you take parenting, caretaking, and mothering seriously is that literally, you start to care. The 'care' in caretaking jumps out at you, whether you are male or female. You start to care about how you fit into our society, how society fits together, how society cares (or doesn't care) for all it's members.

And that's where Ifill's article comes in. She's offered up the most breathtakingly, humanely sublime example of caring I've read in a quite a while.

After discussing just what's wrong with Don Imus' shock radio pronouncement (and I will not repeat it here), she talks about the way he referred to her as "the cleaning lady." Yes, as in "the cleaning lady who gets to tell the news." It's beyond horrid. By mid-article, though, she tells us this is not just about her. She beautifully and poignantly mentions the shell, the carapace, that women develop so that all the barbs don't get under our skin, don't debilitate us, and notes that black women in particular develop this shell.

The Rutgers women though: they are kids. They deserve better. Ifill writes about all the young girls she meets, the ones who look up to her, the ones without a voice.

Then she calls bullying for what it is, and perhaps this, too, is what I'm responding to, having been following all the bullying of women that is the new normal, whether they are politicians like Pelosi and Clinton, normal everyday mothers, or young women playing their hearts out on the basketball court. She calls it bullying. She names it, and then replaces it with vision, love, critique of injustice, and yes, care:

"So here’s what this voice has to say for people who cannot grasp the notion of picking on people their own size: This country will only flourish once we consistently learn to applaud and encourage the young people who have to work harder just to achieve balance on the unequal playing field.

Let’s see if we can manage to build them up and reward them, rather than opting for the cheapest, easiest, most despicable shots."

Gwen Ifill: Thank you.

This morning I've been emailing with Rae Pica, author of the book A Running Start: How Play, Physical Activity and Free Time Create a Successful Child, whom I've never met, of course, but whose book I adore.

I struggle with the rigor vs play conundrum. I do. If there were a 12-step program for parents whose instincts to hyper-train and hyper-educate their parents constantly conflict with their purer values of letting kids grow up without anxiety and stress, I'd be there. Hell, I'd be leading the damn thing.

I constantly keep at bay that voice that says, "If you don't do all the right things now, your child will not be successful, ever, at anything, and it will all be your fault" and then lists all the classes and resources I am ignoring. I admit it, it's a constant battle. Some people battle drugs, alcohol, or eating disorders, and I, a Juilliard trained classical musician and holder of a PhD, battle the anxiety of rigor.

And I resist, with the help of book's like this A Running Start, that helps my value voice. I'm sure that if Rae came down to Philadelphia and saw all the kids running through our linked and open backyards, screaming about going to China, or yelling directions about how to accomplish the latest spy mission, or (my recent favorite), figuring out how to set up a home-made zipline from the tree house, she would pat me on the back and say, Miriam, it's really okay that your daughter isn't a violin prodigy. And I would laugh, because all of this sounds so petty and ridiculous when put to words.

So many stresses about competition and achievement haunt our generation, especially those of us who have made alternate choices about what success means (by the way, I just saw an add for this book, The Anti 9-to-5 Guide: Practical Career Advice for Women Who Think Outside the Cube, which I look forward to reading (the Amazon blurb does say it's good for men, too).  I'm trying hard, as others are, to really show other values to our kids. I grew to adulthood thinking that school and success always had to come with a very traditional form of rigor and attention, and that they must of necessity be accompanied by stress, that's just the  way things are. If there's something good I can give my daughter, it's that work can be about love, that abstract fears of judgment can be ignored, and that stress doesn't have to be a normal part of life.

ps. I just realized that Rae has a website, chock full of info: Moving and Learning.  I think that this is the parenting companion and corollary to my other recent fave site, Equally Shared Parenting.

I think that there's lots of common wisdom parenting guidance for when our kids are little. As they become teens, there's more advice available too: how to keep them safe, responsible, drug-free, how to help them find their identity and sense of being in the world.

I'm missing the emotional parenting guidebook to the eight-year-old set. There's some stuff out there, but it seems defensive: how to keep them little, how to keep at bay the forces of evil that foist terrible teen stuff onto the preteen set.

That doesn't help me. I want a positive guidebook, with pages that tell you about the rites of passage you don't expect, that hold the keys to delight. I'm realizing over and again that what I want to be expressing is the happiness of parenting, that amid the tedium, the frustrations, the worries about their health, and the boredom of reminding them a million times that tossing their dirty clothes on the floor next to their bed is not as good as using a laundry hamper, there are moments, slivers of seconds, even, that bring exquisite joy.

That's the book I'm looking for: a straightforward attempt to note the joy in our lives.


The rite of passage I experienced: reuniting with my daughter Samira after she was away for 2 1/2 days. I walked into the music room where she and all the kids were gathered with their sleeping bags and gear and I soaked in the aura of happiness. I saw an eight-year-old girl who looked three inches taller and a year older. Her light brown hair was down and it flowed over her shoulders, and she had that I've-been-on-a-camping-trip-haven't-brushed-my-hair-for-two-weeks look of total calm, of really living in her body. She ran over to hug me. She hugged one of the teachers goodbye, the teacher grinned and told me everyone had had an awesome time. We left the building, forged our way through the sleety rain back to the car, and when she got in, transferring back to the world of family, I saw in her that pull: when you're really living in a social world that's different from home, for the first time, and you know that you can get by without your parents.

I remember that rite of passage so well; how incredible to experience it as a parent, to feel your child's confidence, and to know you had a part in letting that confidence build.

The book I want has a checklist of moments like these, and empty space to write them in when they happen. It's the elementary years version of the baby book, isn't it.

Later, when I asked Samira which of the kids she thought enjoyed the trip the most, she grinned and said, "Me." And then she conked out, and was fast asleep by 6 pm, dreaming, no doubt, of climbing 11-foot walls, and wading in late winter streams, and feeling the warmth of after dinner bonfires, surrounded by friends.

Samira has been away since Wednesday, off to Outdoor School. I miss her like crazy, but I admit I love the silence. I love not preparing dinner for the family. I adore the solitude, the days where the clock doesn't start ticking its way from wake-up to bus pick-up. 

She's such a grown-up kid, away for the first time on a school trip. She'll undoubtedly return filled with science and nature facts, fun tales about the ropes course and 10-foot wall they scaled, gossip about her classmates' PJ's and who was homesick. And of course, she'll come home soaking wet, since beautiful weather yesterday and the day before was followed by today's dreary rain. I'll have to scoot over to Various Ramblings, to see what she has to say, since her daughter's on the trip too (VR has just finished radiation, so that's two homecomings to celebrate).

The parenting books don't tell you about the rite of passage when your baby starts to leave home.

Oh yeah, and the baby will need foot braces too. This more than anything made her condition real. On the PT's first day, he asked us to take off Amelia's socks. He said breezily that most low-tone kids have flat feet, and pronate (which means their feet turn in, and all their weight goes on the inner foot bones, which aren't made for carrying so much weight). Sure enough, A's cute little feet were pronating when she stood. Good thing the braces aren't those full-length heavy wood contraptions, that even in my 70's childhood were antique, though I admit, that's what first came to mind.

Braces. Boo. At least it's 2007 and they're small, flexible, and come in fifteen colorful and cute designs.

That's a phrase I came across on a chat board over the weekend, and I'm finding it very helpful. As I search around to make sense of the baby's disability, I find myself in the cordoned-off world of mothers of special needs children. (Where the fathers are, clearly, is a question, since they are largely absent online.) I don't yet even know what to call this condition my baby finds herself in. It's not as comprehensible as it would be had she a named disease. That's probably, at this point, a good thing, and perhaps I'd be in this murk anyway, treading from a world in which we laugh at all those developmental milestones and the cultural assumptions behind them, because our children pass them by with nary a thought, into this new place where they mean something medical and real, where it's not our assumptions about proper achievement, but the tension of muscles and the neurologic impulses of the brain that rule the day.

I don't even know what this condition is; the medical literature tells me hypotonia is a symptom of something else, but that something else hasn't yet and might never be discovered. Does she have a condition? A disease? I can't quite think of her as disabled, really. Until I realize that we are receiving all these Sweden-like free services because the state has marked her as disabled, and as such has taken it as it's interest to make sure she is pulled back to the normal mainstream.

The phrase I found was Anticipatory Anxiety. It was used to describe the anxiety we feel, we create when there's a loved one in our life with a condition whose future we don't know. The anxious musing that takes over when we're caught up in wanting to know the unknowable or in imagining different possibilities--usually the worst ones--that's anticipatory anxiety, when, as I'm prone to do, I begin to rue the day when we'll have to sell our home and move to the suburbs for a school district with good special education. The reminder was to keep it at bay, to live more in the moment when we can. As in: I have no idea what the baby's future will be, what special attention she'll need; why am I already imagining packing to leave my life as I know it?

This is my lesson: to grab the goodness of each day, the sweet moments, the love, the most excellent scene on Sunday afternoon of the neighborhood kids constructing a zipline from the treehouse deck to a fence a few feet and a lawn away, and working really hard to make it work (image for the day: 20 wire hangers wrapped in duct tape to make a contraption for their hands as they swing). The crazy thing: these health-scare conditions that are longterm are what turns us around to focus, instead, on the pleasures of the everyday.

Therapy Week Two. We start by reminding everyone that I am a quiet sort of soul, the kind who prefers to work at home, and who already has two different babysitters in her life, lovely babysitters, absolutely, but daily reminders that I have somehow veered off my life's path of becoming one of those elderly North Carolina gentlemen who sit in solitude, through the day's length, waving kindly and slowly to all passersby from the social safety of the green rocking chairs on their front porch.

Add to this path-veering two new people, named here as the OT and the PT (and who, to protect their privacy will never be named or described). OT comes on Tuesday afternoon, PT arrives with the breath of the morning wind on Fridays, early (though we had an additional session this morning, just a day later).

It's been the oddest of weeks, filled with attempts to google "hypotonia" or "infant low muscle tone," which on one hand finds me, in ten clicks, an excellent iVillage discussion board, several neurology Q and A's from a clinic in Cleveland, and a very sweet, bare bones site written by a child, now grown, who dealt with hypotonia his entire life. I imagine all the follow-up testing we'll have to do, after reading accounts by mothers who have passed their young children through gauntlets of neurologists and geneticists, only to learn that a) no apparent cause is discernible, or b) a cause has been found, but it's untreatable and incurable, anyway. Plan: continue with therapy interventions. I worry, because we too, are headed down this path, perhaps, ready to immerse in a world we are unprepared for and have not yet found a wise mentor to help us navigate.

At the other, I read descriptions of babies who are so floppy they can't sit, and can't nurse, and I think that Amelia is quite moderate. I sheepishly asked this question of the PT this morning, and he agreed, saying that most likely Amelia will be fine. I start counting her small achievements, like how at this morning's breakfast, no Cheerios feel on the floor. Because of the way she grips and grabs all the  Cheerios in her hand at once, half tumble to the ground (usually to be squashed into the floor by everyone else). Today: nothing. Perhaps already she's getting stronger. At this end I am in the moment.

Last Friday morning we put Samira on the school bus, then bundled up the baby, pulled out our umbrellas against the rain and headed to our long-awaited appointment at Children's Hospital. My first impression came after we had found parking and wound our way into the waiting room for the Development Center. I was filled with gratitude for life. CHOP has that effect on me. I can be fussing my way through life, frustrated at the health challenges that our family faces and silently glaring at friends whose kids are healthy and fine. When I get there, the feeling turns around. I am profoundly glad that my baby doesn't have cancer. That she doesn't have a regressive metabolic disease like Canavan's that will kill her, or pull her into an interiority that makes autism look friendly. That she can breath without an oxygen tank.

One of the kids in the waiting room was deaf, and had two very large hearing aids. Her mother was signing to her. I wondered how in my schedule I would fit in the time it takes to learn sign language, were my baby deaf.

It puts our challenges in perspective. It doesn't make them go away, and it doesn't minimalize them, but it puts them into perspective.

Amelia was evaluated for two hours by a developmental pediatrician. We got the inside scoop on why it's so hard to get an appointment. Seems there's so much suspicion of autism these days that many families will have their kids evaluated just to make sure, to reassure the parents. That's from the doctor's mouth. Doesn't explain why they don't hire more doctors, but it did help to get an explanation. Amelia had to pull a red toy, find blocks hidden under a napkin. She had to put increasingly small objects into ever-more-narrow bottles. We even had a CSI moment where the lights were turned off and the doctor used a very cool black light to examine the baby's body. By that time I was too tired to ask why and for what, I was just happy that nothing other than random, soap-fleck related spots turned up.

Final analysis: the baby is fine cognitively. She definitely has muscle delays, and poor muscle tone: hypotonia. The good news is hypotonia can have benign, unknowable causes. Also good is that Amelia doesn't seem to be as hypotonic as babies can be. She could be much floppier, it turns out, and have a longer road to travel toward health. The bad news is the doctor wants us to follow up at the neuro-muscular clinic, just to make sure that her condition isn't s symptom of any other disease.

There's much relief in our family. We still wonder whether there's an underlying cause, and it will take some time to learn that. We still can learn that something terrible has happened. The baby's on the road to improvement, though. Her occupational therapy started yesterday and her physical therapy starts later this week (we'll just call her Therapy Baby from now on). I know it will be a slow and steady process of helping her build strength, despite having low tone muscles that don't take easily to strength-building.

At least at this point she has conditions, and not diseases. That's a distinction that matters.

Resources for stressed-out parents of babies-with-challenges, anyone? I can't believe I've gone through eight years of being a parent without really getting what it's like when your baby isn't healthy and well.

The best news of all: Amelia is happy and sweet and smiles and plays with toys. I hope she never has a sense of any of this, and that we, her parents, can keep calm enough so that she has no idea of the stress we've experienced.

Hug the children close.

Baby care update: an occupational therapist called, which is great news. Amelia can have her first body therapy session next Tuesday (I find myself supplying an adjective to the word therapy--it sounds too bizarrely weird to say in plain speech, the baby needs therapy). The catch: the only available time is 5.30 pm, and the little babe calls it a day by six. Amelia's an early sleeper. The OT, who will be known here as T, to protect her privacy, said she'll be flexible, try to get here by 5.15, and that the last fifteen minutes are paperwork anyway. We'll make it work. My fantasy of participating in a public health system that works helps me be more cooperative, I tell you. Hooray, especially as my route into privately paid baby body therapists was leading me toward having to drive 40 minutes each way to the Theraplay office. I do want to believe that the public health system for babies can work.

In other news, we are becoming a minivan family. Replacing our totalled station wagon with an even larger vehicle. The jump feels great (the room, the carpool possibilities, drink holders for twelve lattes) and harsh. We borrowed my father-in-law's car for a few days. It's a Sebring convertible, and he's the 80-something year old man who drives it (good for him! )

My visceral response to my husband: you take the minivan, I'll take the convertible. I still want to be the one driving into the sunset with the wind in my hair.

I suppose we can always borrow it when the urge hits.

Ah for my loveletter two weeks ago to the excellent service we were getting for Amelia's movement delays. I wrote so generously of the utopian world it called up, where every child, person and family gets the treatment they need, and quickly, too. Where a phonecall to the right city agency yielded a caring case worker and two smart people traipsing to my home to do an evaluation of the baby's needs.

Alas, the process has bogged down. There are not enough physical therapists in the city, it turns out. Despite all the promises the two weeks hence, Amelia would be starting her therapies, week three begins now, and we are still waiting.

Our service coordinator took a bad fall last week and is out sick. Till Friday.

The agency he recommended and hoped would take our referral has a long waiting list. Believe me, I did make some calls, and they really do go by the wait list. Or at least, I didn't know the right people to call, which is, I've learned the way medical fields work.

We are back in the muck of health care in America. And while I will wait to hear from our service coordinator, I just placed a call to my doctor's office, to get a referral to a private infant physical therapist. I did love that feeling, imagined perhaps, of being in a system where access and money didn't matter. It was imaginary, though because the wake up has me in a poor city where there's not enough to go around. And a child with movement delays and can't clap or push up on her arms, who needs some physical therapy now, about whom everyone says it's best to catch these things early, and who has parents who can pay for it, and will, and thus won't have to bear the interminable wait.

I truly believed their promises. I'd rather they have told me the truth: that it's our real world, and filled with scarcity. So I could fiercely protect my baby from day one.

Last night I was tooling through the blogosphere, you know, one of those late night, start with a link from an email, and before you know it you find yourself reading something like Shari Strong MacDonald's essay "Love-40"--the must-read of this post's title.

I am 42. One of the pleasures of turning into my forties, and there are many, is that writers of my generation have come of age. I can thumb through any number of pages, on and off line, and find 40 and almost-40 something writers who are really good, essayists and authors who have sat with our generation's decades, its icons, its memories, its promises, disappointments and failures, and have resurfaced with glorious sentences and rhythmic paragraphs, with metaphor and image and detail that greets my eyes and takes me home. I'm especially proud of some of the early forty-something writers like Claire Messud, and A.M. Homes, and a writer whose about to be published manuscript I just read for MotherTalk--Joshua Henkin's Matrimony, which I swear was written about two guys I knew in college, even as I know it wasn't, it's just that he's captured a somewhat universal ennui and ambition among a certain well-educated, writerly, 1980's set. 

So settle in with Shari's essay and send more 40-something literature my way.

I introduced us several week's ago to Equally Shared Parenting, a new blog by Marc and Amy Vachon, "a cyber-home for fathers and mothers who have made (or wish to make) a conscious decision to share equally in the raising of their children, household chores, breadwinning, and time for recreation." I like their willingness to talk about the details of their lives, and to remind us of good priorities in their tagline, Half the Work....All the Fun. Yes, it's supposed to be about fun. Fun sounds frivolous, I know, but the demand for political and social change is so we, all of us, in the end, can have better lives and more fun. Call me postmodern, call me thirdwave, but fun is not frivolous.

Yesterday, Amy and Marc were guest bloggers at the Washington Post's On Balance blog.  Great entry, and the responses were great; the usual On Balance reader vitriol was spewn at other readers, not at the guest bloggers. One reader even called for the Post to give them their own blog, called "On Equality."

Wouldn't that be nice.

When I was on book tour in the Spring of 2005, and I spent some time in Seattle and Vancouver, I got to meet and talk with Canadian mothers, and Canadian mothers who were living in the United States. The later would often be in a state of shell-shock. Used to Canada's health system, they were horrified at how difficult and expensive it is to access good health care in the United States. I would nod. I know how hard it is: to find good doctors, to make sure your health plan covers them, to get different doctors and specialists and hospitals talking with each other when there's a problem. And I'm middle class and my husband has a decent health plan from a major health insurance company. I know that because we pay very large sums from his paycheck to have this policy (and yes, that large sum is in addition to his employer's "benefit") I can walk in almost anywhere, pay a reasonable co-pay, and see a doctor. Our family's concerns are usually with making sure we see the best physicians and specialists. We are very aware of our privilege here, very sensitive to the issue of what-the-hell-do-you-do in this nation if you don't have the cultural privilege and networks and connections to know who the good doctors are and where they practice. That's why our experience with the city's Early Evaluation team, here, called Childlink, has been so mindboggling. Here's what it looks, and feels, like.

• Mother makes telephone call to city agency, Childlink. No one answers, she leaves a voicemail. One hour later, the receptionist calls back. Issues twenty-minute over-the-phone questionnaire. Says that a Service Coordinator will call within two weeks.
• Four days later, Service Coordinator, a Nigerian immigrant nicknamed Ola, calls. He asks more questions, and sets a date to come visit.
• Ola shows up on said day. Asks more questions, fills out lots of paperwork. Hands some off to me, and keeps the rest. Sets a date to return with an Occupational therapist and a Physical therapist to do a full evaluation of the baby's development. In the comfort of our home, so the baby would feel comfortable.
  

• Ola, the OT, and the PT show up at said time. They spend two hours at our home playing with the baby, watching her eat, and asking us questions. They listen as her older sister shows them some things, like that the baby can walk if you hold her hands and arms. They fill out lots of paperwork, and decide that the baby needs two hours a week of therapy. Hands are shaken, smiles exchanged, they leave. I fill out more paperwork, because the state and federal governments cover the costs of early intervention, and that coverage is need-based, the need being the child's health need, and not the parents' financial needs.

In short, all this has happened, and no copays were handed out. No one spent hours on the phone waiting for a health insurance representative to answer the phone, and then wrangling with that person to expand the usualy paltry coverage for physical therapy. There was no anxiety about how to pay for the services, no calculus about how to budget when the insurance runs out. Front and center was a child who needs health care services, and everyone involved was focused on how to make that happen. And the best thing: this would have been the case whether we were poor, or middle class, or very affluent.

I've never before experienced a health system that worked this way. Never experienced that kind of shared, social safety net, and a net that operates at a high standard.

A shame that this isn't the ordinary, but only kicks in under extraordinary circumstances, I thought, after everyone left. The baby was napping, and I made myself a sandwich, and well, just savored the feeling of actually being taken care of by health care professionals. Without any fuss or worry.

I can only imagine, friends, that this is what national health care would look and feel like.

In The Truth Behind the Mommy Wars I wrote about how the US is one of five nations world-wide that do not supply paid family leave to parents of new babies. We're in the doghouse, it turns out, with Leshotho, Liberia, Swaziland and Papua New Guinea.  Here's a nice link to a recent article in USA Today, with thanks to my boss at Hylands (Thanks, Thao) for sending it my way. It's based on a recent Harvard report, and has a link to the report itself.

In New Jersey, the Labor Committee of the State Senate has voted 3-1 on a new bill on Paid Family Leave. There's still a long way from here to there. At our house, we've been delving into the School House Rock DVD, and singing along with It's a Bill ("I used to be just an idea, but now I'm a bill, and maybe, maybe one day I'll be a law....), so I know that passing Committee is only one stage, and an early one at that, but according to the article, in the ten years (say that five, no, fifty time.... TEN YEARS) since they bill was introduced, this is the farthest the bill has gone. An interesting piece of the bill is that it is the opponents are small business owners--this is not a surprise, and in a way, understandable--but that the small business owners who are quoted are all women. Talk about the complexities of being female in our society, and the ways that women are pitted against each other, and how sometimes, our interested can honestly conflict.
Another interesting piece here, and it was true when I researched the current state of paid family leave bills in my home state of Pennsylvania, is that although paid FMLA bills will help both new parents and older children taking care of their parents, it's usually pressure from the second group, as well as the emotional and symbolic impact of taking care of our parents that seems more powerful. It's as if we still tell each other that raising our own children is a personal choice, but we've gotten around to feeling that our parents' care is foist upon us, is something we can't control, and thus, something our governments should help us with. Help for new parents, thus, is riding the tails of our concern with eldercare. Go figure!

This morning we woke to our first true snowfall of the winter. Three fluffy inches, pure delight, easy to brush off the sidewalks, great for snowballs, perfect for snow angels.

1. Just last week, in response to some emails I received, I was wondering where all the energy about motherhood and politics has gone. Then I found these two interesting articles.

The first appeared in the NY Times this Saturday, tucked away in the business section, which I must say, is one of my favorites for the way it mixes tradable, "did you hear" info (in the objective form of business news) with the personal lives of people doing business. I'm the sort who trained first as a musician, then as a professor of religion, and have friends who are involved in all sorts of excellent not-for-profit ventures. As a result, I've become interested as of late, and as a change, in what business is all about, and started a small business of my own last summer.  Where I live, reading the business pages is only slightly weirder than reading the sports pages, although these are becoming more popular in my house.

Anyhow, the article, A Breadwinner Rethinks Gender Roles, is honest in a lovely way. The author is a woman, a mother, and the breadwinner of our family. She writes in a non-ideological way about this as an identity shift, that even though she does it, and likes it right now, it's still an awkward concept, and one that's quite intimate too. "So when my husband asked me the other day," she writes, "'Did your concept of equality ever include supporting your family?' I had to admit that my answer was no. I wanted it to be yes...Yet I alternate between pride in our arrangement--and terror that I'll be the breadwinner forever."

It's rare to find work-and-parenting issues discussed with candor, and with a real acknowledgment of the ambivalence. There's lots of working mom books around now, and even a few I saw on Amazon about "comeback moms," mothers who want to come back into the workplace after being home with their kids. But there's very little writing like this: smart, emotional stuff that keeps it real. The article ends with the author's sense of loss when it's her husband who best comforts their fussy  4-month old, or knows where they keep the muffin tin, and with the sense of pressure that being the sole breadwinner brings: the chest-tightening, as she calls it, that comes when the pays their bills, or signs up for life insurance because, as she writes, "If I don't sign up for life insurance, nobody will. Because it's my job."

2.  For a shift in angle from all this, comes along Equally Shared Parenting, a new blog and a new favorite of mine. Don't want to feel all that pressure, don't want to feel totally stuck at home, here's a couple who are working hard at sharing the joint duties of home-and-child care and earning the paycheck. Mark and Amy live in the Boston suburbs. They present this manifesto on the gains of equal parenting:

• It is the next frontier of feminism.  First, we gave women the right to vote and work…now, let’s give them equality at home too.
• It is a path of balance for men.  Not all men want the burden of breadwinning to eclipse their chance to fully participate in their children’s lives.
• It is a double-win for kids - intimacy with both their parents.
• It is great for a good marriage - lots of togetherness and communication…and sex.
  

And then offer this commentary: "On the flip side, however, equal sharing takes guts.  Men have to give up the prestige of the overworked power career, and women have to let go of control in the home and with the kids.  It also requires compromise and massive amounts of communication and jack-of-all-trades competence."

Of course, my question is always, when two people each have part time jobs, healthcare insurance becomes the issue, since most healthcare is attached to fulltime jobs. I'd be interested in how Marc and Amy work this out.

Anway, when you need vision inspiration, head over to Equally Shared Parenting.

And 3, this morning's NY Times, frontpage, had this article on how politicians are feeling more comfortable showing their maternal roles. Was not able to finish the article before the baby woke and my day mothering began,  so I don't yet know if it included whether these politicians will feel the political ability and will to focus on policy issues that really help mothers, all mothers (ala MomsRising.org), but that's clearly the next step.

I'm wondering if others feel similarly, but blogging is fitting my life less these days. In its earlier days, the novelty kept me going. Checking for comments provided a charge, and those constant emails to my inbox from readers--people who now have become friends, boosted my day.

I also liked the way that blogging takes our lives and helps us make a story out of each day, each episode. When I was in super-blogging mode, I'd walk through the hours of my day seeking the story. I started experiencing ordinary events as part of a broader narrative, as the question "How might I blog about this?" became intuitive. One of the wonders of blogging, as we do it, is the turning of daily life into an essay, with a start-middle-and-finish, with meaning.

For the past few months, though, blogging has not worked its usual magic, and I think I've finally figured out why. I do struggle with the issue of privacy: protecting my husband's identity, and figuring out how to write about our family life--of which he is such an active part--while writing him out of the story. I am conscious of not telling tales of Samira's life in ways that would later embarrass her. But the privacy issue isn't the full explanation,  since despite it I find what to blog about, and in fact, having some limits on writing about my family ensures that I keep my mind on the world outside our four walls, even on cold wintry days, like yesterday where I literally never leave the coziness of my home.

This, I've realized, is the problem. My life these days is not a story. It's not an essay, and I don't have the mother-of-a-13-month-old energy to change that. My life, you see, is a list. Understanding this, I will blog in list form, with no attempt to forge a beginning-middle-end to life events. You know the classic complaint "I start to write and I end of composing a to-do list"? Well I'm giving in. Three cheers for the list.

1. The services coordinator for our city's Childlink forged bitter cold and snow flurries to come to our home and meet with us. That was Thursday. The baby was sleeping, which was fine since this, it turned out, was an initial home visit. He needed to ask me questions, and will return, he promises, on February 10, with a physical therapist and an occupational therapist, to evaluate the baby.

In the meantime, Amelia thinks the funnest thing on earth is to lift her arms to mid-height, thus indicating that what she wants is for someone to hold her hands while she walks up and down our main hallway.

It may turn it that she walks on her own and the doctor has jumped the gun on any real delay. Let's hope. My dream is that she starts walking, I call the doctor, who says she's fine, and cancel the request for intervention.

2. Samira is now playing basketball, which cracks me up because she is so short, and like everyone in our family has a long torso and short legs. I know nothing about basketball except a little tiny bit about college teams. I did my graduate work at Duke, as did my husband, so every March the TV in our house gets turned on to watch the NCAA finals. I will be learning more about basketball, and I'm looking in to getting tickets to see the Temple women's team play.

Here's the funniest, most wonderful part of it all: Samira's really good. She's short, but apparently there's a position called "point guard" (you can see my total ignorance now) where you don't need to be tall, you just need to be able to get the ball away from the other team, which Samira does with her twists and bobs, and by getting down around everyone's knees and pulling that ball into her hands. It's excellent fun to watch her. I'm of that generation of girls that just missed out on team sports. Complications and limits aside, girls sports are one of feminism's successes, and I'm glad that Samira is reaping the benefit. And having a damn good time.



Long live the list, and have a great day.

ps and no. 4:  My friend Michelle is writing about her current bout with cancer at her blog, Various Ramblings. Let's all head over and leave some comments and show our support.

I just had to. Hearing REM on the radio this morning (see the post below! ) made me so happy. I picked the baby up from her high chair, breakfast finished, and danced with her around the kitchen.

Several songs later, I put the baby down with some toys, pulled out the computer, and made an REM station on Pandora. Here it is, for any of you who need the smallest excuse to dance to music from your 20's. In the hours since, my work has been interrupted by memories of the Cat's Cradle in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where I didn't see REM, but I did see the many other bands who made the rounds of southern college towns in their shadow, including the ineffable, life-changing Flat Duo Jets.

It's back to work for me, now. The babysitter is here only for twenty minutes more. Enjoy.

This new year is starting with a terrible emotional bang, it's clamor conflicting with my usual, rhythmic conviction about January's post-holiday calm. We continue to work on getting appointments to learn what's going on with the baby. While we do that, we forge back and forth between knowing nothing's wrong, convinced our doctor is conservative and working on a just-in-case scenario (she herself said it wasn't urgent, right); that, and certainty that something is very wrong. Update: we found a way to get to the scheduling nurse at the Children's Hospital. That in itself shaved a few months waiting time. The nurse sent out the intake forms immediately and they arrived Saturday.

I had the strangest reaction filling them out. The reality of the baby's hard first year hit me. I thought I had taken it in, but the heaviness of it became more real. I filled line after line: Doctors who have seen your child; specialists who have seen your child; hospitalizations; medications taken regularly; medications your child has taken. diagnoses.

With Samira, these lines would have stayed blank. Instead, my hand hurt when I was done. My baby has her own pediatric urologist; how many of us ever have a urologist? She's on daily antibiotic. She took iron supplements. Thank goodness that through all of us she smiles, but I really started to worry. And to remember: the loss of muscle tone when she was sick. The few days I've forgotten to take my prenatal vitamins. I'm trying to stay away from guilt in the abstract, mother-guilt sense of things. At the same time, I can't help ask what specific things I can do to make her life better. We've cleaned out the living room to give the baby lots more room to move around. I'm making sure that she spends lots of time on that cleaned-out floor, that's instead of putting her in the backpack or sling and toting her around. If there's a chance that her development is slow due to lack of floor-opportunity, I'd love the chance to solve it this way.

So many filled line. And yet, I remind myself it could be worse. much worse, and that's not to sound pollyanish, nor to downplay the way lowgrade fear fills our days. It is to find a context, to appreciate our friends, our family, the big picture, that these are things that can be treated, fixed.

For now, it's Sunday morning. Samira is at a playdate, Rob is helping an old friend in distress. The baby is sleeping, a long morning nap because we kept her up late last night. I'm cooking food for the week: french toast and soft carrots for the baby, poached chicken to shred. Making a grocery list, putting washed clothing into the dryer, and listening to REM on the radio, which is strangely healing, reminding me of a time, several decades ago, when problems were abstract, and listening to a great album or spending a patch of late night hours at a club listening to a favorite band could make anything all better.

If there's anything that can claim the same emotional range as a few hours with a late-80's North Carolina or Athens band, it's the ups and downs of family life, the insane love and care I feel for these people, who, small and large, are mine, all mine.

And now, when I most want to wallow in jangly guitars and piano pedals, a little baby sends out a cry that she's awake.