Writing Prompt: The New Yorker for Mothers

I responded to a writing prompt on literarymama.com but it wasn't chosen so I thought I'd share it on here. It's in response to this essay, The New Yorker for Mothers by Becki Melchione.

I was a journalism major and an English minor. My last semester of college I took 22 hours and three of my classes were literature classes. I was reading all the time and I actually loved it. It was insane, but I read some of the best books that I had ever read that year.  I realize now, that those were the best reading years of my life: pre-marriage and pre-children.

Five years after graduating with my undergraduate degree I was getting married while in my first year of graduate school. This time I had chosen an MA in Communication and the reading, although interesting, was not as much fun. This is actually where I saw my reading decline. Between being newly married, a full-time job, and graduate school reading, there was little time for fun reading.

Enter into the picture children and technology when I was 31 and my life was about to change forever. Yes, I definitely saw a change in the amount that I read and what I read. Instead of the wonderful long novels I was now just grasping at whatever I could read online in between breast feeding and changing diapers. 

So I read the internet like crazy, whenever I could. Like the author of “The New Yorker for Mothers,” Becki Melchione, I too found a new favorite read. First I read baby websites all the time . I’d read magazine articles online, short stories, literary sites, and more. Then I started blogging when my son was seven months old and still nursing. Blogging was my outlet and a way that I could read more online as “research” for my blog.

All of this online reading, then social media reading and the years passed me by. Soon I realized that I wasn’t reading the way I used to and I made a conscious effort to start reading again. Honestly I don’t think I really started reading books again until the baby was potty trained and doing more on his own and my daughter was six.

Those babies are twelve and nine now. My daughter is a voracious reader like me. She can go through a good sized chapter book in a matter of two days. She reminds me of me at her age.

My life has changed immensely. The children are older, I’m single again, and I can read whatever I want whenever I want. Well, at least I can when I’m not working or driving my daughter to lacrosse games and my son to football games.

At least now I can read in the car during their practices. I can read in the evenings after they’ve done their homework and they are playing their games or watching TV. I can read on my sacred weekends alone when I can do whatever I want and for just two days I’m not a mom. Yes, I missed reading and I am so glad to have it back.

Thoughts on Aging and How THESE Are the Best Years of My Life

I was at the beach these past two days with kids. As I sat there looking at the family next to me with small children I realized how I am at the perfect age and at the best time in my life right now.

From my Pinterest Board "Great Quotes."

This is the time to really live in the moment. Of course I do believe the quotes that say that every moment of our life should be cherished and we should always live in the moment. That is very true. But let's be honest... some moments in our lives are even better than others and we don't realize it until those years have passed. Like the period between 21-25. I wish I'd appreciated that time more.

But right now my kids aren't babies anymore. They can use the restroom by themselves, wash themselves, dress themselves and pretty much entertain themselves. They are also funny as hell and make me laugh out loud on many occasions. At the same time they aren't in their terrible teens yet either. My daughter just turned twelve and she's on the threshold of puberty, but not there yet. Thank goodness I haven't had to deal with her mood swings when she realizes what is happening to her body. My son is only nine and still years away from that madness.

I'm not an old woman yet either. I'm still young enough that a young man in his twenties would tell me that I look much better in person than on my Facebook picture and that I look younger than his uncle, who is probably around my same age. (That was a great compliment.)

The other great part is that I'm not very young. I'm not a young silly girl that doesn't know any better. I know better now (most of the time) and what I do at this age is my own doing that can't be blamed on age or inexperience.

Of course when I am an old woman and the kids are grown and gone and I'm all by myself again in my house, all quiet and peaceful, I will probably think that that is the best time in my life. We will see then.

Right now is almost perfect. I feel like I have finally embraced my new life and I'm so ready to move on to do the things that I want to do. It is so liberating to pretty much do whatever I want whenever I want, within reason of course. I am still a mom.

Just today I wrote a writing prompt for Literary Mama about how my reading changed after I had children and how I can finally read again now that they are older and I'm single. It's a glorious feeling. Funny how being single frees up so much of your time!

I feel like now in my 40s I am finally ridding myself of burdens in my life that I don't want to carry any more, slowly very slowly. I still have a long way to go but I'm moving in the right direction one goal at a time. Meanwhile I will carpe the hell out of this diem!

The Invisible Mom

A couple of weeks ago I read a story on the Huffington Post that really struck a nerve. It was "The Mom Stays in the Picture," by Allison Tate. I shared the post on Facebook and I immediately started getting "likes" from friends and honest open comments about how they felt about the topic. It was interesting to read their feedback. In fact Katie Couric even picked up the story on her show because there are so many invisible moms out there who are not documenting their existence.

Me, age 35, and my kiddos in 2005, when they were 1 and 4.

I love this picture of me and the kids. I'm so glad my then husband took it of us. It captures the moment of my motherhood so perfectly. My son in his 1 year old cuteness and my daughter in her 4 year old adorable self.  Even though I love this picture, when I look at it I see how fat I am. I see my double chin and the fatness of my arm. Isn't that sad?

What's even more sad is when I realize that we never took a professional family picture when their dad and I were married. I will never have those years or that opportunity back again. When I look back through pictures I see that there are a lot of gaps when I'm not in the pictures with my kids.

I read some of the comments after Allison's essay and one was so sad. This one woman said she only had one child and that she never took pictures with her because it was just a reminder of how ugly she was. Poor woman, but the saddest part is that many of us feel the same way.

On my Facebook post one of my best friends who lost her mom to cancer when she was 19 said that when they go back and look at pictures they have very few of their mom. Another friend admitted that she stays out of pictures too. We all agreed that this article was a reminder that we shouldn't be doing that.

The truth is that when we are old or gone and our kids are adults they won't care what we looked like when they were little. They won't care if we were too fat or too skinny. All they will care is that they have a picture of their mom, a memory of what we looked like when they were children. We are their mom, we're beautiful in THEIR eyes and really that's all that matters.

Thoughts on Writing

My daughter is taking the TAKS writing test today at school and all the parents wrote little notes of encouragement for them and the teacher hung these on the wall outside their classroom. 

www.annetaintor.com

As usual, I lagged behind the other parents, especially the stay-at-home moms who get to be cute and creative. (No, I'm not hating!) I knew about it on Friday, the 18th and I had that weekend to work on it. I didn't. I forgot. I didn't remember until the teacher reminded me when I took my daughter to Literacy Night at the school on Thursday, the 24th.

On Thursday night when I got home I went blank and I felt pressured to finish it so I didn't do it. I told my daughter I would do it over the weekend for her to take it on Monday. So what happened? Yep, you guessed it. Another weekend went by and I forgot again. On Monday morning I screamed, "ARGH!" as I drove away from the house and I realized that I'd forgotten again. (Yeah, I suck!)

Yesterday I got home from the gym and that was the first thing I sat down to do after dinner. I already knew one quote I wanted to write, but I came across another quote by Anaïs Nin and Miranda really liked the second one more. I also added a note of encouragement from me, her father and her brother. Then cute stickers of a ruler, pencil, pen, crayon and some really cute button type of "cutie" stickers.

So here they are in order with her favorite first. I had room for one more short quote and I liked that one by Joan Didion.

"The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say." "We write to taste life twice, in the moment & in retrospection."  Both by Anaïs Nin and "We tell ourselves stories in order to live." - Joan Didion


She was happy and she carried it off to school today to encourage her along in her writing. And I was happy to finally get it done. :-P
All this talk about writing really got me to thinking about my own writing. Lately I've been going through such a range of emotions that my creativity has been sparked. I have a new idea for a novel. or maybe just a short story, brewing inside my head. I'm itching to get it down on paper. I already started a short outline with the idea. Now to write it! Maybe that will be the next short story that I submit somewhere.
 
In my search for quotes on writing I came across this one. "How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live." ~Henry David Thoreau. Beautiful and so true.

Wikipedia, Random Observances & Motherhood

I love Wikipedia. I think we should all create Wikipedia entries on ourselves. Wouldn't that be cool? Instead of Googling each other we just Wikipedia.

Why is it that as big as I am the smallest parts of my body are my ankles and my wrists? So that means that when I'm finally at my target weight I'm probably going to have these bony ankles and wrists. Scary! All I've lost are 18 lbs and I look down and my ankles are already smaller. How do I go and lose the smallest part of my body first?

Whose idea was it to have two kids, and only three years apart, anyway? Okay, mine.

Sunday my daughter got mad at my son and she threw a Walmart toy magazine right at him, full force. She hit him right in the eye! He screamed bloody murder and after he calmed down he could open his eye and it was just red. I kept an eye on it and 2 days later, after the red had cleared, I found that he had a small blister looking thing on the white of his eye. I took him to his pediatrician this morning and she confirmed that it's a torn cornea. Ouch! So tomorrow we have an appointment with a pediatric ophthalmologist at Texas Children’s. Oh the joys of motherhood!!

My Recent Discovery

Who would believe that we'd be so close to the end of September? School has been in session for almost a month now. I've had my good days and my bad days. Some days I get her there early, a couple of times I've gotten there late, but most days I get there right on time.

Now that I'm starting my second round as a mother with a child in school I'm finally catching on to how things work. No one really tells you.

Remember the really popular girls in school? The cheerleaders, the dance team members, the flag corp and any other popular girl kind of team? OK, if you don't remember them just think of the movies, "13 Going on 30," "Never Been Kissed," and "Mean Girls," to name just a few. Remember the really popular girls that were slightly or outright rude to everyone when you were in school? They were the ones giving the parties and being invited to parties.

Well those girls get started in Kindergarten and First Grade. They are already popular when they start school! It's amazing! But I found out why. These are the daughters of the parents who are very involved with the PTA.

There was a PTA meeting on Thursday at my daughter's school and the first graders were performing, so of course I made it a point to go. They sang around five songs while all the parents said ooh and ahh. Three or four little girls were standing in front of the microphone and they were the main little spokespersons.

My sister leans in and says to me, "There go the future cheerleaders of Waltrip."

I cracked up but I realized that it was true.

I was talking to my sister in California, who has raised two children, and I told her what I had discovered. "Oh yeah," she says, "That's how it works. The PTA mother make sure to put their kids right in front all the time. That's why Hannah (my niece) always wanted me to get involved in the PTA."

Well I just now caught on. And who are the PTA mothers? The really active ones, the officers, the ones who have time to volunteer, are the stay at home moms or the moms who work part-time. Interesting... but just like all organizations that's how the politics work. If you want your kids to be active and popular you must lead by example.

The reason I wouldn't know anything about this is because 1. My parents weren't involved in school at all and 2. Well, I wasn't popular. Of course I wasn't a total outcast and I wasn't a total nerd, but I wasn't in the popular crowd either. I was in the middle of the road group. I was the high school newspaper editor.

The closest I got to popular was our senior year when one of my best friends started dating one of the popular boys, who was actually a couple of grades below us, but part of that group. The summer after we graduated she dated him and my other best friend started dating one of the popular boys too and that summer they attended all the popular kids' parties. It was really strange to have friends in the popular group all of a sudden and after school was over with.

So my parents weren't ever involved. I was fortunate if they went to Open House and met my teachers. My parents were older and their motto was, "No news is good news." They didn't worry about me and I was left to defend myself. I guess by making newspaper editor and not being a total outcast, you could say I was a self-made woman.

Now I'm a parent and I'm faced with the important question. Do I become very involved in school? As involved as I can working full time. Or do I stay semi-involved to teach my daughter the type of self-reliance I learned? I don't want to be totally uninvolved like my parents were. That's not good either. It's an interesting question to consider. If you're a mom tell me what you're doing and how you feel about going either direction?