When I was getting married some of my friends from college joked that it was a sign of the Apocalypse. That’s because all through college I vehemently proclaimed that I would never get married and I’d certainly never have kids.

Yes, I eventually learned that I should never say never.

But even after deciding there was a place for a child in my life, I didn’t immediately feel comfortable in the role of mom.  Her infant years were hard for me - I ran back to work as soon as maternity leave was over. I wanted to be where I knew how to do my job and people could tell me what they needed (as opposed to me trying to guess what all that crying was about).

To some of you I’m sure that sounds harsh, but I really think it’s a myth that all women naturally have some instinct for mothering.  Instead of being proud, I resented when my husband would say I was better at some element of parenting than he was.  It wasn’t because I had any more practice at it than he had (never did the whole babysitting thing and was the baby of the family). If I was better at something it was because I poured over books, magazines and websites to learn how.  Something he could have just as easily done.

Toddler years had their own challenges. Getting a mug with “World’s Greatest Mom” on it was still far from my idea of success; but, things at least got a little better once she was able to verbalize her needs and wants. This may still sound uncaring, but to the contrary, I began to realize during this time that I had a love for my daughter I couldn’t explain. It runs deeper and more differently than anything else I’ve experienced. Maybe I do have some sort of instinct after all - like the one that means you never want to get between a mother bear and her cub.

That doesn’t mean I didn’t often wish for the days when going out didn’t take the advance planning of lining up a babysitter. I still cringed a bit when someone would call me a mommy blogger even though I blog here about issues related to motherhood. But, I also found myself becoming more vocal about support for girls and representation by women - not for advancing myself, but in the hopes of better things for women of her generation.

Then, an interesting thing happened the other day. I was watching the news with my laptop in, well, my lap and I saw a couple of guys I follow on Twitter mention that they were heading to San Francisco where the weatherman had just said it was going to rain.  So, I tweeted to them about packing an umbrella and David Armano replied “you’re such a mom.”

And I didn’t flinch. There was no cringe. No resentment.

Instead, I replied with another “mom” retort: “And eat your vegetables young man!”

I think maybe, seven years into this mommy gig and entering my fifth generation of life, I might be finally becoming comfortable with the whole “mom” label.

Photo compliments of Leandro Queiroz via Creative Commons.

I’m one of those children of the 70s/80s who grew up thinking I should “bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan,” and never let my man forget he’s a man. We were supposed to strive to be “Supermoms” who were able to do it all.

And, according to the recent Advertising Age white paper “The New Female Consumer: The Rise of the Real Mom,” most of us do “do it all.” Their research showed that “…women with children still handle the bulk of the household and child-care responsibilities, the so-called ’second shift’ — whether they are working full time, staying at home or something in between.”

This is in an age when the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports both parents were employed in 62 percent of the 24.6 million families made up of a married couple with children under 18. And, in the 2006-2007 academic year, the U.S. Department of Education noted women earned a majority of higher-education degrees.

The full report embedded here is filled with many more such statistics, including a 48-year comparison on education, purchasing power, and wages. But, the “real mom” to which its title makes reference is what they are really making a case for in the paper.

They posit that “the second half of this decade has brought a backlash against the mythical Supermom — that hyperactive type-A personality who whips up perfect cookies and perfect children — and an embrace of the likable, more relatable real mom, who doesn’t obsess over the little things.”

The case is made that millennial women (born between 1980 and 1995) are leading this change in attitude. They are apparently not as “conflicted” as my generation — Generation X. While I grew up being told I was equal to men, what I saw was my own mother doing an unequal amount of work to keep our family running - that “second shift” we women are apparently still working.

“[Millennials] grew up with seeing a lot of moms working, being outside the home a lot, and decided ‘Hey, this isn’t what I want,’” Aliza Freud, founder and CEO of SheSpeaks said in the AdAge report. “So they may be at peace more with their not working or working.”

Nearly have of the women surveyed for the report said finding balance between family and career is “a joke” for working women and I will certainly agree with that. The tagline for this blog used to say that it wasn’t about balance, but about juggling.

As one journalist put it: “While no longer striving to be supermoms doing everything for everyone, mothers are looking toward being pragmatic and good enough, and making a real impact in the areas that matter most for them and their children.”

This AdAge report implies that marketers should help empower women to delegate responsibilities to spouses, children and even brands so that they will have “more time to be who they want to be.”

As Carroll Trosclair on Suite101.com rightly points out, “marketers have been helping women delegate work to products, services and brands for decades. But delegating work to husbands and children may be a new and controversial challenge for advertisers.”

Interesting Side Note:
While researching for this post, I came across a blog that mentions one of the ways information was gathered for the whitepaper. Kitchen Table Conversations, “a new user-generated video research service revolutionizing how qualitative research is conducted” was used to gather information on grocery shopping habits. If you’re interested in qualitative research methods, check it out.

Back in August, I saw a note on Twitter Moms about the opportunity to review a new book titled “The BlackBerry Diaries: Adventures in Modern Motherhood.”

Being a BlackBerry-toting mom myself, it sounded like a great opportunity to read something fun - for free - and, who can resist free? (Yes, FTC, I got a free copy of the book to review in this blog.)

The humor book is written like a blog, complete with tags at the end of each short, dated entry. This style turned out to be both a good thing and a bad thing for me. It’s good because the brief entries let you easily pop in and out of the book (you know, like when you have to step away to deal with something that just came in on your BlackBerry). But, it’s also bad because it can be a little too easy to set it aside.

I received my copy in early September and have yet to finish it. But, rather than wait any longer, I figured I should go ahead and earn my free book by writing about it now.

The premise of the book is that toddlers and technology are not so different. “If they’re quiet, you’re constantly checking them to make sure everything is okay. If they’re loud and interrrupting, you just want them to shut up and go away. When they do, the cycle starts all over again.”

There were some observations to which I could relate: “… many BB-using employees will burn out quicker and resign faster as they continue to jam two years’ worth of work into seven and a half months.” But, others that I could not: “The bottom line is this: children and BBSPs [one of the author's acronyms for BlackBerry Smartphone] are all about ownership, one upmanship and petty jealousies.”

And, according to an article in CIO, the author says “she’s sharing lessons learned from her experience using a BlackBerry over the past year to enhance her and her childrens’ lives;” and, quite frankly, I didn’t see any of that in the book. Tips like don’t share your BlackBerry with someone or theyll see your BrickBreaker score, don’t use your BlackBerry at fondue parties and BlackBerries are good for keeping up with neighborhood gossip, yes. But, life enhancements? I’m afraid not.

It’s a nice, light, sometimes funny read; but, maybe because my girl is no longer a toddler or maybe because I’ve added an iPhone (personal) to my BlackBerry (work), I just never could really get into it. Not every book has to be a page-turner, I guess. But, since this one didn’t turn out to be for me, it remains unfinished. And apparently, I’m not the only one who hasn’t turned all its pages.

If anyone out there made it to the end and feels I missed something, please let me know!

Nod your head if three or more of the following apply to you:

• College graduate
• Employed
• Half of a couple
• Mortgage holder
• Parent

Nod again if, despite acquiring all these trappings of adulthood, you still

There's no fiddlin' with tradition.

don’t quite feel grown up.

To me, if often seems like the true benchmarks of our lives occur unexpectedly. You add up the sum of the parts above, and it equals an adult. But the truth of the matter really crystallizes in specific, isolated moments.

Take parenthood, for instance. While I remember the births of both my children in vivid detail, neither was attended by the blend of awe, fear, humility and hope that parenthood was reported to inspire.

But certain mundane moments conferred precisely that ton-of-bricks mix. Like when we moved our first child from his high chair to a booster seat at the table. Wham. Seeing our then almost two-year-old child right there at the table with us hit me square in the gut. In that moment, I got it. We were a family.

I recalled that moment this week as I sized up that table, wondering about squeezing 11 people around it. Another Adult Moment is in the offing. This Thanksgiving, at age 40, for the first time in my life, I won’t be eating my mom’s turkey.

Forty years is a long time to stick with a tradition, even a holiday one. I have celebrated away from my mom’s table. In the early 90s, when I worked as a newspaper reporter in other states and never got the Friday after off, my family came to me. But Mom always toted the turkey along, too.

My brother got married in 1998, and five years later, I followed. Traditions often shift as family members do. But ours endured. Neither of our spouses had a family Thanksgiving tradition. Since my mom lives almost exactly halfway between us, her place is a sensible and equitable destination.

In 2002 my father’s death further cemented the status quo. We packed up first one kid, then two, then three – now five kids between my family and my brother’s – and continued to head over the river and through the woods so Mom wouldn’t be alone on Thanksgiving.

Not this year, though. My brother’s family decided to stay home first. Meanwhile, my snowbird in-laws are delaying this year’s departure. It’s the first chance we’ve had to spend a major holiday with them, so we decided to stay put, too. My mom – who’s indicated that, after 40 years in a row, she’s not too sorry to skip cooking – will head to her sister’s.

I’m excited about a new tradition. It’s probably overdue. Yet at the same time, it conjures up my adult imposter anxieties. There’s no way 11 people will fit around that table. We don’t have a turkey roasting pan. The under-15 set that will comprise half the guests will likely turn up their noses at the traditional menu, making us wonder why we’re bothering.

Yet sometime early Thanksgiving evening, maybe when we’re cleaning up, I expect another gut-level whammo. One down. Thirty-nine to go.

Image credit: Hale Centre Theatre

I love Lucy.

Not that Lucy. The eponymous ditzy redhead character portrayed by Lucille Ball could hardly be more different than the Lucy I’m talking about: Lucy Stone, the first recorded American woman to retain her own name after marriage.

Actually, I don’t really love this Lucy, who died 116 years ago today.

Lucy Stone, the first American woman to use a maiden name after marriage. Image: Wikipedia

Rather,  as another married woman who’s demurred from adopting a husband’s name, I hold an abiding respect and appreciation for her. And as name pioneers go, I flatter myself as a kind of 21st century cousin.

When my daughter was born a year ago, my husband and I gave her my last name. Her four-year-old brother, meanwhile, has his last name. They each have the other parent’s last name as their middle moniker. So we parents, Cari Noga and Mike Henderson, have as offspring Owen Noga Henderson and Audrey Henderson Noga.

It’s different, to be sure. We’ve fielded some flak over it, mostly well-meaning inquiries about whether we’d considered that this might confuse the kids – and, to my ears, implying that’s exactly what we’d be doing.

Au contraire, I say. Indeed, it deviates from the U.S. norm. But if the kids are raised with this as their norm, there’s no place to sow confusion.  That question is also cloaked in the patriarchal stereotypes we’re trying to shrug off. No one objected that our son would be confused because he and I didn’t share a name. So why should our daughter feel confused about not sharing one with her dad?

After a year of living with it and writing about it (my personal blog explores the anomaly of having two kids with the same, married parents but different last names. OK, and a cute-kid picture now and then. I’m only human.) I’m ready to take the next step: advocacy for name choice equality. As this Salon article from 2000 puts it, why should a baby get the father’s last name? At the very least, can we think about why it’s the automatic choice for almost everyone? Other than that it’s expected and easy, there’s no real reason.

Admittedly, it’s uphill trudging. The most generous estimates I’ve seen say that only 10 percent of American women keep their names upon marrying, making for a small pool to persuade.  But the importance of the advocacy piece was reinforced for me this summer.

In August, researchers from Indiana University and the University of Utah presented to the American Sociological Association their findings that 71 percent of Americans they surveyed believe it’s better for women to change their surname upon marriage. In addition, fully half supported government regulation requiring name change. (See UPI piece and Times of India story.)

“It was a little shocking to see,” said Laura Hamilton, one of the study authors and a Ph.D candidate at Indiana. (Read more about the study, “Mapping Gender Attitudes with Views Toward Marital Name Change” and my interview with Hamilton on my personal blog.)

Shocking, indeed, are such value judgments about what should be a woman’s private, individual choice. It’s also evidence how hard it is, even 116 years after Lucy Stone, to swim against the tide.

But, like Nemo, I’ll just keep swimming. After all, while patriarchal tradition has prevailed the last few centuries in most of the Western world, it isn’t this way everywhere. When I first broached this idea to my husband, he started doing genealogical research and found that ancient Scots – a dominant strain in his ancestry – gave daughters their mothers’ names, while sons received their fathers’. Some Native American tribes and Jewish denominations, to name some found right here in the U.S.A., practice matrilineal traditions, where one’s lineage is traced through the mother.

Let me talk about my husband’s reaction to the idea more. He’s an open-minded guy, but I wondered if this would just be too far out there.
Initially, he did hesitate, because he wanted our kids to share a last name. But I asked him to keep thinking about it. As he did, I got more invested in the idea for what I think it teaches both our kids.

We’re providing a crystal clear, living lesson of what we believe about family: Mom and dad are equally important influences in their lives.

So, from my cyber-soapbox, I make my pitch to you. Think about it a matrilineal name. Talk about it with your husband. (Or, husbands, with your wives.) Block out tradition, the questions from family members, all the white noise that obscures what really matters. Then, just do it.

“I think the big brown guy is going to win,” my girl said the other night as we watched Shaquille O’Neil take on Oscar de la Hoya in the boxing ring on his “Shaq Vs.” show.

She’s just turned seven and still refers to people’s skin color in the same way she might describe a crayon; and while I think that is rather adorable, I do sometimes wonder how long others will think it is cute. At what age do we need to teach our children to use descriptions like African-American and Asian-American? And how do we teach them when to use Latino vs. Hispanic? Or the difference in Native-American and Indian (as in our across the street neighbors from India)?

I know that my own insecurities and fears of saying the wrong thing make me unsure of how to proceed in this area, and it turns out I’m not alone.  Here in my own town, The University of Texas has been studying Caucasian (white?) children’s racial attitudes, and it appears that I’m not the only one who has problems discussing race with their kids.

According to Newsweek, the researcher was “taken aback—these families volunteered knowing full well it was a study of children’s racial attitudes. Yet once they were aware that the study required talking openly about race, they started dropping out.”

According to one blogger on the National Post Comment section, that “confirms what many people probably already thought: white children in Austin, Texas are racist.”

Wow!

That’s exactly the sort of thing I fear that keeps me from being comfortable discussing race with my daughter - doing it wrong and risking being pegged racist. But, the study indicates that not calling attention to racial differences does not mean our children will grow up to be colorblind, no matter how much we wish it.

Those families that did follow through with the study and talked openly about interracial friendship showed a dramatic improvement in their children’s racial attitudes. So, how do those of us not getting scripts from a university handle it?

I’ve asked the question among some of my white girlfriends before, and none of them seemed to know how to do it either. Often it seems something easier left to the school system to try to broach, but I’m not sure that’s really what I want to do.

My girl’s Daisy Girl Scout troop had a session on diversity last year, in which one of our African-American moms talked about race - but, even that was again in the context of crayons and how a picture looks so much better when it has more than one color.

This UT study indicates that sort of wishy-washy description doesn’t really cut it for what I ultimately want to accomplish. Turns out my pride in the diversity of that same Daisy troop doesn’t mean it is going to teach those girls to be colorblind either. Another UT researcher in that same Newsweek story says of desegregation in schools:

“It’s an enormous step backward to increase social segregation,” she says. However, she also admitted that “in the end, I was disappointed with the amount of evidence social psychology could muster [to support it]. Going to integrated schools gives you just as many chances to learn stereotypes as to unlearn them.”

So what is a parent to do? It would appear, much like preparing for “the talk” about sex, we also need to plan for more talk about race. I’m going to try to be honest with my girl and admit that I don’t really know when it is appropriate to use the terms Hispanic, Latino or Mexican-American. I won’t plan a big sit-down conversation, but rather will look for ways to weave it in when opportunity presents itself (much the same way I’m approaching discussions of sex at this point). But, I better prepare myself.

Better me talking to her about race than these guys.

Have you discussed race with your child? What tips can you share to help me and others prepare? Do I need to correct my daughter when she equally uses “brown” as a descriptor for African-Americans, Indian-Americans and Mexican-Americans?

Two coming attractions at the movie theater are based on books that both my girl and I have enjoyed reading - “Where the Wild Things Are” and “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs.”

“Where the Wild Things Are” was a book that I read in my own childhood and a fellow bibliophile I used to work with (thanks Leslie) made sure my child got the chance to read it, too, by including it in a baby shower gift. The “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs” book came a little late for me, but my librarian mother introduced it to my girl and she and I both enjoyed it.

Now, bringing a book to the movie screen has always been fraught with danger. Everyone who has read a book has their own ideas about how the characters look, so casting can get a lot of fan input or backlash (Tom Cruise as Lestat anyone?). Storylines often get changed to meet a perceived desire of audiences to always have happy endings (think “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” and “The Scarlet Letter“). Sometimes entire characters are dropped or added, which frustrated me in “Angels and Demons,” despite the fact that I can understand things need to be edited sometimes to squeeze an entire book into a couple of hours of screen time.

That difficulty of making the in-depth short is probably the most common cause of changes that frustrate book lovers who see the movies based on them. But what of short childrens’ books that need to be expanded to make them long enough for a movie? Does that make it any easier for adaptation? I’m thinking not based strictly on my own mixed feelings about these two new movies.

It appears that they have expanded Cloudy primarily by adding a story in front of the story - giving the audience a tale of how the food first came to fall from the sky in the town of Chewandswallow - and I think this will work nicely.

But, from what I can tell from the fantastic Wild Things trailers, the 10 sentences of the original story are getting a lot of filler in between them - thus potentially changing the story a bit more. The live-action attempt at The Grinch Who Stole Christmas tried doing both and I don’t think the results were very spectacular there.

Obviously aware that I’m not the only one a bit leery of this, the studio has made a point to include original Wild Things author Maurice Sendak in many publicity events and he has been reporting saying the “Wild Things Movie Will Be Okay” as well as promising the “Wild Things Movie Will Be Dark and Controversial.”

Hmm…

Either way, I will probably see both movies. Not needing an excuse to watch kids’ movies, after all, is one of the perks of this mommy gig, right? And, while I will definitely enter the Wild Things theater with trepidation and concern that the book will never read the same for me again, I bet this trailer makes you want to see more, too.

(The Arcade Fire song on this Wild Things trailer really helps inspire a sense of wonder and the desire to see it - too bad word is it won’t be in the actual movie.)

Related articles by Zemanta

• Childhood Memories Coming to a Theater Near You (firstbook.org)
• Watch This: Maurice Sendak Talks ‘Wild Things’ (cinematical.com)
• Dave Eggers’ 300-Page Storybook Adaptation (mediabistro.com)
• Jonze And Sendak Meeting Like Something From A Spike Jonze Movie (cinemablend.com)

This is part of a series of posts looking at virtual worlds targeted toward kids.

If your kids watch the same TV channels mine does, then you’ve probably seen the commercials for a new virtual world called Free Realms. My girl certainly saw them and wanted to go check it out, so our series of kid-focused virtual world reviews continues.

Free Realms
Free Realms bills itself as “a fun, whimsical virtual world filled with dynamic gameplay and compelling content for everyone, especially families.” It’s really more of a pure MMOG than any of the other worlds we’ve toured as part of this series. As soon as my girl set up her account (all by herself, except for my need to give her an e-mail to attach to the account) and entered the world, she was met by a character asking her to embark on her first quest. This prevents the “what do I do now” issue that plagues some virtual worlds, but also aligns more firmly with games such as the non-kid-focused World of Warcraft (WoW).

With more than a million people signing up for it in the first week and that number doubled already, it’s on target to be just as popular as WoW, too. In addition to quests, kids can work at a variety of jobs from pet trainer to ninja to miner and others mentioned below. Like most other kid virtual worlds, you can enter and play for free; but, for $4.99/month you can upgrade to get more things like additional job options, and you’ll also pay to purchase items.

The Good
Free Realms automatically limits kids under 13 to “quick chat” - my preferred choice for my youngster because it restricts them to a preprogramed set of words and phrases to communicate. That way you don’t have to worry about them giving out any personal information (but, don’t let that get you off the hook for still having that discussion about what you don’t share online).
Free Realms’ parent controls area also mentions that they intend to implement a feature which will permit you to customize a calendar to set times of day and/or days of the week that your kid will have access to the account online, as well as days and times during which they may play.

The Bad
I’m willing to bet that most of us teach our kids that fighting is wrong, so it’s a little unsettling to see that quests in Free Realms can involve combat and one of the jobs kids can get is called a Brawler. Brawlers are described as being “up for fight anytime with anyone” and they “use hammers, clubs, and powerful kicks to defeat enemies.”
We didn’t run into any Brawlers in our first few visits to Free Realms, but then again, we didn’t run into anyone other than the in-world characters who play parts in the quests. This may or may not be a bad thing, but struck me as odd considering there are supposed to be more than 2 million people in-world now.

The Lessons Learned
I only heard the “rated E for everyone” part of the commercials, but when you really look, you’ll see it is “everyone 10+” and I would reccomend following that age recommendation from the Entertainment Software Rating Board. Even more specifically the rating warns of “crude humor” and “fantasy violence.” We haven’t encountered the humor yet, but as noted above, the violence is definitely there.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Free Realms Still Growing Insanely Quickly [E3 2009] (kotaku.com)
• Sony’s Free Realms game signs up a million users in 17 days (venturebeat.com)
• The free price is working out nice for Sony’s Free Realms as registrants top 2 million (venturebeat.com)
• Video Game Review | Free Realms: Pick a Role, Any Role, Then Live Nine Lives (nytimes.com)