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Something extraordinary happened in my home state of New Hampshire last week: the election resulted in the nation’s first all-female congressional delegation, plus a female governor.  Not only that, but all five of those elected officials are mothers.

That shattering sound you hear is a glass ceiling being smashed to pieces the size of confetti.

But make no mistake: many women and families–and even men–are still hemmed in by walls.

Let’s be clear on one point right from the beginning: these five elected women hold individual positions, are individual people, represent differently composed constituencies and should not be expected to vote the same way or espouse the same position on any given issue as a result of their gender or any other characteristic.  They’re not even all members of the same political party.

But they do share the following characteristic: they know first-hand what’s it like to juggle career and family.  They know, via their individual stories and in a way our society as a whole has not yet recognized, that the era in which most moms stay at home full-time is over.

Fellow New Hampshire resident and New York Times Motherlode blogger KJ Dell’Antonia ran two pieces last week relating to this topic, one regarding New Hampshire’s new all-mother delegation itself, and another that centered around the desperate exit memo written by a law firm associate who could no longer maintain the crushing, dual life of lawyer and mother.  Dell’Antonia’s commentary made clear what so many women already understand from personal experience: this woman’s predicament is far from unique.

Readers here know I have long maintained that our policies need to catch up to the reality of how we live in twenty-first century America.  We need to recognize that children are both a societal need and a societal good, that someone needs to raise these children, and, ideally, that someone includes the parents.  We need to look for ways to blend career and family, jobs and parenting, and we need to stop professionally penalizing and shaming both moms and dads who want to be engaged in the raising of their kids. (more…)

(Photo credit: WizzyWigg via Flickr.com)

Have you had “The Adoption Talk” with your child yet?  I haven’t, and I don’t plan to.

But that doesn’t mean we don’t talk about adoption.  On the contrary.  The topic can–and does–come up all the time.

Last Friday evening, for example, seven-year-old “Emmie” and I went out for a mommy-daughter sushi dinner.  Somewhere between the miso soup, the nigiri salmon and the whiplash-inducing conversation (regular readers know how Emmie likes to switch topics faster than the speed of light, and without warning), Emmie found herself attempting to describe a tiny object.

She held her thumb and index finger very close together.  “It’s like when I was this small in your tummy.”

Now Emmie knows well the facts of her origins as we’ve gone over them countless times.  But just to be safe, I didn’t want to let this slip go uncorrected.  “You weren’t in my tummy, remember?  You were in your birthmom’s tummy.”

Emmie: “When ‘Jack’ was in your tummy.  Whatever!”  Translation: Mommy, that’s not the point.  Duh!

Before we left this subject behind, however, I wanted to make sure I wasn’t leaving her with any confusion or uneasiness.  I decided to offer one more comment.  “You were that small once, you know.  It’s just that you weren’t in my tummy then; you were in your birthmom’s tummy.”

She put on her contemplative face.  “Right.  So, I have a question.  Are you my real mom?”

I noticed that the dad dining with his young son at the table next to ours had stopped playing and become very quiet–as had his son.

“Well, honey, I think ‘real mom’ is kind of a silly term.  I’m your mom who loves you and takes care of you and will always be here for you.  I help you when you need help, we talk about things, I take you to dance and make you dinner and we do things as a family and we have fun together.  We laugh about things together.  I’ll always be here for you.  So yes, I’m your real mom.  But I’m not the mom you were born from.  That’s your birthmom.”

“Oh.”  She stuffed a piece of sushi into her mouth.

“You know, someday, when you’re older, you will learn about something called ‘genetics.”  Genetics is all about…”  At this point, I realized I had just stepped off the cliff and was about to lose my audience.  The light was flashing red.  “What I mean is that there are some things you got from your birth parents, like the color of your hair, and your skin.  Those didn’t come from me and Daddy.  But other things you do get from me and Daddy, like the things that we teach you…”

Emmie’s face took on that wry look that makes her look like a teenager and that is all her own.  “Well, you don’t really teach me that much.  That’s what school is for.  It’s my teachers who teach me.”

I burst out laughing, and we moved to another topic entirely.

____________________________

The asking and answering of The Big Question–Are you my real mom?–is one that many adoptive parents dread. (more…)

Confession: I don’t really understand the topic of today’s post.  This is why I’m writing about it.  Maybe someone out there can help me.

This past Monday, we were treated to a rare break in the Seattle-like weather we’ve been experiencing in New England, and my husband and I decided it was time for a family hike.  We had to squeeze our activity between scheduled allergy shots and soccer practice, so we picked a local venue.  A ten-minute drive brought us to a trail where, after a short, relatively easy climb through the forest, we came upon this view:

As we began our descent, we chatted about all kinds of topics: school, sports, the kinds of pets we might acquire within the coming year, etc.  Periodically, ten-year-old “Jack” wandered off the trail to explore something or other in the forest.  I knew this because Jack likes to hike at the head of our group.  Often, he just barely adheres to the “make sure you can see us” rule, but he does observe it, so I could see what he was doing.  (Jack adores the woods, and my husband and I have often commented how unfortunate it is for Jack that he wasn’t given more rugged parents.)

Not long into this portion of our hike, Jack came across the remains of a thin, dead tree, partially fallen but propped up against another, living tree.  The two trees were off to one side of the path.  Jack stopped, considered their positions, and said, “Watch this.”

He then walked over to the dead tree and pushed it until it fell over.

Like this:*

When the tree hit the ground, Jack let out a sound that could best be described as a combination of a whoop and a cackle.  A wackle.  And then he went on a mission. (more…)

(Photo credit: Ed Yourdon via Flickr.com)

When you talk to your kids about tough topics, do you talk to the children they are now, or do you talk to the people they are in the process of becoming?

I believe in talking to my kids about almost anything.  If they come to me with a serious question, I believe they deserve an honest, age-appropriate reply.  I also look for proactive opportunities to introduce tough topics, sometimes tossing out a subject to them like a baseball to see if they’re ready to play catch.  If not, that might be okay.  Sometimes we can put off a difficult topic until later–but not always.  If I know there’s a good chance, for example, my sports-obsessed ten-year-old son will hear about an item on Sportscenter or on ads between innings of ball games, I’ll make sure I talk to him about it as soon as possible.  Often, my kids’ young minds are already churning and wondering even before I’ve brought a topic up.

Kids don’t live in a bubble.  They see.  They hear.  They question.  They just don’t always tell their parents about it.

My kids and I have talked recently about terrorism, about awful diseases, about the murder of our ambassador in Libya last week and about religious-based violence.  We talk about politics–the good and the bad, crime in the news and what may or may not happen again, and cool scientific innovations.  My husband and I talk to our son about the pro-athletes who behave badly and what happens to them, and cheer every time we find an example of an athlete who does something positive.  These conversations in the past few weeks have included Lance Armstrong, Brendon Ayanbadejo and Chris Kluwe.

(We also laugh, tell jokes, etc.  It’s not all school-marmy around here all the time, I swear.)

And I have talked to my kids, especially the ten-and-a-half-year-old, about puberty and sex.

Why?  For several reasons.  First, “Jack” intially asked me how babies were made when he was four years old.  Yes, that’s right: four.  And he wasn’t content with the basic answer then; he wanted to know exactly how they were made, how they came out, etc.  He wanted to know, so I told him.  When he stopped asking questions, I stopped telling.  Also when he stopped asking questions, I went downstairs and helped myself to a very large glass of wine.

Second, I talk to him about puberty because it’s just around the corner. (more…)

(Photo credit: Jez Page via Flickr.com)

First, a threshold matter: there’s this thing called a “blogging schedule.”  Ostensibly, I have one.  I don’t know where it’s been lately; maybe it’s hiding in one of my kids’ school backpacks.  If you see it, please tell it to get its organized butt back to me so weekly postings can resume.  Come on now, summer is over.  Jeesh.

On to the topic at hand.  Here’s a question for you: how much assistance do you give your young child with his homework?  (I know people’s opinions vary widely on this issue, but for the sake of this discussion, let’s take “I do his homework for him” off the table.)  Personally, I’ve always believed that my kids should attempt to complete their homework on their own before they look for help.  If they have difficulty or questions, I try always to be available to them.  But the sense of accomplishment and pride they get from figuring something out on their own is only attainable if I give them a chance to earn that.  There’s no shame in asking for help, I tell them, but see what you can figure out first.

So I have to admit I was taken aback last week when my seven-year-old daughter brought home the following instruction to parents from her teacher regarding math homework: “Please sit with your child to be sure what he/she learned [in class] is being applied to the homework.”

Aside from my gut-level objection that, having already attended elementary school, I need my children’s homework time to cook dinner/fold laundry/sort and fill out paperwork/write and read from endless piles/answer the multiple, daily phone calls from political pollsters, I also feel that my sitting beside my daughter throughout every second of her math homework will send her the message that I don’t think she is capable of handling the work on her own. (more…)

“Step away from the iPhone.” This is what I say when I’ve had enough. It’s the imperative that slips out when I’m tired of watching the backs of my kids’ heads, tired of trying to engage with them in the real world while they’re fully engaged in artificial, virtual life.

I generally don’t speak this sentence until my kids have already spent what any person over the age of 30 would describe as a reasonable amount of time in front of a screen, and then one of my kids asks, “Mommy, can I play with your iPhone?”

The offender generally poses the question with an arm outstretched, fingers beginning to curl in anticipation. I can almost see my 10-year-old son or my 7-year-old daughter salivate.

“Mommy, can I play with your iPhone?”

“No, you’ve had enough screen time today.”

“Mommy, can I play with your iPhone?”

“No. You don’t need an iPhone to get you through the 10 minutes it takes to drive from Bow to downtown Concord. Step away from the iPhone.”

The questioning feels relentless. I remind myself that I’m the parent. Summer’s influence has reached its peak: Bedtime has disintegrated, pizza has morphed into a major food group and the Olympics made it okay to sit in front of the television for hours at a time. But if I truly believe my children are spending too much time in front of screens, I’ve got to parent up and re-impose the strict limits I was so good about maintaining during the school year.

“Mommy, can I play with your iPhone?”

For the love of God, I can’t take it anymore. Take the damn iPhone. Just let me know if anyone texts me, all right?

Click here to read the rest of my column in today’s Concord Monitor.

(Photo credit: PictureYouth via Flickr.com)

It’s getting harder to decide whether to write about some of the topics I’d like to feature on this blog.

The problem is that as my kids get older, their lives become more their own.  The parenting issues that arise in my life don’t only implicate me, they implicate my kids, who have teachers, coaches and friends of their own.  They have their own thoughts and feelings about what gets discussed in public and what doesn’t.

Safeguarding my kids’ privacy used to mean taking steps to protect them from potential predators.  Now it also means giving serious consideration to how they might feel about my broadcasting their stories–stories which are often, by definition, intertwined with my parenting stories.

A confession: there are a number of blog posts I’ve wanted to write over the past year or so that I haven’t for this very reason.  I’d like to share these would-be posts with you because they involve issues I think many other parents face; for example, there’s a medical issue, something one of my kids faced at school last year, a youth sports issue.  But these stories and quandaries don’t belong only to me, so I’ve kept them within our family.

This dilemma is a common one for those of us who write about parenting.  Recently, Lisa Belkin and Sarah Buttenweiser have both written at Huff Post Parents about the “code of silence” that envelopes parents who don’t quite tell the truth about their parenting experiences.  Breaking that code, as these writers demonstrate, could potentially help all of us who at times wonder if we’re the only ones struggling with a particular parenting problem.  But while speaking the truth about sleepless nights with a baby or failed attempts to discipline a toddler seems like a no-brainer–the baby or toddler won’t care–discussing how to help your teen through his deep, lengthy and ongoing depression after a romantic breakup is not.

So what is the answer? (more…)

(That’s Jack and me. The family that gets injured together…wait, how does that go?)

Ah, the White Mountains of New Hampshire.  A favorite vacation spot for our family.  Home of Mt. Washington, the tallest peak in the northeastern United States.  Home of Storyland, a superbly run theme park for young children.  Home of the Saco River, endless hiking and biking trails, gorgeous scenery, some of our favorite eateries–there are endless possibilities for recreation and rest.

Well, at least the recreation part.  Rest, not so much.  At least not for my family.

The White Mountains like to offer us unannounced challenges.  Vacations there are often not what we think they will be.  For example, as longtime readers may remember, in 2008 we were a mere 1000 feet from the summit of Mt. Washington when the mountain claimed the transmission of our car.  Forever scarred from its experience, the car nearly died on the Kancamagus en route to our 2010 vacation, and I considered putting it out of its–and our–misery.

We no longer own the car that failed to scale Mt. Washington.  So I assumed our vacation would go smoothly this year.

But the region had other plans.

It begins on the first night of our stay, when I run down the stairs at 2:00 a.m. and my heel fails to clear a stair riser that houses a metal heating grate.  The grate acts, as a friend of mine put it, “like a cheese slicer.”  My heel is the cheese.  I’ll spare you the gory details.  I’ll just tell you that it hurts less than you would imagine, though it is quite messy.  Thus, Day One of our vacation consists of a) locating an urgent care facility–not an easy task in these parts; b) following the intricate procedures required to make sure insurance will pay for most of my visit (this turns out to be more painful than the injury itself); and c) having my heel put back together.

As for activities?  We’d planned a hiking-swimming-biking vacation, but I am forbidden from hiking and swimming for the rest of the week.

Fast forward two days, and my husband and I decide that just because I can’t swim, that doesn’t mean the kids shouldn’t be able to.  We pack up a picnic lunch and I throw a book in a bag.  I can definitely see this working out after all.  We head for a swimming hole on the bank of the Saco River.

We scramble down tree roots and rocks on a steep hill to end up on a rocky river bank.  We find a small clearing with wading and swimming possibilities, and only one other family in evidence some distance down the shore.  It’s perfect.  We spread out our blanket and eat our lunch.  We’re happy.

My husband and the kids take off into the river and I take out my book.  As she’s leaving, my daughter notices a daddy longlegs about to crawl on me.  I redirect it away from the blanket and open my book.

I read for a while, and then I notice the daddy longlegs has reappeared.  Or perhaps it’s another one.  In any event, I remove him (her?), and go back to my book.

From the corner of my eye, I spy some movement–long-legged movement.  Now I really take a look around, and I see: one, two, four, seven…oh, shit.  We’ve deposited ourselves in some sort of daddy longlegs nesting area. (more…)

(Photo credit: alex.ragone via Flickr.com)

All that lovely nostalgia last week.  “They’re getting older” and notions of blissful family time spent together in these last weeks before the next stage of school, of childhood, of life.

Honestly, will I ever learn?

So here’s how the first week of summer has gone down so far: it’s ninety billion degrees outside.  (Yes, ninety billion.  Do you want to challenge me on this?)  My son’s temper has been set ten degrees above the outdoor temperature, illustrated most often when his little sister does something offensive, like breathe.  For her part, “Emmie” has alleviated her boredom by alternately following me from room to room for hours at a time and practicing her considerable people skills by messing with her brother’s head.

Two items have prevented chaos, tears and maternal spontaneous combustion this week.  The first is a given: ice cream.  When everyone needs to cool off, we head to the local ice cream barn.  Easy peasy, and I know I can ride the wave of a little Death by Chocolate for hours.

Sadly, the effects of the ice-cream run on the children wear off by the time the car door closes.  So we’ve needed to find another lifesaver, and I couldn’t be happier with what’s swooped in to do the heavy lifting: reading.

It began on a particularly hot afternoon.  I opened all the windows in our small sun porch, turned on the ceiling fan, turned off the light and declared that we would observe half an hour of “reading time.”  Mostly I just wanted the kids to sit still and cool down while I accomplished some research.

An hour later, “Jack” had read well into Bigger Than a Bread Box, by Laurel Snyder, a Great Stone Face book.  (more…)

(Photo credit: digitalsean via Flickr.com)

This morning I waved goodbye to a fourth-grader and a first-grader as they climbed the steps of  the elementary school bus on the last day of school.

Day skips into day skips into weeks.  A few hours sleep in between, no more.  Are we here already?

Soccer tryouts, three days in a row, not just playing with his friends anymore.  “Jack” wants to take his game up a notch, see if he can do better, learn more, compete.  We pile into the car, drive for miles, he runs hard, works harder, comes off the field drenched in sweat and says, “Mom, that was fun!”

In between the tryouts, I take my daughter to the drugstore to purchase makeup for her dance recital–make that recitals.  Foundation, blush, eyeliner, eye shadow, mascara, and I find a YouTube video to teach me how to apply dance makeup to Asian eyes.  “Emmie” is no longer content with a little girl’s ballet lessons; she’s expanded to hip-hop now.  She travels the distance from seven to fifteen with the change of a costume.  She sets down her Cinderella trumpet, I unpin her bun and she juts out a hipbone to lyrics like, “I got freaky, freaky baby, I was chillin’ with my ladies.”

Somehow, amidst the chaos, I find time to get rear-ended on a busy Boston street.  The auto insurance companies come through, figure out the details as the back end of my car slowly disintegrates driving from home to end-of-year school picnics, theaters and soccer fields.  Look, another piece of the car is peeling off the frame.

“Mommy, can I have an end-of-elementary school party?” Jack asks me.

When did you get old enough for this?

Any minute now, they’ll step off the school bus, pounds of artwork and papers they’ve never told me they’ve written in their hands. (more…)