Strollerderby : Life

You Both Look So Lovely in Your Divorce Pictures

Kelly Mills — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 21:35:00 GMT

I can verify that one of the first things you do when you decide to get divorced is to take down the wedding pictures and put them away. (Some folks probably rip or burn them, but I'm guessing that depends on the nature of the split.) It's a sad moment, when you remove the evidence of a time when you were a happy, optimistic couple just starting out on married life together.

Well hell, why not just replace them with some pictures that commemorate your new, love-has-torn-us-apart divorced life? At least that was the brainstorm of one photographer, who says divorcing couples all over Italy are lining up to get a wedding-style album of their breakup. Because it's a milestone, you know. Um, what exactly do you wear though?

The photographer says, "...I started to offer photo sessions for freshly divorced couples---them smiling or shaking hands or in some cases even kissing." Good lord, shaking hands? "Thanks for the good times, champ, and too bad it didn't work out." Do you come up with a divorce song too, and maybe get some sort of cake that you split 50-50? Somehow I have exactly zero desire to do this. But hey, tell me what you think...

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Mom Brain Is Not Such a Bad Thing

Amy Kuras — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 15:03:00 GMT

Maybe this is a second kid kind of a thing or a new baby situation, but man, I miss having my act together. Two short months ago, I totally felt I was rocking the work-at-home mom thing. Then baby #2 arrived, and while he is delightful and wonderful and a much, much easier baby than I deserve, there is no longer a single, solitary aspect of my life I am not ragingly behind on. Thank you notes unwritten, blogs not maintained, friends not called, books, hell, magazines unread. And we'll not talk about the tumbleweeds of pet fur all over my house or the disorganized cluster-you-know-what that is my work life.
So I found this essay, from Parenting (my least favorite parenting mag), of all places, very reassuring. Writer Margaret Renki posits that the kind of thinking we tend to do as mothers is just as meaningful and important as the stuff we once thought, and sometimes still do, about politics or art or The Meaning of Life.
I especially loved this:
"Motherhood forces us to understand, if only so we can teach it to our children, what really matters in the small space we each have between birth and death. And the easiest way for me to learn this lesson is by living in deep, penetrating kinship with other human beings -- by living, in other words, in a family."
I needed that, that reminder that this stuff matters even when it feels so small and trivial that the best thing I got done today was to keep everyone alive and loved.

What Does This Generation of Moms Want?

Kelly Mills — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 17:39:00 GMT

There's about a thousand headlines trying to define what moms of this generation want. Do we hope to return to the domestic spheres of the 1950's housewives (as has been reported), or are we career-minded? Do we care about our jobs or our kids? And one writer says we don't know what we want. When she works fulltime she can't wait to be home with family, but when she is on maternity leave she finds she hates staying at home. She gets a work-from-home freelance career but misses office action, and when she goes back to the office she chafes at the set hours that make her miss her kids. In short, women of this day and age have no idea what they want. What they really, really want.

I actually know what women want. Every woman really wants...A pony. Can I have a pony? A nice Shetland?

Sigh. If I had to hazard a crazy guess, I'd venture that women really want to feel fulfilled and satisfied at whatever they do whenever they are doing it, be it time with kids or the office grind or the freelance life. They'd also like financial security and crap like that. And that it's hard to balance many priorities, and the balance probably looks different for different people, making it impossible to (gasp) find one way to define an entire group of women, except with very broad strokes. I don't mean to Myspace the party here, but I'd also guess men want the same damn thing. It's a generation of people wanting to feel like they are engaged in meaningful things, which of course makes us sooooo very different from previous generations. It's just that our choices were more limited in the past, but I'd be surprised to find we have become suddenly impossible to please.

Do We Protect Our Kids Too Much From Life?

Karen Murphy — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 17:51:00 GMT

When we first become parents and look for the first time into that tiny face that made us so, that tiny face that's filled with complete trust and vulnerability, we silently vow to love and protect that face as long as there's breath in our bodies. I know we do this. We are hardwired to protect our progeny, not simply for perpetuation of the species, but out of love for that tiny being who lies trustingly in our arms, completely relaxed and open. How could we not endeavor to keep that tiny person from harm as far as we are able?

Problem is, kids also grow up and we have to move from Absolute Protector of the lion cubs to Guidance Counselor/Cheerleader in only a few years. And it's hard to know when to make tha shift, or how, or about what. Especially when it's about stuff that we're not all that comfortable with, like death.

I read this bloggy-essay bit about kids and cats and letting go, and part of me wanted to get all judgy and say, Hey! Let your kids see life, whydoncha! But it's not always that easy, is it? There's this Inner Lioness that kicks in and wants, in some ways, for our kids to always live in a happy bubble land of rainbows and unicorns and never experience any bad stuff, never suffer disappointment or grief or sadness.

But by shielding our kids from that bad stuff, we're also setting them up for a huge shock when one day we can't shield them any longer. It's better, I think, to let kids see what life is, to be matter-of-fact about it, and better still, to let them see YOUR emotion about something, than to think you can somehow hide life from them.

In times past, there was less separation between kids and adults. Kids grew up fast because they had to: they helped with the farm or family business as soon as they were able, or helped in the home. They saw life and they saw death. They were closer to the life that was lived because there was less ability to separate them from it: everybody slept in the same room, for instance, so if there was sex the kids were privy to it. If there was birth, or death, the kids were privy to it.

Not that I'm advocating we go back to that level of privacy (though my 4-year old sleeps in the same room with me now), but I am rethinking some of my own shielding tendencies. This came up on a discussion list I'm part of recently, relating to book choices for kids. We all grew up with reading freedom and access to gory stuff like fairy tales and whatnot, so why the need to "protect" our own kids from what we loved as children and what helped make us what we are now?

So I am backing away from those tendencies and letting my kids see stuff I wouldn't have in the past, adjusted to levels that seem right for them. Otherwise they're in for a rude awakening one day.

Related on Babble: The Over Parenting Crisis.

Photo: cgfocus.com

New "Lite" Versions of Old Standard Board Games Hitting Shelves

Karen Murphy — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 12:37:00 GMT

I'm trying to figure out whether this new trend is due to the dumbing-down of America or because our attention spans are now the size of a gnats, but in either case, toy manufacturers are busy rolling out "Express" versions of familiar family board games like Scrabble, Monopoly, Life, and Sorry. Is this really necessary? I thought part of the fun of these games was the six-hour marathons incurred because the seven-year-old takes so long with her turns, painstakingly moving her piece around the board, one.space.at.a.time. At least, that's how it is in my house.

But...Candyland? One mom in the article admits to cheating to hurry the game. C'mon, Candyland takes, what, 15 minutes? We can't spare 15 minutes with our kids? I admit that there are times when a shortened version of games would make life a lot easier and still please everyone, but I think that sometimes it's nice to just spend a lazy afternoon being really in the moment and decide to mow the lawn, do the dishes, blog that article -- whatever -- later, because pretty soon those kids are going to be growing up and won't give us the time of day let alone sit down and play a game anymore, not without a whole lot of eye-rolling and heavy sighs.

Check out the new Monopoly Express, by the way. WTF? Looks like, er, so much fun. By the way, if you're really into Monopoly, there's about a hundred different specialty versions out there (I had no idea; Bass Fishing Monopoly, anyone? Or Elvis Monopoly?) -- check 'em out!