Tag Archives: Listen to Your Mother San Francisco

The Mother of All Blogging

6 May

In 10 days I’ll be directing my first show. 

I’ve done a bunch of stuff where I was in charge so it’s not that that’s freaking me out or causing me pause. I’ll get through it. I’ll have a giant check list. I’ll nag, I mean, remind, and delegate authority and try not to freakout that little things I wanted didn’t happen.

 I mean, shoot, I ran for statewide office once (you can Google; I’m not going to lead you there) , I’ve organized state wide meetings. and my first wedding had 500 people so I GET this.

What I’m marveling at is the connectedness (no really, I’m not being hokey) of it all. 

Listen to Your Mother Show in San Francisco Show 2012 was kind of a fluke. I was in my office working on other stuff, up pops Lela Davidson who says hey, is San Francisco near you? They’re doing this show…oh and the deadline is tomorrow.  I sit there for a moment huddled under a blanket in my office—a hundred plus year old building that shows its drippy age every winter –and think it’s too cold to think about motherhood. She’s read my work when she was an editor on Parenting Squad. She says you should submit something you did there, but funnier. Lela, after all, is the queen of motherhood funniness.

So I looked over a post I’d done on my moms getting married and my daughter’s reaction to it. That was it. I’d rework that and submit it. Submitted. Wait for rejection.

But they didn’t reject it. They took it and thus far that little essay has wracked up nearly 20K hits on youtube. But that’s not why I’m writing this. I’m looking back and seeing the great women (and men) I met in San Francisco. For the thinking woman, mothering can be a lonely place filled with people who like to go to Babies R Us for fun instead of recognizing it to be a nightmare. American Motherhood is lonely and filled with judgment.

You do what you think is best, only to find out you did something shitty. Anyone else stick their kids in front of Baby Mozart? Send them to school with mix matched socks? Encourage them to play with your friends’ kid only to find out that kid is a monster? Ban stuff from the house for no other reason than you hate it? Why can’t we watch Cars 2, mommy– too violent? No, because the script sucks.

So I met these other women and man and we all had something to say about it all. And from them I met others. And before I even knew I’d be directing a show, I’d published more things in more places than just here at Tales of Sierra Madre. I got turned on to new sites and to women doing cool things. And I might live in my little red corner of blue state California and feel isolated and alienated, but I have a whole Internet sisterhood watching my back.

I just submitted a story to a journal I would haven’t thought to send to and it was accepted (yay, thanks Rhea).  That keeps happening. I keep meeting people. I keep having my voice. It keeps getting louder. I can walk around this hamlet mountain town with a whole cacophony of brilliant dissonants in my head. The voice of you, sisters, and the voice of me. 

There is strength in numbers.

On May 15th, I’ll be directing my first Listen to Your Mother show. I enlisted the help of 12 cast members to share their voices. There’s some scary messed up stuff in those stories and some sheer brilliance and some funny realizations and some perfect moments.  Before casting the show, I didn’t know that all these voices right around me existed–and that’s something else for me to be thankful for—-that through the Internet vast and wide, I became closer to the voices around me–the ones literally down the street from me.

Every day someone invariably says something bad about the Internet or phone addictions or some such thing, lamenting the simpler times when we remained distance and unknowing of each others anxieties, existences, and foibles in such an intimate manner. But the Internet and I have grown up together—my motherhood is the Internet–who else was getting up with me at 4 am to feed babies?

So I guess I’m saying thank you. Thank you, mommy bloggers. Thank you, Brain, Child magazine, and Hip Mama, and Girl Body Pride and all the other mama places I’ve found online that brought me back to my own town, my own house, my own room.

And thank you, Ann Imig, and Listen to Your Mother Show for providing this unique connection across a country usually so divided–a motherland for us all. And thank you Ariel Gore for providing the inspiration and ear.

 

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Back from the City.

15 May

It’s Monday. The mountain air today had that overcast something wicked this way comes sort of feel. But still warm . Tee shirt and umbrella weather. It made the last portion of the set of Milkshake & Honey go vaguely gothic, or at least, Brit Pop-induced. Fun , with a jacket on. But enough about the weather.

I’m not quite over last Thursday. I’d been trying to nail down my timing for weeks , never quite getting it right and then it all came together. I was happy with it. The children have forgiven me for writing and PERFORMING stories that included direct quotes from them. Though they asked the age old question “Must you write down and observe us? Can’t we just live?” I tell them, well no. I didn’t do scrapbooks for them beyond their first couple of years. I stopped taking photographs with real cameras and didn’t bother with school photos even. Their stories. Their experiences. Our stories together and experiences—this is what I have. This is all that will be there later. 

I meant to take more photos with real cameras and real photo paper. I meant to make more scrapbooks for them. But I didn’t. It didn’t come natural to me. This did. This writing us down thing works for me.

Apparently it works for other mothers too and until I was part of the San Francisco cast for Listen to Your Mother last  week, I didn’t quite get the universality of this motherhood storytelling thing. I get it now. I don’t make friends easily.  I stand back too much and watch. But the evening of stories of motherhood really worked itself on me. The big moment for me? One of our directors wrote and read a piece that contained a bit piece of accidentally hitting her kid in the face with the strap from the car seat. Ah. Memories. That moment where you feel CPS must surely be lurking around the corner to take you in. Perhaps that’s it. It’s the sharing of stories that politely aren’t shared that made the show for me.  Our one man in the show talked of beatings as a kid but not in a whiney way but instead a matter of fact way. We’ve become a culture of parents afraid to share the real behind the facade because, well, the real might not measure up. The real might be frowned upon. But that, as Robyn our last reader noted, might just be the secret of our success.

At any rate, now in our afterglow of the performance I’m super excited that we have this little private chat group going. Because even if I haven’t found my motherhood posse up here in the mountains, I have it there out on the ether.

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Thoughts on Listen to Your Mother and Moms on the Internet in general…

13 May

 

The Listen to Your Mother Show in San Francisco is done. Whew. I’m back home. And now my fellow cast member moms are doing what we did before: thinking and writing about parenting on the Internet. Why is it that this medium seems to work so well with us? Is it the stop start of mothering in the first place?

 

Write a thought. Make a lunch. Write a thought. Drop someone off. Write. 

 

I seem to remember a passage in Ariel Gore’s How to Become a Famous Writer Before You’re Dead where she discusses writing in the car at traffic stops with a child strapped in her car seat in back. Do mothers start up  their own blogs because they have no time for publishers? If they waited to find time for one their writing would never see the light of day? Quite possibly.

 

One of the best moments of becoming a cast member was that this cast was really built by moms of the Internet. Once the cast was assembled (many by and large had used their various blog posts to audition for the show) we were all given links to each other’s blogs. We literally got to know each other between our month long absences from each other, through the Internet. 

 

Someone said recently that moms on the Internet was done. Finished. Stick a fork in it finished. No niche there. Move along there’s nothing to see, finished.

 

But not quite. 

 

It might seem terribly isolationist but getting to know someone through a blog rather than through a playdate for toddlers or a playgroup works better for me. 

 

I remember a weird moment at rehearsal when I realized that I’d been reading Rhianna’s posts on Huffingtonpost for months and here she was, sitting next to me. It felt like I knew her.  http://www.listentoyourmothershow.com/sanfrancisco/ . 

 

Some argue frequently that ‘mommy bloggers’ that horribly cute name given to women who happen to write and happen to have children and happen to make observations of where those aspects of their lives intersect, are really just today’s scrapbookers. And who really cares about other people’s children and experience?

 

If you’ve ever had the unfortunate experience of being the isolated 40 year old mom in a room of 20 year old moms, or if you’ve ever watched in silence as parents in the bleachers of a Little League game act like they are out for blood, or if you ever whipped out your breast to feed someone in public only to be sneered at–you know the power of finding someone out there that will comfort you and tell you you are not alone. You feel that way too. 

 

I remember how isolating reading What to Expect When Your Expecting and the rest of that horrible series of culturally biased perspectives that did not fit my life. I remember the moment I found The Hip Mama Survival Guide and realized that yes, people like me could do this parenting thing.

 

Okay. I can hear my grandmother nagging me in the back of my brain. She’s saying what she always says. The problem with your generation, Margaret, is that you all over think this whole thing. In our day, we just had kids. 

 

That might be true. But all the same, I’m glad all those other mothers are out there on the Internet adding to the conversation of what it means to be a mother. Now.

 

Happy Mother’s Day.

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