Posts Tagged Under mom blogger
All Babies Come With A “Backstory”
Most days, Mateo takes the bus to kindergarten, but sometimes we drive so we can read together in the classroom for 15 minutes before school begins. I chat with the other mothers on the playground as we watch our kids jump and run, their little bodies radiating energy and happiness. At the sound of the bell, the teacher, Ms. S, emerges from the classroom and the kids fall into an orderly line. Ms. S has been teaching kindergarten for more than 20 years. She knows how to set a tone.
This morning, the excitement is especially high. Ms. S’s oldest daughter, a married woman who lives back East, is pregnant, due to deliver any minute. I know this because all week Mateo has been telling me, “Ms. S is about to become a grandma!”
As the kids file into the classroom and Ms. S is telling us about her daughter’s long and seemingly endless labor, her cell phone rings. “Oh, oh, oh!” Ms. S spins in a circle as she flips open her phone. “It might be news!”
Another false alarm. Continue… »
By Jessica O'DwyerOut of My Element
Woman in Congo
Today I stand in the middle of the FedEx office with a mailer in my hand. Oblivious to my children who chase each other in circles around me, I tear open the strip on the package. It’s the moment of truth. I can’t believe what I see. It’s my passport with something stapled to page 11. I’ve finally been granted a visa to visit the Democratic Republic of Congo. I’ve been waiting for this moment for years.
In 2008, I made a contribution to Human Rights Watch, which changed my life. When I casually asked my contact at the organization how my donation might help, I received a report from a researcher in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It outlined a brief history of outside entities raping the land for natural resources, the fallout from the war in the Kivus, as well as descriptions of violence against women. The tyranny of militias and the suffering of Congo’s people got me riled up, and I began devouring books and articles about the subject. Continue… »
By Mindy UhrlaubPajamaJeans: A Mommy’s New BFF
PajamaJeans!
My friends and I like to regale each other with stories of our personal parenting disasters. Maybe the omnipresent pressure to play the cookie-cutter, Martha Stewart, soccer mom has us hitting the sauce too hard or taking it out on a bag of Pirate Booty. But, we find that the soothing, “Oxytocin-like” release to friends is clearly much healthier.
Yes, it’s fun to look an equally disheveled mommy friend in the eye and say: “Shiiiiiiit! I forgot to bring in 32 organic cupcakes today!” (With no flour, dairy or peanuts in them.)
But my favorite mommy humiliation moments have always been the different stories about getting busted for wearing our pajamas to drop the kids off at school. Because who HASN’T tucked their pajamas into their rain boots, thrown on a ski jacket, and driven the kids to school? Forgetting, of course, that once you get there, you actually have to get out of the car in your pilled-up, hideous, cardinal-red flannel pajamas, and help your kids get their “whirling tornado” science project from the car into the auditorium for the science fair that night―ooops! Continue… »
By Annie YearoutEase a Grieving Heart Through Play Based Therapy
Vintage horse
Keira, my five-year-old daughter, whined, “I don’t want to talk to anyone,” from under her purple, fuzzy blanket. She did not want start going to therapy.
She had returned from school one too many times, saying “nobody likes me,” or “I’m not smart,” or “nobody wants to be my friend.”
But that was as far as the conversation ever went. She really didn’t want to talk to anyone. Not even me.
I pulled the covers back, exposing her angry, brown eyes. “That’s just it, honey. It isn’t good if you don’t talk about your feelings.” She wrapped her front teeth around the base of her thumb’s cuticle and chewed on the skin. “I don’t have any feelings.”
“Honey, you’ll be going to see Steve. Remember the man Tatiana went to talk to for a while?” My older daughter, Tatiana, had also seen Steve for about six months, when she was five.
Keira wiped her now-bleeding finger on her pink pillowcase. “With the dog?” “Yes, the man with the dog…and the toys. A whole room full of toys.” “I’ll play there one time, but I’m not going to talk.” Continue… »
By Hyla MolanderBeware the Ophidiophobiac!
By WWarby
My husband is frightened of snakes. Not too unusual you might think, lots of people are frightened of snakes. But he is not just frightened, he is terrified of them. The official term for this is “Ophidiophobia,” not to be confused with “Oneirogmophobia,” which is the fear of wet dreams.
I knew he didn’t like them but I really didn’t think he was such a baby. Honestly, I don’t like spiders and here I am living in a place where there are scary Black Widows lurking in the garage, and the females eat their men-folk, for goodness sake! In fact, one even started crawling up my leg last week when we were spring cleaning and I didn’t make a fuss … well, actually I screamed blue murder. But then they ARE deadly.
One time we were driving out to the beach and my husband nearly drove into a ditch just because there was a snake on the road. What did he think it was going to do, jump up and attack him through the truck window! Continue… »
By Claire HennessyLife Lessons from Dog to Child
I’m walking around our neighborhood looking for a woman and her dog. I want to reassure her that the scare she had the other day resulted in some invaluable life lessons for my three-year-old daughter, Chiara.
Chiara and I were walking with my twin boys in the bulky double snap-n-go, (which is like pushing a small fleet of shopping carts.) We came upon our neighbor and her little black and white dog. The dog has this fancy collar that emits a blue light.
I point out the fancy collar to Chiara: “When it’s nighttime, the collar shines a light and then his mama can see her doggy.”
The owner and I joke about the day when I might need a similar kind of collar for the twins. We smile and part ways. Continue… »
By Janine KovacCould You Survive After Being Shot 15 Times?
Abelina Magana a mother of three
Abelina Magana knows something you and me will never know.
She was shot 15 times and lived to tell.
During the nearly half-hour it took her husband to shoot her repeatedly, she thought only of her three children. The last words she remembered saying to her daughter were: “Mommy will be okay.”
Abelina awoke about a week later in the hospital. Tubes covered nearly every orifice of her body. During her almost yearlong stay in the sterile institution, she was told she would never breathe on her own. She did. They said Abelina would never feel below her neck. Today she can move her arms and has sensation in her toes. They said more than once that she would die. Continue… »
By Dawn YunA Tale of Two Children
Harvest Moon
We welcome Steven Friedman, our first male Writing Mama! And, as you know, fathers make some of the best mothers!!!
“Mommy made the moon for us,” squealed Maya, looking at the harvest moon shimmering in the sky. “Look, Daddy. Miguel said so.”
“Yes, that’s right,” I said, happy that Miguel was initiating conversations about Verna, who died at the end of August this year.
Not that I have the energy or desire to wade into the nature versus nurture debate, but both our kids, like everyone else’s, are proof positive that they do come to us with at least a broad set of biological potentialities. In other words, we are not completely blank slates when we are born. To what degree we are influenced by culture is for graduate school. All I know is that Miguel and Maya have distinct personalities, and that reality has informed how they’ve reacted so far to Verna’s death. Continue… »
By StevenFWelcome to Mom’s Diner
By fiftiesweb.com
“Waitress…waitress, my food’s cold and I need some more water. Oh yeah, and you forgot to bring me another fork.”
This is what I imagined I heard in my dazed reverie as I leaned against the kitchen sink. But you can just replace “waitress” with “mom.” I shrugged off the shroud of sleep deprivation that has become my constant cloak these days and dashed to the refrigerator to retrieve the requested item.
I held a lot of jobs during school—from retail to personal trainer to staff writer at the school newspaper. But for whatever reason, I was never a waitress. I always chalked it up to my own shortcomings in diplomacy or perhaps never the right opportunity. But I occasionally thought I was missing out on some teen-aged rite of passage by eschewing the food industry.
And then, I had kids…. Continue… »
By Laurel Hilton
