Awesome children’s books

After reading this AP story on gender-biased children’s stories, and after hearing a compelling feminist reading of the Berenstein Bears books at the Southwestern Popular Culture Association conference a few months ago, I’ve redoubled my efforts to find rocking children’s books. (I’ve already posted about how, in our house Ming Lo’s wife has a name, [...]

Dire consequences and desperate measures

A discussion last weekend at the playground with a creative, lovely, and wicked smart lady yielded the following observation: we’re all desperate to protect and justify our choices. After reading Peggy Orenstein’s Flux and The Atlantic Monthly’s article “The Case Against Breast-feeding,” the glaring truth to me is not that one side of each debate [...]

Flux and another book on the choices of motherhood

I’m most of the way through Flux by Peggy Orenstein, and I have to say, I dig it. And not just because she reiterates in a sentence what I posted months ago: “Ambivalence may be the only sane response to motherhood at this juncture in history, to the schism it creates in women’s lives.” I’m [...]

Something of worth

If you take some time to focus on the present, to take every day as it comes and honor each moment, rather than looking back at the demons chasing you, they will catch you and claw their way up your back and slow your progress to a crawl as they cling to your neck and [...]

You know it’s been a long day

…when you just can’t find the right adult beverage to complement the girl scout cookies your neighbor dropped off right before dinner.
Samoas and… red wine? Samoas and pina colada? Who the hell whips up a pina colada after their kid goes to bed, just to go with cookies? Fine. Where’s the blender?
Tagalogs with…Jack and Coke? [...]

CNN thinks it’s groovy to leave a job for another job, but not to parent.

So this article beatifies those who leave a lucrative career to follow their gut. The people profiled left jobs with great benefits for…other jobs.
There is no mention of the hundreds of thousands of women leaving really good jobs to make a difference in their children’s lives. Those, for instance, who leave simulating and lucrative careers [...]

What about the issues?

So the blogoshere and FoxNewsForRepublicans are abuzz with silliness about Sarah Palin’s Newsweek cover. Some are upset that she wasn’t airbrushed to within an inch of recognizability. Um…two things. First, airbrushing the humanity out of women’s faces is part of the problem with the way we, in this country, judge a woman first by her [...]