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  • Get Real
    An occasional series of unflinching commentary by Abby Arnold
archive

MILF: Is the "hot moms movement" a sign of progress?
At first glance, the MILF phenomenon seems pretty liberating. But is it possible that the hot mom craze is just another way to make women who are not "hot," or don't feel "hot," feel lousy about it?
By Kathleen Furin

Anniversary
Suddenly every act seemed, potentially, to be the last time such an act would be carried out; every conversation, perhaps the last conversation. America was under siege; we were no longer immune, nested here between the oceans. We had been called to task: the next phase of history had begun.
By Jampa Williams

Unforgettable
I try to explain to people why I only want one child. I start to discuss what a traumatic childbirth entails, what postpartum depression is and what it can do to a family. Even the most sympathetic shoulder usually ends up telling me that I will forget the pain and the fear will go away.
By Carter-Ann Mahdavi

Knock me out!
When I handed my two page birth plan to the nurse, she almost looked amused. She knew what I didn't, that the only thing that ever goes "according to plan" during childbirth is that a baby is coming, and that it hurts like hell.
By Laura Owens

Craggy dancing
Life in a female body involves surrender to years of biophysical processes over which we have little or no personal control. Now, just as my three daughters become ripely adolescent, I am hitting my own hormonal stride. Or is that slide...? Yeah, definitely sliding.
By Dina Stander

Girl + Bat = happy
For Christmas, Sophia asked for and received Batman on a motorcycle, Batman on a glider, a Batmobile that shoots disks, Batman pajamas, a Batman ornament, and a Batman fleece blanket. It all seemed such magical, wonderful, glowing evidence that one small family can hold its own against the Disney Princess machine.
By Monica Crumback

Parentbling magazines
I have a few complaints to lodge against the mainstream parenting magazine industry.
By Erica Etelson

He gets/she gets
We negotiate schedules and chores with general good humor. But will there ever come a time when we won't be keeping an internal tally, an imaginary score sheet of what needs to be done and whose needs take priority?
By Shannon Hyland-Tassava

Fighting for a collective "we"
Maybe what I've come to believe is wrong. Maybe life's not meant to be this hard. Perhaps there is something better than the "American way."
By Laura Camp

J.K. Rowling and Maternal Magic
Perhaps because of her own well-known experience as a single mother, J.K. Rowling has a special place in her story for the role of fierce maternal power to save lives and demonstrate courage, as well as to advance key story lines.
By Amy DePaul

Beyond choice, access: The National Network of Abortion Funds
Abortion funds and grassroots activism are essential for turning the tides back towards women's reproductive freedom.
By Sarah Werthan Buttenwieser

Standing up straight for equal rights: Atticus Circle
Same-sex couples and their children are systematically denied the protections and responsibilities afforded to other families.
By Matri Bier

Women raising girls: It's complicated
Anyone who's ever participated in a birth must surely know that there is nothing wimpy about the pussy. It bleeds, it swells, it tears, sometimes it demands to know whose stupid idea childbirth was in the first place, but it does not, cannot, let go until it has done what it must.
By Kyndra Wilson

Talking points:
How we talk about home and work, and why it matters

My two-year old son is busy acquiring language with the same ferocity with which he does everything else, which is to say that he doesn't, won't, can't stop talking, not even when he sleeps. What his language reveals he is learning is that most men work outside of the home and most homes have women in them.
By Karen Oakes

How Linda Hirshman got me back to work
I don't agree with everything Hirshman said. But maybe it's necessary these days to be highly polemical to affect small changes.
By Sharol Gauthier

Last-chance parenting
The thing about thinking that you're probably not going to have any more babies is that everything -- every single little thing -- is the last.
By Shannon Hyland-Tassava

My left breast
I had no intention of doing reconstructive surgery, and in fact, I found the scars from the surgery quite beautiful. My scars are like a red embroidery, as if they were a warrior's ornamentation. I feel like an Amazon woman, a warrior, a woman who lives life on her own terms.
By Jampa Williams

Home-making
I tell myself I do not need to be noticed for my performance as a homemaker. But as I write these words, I wonder how true it is. I look around my living room, and I see a color-coordinated space. I see chairs thoughtfully positioned, chairs that we never sit in, to maximize the perception of ambiance. I see vases and pillows that match the curtains, photos of all of us looking picturesquely happy. This is an image I am creating.
By Laurel Shelton

Crack Your Shackles, Martyred Mom!
When guilt is my master, I cannot be a whole free woman. When I obey the guilt, I push myself to be a better mother than I actually am. But who is this Better Mother I try to emulate?
By Elena Taurke Joseph

Drool State
I'm going to try to pretend that I like motherhood immensely, that I relish the domestication that has me doing most of the household management, and, this is the most important part: I'm going to pretend that I'm a fabulous, kick-ass mom. I'm just going to try some good old mind control.
By Heather Janssen

The Goodbye Girl
I have crossed the Atlantic ocean sixty times -- thirty times west, and thirty times east. This summer will make sixty-two. My pull to family, it seems, is nearly magnetic.
By Hannah Nia

Family Friendly:
How does defining mothers as workers or nonworkers help our cause?

'Mother' is not a homogeneous category -- different women want different things, have different priorities and values, are driven by different belief systems and world views. Still, we, as mothers, have a lot in common; we, and our families, share many of the same needs. We need to find a way to address those needs, rather than try to convince one another that we all share the same perspective.
By Melissa Wilkins

It takes a whole community… to reform U.S. health care
Sometimes we need to pull back from the day to day and direct our energies to much larger and less personal issues in order to make our day to day world more what we'd like it to be. And yet, although many mothers are touched personally by the issue of health care reform, I hear over and over that there is no time.
By Robin Martin

Who is left to mother me?
Mothering fore and aft while riding the waves

While considering the multiple definitions of feminist mothering and motherhood, I personally struggle with the question of whether feminism is intrinsic or organic. Yet my own experiences lead me to question how do we raise our daughters to be strong women?
By Terri Pantuso

Who are you calling "lucky"?
Musings on the meaning and economics of a childcare choice

What I really want to say, in a necessarily non-politically-correct kind of way, is this: It's not luck that is allowing me to be a stay-at-home mom, okay?
By Shannon Hyland-Tassava

The rabble-rouser in me:
A baby, a book and a reawakening

Motherhood had made a mess of me. My chest felt tight all the time and I didn't know why. I was mad, sad, lonely and felt guilty for all those feelings. Ann's book helped me begin to sort through it all. I'd left a fast paced job to take care of Kate at home while my husband started logging the insane hours of a new associate at his law firm. Ann explained just how much I'd given up financially and why I now felt so vulnerable and powerless in what had been a marriage of equals.
By Kristin Maschka

The whole truth:
Spreading the word about "The Price of Motherhood,"
or How I met Ann Crittenden

In the late 1990s, I found a cause -- or the cause found me. I became a champion of mothers' rights, and the value of the all the work mothers do in our society. Ann's book helped me crystallize my thinking on motherhood issues; moreover, by talking to and connecting with thousands of mothers around the country, Ann spread and nourished the seeds for a social movement to sprout forth.
By Debra Levy

Children of global poverty:
Nairobi's street kid problem is among the worst in East and Central Africa

As I sat across from V'key in the small cement room he now calls home, I couldn't shake the feeling that many of my day-to-day concerns about my own three children in Brooklyn seem, in a global sense, a luxury. And I was struck by a wild notion. In becoming a mother, maybe I joined a global community of moms. And maybe that membership comes with certain responsibilities.
By Masha Hamilton

The Mother Lode of Guilt:
How Betty Friedan Freed My Mother

Ours was not our mothers' guilt -- wanting more than what they were told to want. Ours was the guilt of having more options and still not being satisfied. Each rung up the ladder brought you closer to the specter of being the bad mother.
By Megan Beyer

Suburban Playground:
My intermittent attempt at blogging

I often debate about how much personal information to put out there, especially about the kids. Instead, I put personal things out there about myself.
By Jessica Gullion

Finding my voice… and broadcasting it to the world
Extended discussions about motherhood, culture, feminism and politics -- topics that are unlikely to make it onto a commercial morning drive-time radio show -- can now have reach a wide audience thanks to internet radio.
By Amy Tiemann

Nothing sacred
My name isn’t really Lucinda. It’s a pseudonym that allows me to blog about groundbreaking subjects like post-partum peeing, bitchy soccer moms, angst-ridden stepdaughters and a toddler who says the f-word -- all without being tarred and feathered and drummed out of the suburbs.
By Suburban Turmoil

Changing the Script
Like most parents, I had a script; hopes and expectations for both of my sons. But Sam has taught me an enormous amount. He can't follow my script. The pieces don't quite fit. I have decided to do the only thing I authentically can do and follow his script.
By Regina Walker
The hand that rocks
I write songs to break the silence about things that are bugging me, or things that I just happen to notice. About being a single mom, being treated like a pariah, while my ex pays no child support, and nobody does anything about it… About the depression associated with mounds of laundry, or having to shop at the canned food store. About the exhaustion and endless tasks of motherhood… About feeling that, after all, I'm really too much woman for anybody, so there!
By Rachael "Yellow" Huang
Baby blues (or pink?)
While education, exposure and affluence have not inculcated a culture of equality of the sexes in modern India, it has enabled access to sophisticated diagnostic tools to favor the process of sex selection.
By Ranjani Rao

Of the world
I cannot make my child experience a sense of right and wrong in the same way I do. What I can do is to share with him how gorgeous life feels when you're part of the healing of the world, and not its torment.
By Sonata

Job equity (or, what's fair is fair)
Our growing family had increased our household chores by more than one hundred percent. Yet these chores were now handled primarily by one person. Me.
By Erika Federmann
In my real life: hanging on to salsa
Being a mother is definitely the most important thing in my life. It’s just not the only thing in my life
By Kathleen Furin
Why can't men be more like women?
Nowhere in all this hand-wringing does anyone stop to actually ask women (and men) what they need -- to be good mothers (or fathers), to be good workers, to be responsible members of their communities, to be whole human beings.
By Nandini Pandya

Love Thy Neighbor, Mama
We mothers are the only ones who can truly know how lonely, tedious, wearing, and draining the work of motherhood can be, how invisible and underappreciated. How can we attack each other? How can we expect social attitudes to change when our own are so paradoxical?
By Jackie Regales

You’re not the boss of me
Now that I have decided to once again change careers, I have found a whole new set of problems just waiting to undermine me. Not the least of which is the fact that I haven’t held a paying job since they stopped putting aircraft-sized shoulder pads in power suits.
By Cindy DeMerlis

Soccer Mom Wannabe
Welcome to postmodern child rearing: I watch my son at daycare over the internet. He is growing up in Technicolor, right on my screen.
By Jessica Smartt Gullion

Born Too Soon
Every time I read one of the new websites or magazines about motherhood, I feel twinges of envy and despair, wishing that these resources and forums had existed thirty or forty years ago.
By Marcy Sheiner

Another Mother For…
I absolutely support a woman’s right to control her reproductive life and her own body. But as a woman and a mother, coupling the word abortion with the word rights causes a whirlwind of dissonance in my brain.
By Eva Rae Henry

Making Babies: Ideals, technology and politics
How does reproductive technology affect our images of and aspirations about family? On the one hand, technology has played a significant role in widening the definition of family from the traditional nuclear model of mother, father, and child or children to nontraditional configurations. On the other hand, technology works to assure that the nuclear family remains a revered, even more perfected aspiration— a dream, some would argue, that crosses over to entitlement.
By Sarah Werthan Buttenwieser

Sequencing: Confessions of an Unnatural Mother
Adrienne Rich didn’t have twins. Letty Cottin Pogrebin didn’t have to figure out where she was going to find daycare for two infants. This was not in the plans, and this wasn’t at all what I had in mind when I thought about ‘having it all’.

By Jenan Gray
How Neat is Neat Enough?
I have given the issue of household neatness a good deal of thought since my son was born six years ago, and I continue to feel that, on balance, he is better off if I have the sense of order I need.
By Hannah Nia
Confessions of a Mother/Reader
I curse the brainwashing that prompts mothers to question our every move. What my son needs is a parent who feels like a human being, and reading is what keeps me sane.
By Kate Haas
Let’s Talk About Mothers and Choices
Choice is for women with social, cultural, and economic capital. The discourse of choice is not about women’s empowerment or advancement— it neglects those lacking both.
By Shawna Goodrich
Full House
Rationally, I did understand that many women have miscarriages with worse situations than I did but that didn’t change the sadness I felt. I had waited and prepared in order to make everything right, but it wasn’t right –not now.
By Erica Wells
Thoughts on Sam
We learn to love our children uniquely, not equally. It took me months to discover there were different kinds of mother-love.
By Rachael Levy
My Mother’s Gift of Feminism with Sympathy but No Empathy
Even with all my feminist credentials, I really did not understand in a very deep way what it was that drove women like my mother in the feminist movement; I had to experience it myself, sadly, before I understood.
By Lynn O’Brien Hallstein

Mother of Milk
What I found with breastfeeding was both a forgetting and a remembering. Had I lived in my head, even if passionately so, and now was being taken into my heart by my children?
By Brenda Clews

The Meta Mother
I am not the voluntary mother. I am kicking and screaming. I whine, cajole, rage, cry, and fall into strained preciousness. I can’t take this motherhood gig quietly. I have to remark loudly and crassly about every miserable minutiae of mothering.
By Anne Boyer
The Case Against “Opting-Out”
I was a thirty-something, married mother of three with a college degree, a nice house, a flexible, work-at-home writing career, and a husband with a good job providing health insurance. In 2002, a sudden and unexpected shift of seismic proportions rearranged my enviable work-life balance.
By Katie Allison Granju
The Mommy Tug-of-Wars
No matter how available I make myself, or no matter how many times I rearrange my priorities, it will probably never really be enough; not to my children.
By Lizbeth Finn-Arnold
Fear and Silence
Of all the challenges of parenthood, the vulnerability to sorrow coupled with the enormous responsibility for another’s life is perhaps the most difficult to incorporate.
By Rosanne Weston
Living Full-Throttle:
Motherhood, Balance And Another Women's Movement

The answers to gaining a little balance fall into two camps: change your life or change the country.
By Jennifer Niesslein
Get A Wife: Confessions of A Slob
Leisure and autonomy seem to me the most taboo qualities imaginable for a mother of young kids.
By Faulkner Fox
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