Miriam's blog

First off, I had a fabulously fun time this Monday appearing with Kristin on KALW radio in San Francisco. She's totally inspiring, spot-on with numbers and statistics, and well, just a pleasure to be on air with. In our blog format here, I feel like I should be waving down (hi Kristin!) to her on her entry, just below.

I've been lightly following the debates over Feminine Mistake. Can't help but think that while the NY-based intelligentsia is debating what mothers should be doing, MomsRising was out in force in Washington State, putting on the pressure to pass paid family leave.

Today's the first time we've included MomsRising on a MotherTalk Blog Tour, and it's fitting that the book is Arianna Huffington's Becoming Fearless, her excursion into what stops us women in our tracks, and what life looks like when we meet fear where it is, toss it to the wind, and figure out what the hell we want in life and how to get it.

I'm enjoying True Mom Confessions, the newest fun going around the mom blogosphere, and I thought I'd bring it here to MomsRising, home of moms who may need a break.

True Mom Confessions is the brainchild of Romi Lassally of the Huffington Post. The idea burst out of a long day with kids, the dream being a place we moms can confess that which we can't change, the situation that wrangle our psyches, tease us, or frustrate the hell out of us.

Cross-posted at Everyday Mom

So glad I squeezed in a moment to scan the NY Times Op-Ed page this morning, in between puring cereal, warming up soup for Samira's lunchbox and handing the baby a sippy-cup of milk (and let me tell you, if the NYT were based on mothers' reading it over busy morning routines, they would not publish on those huge oversized pages).

Some of us who blog here at MomsRising talk over email about whether and how to engage the ongoing "mommy" debates that erupt from time to time. These are always mommy warish in nature, and you know that we forward-thinking, action-oriented, nice moms prefer to say, spread the word on the amazing possibilities for paid family leave in Washington state (see Joan's blog entry two below) than go head to head with people who prefer to stay within the culture of judgment and single-mindedness. My dream is that five years from now, they'll look up from their computer screens to learn that the US has a national policy on paid family leave. And that's just a start.

My new fave bloggers are Amy and Marc from Equally Shared Parenting, described as"a cyber-home for fathers and mothers who have made (or wish to make) a conscious decision to share equally in the raising of their children, household chores, breadwinning, and time for recreation."

I've written about them several times at Everyday Mom: click here and here, the second being Amy's response to my nosy questions.

Click over to LiteraryMama.com where movie critic and San Franciscan Caroline Grant writes about viewing "The Motherhood Manifesto" at a house party, one of many happening throughout the country.

Her report's worth reading in full, so follow the link. Instead, here's a taste from one of the comments.

Crossposted at Everyday Mom

In The Truth Behind the Mommy Wars I wrote about how the US is one of five nations world-wide that do not supply paid family leave to parents of new babies. We're in the doghouse, it turns out, with Leshotho, Liberia, Swaziland and Papua New Guinea. Here's a nice link to a recent article in USA Today. It's based on a recent Harvard report, and has a link to the report itself.

While the MomsRising discussion boards are filling with comments about the recent assault on airplane breastfeeding. Amy at Mojo Mom has logged a must-read post about how truly radical an act breastfeeding is. This new event reminded me of something I'd written about in the past, the Starbucks nursing shame.

When Judith Warner's book Perfect Madness reached the shelves a year or so back, it wasn't immediately clear that she'd become a forceful political advocate for mothers. Yes, the book did end with a slew of policy proposals. The majority of the pages offered cultural analysis, though, and more often than not, Warner seemed to tread perilously close to blaming mothers--affluent, over achieving, hyper-perfectionist mothers, the prime focus of the book--for the malaise upon us. The book's political ending was nice, but it felt tacked on. How, after all, would improved access to quality daycare really make life easier for the mom committed to hand painting paper plates for her child's birthday party? The blogosphere, especially, took aim. The lack of online word limits allowed an almost limitless analysis of Perfect Madness, and most bloggers were relentlessly critical of the book.