A Mom Like Me

Posted on June 22, 2016 by Brain Child • Posted in Articles Page, Highlights, Slider Content • Tagged African American, Betty Christiansen, mom-friends, moms, mothers and sons, school, school bus, white, young mom • Leave a comment

By Betty Christiansen

At first glance, Gwendolyn and I have little in common. She’s in her twenties; I’m in my forties. I have a house; she has an efficiency apartment with a shared bath. I work in publishing; she works in fast food. I am white; she is black. I drive a car that seats seven; she rides a bike. Yet she is a mom, just like me.

She has two small children; I have three. We have meals to make and homes to clean and staggering amounts of laundry. We both have husbands. We juggle everything around our jobs and their jobs.

Our common ground is the bus stop. Our mornings are the same: a scramble of rousing kids, feeding them, and rushing out the door by 7:45. She and her son are always on time; we are always running late. We take turns reminding the kids to stop running, to stop pushing, and to stand back when the bus pulls up. “Goodbye,” I tell my kids when they climb on the bus. “Have a good day! I love you!”

“You be good,” she commands her son. “Don’t disappoint me.”

Gwendolyn is a mom like me, except she doesn’t have a car. Some mornings, I’ll drive her to the bank or to Kwik Trip, the convenience store five blocks from our homes. She’ll get some cash and then buy milk and breakfast, or milk and beer. She asks me where I have to go that morning, and I tell her I have a meeting or a photo shoot or a press check. I’ll ask her if she’s working that day, and she’ll say yes, she’s got the closing shift at Taco Bell, or no, she’ll be home with her two-year-old, and she doesn’t know what she’ll do with her that day. I tell her I know; my youngest is finally in preschool and I remember those days.

She might ask if she can wash some clothes at my house, because there’s no laundry in her building. Sometimes, we’ll load up all her laundry when it reaches a critical mass and pile it into the back of my car, and I’ll take her to a Laundromat.

We are both protective of our children. Mine are old enough to walk the block back home from the bus stop by themselves in the afternoon, but still I watch out for them. Gwendolyn does not let her son do this; if she is home and not working a shift at Taco Bell, she will walk down and get him, or have her husband do so if he is not working a shift at Burger King. If neither one can, she’ll ask me if I’ll make sure he gets in their apartment okay, where his very frail granny is waiting for him.

“You know I will,” I say.

One morning, they’re not at the bus stop, and I ask her about it the next day.

“Anthony didn’t go to school,” she says. “He had a cough.” She then goes on to tell that he needs to go to the doctor, but not because of the cough. It turns out a woman from that damn Child Protective Services came over yesterday, eyeballing the house and following up on a police report. “My house is clean,” Gwendolyn declares. “I ain’t got nothin’ to hide.”

But apparently there were sores on her son’s arms, and a teacher saw them. A police officer came to the school, took photographs, and filed a report with CPS.

“They could’ve given me a heads-up,” spits Gwendolyn. “They said they tried to call, but my phone isn’t working. They could’ve sent me a note. They never asked me what happened.

“I could’ve told them he has these bumps on his arms, and he keeps scratching them,” she goes on. “I ain’t got nothing to hide. I make sure he has clean clothes, clean socks and drawers. I know they’re looking for that kind of thing.”

I don’t know what to say, so I just listen. It wouldn’t help to explain that the teacher is legally bound to report her fears, that everyone is just looking out for her child, that they’re doing what’s required to keep him out of harm’s way—even if that might be harm by a parent.

For all our mornings together, I don’t know Gwendolyn well enough to know if she would hurt her son, or if someone else in their house would. I have seen small, round scars on her son’s legs, and I’ve heard her threaten him for getting in trouble in school. I don’t know how seriously to take that. After all, I have threatened my children, too.

What I do know is that this would never happen to a mom like me. A professional mom, a well-spoken mom, the mom who volunteers in the classrooms because she can; she has the flexible schedule and the car. The mom who can be home for her kids, never uncertain of their safety. My own son has had eczema on his arms, and no one has questioned me.

I’m all for Child Protective Services—but how about a Mom Protective Services? Where is that agency, the one that makes sure a mom like Gwendolyn has a way to shuttle children, work without worrying about them, make sure they’re fed and dressed and on the bus on time? Who makes sure she can get her laundry done? Who makes sure that she has a way to wind down from all of this without needing the beer that might lead to arm sores and leg scars? Who’s looking out for the moms like her?

Because Gwendolyn doesn’t have a car, I drive her and her son to his doctor’s appointment. When I pick her up later, she seems relieved, even happy. It was eczema after all, and now everyone knows it. She also picked up her new glasses from the optometry department while she was there, and they look sharp. I tell her so. She looks at me, smiles, and says thanks.

Betty Christiansen is a writer and editor who lives with her husband and three children in La Crosse, Wisconsin. She is the author of two books—Knitting for Peace: Make the World a Better Place One Stitch at a Time and Girl Scouts: 100 Trailblazing Years—both published by Stewart, Tabori & Chang, a division of Harry Abrams. She’s also the editor of Coulee Region Women, the women’s magazine of the La Crosse area, and a graduate of the creative nonfiction MFA program at Sarah Lawrence College.

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Conversations with my Son About Gender

Posted on August 4, 2014 by CNF • Posted in Blog, General • Tagged family, gay and lesbian families, gender identity, Jennifer Berney, moms, motherhood, parenting, two moms • 1 Comment

By Jennifer Berney

When my son was three, as he sat at the kitchen table playing with his Etch-a-Sketch, he offhandedly asked me the following question:

“When Mommy Kellie was a little boy, did she have an Etch-a-Sketch too?”

The wording of this question reveals a lot about our family. To begin with, of course, my son has two moms. I am his birth mother, and so far have played the traditional role of “Mommy”: I’ve been the breast-feeder, the diaper-changer, the lunch-packer, the medicine-giver. But my partner Kellie goes by “Mommy” too. She’s the one he runs to when one of the handles has fallen off of his dresser; she’s the one who brings him to the dump and stops for hot chocolate along the way. My son has never attempted to call my partner “Daddy” and has never stumbled over gender pronouns. And yet, apparently his understanding of gender categories had some room for variation.

“She probably did have an Etch-a-Sketch,” I answered, “but did you know that Mommy Kellie was actually a little girl and not a little boy?”

My son gave me a puzzled look. “When did she change?” he asked me.

“Well,” I answered, “what is she now? Is she a woman or a man?”

He thought for a good while. “She’s a mommy,” he concluded, apparently giving up on the categories I had offered.

Gender was confusing to me too. Before our son was born, I had ideas about raising him gender neutral, not constraining him to our cultural mandates on what colors he could wear or what toys he could play with. I didn’t plan to put him in dresses, but I happily bought a pink onesie and enjoyed imagining him in that. Once he was born, I dressed him in it a number of times. He wore it well. But as he grew older I found I had no desire to replace it with pink t-shirts or lavender sweaters.

I did continue to think about gender and explore this through his wardrobe. I bought a yellow girl’s t-shirt that featured a kitten; I cut off the puffed sleeves and replaced them with straight navy blue ones. On the one hand, it was an act of rebellion: my son liked kittens. Why shouldn’t he be able to wear one on a shirt? On the other hand, it was an act of conformity: I clearly did not want to dress my son in girls’ clothes.

My son is five now, and gender informs our conversations in ways that reveal the values of our culture at large. Recently, after my son had just lost a race to a friend, I tried to explain that winners aren’t by their nature better than losers. I ran this scenario by him: “Mommy Kellie can build a house better than I could ever build a house, but that doesn’t make her better than me, right?”

“No, it just means that she has better skills than you,” he said.

That stung. My partner, an electrician by trade and builder by hobby, offers him a great example of how women can excel at “men’s work.” This is great, but I still worry that our culture has taught him to value her skills above more traditionally feminine pursuits. I tried to explain to him that my skills are pretty awesome too, that making dinner is important, as is teaching grown-ups how to write papers for college (both are things that I do), but I’m not sure he bought it.

In the end, there seems to be no escaping this gender conundrum—no easy way to keep every door open, to convince him that hemming a pair of jeans and installing a dryer vent are both valuable skills and both within his range.

Now that my son is old enough to dress himself, his drawers are filled with Spiderman shirts, Star Wars pajamas, and Transformers underwear. It seems the best that I can do is just embrace and love his boy-identity while trying to make room for balance. Right now balance means that we snuggle in Star Wars pajamas, encourage him to cry when he is sad, and have a “yes” answer on the ready if he ever asks for a pink bike or a Barbie—two things that I’m pretty sure will never happen.

Jennifer Berney’s essays have appeared in Hip Mama, The Raven Chronicles, and the anthology Hunger and Thirst. She is currently working on a memoir, Somehow, which details the years she spent trying to build a family out of donor sperm, mason jars, and needleless syringes. She lives in Olympia, Washington and blogs at http://goodnightalready.com/.

Dancing Queen

Posted on March 24, 2014 by CNF • Posted in Articles Page, Highlights • Tagged daisy florin, dancing, friends, fun, marriage, moms, mothering, summer, vacation • 3 Comments

By Daisy Alpert Florin

Last summer, my family and I spent a week in Vermont at the kind of family resort that promises fun for all ages. It delivered: while our three kids participated in wholesome summertime activities with their peers, my husband, Ken, and I had time to reconnect during long bike rides, canoe trips and swims in the lake. Each night, the resort offered after-hours activities as well, most of which did not appeal to me. Bonfire and sing-along? Too hokey. Trivia night? Too geriatric. But Thursday night’s offering seemed perfect: Dance night with DJ.

I love to dance. Years of childhood ballet have not translated into a lifetime of grace, but give me a few drinks, blast some pop music and I’m unstoppable. At 40, the opportunities for dancing are few and far between. Before last summer, the last time I had been dancing was four years earlier at a friend’s wedding. I danced non-stop, sweating through my dress, pausing only when the DJ took a break for the father-of-the-bride’s toast. So any chance to dance, I’ve come to learn, should not be passed up.

Ken and I reserved a babysitter, put our kids to bed and headed up to the inn. The breakfast room had been transformed into a dance floor, complete with disco ball, strobe light and a mountain of sound equipment. When we entered the room, a few guests were taking salsa lessons. I sipped my maple mojito through a skinny straw and watched the sad scene unfold.

“What’s up with the salsa lesson?” I asked Ken. “I thought we were here to dance.”

“Calm down. There’s the DJ,” he said. “Let’s just wait.” He patted my hand, trying to keep my tantrum at bay.

Dancing, or the promise of dancing, can bring out my nasty side. At my five-year college reunion, fueled by several foamy beers and the crush of alumnae dancing around me, I had yelled at the college students sneaking some grooves on the tiny square of dance floor set up on the grass for the class of 1995.

“This is our dance floor, yo!” I’d hissed at them. “Get the hell off!” I couldn’t stand the thought of them dancing every weekend the way I used to, traipsing from frat house to frat house in search of the best crowd and the best tunes, while we returned to entry-level jobs in the city, our weekends spent in overpriced bars with nary a DJ in sight.

The salsa lesson ended and the dance floor cleared out. The DJ started spinning some tunes, mostly unoffensive, generic stuff: “I Will Survive,” “Holiday,” “Dancing Queen.” All in all, pretty uninspiring. The crowd apparently agreed with me: fifteen minutes in, the dance floor was pretty much empty.

“This is lame,” I said to Ken, eyeing the middle-aged crowd around us.

“Do you want to go?” he asked.

Before I could answer, the doors opened and a crowd of staff members entered the room. This could get interesting, I thought and ordered another drink.

The young men and women, released from their day jobs as camp counselors, waitresses and Zumba instructors, sauntered in in groups of four and five. Having shed the cocoon of their uniforms, they emerged like butterflies in low-slung jeans and baby doll dresses. All week long, I had been obsessed with the group of young people who kept the resort running. I invented fictions about them–love triangles, bitter breakups, kinky sexting. Each morning, as I biked from our cabin to the resort’s main buildings, I passed by the staff’s residence. It was a shabby Victorian-style house covered in layers of colorful paint and strung with Christmas lights. I could only imagine the amount of screwing that took place inside.

The staff greeted each other, some affectionately, others nonchalantly. I recognized the waitress who served us breakfast each morning standing on the periphery of a loud group of girls. She was wearing a brightly patterned dress, high-waisted and billowy around the hip. Looking around at the other girls, I noticed they were all wearing different versions of the same dress regardless of how it suited their figures. They were too young to know how to dress for their bodies, but young enough for it not to matter.

Watching them, I couldn’t help wondering how I had entered this other group, parents–or “guests” as we were known–when deep down I felt like I should be hanging out with the the staff. Why had I never had a job like this instead of wasting my college summers working at internships in fields I’d never entered? They got to go dancing.

As Ken and I sipped our drinks and grooved half-heartedly to ABBA and Van Morrison, the staff played out their own dramas, oblivious to us. My eyes tried to meet theirs across the dark room. Can’t you see? I tried to telegraph. I’m really one of you.

After a few more songs, I walked over to the DJ.

“Are you going to play anything more current? Like Katy Perry or Rihanna?” I asked the boy-girl pair parked behind the turntable.

“Yeah,” the girl answered flatly. “We usually play the older stuff first for the older crowd and then we’ll start with something more modern.”

My eyes met hers straight on. “Well, let’s hit it NOW, O.K.?” I think I kind of yelled.

Seconds later, Macklemore’s “Can’t Hold Us” exploded through the speakers. I ran out onto the dance floor, pumping my hands toward the roof as the chorus rang out. I twisted and grooved through the twangy horns section and stamped my feet during the final na-na-nas. The music continued, the songs of summer streaming out one after the other. I knew them all from listening to the radio in my minivan. I closed my eyes and felt the music pulse through my body. I shouted along with lyrics that had nothing to do with my life anymore, stories of love and breakups played out in school yards and on city streets.

After awhile, I gave Ken the O.K. to head over to the bar, and I moved around, unfettered, looking for a new group to join. I found our waitress dancing with a group of her friends. Their circle opened slightly and I poked my way in.

Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines,” the biggest hit of the summer, came on and the crowd screamed. It was a song my kids and I had hooted along to during our morning ride to day camp. Now I mouthed the lyrics seductively in the dark: I know you want it… I know you want it. The girls and I swiveled our hips and shimmied our shoulders, shouting when Robin anointed us all “the hottest bitch in this place.”

Wanting to end the night on a high, I slipped off the dance floor as soon as the song ended. But before I left, I grabbed the waitress’s arm and pulled her toward me.

“Listen to me,” I said, my lips close to her ear. “Go dancing every night you can, OK? And just, like, own it. Do you get me?”

And then I was gone, pulling Ken away from the bar and out into the summer night.

“Did you have fun?” he asked as we walked along the dark path back to our cabin.

“It was good,” I said, yawning. Nestling closer to him, I remembered that all I’d ever wanted during the crazy nights of my youth was a man to walk home with afterwards. All the primping and preening, the sexy moves on the dance floor, all of it had been in pursuit of the life I had now. The moon rose high in the nearly black sky, crystalline stars stretching on as far as I could see.

Daisy Alpert Florin is a freelance writer. She lives and works in Connecticut.

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Why It’s Not OK To Label Our Children

Posted on June 17, 2013 by CNF • Posted in Blog • Tagged ADHD, daughters, emotions, moms, motherhood, relationships, shy • 16 Comments

By Julie Hill Barton

When my first daughter was born, I fell madly in love with her. I remember crying in my hospital bed, my dad whispering, “You okay?”

“Yes,” I said, wiping my tears. “I knew I would love her. But I didn’t know I’d love her this much.”

That baby is eight-years-old now, has a five-year-old sister, and I still vividly remember how blessed I felt that day, how confident I felt that I could raise a strong, kind, loving, self-assured girl. I always had a deep-down faith that I knew how to teach my girls’ right from wrong, kindness from thoughtlessness, respect from carelessness.

That is, until our oldest daughter reached kindergarten. At our spring parent-teacher conference, we learned that our sweet girl was sometimes monopolizing her best friend, could be grumpy with peers, and had rolled her eyes at the teacher. The teacher suggested our daughter needed to see the school counselor. When the conference ended, and I managed to extract myself from the tiny chair, I walked outside and burst into tears. What had I done wrong?

It has taken me almost four years and lots of drama to understand that all of this has very little to do with me. I’m doing my best. My daughters have vastly different personalities, and that’s just how they came. Both have strengths and weaknesses, and both are at the core, nothing but good.

My oldest is in third grade now. I’ve watched as she has learned, through trial and error, to be a good friend. She is strong and confident, but she gets hurt sometimes too. It’s all part of that sticky process of growing up.

In second grade, she asked her best-friend-since-kindergarten if they could have a play date. Her friend replied, “I can’t have any more play dates with you because my mom says you’re mean.” My daughter came home with eyes as big as saucers, collapsed into bed and wept.

That was a year ago, and she still talks about it. She still asks me if she’s a mean person. She was seven-years-old when this happened, and I fear that the trauma of this one word being uttered about her by one careless adult will forever be etched in her heart, making her question her own goodness.

I called that mom, who was my friend, and she mumbled that our daughters were both mean sometimes. She tried to make a joke about girl drama, but I wasn’t laughing. I hung up feeling sick and guarded, and hyper-aware of how nonchalantly we, as a society, label children.

A short list of things I’ve heard parents say about other children: “He’s a shy kid.” “She’s such a sweetheart!” “Ugh, that kid’s a nightmare.” “She must have ADHD or something.” When we say these things, it’s the emotional equivalent of juggling knives in the NICU. We’re putting children in narrow boxes, cornering them into behaviors and personalities that they’ll then feel that they must inhabit. We all experienced this as children in the 60’s and 70’s. Isn’t it time we changed the course for our children?

I can’t say it clearly enough, both to myself and to other parents: There’s no mean one. There’s no nice one. There’s no sweet one. There’s no nasty one. They’re all little imperfect, nascent beings with every single one of the above qualities healthily intact. As my daughter’s third grade teacher says, “Label the behavior, not the child.”

I was in school just a few days ago and watched my daughter walk by her former best friend in the hallway. They waved at each other with a longing so sweet and strong that I wanted to hug them both, tell them it was okay to be friends, that it was their choice and no one else’s, and that they were both nothing but walking goodness, simply and beautifully learning their way in the big, wide world.

Julie Hill Barton is a writer and mother of two daughters in Northern California. She has an MA in Women’s Studies and an MFA in Writing. She is currently writing a memoir about battling depression with the help of a remarkable therapy dog. You can read more about her athttp://www.byjuliebarton.com.