Stoopid moms! Two moms, grown women, got into a brawl at a Chuck E Cheeses restaurant. Why? One mom was upset that the other woman’s child was “hogging a game”. Numerous 911 calls to the police were made, and both women are being charged with simple assault and battery. The children were 9 years old, old enough to be totally mortified at their mom’s behavior. Way to go, moms! ..not!

Mommy fatigue causes memory loss. Mommy is sometimes a scatterbrain. At least I am. I am especially horrible with people’s last name - especially at work where I am constantly scanning the phone list to prompt my memory. But, amazingly enough I can usually remember where every single miscellaneous item is in my house for whenever my kids (and husband) whine “moooommm… where is the (fill in the blank)?”

Sleep deprivation, hormone changes and stress can reduce memory. Did you know that a mom loses between 450-700 hours of sleep in baby’s first year alone? I was a walking zombie as well. And I feel for my friends who have older “non-sleepers” that can go on even for a few years. On the positive side, a mother tends to have increased awareness for the health and safety of their child. Some serious nurturing kicks in. So don’t fret if you put that gallon of ice cream in the fridge instead of the freezer… you will still be a great parent to your precious children!

Dying to know if hubby will go bald? Well, a new DNA test is available and for $150, a guy can swab his cheek and send it away for analysis. In return, it will give you decent odds to consider. The big question is, what to do if it does happen? Personally, I prefer a nice sexy shave like Chris Daughtry. What I don’t get is all the guys who are seriously losing it and grow what is left into a looong ponytail hanging down their back. I guess that is our generations answer to the comb-over.

I smiled at Kathleen Deveny’s recent column in Newsweek where she asks narcissist mommies who share every obsession over all each minute parenting choice to shut up already:

Do whatever you want: stay at home with your kids, wear gym clothes all day and make your own organic baby food. Work 60 hours a week, fire your babysitter every six months and communicate with your children via BlackBerry. Declare your toddler carbon neutral or get your hair highlighted while you’re in labor. Breast-feed your kid till he’s 17! I’m a single working mother, and should be interested in all this, but I’m not.

And though as a writer for a mom blog I know Ms. Deveny is also indicting me when she says that she’s “bored to death with talking, hearing and reading about motherhood,” I found myself agreeing with one of her larger points: The seemingly constant media drone of “experts” critiquing others’ parenting choices (”Lazy moms gaining on the Alphas!”) obscures issues that deserve much more attention: The daily crises faced by women who don’t have a lot of wiggle room in terms of parenting choices, such as low-income mothers. (And please tell me if I’m missing something, but I think I’d agree with Ms. Deveny’s assessment of the recent spate of “mommy lit” that has hit the bookstores. When the boys are in bed and I have a half hour to curl up with a book, the last thing I want to do is read about some other mother’s day. Give me murder most foul, thanks.)

Of those who seem to be caught by surprise at how difficult motherhood can be, Ms. Deveny has little sympathy:

Sure, husbands could be more helpful and bosses are always demanding something on the day your kid comes home with lice. The challenge of finding good, affordable child care is no joke. But we didn’t exactly invent kids. “No one can ever understand how difficult it is,” says Kateria Niambi, a publishing executive from Montclair, N.J., and single mother of girls, ages 14 and 11. “But once you are a mother, you need to get over it. There’s no need to whine about it.”

No argument here on the whining. But my mother-in-law insists of motherhood in her day, “It was easier back then because everyone was doing it.” When she had her children and stayed at home to raise them, her sister, her best friends, her neighbors – every woman she knew was on the same path. Obviously taking care of babies and children wasn’t physically easier than it is now – how could it be, without proper bouncy chairs? – but maybe she’s right about the emotional and psychological impact of motherhood. For most of us today, motherhood is infused with much more choice than in the past. Should I have my kids “on time” or “delayed”? If I work, who will care for my kids? If I don’t work, how will we survive financially? How will I manage my career track? How will my husband and I achieve work/life balance for our family? And with each choice comes the subsequent awareness of the other option, the path I didn’t follow. And mixed in with the trademark joys, sorrows, and in-betweens of motherhood, those “shadow choices” can provoke a certain measure of doubt, anxiety, guilt, and perhaps regret. Certainly those feelings pepper every individual life, but a lot of us seem to be living similar psychological scripts right now.

And I suppose that produces a bit of analysis on message boards, in magazines, on blogs, and the like. So long as this happens while we’re getting on with the business of raising our kids and living our lives generally (including the non-mom parts!), I can’t see this as a bad thing. We didn’t invent kids, true. But motherhood in the developed world looks a lot different now than it did forty years ago. I think that’s worthy of a conversation or two.

Posted by MommaSteph.

Well, of all the nonsense…

In the UK, where legislation to protect a mother’s right to breastfeed in public has just been penned, a bottle-feeding mother was asked to leave a “breastfeeding café” - an informal drop-in center for new and expectant moms who want advice on breastfeeding and other new-mom concerns.

The woman, who does not want to be named, has previously been advised by medical professionals to stop trying to breastfeed her baby, because her baby son had lost so much weight since birth that he had to be admitted to hospital…

The mum said she broke down in tears when the organisers of the mother-and-babies meeting suggested that she might attend a different group. Her friend, who also attended the breastfeeding café and who feeds her baby both by bottle and breast, said there was such pressure at the meetings to breastfeed that she nursed her child even though he was not due to have a feed.

I have a hunch those organizers were not breastfed themselves, if the IQ-breast milk connection is actually real. I can’t fault the mom for falling apart - new motherhood does a number on the old emotional stamina. But I hope, upon reflection, she can now laugh at such asinine snobbery.

Posted by MommaSteph.

The latest salvo in the ongoing “Mommy Wars” is coming from author Leslie Bennetts, who argues in her book The Feminine Mistake that when a woman takes a break from her career to care for young children, she’s engaging in a dangerous risk because she puts herself in the position of financial dependence on her husband. Moreover, she’s at risk of being unemployable if and when she returns to work because, apparently, employers resist hiring women who put themselves on the “mommy track.” Ms. Bennetts recently appeared on NBC’s Today Show discussing her findings.

While I found her logic to be solid, and her research to be indicative of what is readily seen in today’s workforce (but not often acknowledged), I was still troubled by her whole line of inquiry.

I’m certainly glad that it is starting a conversation about what women, and even further, what parents need from the working world. What bugs me about the line of thinking presented in the Today Show piece, though, is that it closes down discussion about creating a pro-balance, pro-family, pro-human lifestyle in the American workplace. The truth is, there is validity to what she is saying about “offramping” from the corporate ladder—spending time away from work can damage a woman’s ability to climb and earn later in life, not to mention to achieve the leadership positions that will allow her to influence the issues women care about most.

To me, this indicates that the trajectory or “work life span” in America is geared towards a man’s life. Sure, we have won the fight to work side-by-side with men, but the actual make-up of work—i.e., fight though your twenties to climb, establish your management and leadership skills in your thirties, take on more top-line responsibility in your forties, coast into retirement—is geared toward the biology of men. Pregnancy and childrearing are not even factors in this schedule. This is not good for men or women in a pro-balance or pro-family lifestyle, because it says that hopping off the ladder in your twenties or thirties, for whatever reason (but particularly true for children), will make you suffer in your career. It hurts women, clearly, but it hurts men, too, who don’t want to live as their fathers did, with their number one “family” priority being breadwinning.

Why on earth would women want to join this old mentality, where providing financially is the number one way we show love and support to our kids? If it worked so well for men, why are modern men taking such delight in more actively raising their kids� Of course, money is always important, but more important than everything?

Speaking as someone at home now who truly misses work outside the home, I feel stuck. Affording full-time daycare is really out of the question, and honestly, I don’t want to be away from my daughter all day. Where are my options? Furthermore, where are the options for my husband� What would be so wrong about having a different kind of work schedule? A BALANCE-CENTRIC schedule?

I think we need to work to reengineer our lifestyles so that the work week isn’t so long. So that there is ample opportunity to still have intellectual and financial fulfillment working part-time or in flexible situations. So that child care options are fluid and possible for all types of families.

Simply instructing women that their career might suffer if they stay home is not enough. It negates all of the value of that time spent at home, and doesn’t provide any solution that will work for whole families. We need revolution for men and women. We need a healthier, more active, more relaxed, more family-oriented, more HAPPY society. Continuing to spin on the hundreds-year old hamster wheel is not making us better OR more productive, in my opinion.

Posted by korilu.

There are a lot of myths out there about breastfeeding, and Nancy Howe of WIC tried to address many of them at a recent brown bag luncheon.

• “Eating onions will not make your breastmilk taste like sauerkraut.” While that’s probably true (I’ve never tried breastmilk, so I wouldn’t know how onions actually change the taste of it), I have heard that the food a lactating woman eats can change the taste of her breastmilk. Some foods you eat can even make your baby fussy, gassy or allergic in extreme cases. The good news, some say, is that breastmilk can expose your kids to more flavors, which can make them more open to try a greater variety of foods as they transition to solid foods.
• Infant formula is not an ideal substitute for breastmilk. “…aside from knowing that formula doesn’t provide everything contained in breast milk, there are also no long-term studies of the effects of formula feeding.” Of course we’ve all heard the usual arguments about why breastmilk is better than formula, but Howe raises more reasons why breastfeeding is best, including “increased environmental pollution from formula and packaging production, as well as the possibility of infant malnutrition or death resulting from natural disasters that would cut formula supplies - a real scenario that America witnessed after Hurricane Katrina.” While those reasons may seem like a stretch, you can’t deny that it did happen to our neighbors in New Orleans, and even to people in Thailand after the tsunami. Who’s to say the next disaster isn’t right around the corner?
• Breastfeeding may not happen as naturally for mom and baby as you may think. I could be the poster child for this common misconception about breastfeeding. My sister told me her baby latched on right away and her milk flowed from her like water from a fountain. It never occurred to me that this wouldn’t be the case for me and my first baby. The only thing I can tell new moms is to seek out all the support you can, even before the baby is here. It’s best to be prepared for the worst. Get a good pump, accept all the help that is offered at your hospital, and hire a lactation consultant if necessary.

Time to squawk: Do you have any breastfeeding myths to debunk?

Posted by Pager12.

It happened to me about 2 years ago.�

This is the scenario: At that time, I had two sons who required a lot of time.� No family was nearby, and I was working long hours.� My husband�was stressed out for�trying to handle work and family with me.��On top of that, I�was in graduate school, so weekends were devoted to that.� People around me where pro-work instead of pro-family.� I came home to complete homework at 10:oo pm.� Can you imagine how stressful were those days?�

Not anymore.��My husband and I sat down and paid�most of our debts, and I decided it was time to be there�with my kids.��There was also a sign:�I got pregnant.�

At first everything was great, but then not having an adult�conversation for long periods of time drove�me crazy.� That’s what happens to Alexandra Moses who provides insight of the on-going war in�her Work-Life Blog.� She�says that�her mind�plays endless wars between a professional career or the mom path.� For some people, being a stay-at-home mom works great.��For others it can be depressing and even frustrating.� I guess each of us has to find the correct path so we can feel good�about ourselves�and our families.

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Over at Salon, an eyebrow-raising item�on why Campbell Brown, the competent, seasoned reporter at NBC news, was not even considered for Katie Couric’s plum spot on the Today Show:� She’s childless.� Add to that�her youth�(I admit it made my day�to�learn 37 is considered young these days!) and attractiveness, and you have a woman from whom stay-at-home moms (a substantial percentage of Today Show viewers) do not want to get their news, entertainment snippets, and health and beauty tips.

Really?� Not being a morning “news” program watcher myself, I’m perhaps not qualified to weigh in here, but I could not care less whether or not the TV lady has kids when I want to know the inside dirt on the latest human interest drama, or to hear a politician answer puffball questions about low-impact policy matters.� And who better than a hottie to tell me that brown eyeshadow is a timeless choice, or that the wrap dress flatters most figures?

Mind you, I have no personal stake in this, and Meredith Vieira always struck me as a calm, sensible, and smart woman, so I’m sure she’ll make for lovely company first thing in the morning.� You may recall that Vieira cut her teeth on 60 Minutes, but quit after she had kids because CBS wouldn’t give her�a workable schedule.� It’s nice that she’s managed to stay in the game while keeping her family a priority.� But what does it mean that Vieira likely made the initial cut for Today because she had procreated?

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As part of a nationwide effort to encourage more women to have babies, Tokyo rail companies are offering pregnant women pink and blue badges that read “There is a baby in my belly”.� The idea is the badges will encourage other commuters to give up their seats to the expectant moms.

“Especially in the early stages, it is difficult to tell from someone’s appearance whether they are pregnant,” said an official at the Health Ministry which came up with the idea. “But these early stages are rather unstable and it is important to take care.”

The move comes as Japan scrambles for ways to persuade women to have more babies. The dwindling birth rate has left the nation with a shrinking population and the world’s highest proportion of elderly people.

“We want to create an environment that is pleasant for pregnant women,” the agency official said.

In addition to the rail passes, recent initiatives to persuade Japanese women to have more babies include improving employment conditions for working mothers and government-sponsored speed dating.

Hm…or they could just force the dads to do more diaper changes�and get rid of instant noodles.

Posted by MommaSteph

In her book The Female Brain, neuropsychiatrist Louann Brizendine uses over 1,000 studies from various fields of science, plus her own research on female hormones and mood, to present the case that, yes, male and female brains are fundamentally different, and these differences do make it difficult for women to balance career and motherhood.� Women are wired to be caretakers, and when those hormones kick in during breastfeeding, it’s can be extremely painful for a woman to separate from her child to return to the office.� But, Brizendine notes, the onus is on the workplace to evolve to accomodate women who want to work and take care of young children.� “We cannot afford to lose half the brainpower in this country. Our intelligent women are getting completely out of the loop for five to 10 years, and they cannot get back in.”

Brizendine’s work looks not just at “mommy brain”, however, but at the whole life of the female brain from�conception to menopause.� And while she plays up the differences between the makeup and functioning of male and female brains, she notes that neither is objectively “better” than the other; our brains are purposeful, and still largely wired for cavepeople duties.

For some watercooler talk, here are a�few interesting tidbits from Brizendine’s book:

• The female brain releases oxytocin after a twenty-second hug, which�causes the woman to bond with and begin to trust the person she is hugging.� So be a discriminating long hugger.
• Women have thoughts about sex every couple of days, while for men it’s every minute.
• Erma Bombeck was right:� Women use 20,000 words per day; men use 7,000.
• Women remember fights that a man insists never happened.� (I’m so glad I’m not the only one who experiences this.)

Posted by MommaSteph

The Boston Globe featured an article on Sunday written by a Dr. Darshak Sanghavia, an assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, discussing the oft-debated state of birth pain management today. Calling birth without pain medications “odd”, one must consider the source here when researching one’s own birthing options…Dr. Sanghavia is clearly pro-epidural.

Sanghavia presents some interesting historical background to anesthesia during birth in America, but aside from that presumably factual information, you’ll find plenty of conjecture and even near-ridicule of women choosing a drug -free birth (emphasis mine):

“Yet pain in the end is an utterly primitive thing, a vestige of insect and reptilian brains. It evolved primarily as a way to change behavior without need for thought - to force one’s hand to pull away from fire or tend urgently to an injured limb. Thinking beings, in some sense, have evolved beyond pain. (Some pain reflexes continue even in brain-dead individuals.) If anything, reliance on pain to create meaning during childbirth indicates a constricted imagination. Surely there must be more innovative challenges than voluntarily refusing effective, safe, and available pain relief during labor.”

I wouldn’t consider choosing to have a needle placed in my spine to be “evolution” in the sense that a pain reflex is evolution - quite a stretch there, doc. And my imagination is just fine, thank you — no constrictions here, aside from the trouble I have making decisions when I try to imagine where I’d kick you first (shin or otherwise) if you told me to my face that my unmedicated choices were due to having a reptilian brain.

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