Mom's Got Her Thing Tonight

I’m lucky to know a variety of excellent women. It’s why I started MILK Podcast, for a chance to converse with and champion some of the passionate and fabulous ladies I come across.

Some of my most treasured women friends are ones I don’t see all that often: my gal pals from college, and they are a special little coven. We get together every few years for an unofficial reunion, and it is always the most replenishing and hilarious time. We drink wine, laugh constantly, tell stories about our kids and jobs, and of course, reminisce about who we were and what we wore while students at The University of Vermont. I always leave these weekends so inspired, so vibrant, with my heart so full. I remember things I had forgotten about younger versions of myself, and I’m moved by them, as if reconnecting with an old friend, and that friend is me.

These women: Heather, Whitney, Aimee, Danielle, Lisa and Cressida, are unconditional supports. We live in different locations (urban/suburban/country/east coast/west coast), and aren’t all in touch on the daily, but our choices and values overlap. We share honestly and vividly about our fears and accomplishments. In one breath we feel 19, and like we live on the same dorm hall getting ready to go see Phish play in our student center cafeteria (which we did). In the next we are aware of the responsibilities that challenge the free spirits we all once were (how many types of insurance can one person/family have, just for example).

I came upon this piece on “The New Mid Life Crisis, Why and How It’s Hitting Gen X Women,” while researching an interview that I’m recording tomorrow with it's author Ada Calhoun. She also wrote a crisp and entertaining book of essays called  “Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give,” which I loved and highly recommend. This essay, however, is a bit bleak, -- full of research both scientific and anecdotal about why women in their forties, like me and my UVM girls, would or could be struggling physically and psychically in this mid life place. It is very much worth reading and discussing. 

Coming off of this weekend, however, where Whitney hosted us one night in her cozy home, and planned our meals and thought of everything, I felt so loved and tended to. The second night we stayed in a hotel and met up some other college friends, and it was pure silliness and reconnecting with that fun time freedom we all took for granted in our college days. Meanwhile back at the ranch, our awesome partners tended to our kids. 

Thinking back on our reunion and considering this piece today, I do not feel in crisis. Perhaps this is because I am privileged to have a partner who will watch my kids, and friends with the means to host a lovely dinner and split hotel rooms for a night. That is my pure luck in this life to be able to afford these luxuries.

But I wonder also if I am feeling less mid life crisis-y and more optimistic lately despite the constant drum of bad news and our dire seeming, violent world, because I’m feeling free to be myself, finally, at this mid life crisis prone age. Being with these old friends allows access to the previous selves inside of me that I’ve been able to embody or else retire. Conjuring them up is intense, but feels like a release when I can let them go.

“Self-care” is a phrase that annoys me for no good reason, but letting laughter and love wash over me, and spending face to face time with people dear to me, really felt that way. As moms, women, humans --  our many selves need care, and we deserve it.

why you need to know Amy Shearn: writer, editor, teacher, mom

She's smart, she's hilarious, and man, is she ever a MILK. She's Amy Shearn: novelist, non-fiction writer, editor, teacher, social mediatrix, mother, and the third guest on the MILK Podcast. 

Amy and I met when my children's book came out last year, and "liked" each other's posts on Facebook a lot before I took her fiction writing class at The Sackett Street Writers Workshop in the spring. 

Then, we liked each other for real. She is inspiring in the amount she manages to get done in a day, and I loved talking to her. Check out our interview here, and if you like it, please subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or Stitcher.

talking with yoga instructor Amanda Harding on my MILK podcast

This woman is one of my teachers and a major MILK. Amanda Harding, owner of Prema Yoga in Brooklyn is a graceful and beautiful person. 

I know it's cliche to want to know more about your yoga teacher (or therapist!) but I think our talk should be interesting to many. 

We discuss the importance of the mundane, how to create ritual, some of her ideas for stimulating activism in one's community, and coping with anxiety. She's a wonderful mom and person. 

Check it out on iTunes and Stitcher! 

singer, songwriter Jamie Leonhart is my first guest MILK podcast guest

Today, we meet Jamie Leonhart, the first guest on my inaugural MILK podcast!

Jamie is truly flawless. She is a singer, songwriter, and mom to Milo. She wrote a beautiful piece of theater with original music called Estuary, all about the trauma and beauty of being a mother and an artist. Then she went on stage with her husband, who is also her musical director, and was honest and funny and real with that crazy voice of hers. 

I ❤️our talk. 

Give it a listen on iTunes and Stitcher. 
 

milks (moms i’d like to know)

On the recommendation of a fellow mother/writer BFF, last week I tucked into “Devotion,” by Dani Shapiro. A memoir of a 40ish woman with fulfilling family and career lives, she struggles with conquering extreme anxiety and questions of faith. The book poses a quandary familiar to me: how exactly, do you stop the racing? How do you feel content and not afraid that something terrible will happen to you and the ones you love?

Guided by a writer of gorgeous prose, who is also a blonde, a mom, a Jew and a yogi, (I am least four of those things), I hoped for some light and self-knowledge in terms of my own similar fears and questions about belief.

“Devotion” is nostalgic, deeply personal and edgy. Dani seems like someone I know, or should know. An enviable writer who has found the discipline and balance to produce beautiful books, she has succeeded beyond the difficult relationships of her past, and is struggling to really know herself as a mother to her son and a wife to her husband. But she is someone who searches obsessively for meaning, worries about not living up to her own expectations, or knowing what the f she’s doing.

Yes, that sounds familiar.

It felt like she was inside my head at times – or maybe that I was inside hers, while she struggled with reconciling her Orthodox Jewish background with her more recent interests in Eastern philosophies and her New England WASP hometown. And oy, the anxiety she has at the onset of the book, especially about things happening to her loved ones. What wrestling and twisting and angsting and obsessing – it felt like my brain!

This really resonated:

“Just a few months ago, Michael and Jacob had been driving home late at night from a baseball game when someone threw a glass bottle of salad dressing off an embankment. The bottle hit the roof of our car and shattered. One fraction of a second earlier, and it would have hit the windshield.

Salad dressing, I thought to myself, when Michael told me what happened. I never considered salad dressing.”

I’m having my own waking up in the middle of the night with heart palpitations situation these past few years, often drowning under the idea that this life I chose, with family, with work, with all the things I’m certain I want, is one merely of striving, of stress and of lists, big and small, of things to check off. There are moments in my day that are a constant struggle to breathe, and the desire for a free moment to just think a clear thought and make sense of all the (self-imposed) constant activity is overwhelming.

This book made me a little stressed out while I was reading it (more ways to think about bad things that can happen, yay!), but ultimately, her honesty and guidance played the role of a smarter, slightly older and definitely more established writer and cool mom person I’d like to kibitz with. One who admits, in print, “It’s cool. This is some big stuff and I’m totally freaking out too. Let’s have a book club.”

When I think about her writing in terms of being a mother and having to compartmentalize her brain into action (to-do lists!) and later reflection (making sense of it all), it made so much sense that she would search her soul, looking for religious or spiritual guidance that would provide a framework for daily life. Her writing sounds like her own therapy, and it is, but it’s so thoughtful and sharp and wistfully funny that it could never be called indulgent or self-helpy.

Dani shares her past in such a specific and intimate way, with poignant memories of her late parents in the context of belief and faith, melded with the sweetness and of her present life as a parent to her own son. There’s a nostalgia to the way she writes about her current family life that I recognize too. Sometimes when I tune in to watch myself with my children it feels like a movie or a short story I’m recording or writing for posterity. I feel hyper-awarene all the time of how sweet and fleeting raising children is, even as I try to drink in every moment with every photo, every hug, every inhale of their little children smell.

This piece I found on Dani Shapiro’s website is really relevant to the idea of what it means to be a writer and to get to a place of truth. And what it means to be a mother, and how at odds these forces can be. How honesty and working out your schpilkes on paper or online can take on a new dimension when the kids start Googling.

http://danishapiro.com/all-titles/the-me-my-child-mustn%E2%80%99t-know/

So thing is, I would like to be like Dani. She has the discipline and the doggedness to ask difficult questions of herself, and then write a beautiful book as she struggles to answer them, as she “climbs inside the questions.” When I think back on reading this book at this time in my life, I’ll conjure an image of her sitting at her computer and forcing herself to write every morning, and it never ever getting easier to begin. I’ll think of her doing her yoga and going to workshops and trying to sit every day. I’ll think of her trying to find a community that makes sense for her as a modern Jewish woman and an intellectual and to look for meaning in the rituals of daily life.

Dani, you’re a MILK.

milks (moms i'd like to know) - Jennifer Egan

Last night I heard Jennifer Egan read from her novel “A Visit from the Goon Squad.” I’ve long admired her gorgeous fiction, as well as her compassionate journalism for the NY Times Magazine. In person, she is a warm, thoughtful, and self-deprecating woman. I’m trying desperately to figure out how we can be friends.

Goon Squad came out right after I had my second kid and I devoured it like a pint of artisanal salty caramel ice cream. We were in the country that summer, in a house we had rented with my family, and I was sleep starved and overwhelmed, but somehow managed to finish the book in a day and a half. I was so captivated by the magic of Egan’s prose and the vulnerability of her characters that I was moved to tears many times while reading it. I was convinced at the time that Egan’s experience as a mother must deeply inform her work. Now, reading the book for a second time and hearing her talk about crafting it, I’m convinced of the parallels.

Egan spoke about her intuitive writing process, how she writes first drafts long hand on yellow legal pads so the good stuff from her unconscious can just tumble out, and so her flow isn’t constricted by the constant editing a computer encourages. I love this image and liken it to letting parenting also be intuitive. I certainly aspire to trust my instincts and allow my children to reveal themselves to me just as I imagine Egan wants her characters to come to life. It’s the being present in the process that appeals to me both about writing and about parenting – both when things are working and not!

Egan seems to love and nurture her characters as if she birthed them – flawed and all, and with the honesty and the compromise it takes to raise them. She infuses the children in Goon Squad with such tenderness and little people wisdom – this is likely what I responded to with my tears and fears about bringing yet another baby into this fucked up world that summer when I read voraciously in the middle of the night.

The early chapter when music producer Lou takes his kids on safari to Africa and the flashing forward technique Egan uses to capture where his daughter Charlie, son Rolph, and an African warrior’s spear will be in 20 years is absolutely breathtaking, as is the chapter where the middle aged punk kids Rhea and Jocelyn go to visit a bed-ridden older Lou to say goodbye. Implications of motherhood (and the lack of fatherhood) abound in this chapter particularly. Jocelyn rails internally against Lou for stealing her childhood, leaving her unable to cope with living an adult life, and marvels that her best friend and former nobody Rhea has 3 children of her own. Egan even gives Rhea the opportunity to admonish Jocelyn using her sharp “Mom Voice,” and imagines what it must be like for Jocelyn’s mother to take care of her adult daughter as she struggles with sobriety and starting over after repeated failures.

“Tonight, when my mother comes home from work and sees me, she’ll …. fix up virgin Bloody Marys with little umbrellas. With Dave Brubeck on the stereo, we’ll play dominoes or gin rummy. When I look up at my mother she gives me a smile, each time. But exhaustion has carved up her face.”

The smearing of boundaries between adults and children here and throughout this novel is painfully beautiful.

In an interview I found online, a journalist asked Egan:

“Are you a disciplined writer?”

And she answered, which is SO momlike:

“I have a ferocious determination, which I really am grateful for, but having children was a gigantic recalibration of my workaholic nature. They exert such a strong gravitational pull, and so does the work. Ever since the children were born it’s been a challenge trying to give myself fully to all of them, without compromising any of them. On a large scale I’ve managed to do that, but day to day I usually feel I’m shirking something or someone.”

I also found this short piece that Egan wrote, which captures more of the dark and mischevious side of being a parent, and less of the sentimentally poignant stuff.

Using a to-do list to express a secret murderous mania is a black way of looking at the multi-tasking aspect of being a mom. But that doesn’t mean it ain’t true.

Jenny Egan – call me?