Month: January 2012

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Happy Birthday, Mary Tyler Mom!

MTM Birthday Cake

This month, Mary Tyler Mom celebrates her first birthday.  This makes me happy.

When I went back to work after a four year hiatus last winter, I took that return to normalcy as an opportunity to write about something other than grief and sadness.  A blog was born.  Mary Tyler Mom got her name from one of my childhood icons, Mary Tyler Moore.  She was a symbol of independence and sexiness and capability and pluck and pantsuits and spunk.  She could turn the world on with her smile.  She was gonna make it after all.  Just like me.  Mary Tyler Moore was my patron saint of hope.

After a few months hanging out with my three readers, writing weekly posts about working and mothering, I made the decision to move MTM to ChicagoNow.  I struggled with the decision at first, worrying about “creative control,” and other pretentious things like that.  In the end, the move was one of the best decisions I have ever made.  I met other bloggers, amazing writers, and mighty human beings who supported me and helped me make a home for Mary Tyler Mom.   I had the voice and now I had a platform.

In September, a fellow blogger (Thanks, Susie!  I didn’t forget!) nominated me for “My 7 Links,” a blogger’s challenge to identify particular posts in seven different categories.  Well, I was a little busy in September with Donna’s Cancer Story, but at this first birthday, it seems like a perfect opportunity to look back and throw my beret up in the air.

The Goal:  “To unite bloggers (from all sectors) in a joint endeavor to share lessons learned and create a bank of long but not forgotten blog posts that deserve to see the light of day again.”

My 7 Links:

Most Beautiful Post:  “Kraft och Omtanke” to You.  This was written in October, while I was still trying to come down after having written Donna’s Cancer Story.  The volume of love and support which was shown to me during those few days still moves me.  To be at the receiving end of all that can’t help but change you.  A reader from Sweden sent me the message during those days “Kraft och Omtanke,” which translated means, “strength and consideration.”  This post is my reflection of what those words truly mean and how much each and every one of us are deserving of them. 

Most Popular Post:  Gwyneth Paltrow Can Kiss my Sweet Chicago A$$.  I wrote this on my tenth wedding anniversary, a gift to working mothers everywhere.  If you’ve ever wondered about all the Gwynnie references in my posts or on my facebook page, this will explain them all.  Within this link is another link (bonus, yo) to my original Gwynnie post, written last winter.  Ugh, I could go on, but I won’t. 

Most Controversial Post:  Barbie v. Cancer.  Believe it or not, I am still in the middle of “Barbiegate” as one of my readers referred to it yesterday.  Here’s the deal people:  I am not a Barbie fan.  Never have been.  I make no apologies for that.  What I learned, though, is that Barbie is an American icon, and YOU DO NOT MESS WITH AN AMERICAN ICON.  Okay, okay, okay, I get it.  My point, in a nutshell, is that kids need research more than they need dolls.  I hate the idea of children with cancer being used for corporate profit, which is what would happen if Mattel were to make this doll.  It is what it is.  Also, this post taught me the lesson that an opinion is a powerful thing.  It doesn’t matter that when I wrote this I was sitting on my living room sofa, in my pajamas, my kid at my feet happily playing away.  I am mommy blogger, hear me roar. 

Most Helpful Post:  Thanksgiving:  Wherefore art thou?  It seems that my most powerful posts come from a place of agitation or indignation.  Huh.   The truth is that I can be a cranky son of a gun through the holidays.  I worry for Mary Tyler Son, I do.  Kids deserve better, though, so I work hard to keep my inner Grinch at bay and give the kid a proper season full of joy and wonder and all that holiday jazz.  The key word, though, in that admission is “work.”  Holidays do not come naturally to me.  The joy and wonder that finds its way into our home between October and January is hard freaking earned.  Methinks I am not alone in this, hence the popularity and helpfulness of this post. 

Post(s) Whose Success Surprised Me:  Donna’s Cancer Story.  In September 2010, before Mary Tyler Mom was even a thought in my head, I posted a photo of Donna every day on facebook and wrote a few paragraphs about what happened in each month of her 31 months of treatment.  This was a way of recognizing Childhood Cancer Awareness Month and rembering my girl.  At least it started like that.  It ended being something completely different.  Without consciously knowing it, reliving the trauma of Donna’s cancer helped me steel myself for the first anniversary of her death.  In August 2011, I pitched the idea of modifying it for Mary Tyler Mom, thinking I would reach a larger audience.  What I foolishly thought would be a cut and paste job turned into a momument to the love and hope and joy and terror that moving to Cancerville with Donna brought to my family.  The numbers are impressive:  over 500K hits, $25K in donations to Donna’s Good Things since it was published, over 100 Good Things performed by readers in Donna’s name and memory, and no less than two readers got tattos (acorns and “Choose hope”).  And 1 writer was born — with its publishing, writing, and producing it every day of the month, at some point in September, I finally came to call myself a writer.  Without smirking.

Post That Didn’t Get the Attention it Deserved:  Got Milk?  This was written in the midst of World Breastfeeding Week and it holds my own, personal experiences with breastfeeding, as well as my thoughts on the moms who don’t breastfeed.  Moms love to judge.  Sad, but true.  This is a call for tolerance and understanding, for whatever decision you make in regards to how to fatten up that baby of yours.  When it was published, Mary Tyler Mom had a significantly smaller reach, and my hope is that others might find it through this challenge and spread the word. 

Post I’m Most Proud of:  This is a tough one, because, quite honestly, I could close my eyes and point to any of the posts within Donna’s Cancer Story and be happy with its designation as “Post I’m Most Proud of.”  So know that.  I opted not to pick and choose between those, because, like Donna and Mary Tyler Son, they, too, are my babies.  There are things a mother just doesn’t do, and that is one of them.  So with that said, Jack Layton is my new hero is a post I am truly proud of.  It was written late at night and was one of those posts that just kind of appeared on my screen.  I felt passionate about what I was writing, passionate about what Jack Layton stood for and accomplished.  For me, passion = joy and ease in writing.  That is something I am proud of, indeed, and something to be celebrated. 

So there they are, My 7 Links!  This was fun, but now for more fun.  As part of the challenge, I now get to nominate other bloggers to take the challenge themselves.  Drum roll, please . . .

My 5 Blog Nominations:

Finding My Voice

I Want a Dumpster Baby

From the Bungalow

Daddy Knows Less

My Sports Complex

Real Mom Nutrition (YES, I added one extra) 

 

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Sr. Iphielya: Sisters Are Doin’ It For Themselves

Sr, Iphielya

The photo above, my dear Sr. Iphielya, is not an image I poached off the internet.  She is my aunt, Mary Cecile, or to me and my siblings, Sr. Michael.  Today, Sr. Iphielya is going to take a break, as Sr. Michael is the star of this particular show.  Humor me as I honor a most mythic woman and a most mythic way of life.

Growing up, I went to Catholic school.  A nun, or more properly, a sister (I learned just recently that a nun is cloistered and sisters live amongst us), is who taught me about periods and other things that Judy Blume wrote about.  RIP, Sr. Morrison — you were quite the dame.  As a girl, I always felt special, in that several of my aunts were nuns — two of my Dad’s four sisters and one of my Mom’s aunts.  I grew up with an awareness of and proximity to a very endangered way of life.  We ran around convents and used to role play by placing the cover of the living room arm chairs on our heads, making instant habits.

Sr. Michael, my Dad’s oldest sister, died two weeks ago today.  I traveled to a small town in Michigan to deliver a eulogy and watch her be buried.  She was the first of her five siblings to die, but only the most recent in a string of aging nuns who reside at the Motherhouse.  Dying is something nuns do a lot of these days.

When my aunt made her vocation in 1946, she was one of many, many young Catholic women drawn to the Church.  I’ve had the privilege of visitng the Motherhouse three times now and it is the most amazing of places.  There is an historical room there, just off the main chapel, that tells the story of the order both of my aunts professed.  In this room there is a parchment book with pages and pages and pages of calligraphed names under years.  You will find Sr. Michael’s name under 1946 and my other aunt’s name under 1948, but you have to look hard, as they are written amongst hundreds of others.

Each of those names is a woman with her own story of what brought her to the sisterhood.  For Sr. Michael, it was about vocation and adventure.  She felt a calling to become a sister and that calling turned into a most remarkable life full of travel and education and ministry and beer and achievement and chocolate.  Sr. Michael was a formidable aunt to me.  She always corrected my speech, placed a firm hand on my shoulder when I rocked unconsciously, listened with interest about what I was learning in school, and would buy me ice cream for lunch if we were having a day out together.

She dressed to the nines.  I’m not kidding.  Sr. Michael had a knack for finding Chanel and Dior in high end thrift stores.  She taught me about spectator pumps and handbags, “Never call it a purse,” she would tell me, and the importance of them “corresponding” with one another.  I used to worry that I disappointed her and sometimes got nervous in her presence.  As I got older, and more confident, I was challenged by her and loved to discuss the things I was learning in college.  She had three master degrees herself and used to encourage me to read Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk who wrote poems and books about social justice.

She did amazing things in her life, Sr. Michael, and saw amazing things.  I think, for most of her first 77 years, she was happy.  For the last of her 87 years, less so.  That final decade was spent waiting.  Waiting to die, waiting to be released, waiting for peace.  For a woman who embodied joie de vivre — not a phrase often associated with nuns — her joy became scarce in her later years.  Tis a shame.

At her funeral services, my family and I traveled in the snow to see Sr. Michael put to rest.  My other nun-aunt did me the honor of asking me to give the family eulogy.  I thought that would be on Friday, and planned to write it Thursday night.  Turns out, I was to deliver the eulogy at the wake service.  Oops.  I like to plan the words I deliver, but I think it was better that this one was extemporaneous.  I followed a most moving tribute by a nun who was in Sr. Michael’s crowd — the group of women who professed in the same year.  She was a good friend to my aunt for 64 years and recounted a story I have heard my Dad share.  Early on, after joining the sisterhood, the family traveled from their home in Chicago — a nice southside Irish family — to visit their oldest sibling at the Motherhouse.  Rules were very clear and limited about how much exposure nuns had to the outside world at that time.  There was concern about how Sr. Michael would be doing or what interaction they would have with her.  All concerns were erased when as her family waited below, Sr. Michael ran down the grand staircase at the Motherhouse, in full habit, to greet the family she loved and missed.  My Dad says it was then that her parents stopped worrying over her.  Sr. Michael had found her path.

May we all be so lucky to find our path.  This latest trip to the Motherhouse was my first as a mommy blogger.  The significance of going to a place called the “Motherhouse” was not lost on me.  But my associations were trivial and one dimensional.  Once there, standing in the reception line at the wake when nun after nun, filed past their sister to pay their respects, all of them in various states of visible aging — gray hair, walkers, scooters, stooped posture — I was struck by just how lucky I had been to be exposed to such a unique way of life.  Women who willingly opted out of marriage, out of children to serve a God they worshiped.

Their choices were vastly different from my own.  And now, their choice of a vocational life is all but extinct.  With Vatican II in the 1960s, those women choosing the sisterhood dramatically dropped.  That parchment book that listed all their names under the year they professed documents that visually.  In the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, each year is followed by pages of names.  In the 1960s that dropped dramatically to the point of one to three names following each year.  You will see a decade on each page now, a striking reminder of a way of life that is ** poof ** gone before our eyes.  It is a loss.

When my daughter was given her terminal status, I searched for a book that would help us help her understand what that meant.  What we found was a book called Lifetimes, which very gently but realistically stated that for each life there is a beginning, an ending, with life in between.  Such it is with people, and such it is with the sisterhood.  And as with Donna, you can understand it and accept the loss, but it does not make its passing any easier.

Rest in peace, Sr. Michael.  You will be missed.  And whenever I don a pair of spectator pumps, it is you I will think of . . .

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Ode to a Pot Named Crock

It’s January, and that means the crock pot is my new bff.  This is from the archives, folks, but too good to let it stay dusty.  Enjoy!

Crock Pot

When I left my career to care for our daughter, not cooking was not an issue.  We were blessed with faithful and talented houseguests who kept our fridge and bellys full.  After Donna died a group of parents from her pre-school organized six weeks of cooked meals that somehow lasted longer.  The winter set in and our houseguests got back to their own lives.  I was home with a then one year old boy and would spend my days grieving for Donna and caring for Jay.  They were full days.  My man would get home from the office and cook dinner for us, just as he had before we moved to Cancerville.   

As spring neared and some of the initial fog of grief lifted, I came to realize that I was officially a stay at home mom.  Circumstance had brought me there, not choice, but there was no denying it.  And from my POV, the gig of a stay at home parent involved kids, home and food.  I was solid on kid and home, but was coming up very short with the food.  So, I taught myself how to cook.  Nothing too ambitious, but generally delicious.  I deemed May as “Make My Husband Dinner Month” and worked to have five cooked meals for him each week. 

The food came to be a revelation for me.  I was expressing love through food and I liked it.  (Isn’t that a Katy Perry song?)  I didn’t recognize myself, but that’s okay.  My man loved it.  Loved it.  I mean, who wouldn’t?  We were eating well and I got a bit more ambitious.  I started to have opinions about cookware.  My mother-in-law, a card carrying foodie, bought us a fancy pan and baking sheet.  Cards on the table, I was resentful for a moment (or a week), but then I used first one, then the other.  She had converted me.  All apologies, dear mother-in-law. 

But what does all this have to do with Mary Tyler Mom?  Six weeks into my new gig I realized that I was still doing all the cooking.  Last week I served two slices of deli roast beef on a low-fat wheat tortilla smeared with no-fat cream cheese and called it dinner.  The lettuce inside the wrap counted as the salad.  Yeah.  Not good.  Honestly, folks, we don’t have a new division of labor yet, the husband and I.  We’ll get there, but for now I’m planning the menus and executing the meals five nights a week.  So I stepped it up this week.  Enter the Crock Pot (another purchase from my mother-in-law, herself a gal who raised two kids while working full-time).  I think I’m in love.

Just after I got Mary Tyler Son to sleep Tuesday night I pulled out my cranberry hued crock (isn’t she beautiful?) and we had our first fling together.  It was a little akward, as most new relationships are, but something about it just felt right.  In ten minutes I had it locked and loaded, wrastled it into the fridge, and felt superior for the rest of the evening – – my dinner was done roughly 22 hours ahead of schedule.  I never finish anything in advance, so you’ll forgive me the self-righteousness that lulled me to sleep that night. 

There was a bit of a panic at work the next day, which revolved around intense fear that I burned our home down to the ground for the sake of a delicious and nutritious meal, all the while expending minimal effort.  But it was short lived.  I got home after picking up the boy, and smelled the warm scent of tomatoes and cilantro before I had even turned the light on.  Dinner was served.  Yum. 

So what about you, dear reader?  If you work, how are dinners handled?  Who cooks?  Who cleans?  What is your division of labor in the kitchen, and more importantly, does it work?

BONUS:  Here is what’s for dinner tonight, and my favorite crock pot recipe!