Category: Humor

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Adieu, iPad, It’s Been Real

My iPad is dying a long, slow death.  I call it the iPad no number, as it is first generation.  This is a little painful for me, because the iPad is a thing of beauty.  Cue singing angels here.  Mary Tyler Dad gifted it to me for Mother’s Day, 2010 — my first Mother’s Day without Donna.  Well, you can imagine that was not an easy day for me.  I had spent each Mother’s Day since 2007 worrying what life would be like without Donna, and in 2010 I was finding that out.  Apparently, life without Donna has better tech.  Sigh.

It was wrapped nicely and I opened it up and just kind of stared at it.  I thought it extravagant and intimidating and unnecessary.  Worst.  Wife.  Ever.  I didn’t really touch it for a few weeks and it confused me.  What was the point, I wondered.  I had been one of those to make fun of the name at its release, with the almost too easy reference to sanitary napkins.  Steve Jobs walked straight into that one.

Well, some time passed and I started using it here and there.  Words like “apps” and “cushioned carrying case” entered my vocabulary without irony or sarcasm.  Apps, in fact, morphed over night from something I put in my mouth to something I used to learn more about what I wanted to put in my mouth.

This iPad, I really should have named the sucker given how much quality time I spend with it, has kept me company on many a dark day.  When I discovered streaming, all freaking bets were off.  Mary Tyler Dad became what we fondly refer to as an “iPad widow.”  More than once I have been admonished not to use his back as an iPad stand while I watch the 92nd season of SVU.  Sheesh.  Some husbands are so sensitive.

And I say that I stopped reading as much as I used to when Donna died, but sometimes I wonder.  It’s hard to read when Facebook and links and pin boards are calling my name.  I’ve tried electronic books, but I think I have developed late onset ADHD because of the damn thing.  Seriously.  That should be a thing if it isn’t already.

Problems were first noted months ago.  It would crash suddenly and bring me back to the home screen.  Then that started happening more and more.  At first, it was just on Facebook, and the streaming remained intact.  Sadly, it is now on everything that I use it for.  Facebook won’t even let me click on a link or shift pages without crashing.  What’s the point of the damn thing if it keeps crashing?

I am hoping Santa brings me a new one.  A girl can dream, right?  If so, Mary Tyler Son will be granted full custody, something he has been petitioning for for months.  I joke that he actually has custody and grants me visitation rights.  Pfffft.  Even he gets annoyed with it now, too.

I will miss you, iPad no number.  You have been very, very good to me.  You’ve made me laugh and cry and imagine very real fits of violence, wherein I throw your slim and sexy frame across the bedroom, Frisbee style, with each successive crash.  Yes, I will miss you, despite your betrayals.  I just have one question before we part, “Why you got to do me like that?”

Sick iPad

Is it odd to create a sick bed for your most treasured piece of tech?  You do that in your house, too, right?

If you liked this post, read my ode to Steve Jobs, The Apple of My Eye, written the night of his death.  And as always, hang with me on the Facebook.

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Seven Deadly Sins: Sloth – Embracing My Inner Sloth

Sloth [slawth], noun:  

1.     habitual disinclination to exertion; indolence; laziness.

2.     any of several slow moving arboreal tropical American dentates of the family Bradypodidae, having a long, course, grayish-brown coat often of a greenish cast caused by algae, and long, hookline claws used in gripping tree branches while hanging or moving in a down position.

synonyms:  shiftlessness, idleness, slackness.

I am a sloth.  I know this about myself, I embrace it, I accept it.  Most of the time I work my way around it.  Some of the time it just sucks.  Like at Christmas.  It sucks so badly to be a sloth at the holidays.  But I digress.  That is a blog post for another day.

Today is write a blog post about sloth day!  Evidence of me being a sloth is that with my son tucked away for his blessed and no longer can be counted on nap (these minutes are &%$#@! GOLDEN, sayeth our former Illinois Governor), what I really want to be doing is watching the season finale of Boardwalk Empire.  Where I really want to be is tucked under the throw, reclined in my bed, iPad on my lap and soda at my side.  Doesn’t that sound just divine?

Seven Deadly Sins: The Series
Teppi Jacobsen: Gluttony
Jenna Myers Karvunidis: Greed
Lyletta Robinson: Anger
Patrick O’Hara: Envy
Evan Moore: Pride
Sheila Quirke: Sloth
Crystal Alperin: Lust
Andy Frye: The Eighth Sin: Rebellion

But I can’t.  Because I have to write this post.  And another one I promised my editor at the Huffington Post.  Oh, yeah, and there is that other one about inspirational quotes I gotta get to, she typed, slowly,  s   l   o   w   l   y   .

I think people have this very mistaken sense of me being the gal that has it all together.  That Mary Tyler Mom — she’s really got it going on!  She cooks (Have you seen her stuffed peppers on Facebook?), she writes (That gal is on fire, lately!), she advocates on behalf of pediatric cancer (Don’t forget to donate some or all of your 2012 Illinois income tax refund for the new Illinois Childhood Cancer Research Fund!), she keeps a tidy home (Please for the love of all that is sacred, do not open my closets when you come for a visit).

Oy.  I am a sloth, folks, true story.  Ask Mary Tyler Dad and he will tell you.

The other night I promised Mary Tyler Son pudding in a cloud for dessert.  I thought he would love the idea.  Nah.  All he wanted was another piece of Halloween candy.  Later that night tucked under previously mentioned throw with iPad firmly ensconced in my lap, I pined for that pudding in a cloud.  I did.  I could almost taste the rich, creamy spoons of deliciousness on my tongue.  But everything I needed was in the kitchen.  I was in the bedroom.  There’s probably, like, nineteen steps between the refrigerator and my bed.  (I may be a sloth, but I am also obsessive, so I know these things.)  That was nineteen steps too many.  I called it a night and fell asleep.

I don’t want to be a sloth, I don’t.  I wish I were more like my Type A mom friends that somehow seem to manage and organize and shine and produce all the time.  All the damn time.  How do they do it?  Seriously, I want to know, cause that energy mystifies me.

I have one friend I will call the Martha Stewart of Iowa.  She amazes me.  She is a great mom.  She is a gifted artist.  She is a domestic goddess.  She keeps a calendar.  A calendar!

But I fear that I am giving you the wrong impression here.  You know what I hate?  I hate writers that wax poetic about things they don’t have or qualities that they aspire to in a different life.  In my book, you are who you are.  I am a sloth.  It’s just sort of in my DNA.  I’m Irish, nearsighted, and a sloth.  It is what it is.  Be the change you want to be, you know, and all that mumbo jumbo kind of stuff, but don’t whine about it.  If you want to change, change.

If I wanted to be anything other than a sloth, I could be.  I could.  I could work really, really hard at it and I could be more like the moms I admire — the ones that I imagine have it all together.  I could exercise every morning after dropping Mary Tyler Son off at school.  I could have dinner ready *ping* at precisely 6:30 every evening.  I could go to the grocery store once a week, not four times.  I could actually mail the birthday party invites for Mary Tyler Son rather than distribute them over the Christmas dinner table, as I have done the past three years.  I could move that laundry right along, rather than letting it linger a few hours longer than it should, the faintest waft of mildew greeting me as I open the washer door.

I could do all those things and 476 more that I won’t bore you with.  But the truth is, the deadly sin that I embrace as my own is that I am a sloth.  It’s true.  And that is okay with me, as it is a part of me.  I don’t envy the other moms that do it with more efficiency, I marvel at them, I salute them.  There is a difference.

Embrace those things that are you, even if they are flaws.  Know your limitations well enough that they won’t trip you up, but instead, guide your decisions, e.g., I will never be able to volunteer as room parent for my kid as it would be utter disaster.  Papers would get lost and sign-up sheets would go unsigned.  Catastrophe.  Best to know my strengths and stick to them. Yep, I am a sloth.  And look how cute a sloth can be . . .

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Mommy Bloggers and Douchebags

My name is Mary Tyler Mom and I am a mommy blogger.

It’s true.  I am a mom and I blog.  It stands to reason that I am, therefore, a mommy blogger.  Except many folks do not think that is a good thing.  Many, many folks think being a mommy blogger is a bad thing, in fact.  And full disclosure, more than a few mommy bloggers hate the term and probably hate me for using it.

Par for the course.  I tick people off without even trying.  It is a special talent to tick people off when you’re not even trying.  People either love me or hate me for that.  They stand around shaking their heads and saying, “That, Mary Tyler Mom!  Just look at the nonsense she’s gotten herself into now.”  Or, conversely, “That Mary Tyler Mom.  What a self-righteous bitch.”  I know where I stand, and it’s all good.  And full disclosure, it even happens within my own family, except they don’t call me Mary Tyler Mom.  Ahem . . .

I took a completely unscientific poll on my Facebook page last night, asking my readers what comes to mind with the term “mommy blogger.”  Here is a sampling of the negative connotations of the term offered by my readers.  Of my mommy blog.  Hold on, folks, this gets a little rough:

  • overdone
  • tired
  • ranting
  • self-absorbed
  • irritating
  • eye roll, please
  • depressing
  • messy
  • unnecessary
  • annoying/annoyed
  • marginalized
  • wannabe
  • angry
  • trouble
  • ick/ugh/blech
  • dumpy
  • bored/boring
  • nag
  • no real sense of the world
  • vulgar
  • pretentious
  • disconnected

Honestly, I am a bit confused as to why “mommy blogger” has become such a divisive term.  I mean, I get it, “mommy” is a diminutive word and certainly the work of moms is devalued in our culture, as is parenting in general.  What I don’t get is why we moms not only allow that to continue, but buy into it hook, line, and sinker.  Think about it.  Is there anything MORE POWERFUL than a mom?  We are the bomb, my friends, and need to embrace that.  To diminish something so central to being a woman, motherhood, is nothing more that veiled misogyny.

Now that I’m up on my high horse (“Hello, down there!” she typed, waving frantically), I want to make another argument that proves my point.  Think about some of the worst things you can call a man.  Sissy, bitch and douchebag come to mind, don’t they?  Those are all things associated with being a woman, right?  “You run like a girl/You throw like a girl/You (insert verb of your choice here) like a girl.”  These are taunts our boys hear frequently, some probably from the adults who surround them.  That shit ain’t cool.

And let’s talk about douchebag for a moment, shall we?  I am having a fond flashback to a Facebook argument I got caught up in a few months ago.  Basically, I made the point, to a virtual room full of men, that I refused to use that word as an insult, as who it was truly insulting was women.  A literal douchebag is a device most commonly associated with rinsing out and cleaning the vagina.  THE VAGINA, my friends.  And please, don’t even get me started on the premise that our vaginas are dirty and require cleansing in the first place.  That is a whole ‘nother post.

I don’t choose to insult the men in my life by referring to them as a device used to clean out a vagina, as if anything associated with the vagina would be the worst possible thing imaginable you could call a man.  Nope.  I’m not gonna do it.  Especially when asshole works so well and is positively democratic.

The point, my friends, is straight out of one of my women’s studies courses from 1990.  Feminism 101, if you will, and why yes, I am a feminist.  Our culture universally and systematically devalues the contributions women make.  I could go on a litany of ways in which women are devalued and persecuted, but I don’t feel like it.  Instead, I will make one more point that I was first introduced to as a young woman of 20.

The things that are most closely associated with womanhood, and mind you, I do not mean to start a gender war here, as I know not all women are the same, but those things most closely associated with womanhood — empathy, caring, nurturing, compassion, understanding, connection — these are the things that are devalued in our culture.  The helping professions for one, capitalize on these traits.  I am trained as a clinical social worker.  I figured that I was already all of those things and people seemed to seek me out for those things, so I may as well make a profession of it.  And I did.  Just didn’t make any scratch.  Emotions are seen as weak; vulnerability is not an asset, it is a detriment in many cases.

My wish is that mommy bloggers would turn that mother out.  Re-claim the term “mommy blogger” as an asset — a powerful attribute that suggests great strength.  As women, we have sought to do this with the term “bitch,” right?  It is common now to use that as a term of respect.  Do the same for mom, mommy, mother.  Own your power, whatever that may be.  Be proud of who you are in the world and what you contribute.

Just as I shared a list of negative connotations for mommy blogger, let me share a list of the positive connotations that both surprised and gave me hope:

  • honest
  • connection
  • humorous/funny/hilarious/hi-fucking-larious
  • passionate
  • sassy
  • informative
  • enlightening
  • intelligent/smart/brilliant
  • comrade
  • wise
  • lucky
  • ambitious
  • helpful
  • clever
  • articulate
  • truth tellers
  • inspirational
  • organized
  • confident
  • courageous
  • proud
  • free
  • invested
  • supportive
  • hard worker
  • fan-freaking-tastic
  • daring
  • thinkers
  • writers
  • badassmotherfuckers

See now?  I recognize myself much more in this second list, as well as the cadre of mommy bloggers I read.  We are, so many of us, badassmotherfuckers.  We are courageous, and daring, and inspirational and honest and ambitious, and writers and thinkers.  We are all those things.

So, yeah, my name is Mary Tyler Mom and I am a badassmotherfucking mommy blogger.  What of it?

Oh, and for the love of God, if you like what I write, throw me a bone and vote for me to be a recognized Top 25 Mommy Blogger with Circle of Moms.