Category: Let’s Do Better

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The NRA’s Mom Problem

As a mom who has written about gun legislation and senseless gun violence for almost two years now, I’ve learned a few things about the Internet, human nature, American culture, gun advocates, the NRA, and myself.  I came to write about guns after the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut in December 2012.  That dark day changed me in profound and lasting ways.

Another mother impacted by that day’s events was a gal by the name of Shannon Watts, an Indianapolis mom and former communications executive.  Where I was moved to write about the incidents of December 14, 2012, she was moved to create a grassroots campaign ultimately called Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America.

Some might say that Ms. Watts has been successful because she has created a movement that has drawn a tremendous social media presence. Some might say her success can be measured by aligning herself with former NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s well oiled gun control campaign, Everytown for Gun Safety. Others might suggest that her success can be seen in national chains like Starbucks and Target rethinking their gun policies after feeling the heat from her organization.

I think her success can best be measured by the NRA clearly being afraid of her.

And, yes, I do believe the NRA is afraid of a mother.  One mother.

How else would you explain the takedown piece they published recently in their propaganda publication, America’s 1st Freedom?  Written by Dave Kopel, the article seems to suggest that Ms. Watts is pulling a fast one on America by painting herself as a stay-at-home mom, when in reality she is nothing more than a shill for Bloomberg.  A highly educated, very experienced shill.  A trained strategist, if you will, in mom jeans.  Pffft.

Ignoring the ridiculously sexist graphics that accompanied the article, Kopel does little to move the NRA’s agenda forward with his article. Instead, he is pandering to the same kind of ill informed, misogynistic, far right base that got the Open Carry Texas movement in such hot water earlier this summer.

When faced with women who dare to speak out against gun violence, women who support education around gun safety, women who coordinate campaigns to educate others about common sense gun laws, these gun advocates — most of them men — use gendered tactics, primarily fear and intimidation, to try and silence us (and yes, I count myself among them, having been visited by more than a few online trolls).  Spitting, rape threats, publishing addresses and phone numbers of gun sense advocates who also happen to be moms, are just some of the cowardly tactics used.

The thing is, though, it’s not working.

In my years of being a Cancer Mom and now childhood cancer advocate, I have frequently used the phrase, “Never underestimate a committed mother.”  Shannon Watts is a committed mother.  She is also an advocate, communications professional, intelligent and composed speaker, and force of nature.  Those things, you see, are not mutually exclusive.

While Mr. Kopel seems to suggest in his article that being a stay-at-home mom only involves the cooking and the cleaning and the wiping of noses and bottoms, he fails to grasp the wealth of abilities so many women who opt out of the work force to focus on families hold.  Hell, our First Lady is a prime example of this.

And so am I.

As a professional with a graduate degree, I was thrust into the role of stay-at-home mom with my daughter’s cancer diagnosis in 2007.  Her treatment was too intense and exhaustive in its scope and required a stay-at-home parent.  Truth be told, I was a bit of an employed mom snob before cancer came a callin’, never thinking I could be fulfilled by full-time child care and home maintenance.  And double truth be told, I am still not completely fulfilled by those things.

That’s why I blog.  That’s why I advocate.  That’s why I fundraise for childhood cancer research.  It’s probably why Shannon Watts does what she does, too.

What the NRA fails to grasp is that mothers are allowed to be multi-dimensional.  We are allowed to be competent care providers and homemakers and still hella talented as gun safety advocates or childhood cancer advocates or as whatever the hell we want to be.  Part of what makes mothers so successful as advocates are because we hold those dear children we are raising so close to us — their well being fuels our fires.

When I write about guns, I brace myself for the comments that will follow. I know that those posts will find readers that don’t reflect my typical reader.  I have learned that the comments will be mean and sexist and threatening and relentless.

I don’t care.  And neither, apparently, does Shannon Watts, which is precisely why the NRA has a mom problem.

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How United Airlines Lost My Family’s Business

Author’s Note:  I have never used this blog platform to complain about a consumer experience I have had.  Please know this is not an axe job on United, just a frustrated and worn customer who has had enough. 

It’s never easy to travel these days.  Add two children to the mix and it’s a wee little bit like going to the dentist — it might hurt, but you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do.  At least the dentist gives you Novocain to dull the pain.  United Airlines gives you bupkis.

After a splendiferous, spectacular, amazing family vacation to Northern California, we arrived at San Francisco Airport last Saturday in plenty of time to catch our 4:20 PM flight to Chicago.  Bags were checked, car seat and umbrella stroller carried with us through the terminals.  Our five year old’s flight “distraction pack” was bursting with everything he needed to occupy the almost four hour flight.

We fly fairly regularly with children (2-3 times a year), so know the drill — the secret to easy flights are just packing what you need and keeping it within arm’s reach.  Formula, iPads, books, photo flash cards, snacks, diapers, head phones.  It’s sort of a science and it works for our family.  Knock on wood (or plastic in-flight tables), we’ve never had a serious meltdown on a plane.  Well, I have, but not the kids.

We learned fairly early on that our flight was delayed due to mechanical issues.  No worries.  They would be fixing the plane on site with updates every 30 minutes.  The updates did come every 30 minutes, but grew less encouraging as the time passed.  We heard that the adjacent gate’s flight had been cancelled, also for mechanical reasons, but not to worry, all flyers would be accommodated in a Honolulu hotel until they can catch the next flight to Maui.

Tick tock, tick tock.

It got harder to amuse our five year old at the gate.  There’s only so much to do at an airline gate and as two hours of waiting turned to three, well, yes, it was challenging.  Our little baby, too, who surely would have slept in flight, had way too much to look at and see.  New faces, carpeting, chairs galore.

Having been at the gate four hours at this point, we started to get nervous.  And there was the frequent message from the ticket agent over the loudspeaker, “We have NO NEW INFORMATION.  If you have other questions, you may approach the desk, but if you want to know the status of your flight, we have NO NEW INFORMATION.”

That voice was getting more hostile.

An hour later, at 7:30 PM, they cancelled our 4:20 flight for mechanical reasons.  No other airplane would be found and all passengers were told to approach a customer service desk in another terminal to make other arrangements.  Then the gate agents calmly (and with seeming relief) left the gate.

At this point, you have approximately 100+ passengers trying to make a MAD DASH to the assigned customer service desk.  None of us were welcome at the customer service desk at the end of our terminal.  Nosirree, folks, make your way to the customer service desk in an adjacent terminal.  This is how the line looked when I arrived:

Cattle call at the United Airlines Customer Service Desk
Cattle call at the United Airlines Customer Service Desk

There were four customer service reps.  Three were helping the premier class passengers that had appoximately four people in line.  One sad worker was left to handle the rest of us.  In the 45 minutes I stood in this line, it did not move.  That’s not true, about six passengers just up and left, so yes, it moved, but only by attrition.

Folks get to talking in a situation like this.  It’s a little “us v. them” mentality.  Passengers trade tips.  There was the old man who simply walked to a gate agent and got help without waiting.  There was the bright young man who re-booked using his mobile device and encouraged the rest of us to do the same.  There was the angry mom of teens who was trying to rally a social media campaign against United, #UnitedSucks.

I mainly kept my ears open and texted with my husband who was back at our original gate with the kiddos and luggage.  At this point it was 8:30 PM.  Both kids were well past their bed time.  The line, I’m telling you, had not moved, except it had grown considerably behind me.

I wondered how long it would take to get to the front of that line for our hotel voucher.  Friends outside San Francisco came to our rescue, offering to pick us up immediately and host us for the night.  The gossip going around was that a new flight at 7 AM had been created for two Chicago flights that had been cancelled that afternoon and evening.  Sure enough, we got mobile confirmation of that.  We called an audible and booked it out of there, leaving the airport not certain at all where our baggage might be.  I tried to ask two separate gate agents who both just referred me to the customer service desk I had just abandoned.

There comes a point with kiddos that you learn to just cut your losses.  A family member in the Mission was away for the weekend so we crashed at his place.  It was close and comfortable, but cab fare there and back still ran us over $90.

The next morning we learned just how very lucky we had been.  After returning for our morning flight, we learned from passengers we recognized from the night before that those who had stayed in the customer service line were shuttled to hotels in San Jose, almost a solid hour outside San Fransicso.  They didn’t arrive there until 1 AM and their return shuttle picked them up at 4 AM.

This, United Airlines, is where you really, really lost me.  If a 4:20 PM flight is cancelled at 7:30 PM, how on earth can arrival at a hotel not until 1 o’clock the next morning be justified?  Does it really take FIVE HOURS to work through the customer service cattle call you created?  Yes, apparently, it does.

Now all of this is terribly annoying to passengers, of course, but add a baby to the mix and all bets are off.  Babies need special things like formula and diapers, which we had packed in excess in case of delay, but certainly not for an overnight delay.  Had we been good and obedient little passengers, as we were told, we would have been carted off to San Jose with absolutely no access to drug stores or the formula or diapers our son required, and with only a three hour sleep under us.

No matter how I do the math, it doesn’t add up.

Mechanical things break.  Certainly I want my family to be safe and want those mechanical issues to be addressed and detected on the ground, but while those good folks are doing their jobs, United’s skeletal staff of customer service reps are hemmoraging any good will the passengers might feel towards the airline.

I am a Chicago girl, born and bred.  I have stuck with United Airlines my entire 44 years, wanting to support our local Chicago economy.  No more and not again.

Those 2-3 flights my family takes annually will now be through a different airline.  Those “friendly skies” United touts in its revived marketing campaign touting their return to customer service are not friendly.  Indeed, they are apathetic at best and hostile at worst.  Those friendly skies are overworked and understaffed, leaving employees who don’t give a fig about the customer experience as they look at you blankly with their worn eyes.  They too, you see, have been hanging out at the airport all day.

Huh.  “Fly the apathetic skies,” just doesn’t have a good ring to it.  And “Fly the hostile skies,” well, no thank you.  I will take my family’s business elsewhere.  Know any good airlines with better customer service?  I’m in the market.

Oh!  And did I mention that our 7 AM flight was delayed, too?  Yep!  Mechanical issues!

ADDENDUM:  How did I forget to mention that we had upgraded on this flight just so we could sit together.  Only available seats together when we booked were in Economy+, so we popped for the extra $.  Wouldn’t you know that when we were re-booked automatically, we were put back in economy.  When I brought that to the ticket agent’s attention for the morning flight, he demanded to see proof of having purchased Economy+.  Nothing like taking a customer’s word, especially when your own computer could tell you!

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Michelle Obama on Work-Life Balance and Family Needs

It’s probably no surprise to the folks who read me regularly that I am a fan of our First Lady.  Michelle Obama, who took flak for calling herself America’s Mom-in-Chief several years ago, is a woman and mother I admire and respect in many ways.  Gal’s got it going on, you know what I mean? She can dance with Jimmy Fallon one night, turn around and represent America abroad as an icon, create a garden on the White House lawn, and be honest about the difficulties of achieving the elusive work-life balance so many working women struggle with.

And, you know, those arms.

^^^ Those are the arms I'm talking about, right there. Those are some guns I could support.
^^^ Those are the arms I’m talking about, right there. Those are some guns I could support.

Noodling through Facebook today, I found a link to an interview Ms. Obama did with Robin Roberts at a White House Summit on Working Families. Given that I no longer work outside the home, I had the 30 minutes to actually watch the interview.  Cue the bon bon comments now. Snark aside, I came away with my respect and admiration for Ms. Obama only grown in scope.

She gets it.

Before I had children I was very career driven.  I was going places and saw my trajectory only going up, up, up.  I presented professionally, wrote an occasional article about my field of expertise, and had, I thought, the world by the career stones.  I put off the decision to have kids because, well, I was pretty happy and fulfilled without them.  Then, in an instant, my life changed.

Sitting in front of one of her beloved slot machines in Biloxi, Mississippi, my Mom experienced a cerebral hemorrhage caused by an undiagnosed brain tumor.  That moment would change everything I valued and believed in about myself and my path.  A few months later, after becoming stable enough to fly to Chicago by air ambulance, a surgery, and weeks of hospitals and rehab, my Mom and Dad moved to a small Chicago apartment to be close to the medical team at Northwestern.

I went from staying at the office every night until 7 to skurrying my little tokus out the door the minute the clock struck 4:30.  My priorities shifted in an instant from career to caregiving.  Suddenly, the things that were most important to me were no longer ambition, conferences, mentoring, and advancement, but watching CNN with my Mom, folding sheets, cooking soft foods, and helping my parents through an inordinately difficult time.

For the first time I understood the impossible push/pull the mothers I worked alongside had struggled with.  I no longer felt like the work mattered to me more than them.  I realized how incredibly naive I had been, and unwittingly, what a jerk.

My Mom died eleven months after that bleed in front of the slot machine. My daughter was born just five months after her death.  I feel so grateful that the last lesson my Mom blessed me with was the knowledge that caring for the people I love is the most important work I will ever do. Because of that caregiving, I was a better mother to my daughter, and now my sons.

I also know how ridiculously privileged I have been in my own work-life balance.

With my Mom, I had a job that I could easily leave every day at 4:30. There were no professional obligations that bled into my caregiving time. When my first child was born, I negotiated moving to a part-time position, allowing me four days at home and three in the office.  When that same child was diagnosed with a brain tumor, I simply walked away from work, as there is no balancing the needs of a a critically ill child, in and out of the hospital with surgeries, chemo, ER visits, and neutropenic fevers, with a job outside the home.  I didn’t return to professional work, part-time again, until our surviving child was two.  And when my husband and I opted to adopt, I quit that job knowing that stay-at-home mothers are more attractive to many women looking to place a child for adoption.

Like I said, I have been ridiculously privileged in my work-life balance.

So has Michelle Obama.

What I love about her, though, is that she, too, seems very aware of the privilege she enjoys, despite her own hardships of parenting while working.  In this 30 minute interview with Robin Roberts, Ms. Obama demonstrates a keen awareness of the difficulty of raising children while working outside the home.  She knocks off facts about the high cost of child care, the difficulty of finding quality child care, the differences women who work hourly versus those women who are salaried face in their dual roles of mother and worker, single parenting, and the need to make work-life balance a family issue, not just a women’s issue — one that both fathers and mothers must consider and plan for.

And like I said, she gets it.

Two summers ago there was a huge Internet reaction to Anne-Marie Slaughter’s article in The Atlantic entitled, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All.” Like many with a wee little online platform, I criticized her arguments in a blog post.  What riled me the most about her position was how utterly privileged her concerns were.  There are so many working mothers out there whose struggles are so much more dire than whether or not to create a commuter arrangement for career advancement or if it is detrimental to have the nanny cook dinner rather than yourself.  There are mothers out there who get arrested for having their children sit in a locked car while they interview for the job they so desperately need to pay for food and housing.

While many women of privilege struggle over the idea of work-life balance, many more struggle with the reality of work-life balance.  The consequences of losing a job because they were at the hospital with their sick child.  The need to choose between food or rent.  The peril of leaving children alone, unattended, because that is the lesser of two evils — homelessness being the natural consequence.

Our First Lady encourages all of us, men and women, those of privilege and with access to resources and those choosing between untenable options, to start owning this issue of work-life balance.  She encourages us to make it a family issue instead of a women’s issue.  She encourages us to change the conversation and start speaking up for workers’ rights instead of corporate rights.  She wants workers to bring to the discussion the same pull that politcians feel from monied corporations.

Amen, sister.