Are women unhappier than they were in our mom’s day?
Maureen Dowd sure thinks so; in a recent column, “Blue is the New Black.,” the New York Times columnist cites a few studies, including theGeneral Social Survey, which has tracked Americans’ mood since 1972, all indicating that women are getting gloomier and men are getting happier.
Then she questions if “the feminist revolution end up benefiting men more than women?”
The e-mail came late the other night — I need u to send me a photo of the family. Thanks!!
"Family" meaning him, his brother, his dad and me. Whose idea that was — his or the teacher's, I have no idea. Teachers and schools don't really get divorced families, the need for two sets of paperwork to go to two separate house, etc. And that "family" isn't always Mom, Dad and kids.
There always seems to be one teacher who needs pictures of his or her students’ family; I understood it in elementary school when most young kids are still trying to figure out who’s connected to whom and why — especially since most parents throw them curve balls by calling longtime friends “Aunt” or “Uncle. But in high school?
And there never was a problem back in elementary school, because I was a SAHM and married and I was keeper of photographs, as most mothers are.
But now, I am a full-time working divorced mother, and “family photo” has a different meaning. Our family looks different now. Which family is the teacher talking about?
When I heard about the death of Maria del Carmen Brousada, the 69-year-old single mother who made the news three years ago by becoming the oldest woman in the world to give birth, I was transported back to the summer I turned 8.
My family had gone to visit relatives in Israel. For whatever reason, my parents thought I was too young to join them and my sister, then 11, to Eliat, the southernmost tip, so they left me for a long weekend with those relatives.
The day they left, my relatives — who barely spoke English — did what most relatives would do to entertain a child they couldn’t say much to: we went to the movies. I can’t remember the name of the movie anymore, but I remember the opening scene. There was a house fire that kills a young boy’s parents, and he is left an orphan. That night, I had a nightmare that my parents died. I woke up screaming, and my great-grandmother, in her 90s, came in to soothe me. “Vas ist los, kind?”
Needless to say, she didn’t help much. I wanted my parents!
My friend is finally pregnant after years of the pain — emotionally, physically and financially — of fertility explorations.
Which, of course, makes her an Oprah show — everyone wants to rush in with his or her opinion and story, often bordering on a Stephen King horror novel, about 36 hour labors, last-minute C-sections, lactation woes, lack of sleep, endless feedings …
There’s only one other life event in which people feel so free to divulge and advise, and that’s divorce.
So when I saw her recently — she looked so radiant and happy — I wanted none of that. Instead, I told her what I thought was the key to having a baby: Saving the marriage.
Not that anything great has happened to me personally, but I know five people who are getting married and one is pregnant.
When you get to be middle-aged and you watch your friends and acquaintances get divorces or become empty-nesters as their kids graduate high school, it’s nice to experience the excitement of new love in its various forms.
The most amazing story of all the weddings, however, is the one of my recently retired co-worker, Beth Ashley. At age 83, after two marriages — one that ended in divorce, another that made her a widow many years ago, she is getting married. What’s even more heart-warming is that it’s to a man on whom she had a crush as a child.
It wasn't until I was a middle-aged woman, a mother of two boys and heading toward a divorce that I finally asked my mother whether she had been happy in her marriage.
I certainly had my ideas about that; after all, her marriage was my main model, and I’d been watching her and my dad all my life.
And now that I was about to have my family torn apart, my dad sent me pleading letters — don’t do it! — while my mom mostly worried about me, how I’d survive.
When I told a friend that I was going to — finally — start my own blog, she asked me "Are you a mommy blogger?" (well, after making a snarky remark about entering the 21st century).
I had a visceral reaction, which surprised me. It felt a little like a loaded question, like she was Dirty Harry asking me if I felt lucky — "Well, do you, punk, er Mom?"
Or like she was asking me if I were a good witch or a bad witch a la "the Wizard of Oz."
What is it about "mommy blogger" that give me pause?
I know that on the stress-o-meter, the death of a loved one and divorce are at the top. But if you’re a working parent, having a sick kid or unplanned time off from school is just as stressful. It means someone is going to have to scramble, either changing his or her workday to stay home with the kid, or begging or paying for someone else to do it.
When the swine flu hit recently, it had a lot of parents freaked out, for more reasons than just the flu itself.
Do you go back to the beginning, like Steve Martin so comically did in “The Idiot:” “I was born a poor black child …”
Do you start somewhere in the middle, the wedding, the years of endless diapers, your 40th birthday?
Or do you start now, with the cumulation of experiences, good and bad, that brought you to this place?
Do you focus on the positive — the loves, the marriages, the births, the graduations, the friendships, the promotions — or the darker stuff — deceptions, addictions, mental illness, divorces?
We can tell our story so many different ways, and all, in part, are true.
