Mamaphonic - Non-Fiction

Working Together To Help The Kids of Your Community - Feedback, Please

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 13:06:40 -0700

Working Together To Help The Kids of Your Community

My colleague, a bitter old juvenile probation officer with whom I attended many, many meetings revolving around services for the youth of our community, liked to tease me. He called me a pinko, commie social worker and tended to dismiss much of what I said on the basis of my liberal leanings and my Master’s Degree in Social Work. Eventually, though, he had no choice but to realize that we were actually on the same side most of the time. He expressed some puzzlement over this.

Illness: Where the Caring Gap Meets The Concrete (feedback, please!)

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 12:32:17 -0700

Where the Caring Gap Meets The Concrete

“Oh, my God,” I said, looking at her finger. My daughter’s finger had a small abscess on its side, along the nail bed, red and angry. I well knew how quickly a skin infection on the finger could become serious, having a grandmother who recently had to be hospitalized for one that was ignored. After a couple of days of triple antibiotic ointment treatments did nothing to improve the infection, I took her to the doctor for some oral antibiotics to get it cleared up. My husband thought I was over-reacting, but the pediatrician took one look at it and prescribed the big-gun drugs with no waffling. This, I thought to myself for the first time, is the sort of thing that could kill a motherless child. Even a loved and well-cared for one, I thought. It would be easy to miss…I almost missed it myself, surely had missed it for days of brewing. My daughter was eight years old, long past the days when I was the High Priestess of Her Body, aware of the consistency of every stool and regularly seeing every part of her as I washed and cared for her. I rarely saw her unclothed anymore and never thought to examine her fingers. I was pregnant and distracted, as well. I might have missed it entirely, but I didn’t. Anyone else would have, though. Had a loving father or grandparent been raising her, I thought, it just probably would not have been seen…not until it was much worse. It took a mother to notice such things.

Baby Moon again - Red Moon - feedback, Please

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 09:19:23 -0700

Red Moon

I am on my maternity leave and am never separated from the baby.

I breast feed exclusively and often.

I do not give artificial nipples, although I tried to give a pacifier to help with car screaming. She wouldn’t take it, though.

I sleep with the baby and night-nurse.

I do everything that is supposed to delay ovulation … everything.

Baby Moon is back - Vagabond Moon - feedback, please

Sun, 08 Jun 2008 13:09:26 -0700

Okay - remember my Baby Moon book about maternity leave? I posted recently that I had found my lost notebook with my old notes for it that I didn't really need but that I just had wanted and been unmotivated without. I am back in the saddle! Here is the next essay! Hard to go back in time, like this, but I am trying! Most of this essay was written over a year ago. Feedback, please.

Vagabond Moon

Boys To Men - Feedback, Please

Sat, 31 May 2008 18:48:42 -0700

Boys To Men

Far too many nights find me in line at H-E-B for an item forgotten on our theoretically weekly grocery-shopping trip. On this night, I stood in line behind two friendly-seeming boys as I waited my turn to pay. I definitely considered the young men to be boys. Having tipped over into the latter half of my thirties, I know that people look younger to me than they really are, so the boys could have been high school age or a little older, even. Sixteen or twenty, though, they were still boys as far as I was concerned, clothed in the dangerous make-believe that the gang lifestyle is a fashion statement, just like the twelve-year-olds I teach at school. These kids were not well dressed, so their affiliation did not appear to involve any drug dealing, which was good. There was no bling – just the red pants and the shoes, edged with enough of the same color to make their point – the colors on the shoes are always a give-away. Also, the hats, placed so carefully – there is a whole language to head wear on the streets these days. I’ve learned the language and markers, but I also know that kids are just kids, no matter how they live, full of the same complexities as everyone else. These kids were buying several jars of baby food.

Bus Brats - Feedback, Please

Sat, 12 Apr 2008 21:22:22 -0700

Bus Brats

“Your daughter’s on the phone. Her bus didn’t pick her up,” the school secretary told me on the phone in my classroom. She couldn’t transfer my daughter to me on that phone, as the classroom phones only worked inside the building, not out, and I couldn’t call my daughter on my cell because it didn’t get service inside the building, either. After a few flustered seconds for me, she said, “I’ll get Phil to come watch your class. Come take it in my office.”

Sex-Positive Parenting

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 18:41:16 -0700

I haven't been posting my monthly columns lately because they haven't been very literary and I usually finish them right around when I need to get them in. We aren't getting much writing, up, though, so here's this month's attempt (it also includes a textbox with recommended sex education books for kids) - what do you think?

Sex-Positive Parenting

Ah, spring. Spring is the season when the sharp green blades of tulips and other burgeoning bulbs thrust their way up through the dark soil and open. It is the season of tender, budding flowers and buzzing bees, of songbirds, eggs and bunnies and other thinly veiled symbols of fertility.

Raising Eco-Terrorists - Feedback, please

Sun, 14 Oct 2007 11:31:54 -0700

Raising Eco-Terrorists and Other Environmental Concerns of Parenting

So, Al Gore and the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have won the Nobel Peace Prize for their work on global warming. I’m glad someone is working on it. I often find myself wondering if I can get my bright daughters to take up careers in…meteorology? Environmental engineering? It’s hard to tell what sort of fields will even exist in a few years, but I know that we parents have a responsibility to get this younger generation thinking about how to use their minds in the service of humanity’s greatest challenges. It is pretty clear to me that environmental crises and the human crises they create will be first among those challenges, but it is less clear what we, as parents, should be doing.

Writing Motherhood: Mama Zines And Mommy Bloggers

Fri, 31 Aug 2007 16:43:23 -0700

This is my next submission to the local alt. monthly I'm writing for. It includes a sidebar of mama zines and a sidebar of mommy blogs. Feedback appreciated! I am usually way too long-winded and enamored of complex sentence structures for newspaper-writing and have to do many condense-and-simplify edits but I think I did much better here.

Writing Motherhood:
Mama Zines And Mommy Bloggers

no title

Mon, 27 Aug 2007 13:59:33 -0700

The summer monsoon taints the blue sky with it's black and grey. The baby momentarily naps while I try to finish a sentance. Nothing is complete the story never finished; only incomplete paragraphs on a half blank page. I step outside to smell the rain. I sneak a cigarette even though I quit a year ago. My mind races creating thoughts, phrases, endings. I wonder how I got here. Here in this place where I am now a mother franticaly trying to get it all down before my baby wakes up.

Vagabond Moon - feedback appreciated

Fri, 06 Jul 2007 11:34:34 -0700

The next Baby Moon essay. I really thought this one would be longer. Probably would have if I hadn't waited so damn long to write it - what do you think?

Vagabond Moon

The Cave Baby needed constant motion and visual variety. I got really stir-crazy being cooped up at home. Thus began my maternity leave journeys…my wanderings and explorations into the shops and restaurants and libraries of Corpus Christi. These were the voyages of a restless mama and her newborn babe, and usually the newborn babe’s sister, too. Stimulation and comfort, good food and clean places to nurse and change diapers and pee were our primary missions. Endless were our walks and drives and sit-in-strange-places-to-nurses…we became travelers and urban anthropologists of a sort in the months of my maternity leave, driven to this vocation by our separate needs to get out of the house, a wanderlust mainly unhampered by any real need to go anywhere specific.

Socially conscious Summer Reading for Kids - feedback, por favor?

Wed, 04 Jul 2007 13:10:52 -0700

Here's my next submission to the local alt. monthly...

Socially Conscious Summer Reading for Kids

Summer time at our house is family time, a time when we all get to spend more time together having fun at the beach, on road trips and just relaxing. It is also library time, though! We are big library people all year long, but the Texas Summer Reading Club means that the libraries have more fun, free things for kids to do than ever, so we go to the library even more. Also, even though summer provides a nice break from school, reading is still as important as always. Kids can regress academically if they do not read during the summer and, well, everyone needs to learn new things everyday.

Angels Unawares Piece picked up

Mon, 25 Jun 2007 20:53:05 -0700

My Angels Unawares article is being picked up by a local alternative monthly that may start using my stuff regularly.

Six Weeks Moon (feedback appreciated)

Tue, 02 Jan 2007 13:29:11 -0800

Six Weeks Moon

Of course, the unspeakably long flow of blood that I had been experiencing stopped the day before my six weeks post-partum check-up, as it would be necessary for my body to pretend to the midwife that I was just crazy to be mildly concerned that the bleeding took so damn long to stop. For this appointment, Tom was back at work and it was just Mimosa, the baby and I going in to make sure that everything had healed up nicely.

Job Moon (feedback appreciated)

Sun, 31 Dec 2006 19:17:47 -0800

Remember Baby Moon, my book-in-progress of maternity leave essays? Well, having gone so long without working on it cannot improve its quality and I need to get back on the ball...the baby is two and a half and I am forgetting stuff! SO...here is the next installment - Job Moon! Feedback appreciated, por favor!

Job Moon

The very first person who came to visit me at my house after Marigold was born, was the employee who was covering for me at work while I was on maternity leave. I had worked with her for years, but she had never been to my house before. She brought presents for the baby and Mimosa, and also her pregnant sister to see the baby. She stayed and visited with me for a while as I held court in my nightgown and I was glad to see her. That was only a couple of days after the baby was born. At that time, I was not yet checking e-mails from work or even checking in at all. I gave myself two weeks to be completely oblivious.