How To Honor Your Mother (Differently)

If imitation is flattery, what is the desire to do things differently?

I want to mother my children differently than my mother raised hers.

Mothers Day: Sadly, Overcommercialized

By Joy Pullmann

I do not like to receive gifts for Mother's Day or Valentine's Day. And don't even think about Sweetheart's Day or whatever else they're calling further additions to the list of "buy crap no one wants because commercials made you feel guilty."

Mother's Day advertisements on my Kindle and email sidebars began a solid three weeks before Mother's Day. It may have been four weeks. Whatever it was, it was indecent. Mother's Day is not even on the A-list of holidays. That, for me, includes Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. And maybe the Fourth of July. Those would be the top two Christian holidays and the top two American holidays. (By the way, President's Day and Labor Day are also stupid.)

Seeing Beauty in Imperfections

 

By Emina Melonic
Illumination; The Magic Lantern

It has been a while since I’ve seen a film as beautiful and poetic as Everlasting Moments (Swedish: Maria Larssons eviga ögonblick, 2008).  I did not know what to expect.  The synopsis said that it was about a woman who is trying to be a photographer at the turn of the 20^th century.  She is facing many obstacles, one of them being her husband who is a drunk and a womanizer.  Given the usual ideological subtext present in cinema, which is artistically nuanced as a billboard on a highway, I am perpetually cautious as a viewer.  But ideology did not overtake this film.

The film centers on Maria Larsson, a wife and mother, who wins a camera in a lottery.  She is the focus of the film but her story is narrated by her daughter Maja.  Maria is struggling to take care of her family and is running into many difficulties, mainly because her husband, Sigfrid, is wasting money on drinking.  Sigfrid is an aggressive drunk, who occasionally beats Maria and the children, and this magnifies Maria’s suffering.

In order pay for the bills, she decides to take the camera she won in a lottery to the local photography studio.  Perhaps she might be able to sell it.  She meets Sebastian Pedersen, a photographer who primarily does portraits.  Instead of buying the camera, he suggests that Maria experience it first before she sells it.  Of course, she finds this frivolous in the midst of her suffering.  But she is at the same time intrigued by the “miracle” of development and printing of film.  

Letter to a Young Woman about Balancing a Writing Career and Kids

By Joy Pullmann

A few days ago, a college freshman emailed me to ask how I manage to work and have kids, and what a regular work day looks like for me, and if I have advice for her now. She also wants to be a writer and mother. Here's my email back to her, edited a little to add clarity and delete a few things that are unique to her situation.

Dear [young lady],
A regular day looks like crazy. :) Like right now I am standing in a New York train with my sleeping 2-month-old hanging off me in a pack. I'm here for work. I have three kids under four, and it would be utterly impossible to work if my husband did not stay at home with us (you can always ship your kids off to daycare, but I thought that would be selfish of me and knew it is also bad for their development). The littlest guy is two months old, and I mostly work around his nap schedule (luckily, the little ones sleep a lot) while my husband wrangles the other two. If I have to take or make a phone call and must not have random whining in the background, my lucky husband wrangles all the kids.

Luckily, writing and editing is very flexible and can be done reasonably at home, which is where I and many writer/editor friends work. Once your baby is about 6 months old, however, you basically either need to go part-time or get childcare, or plan to work evenings and probably weekends also to fill in those breaks during the day when he is now awake and needs attention. And that is only really possible if you are lucky enough to get a baby who sleeps well (hah!).

7QT: Seven Things I Didn't Know About Single Motherhood

Image by Ashleigh W.

By Mary C. Tillotson

While basically all the research shows that kids do best when raised by their own two biological parents who are happily married to each other, many children are raised by single mothers. Politicians and political commentators argue until they’re blue (or red) in the face over how to handle the issue. The left argues for increased contraception and abortion; the right argues for promotion of sexual abstinence.

What neither side is doing is talking to the actual single mothers living in poverty to hear what they have to say.

I recently finished Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage by Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas, professors at Harvard and St. Joseph’s University. The two women spent several years in the poor areas in and around Philadelphia trying to understand why poor women so often raise children without fathers. They interviewed 162 women and condensed their research into a book – which you should read.

Paper Bags and Lipstick

By Rebekah Randolph
A Mad Tea Party

Are human bodies good or bad? Glorious or shameful? Nobody knows anymore, and our culture's confusion leaks into Christian attitudes towards modesty, including how it relates (or doesn't) to a woman's beauty.

Modesty is a thorny topic and believe me, I don't intend to define it; for some useful opinions, you might want to read Simcha and Challies. I am more concerned with the extremes to which we go as we pursue virtue.

On one end you have the prevailing message we know so well. A body is meant to display, to manipulate others with. Work it, girl. One the other end you have paper bags; if we assume that godly people should aspire to the world's exact opposite, we all end up in shapeless sacks. Yet that is not godly either! The Lord loves beauty. I wrote something on that way back when, but you don't have to take my word for it. Just read the dang Bible. Beauty's goodness—even feminine physical beauty, forsooth—pops up everywhere.

I am pretty passionate about this because when I was younger, I somehow came up with the idea that beauty equaled blatant sexuality, so to glorify God with your appearance, you probably shouldn't try to make your body beautiful. That might be an exaggeration (it is) but more or less, that summed up my attitude towards physical attractiveness. Though nobody actually told me that I should look askance at beauty, I inferred it from what I did hear about modesty.

Waiting for the Morning

By Joy Pullmann

I wanted to post this during Advent, when I was thinking it constantly, but I couldn't. During Advent, I was holding a newborn all day and night, and wishing desperately for some sleep. Any sleep. (I would still like more, but six hours a night broken by nursing is better than four broken by hours of fussing.)

Our second son was born December 5, and quickly revealed he would have the same tummy troubles as his two older siblings. This meant hours and hours a day of fussy sleep, where baby sleeps for five minutes in between squirms while mom and dad can't because he's squirming every five minutes. So I spent hours staring bleary-eyed out our bedroom window, holding a wiggly baby and waiting for dawn. I'd repeatedly check the time not to see how long baby had slept but to see how long it was until it was finally day and I didn't have to pretend I might get some sleep any more.

Advent, like Lent before Easter, is a time of sober reflection and preparation. New year resolutions and post-holiday housecleaning faintly resemble these two religious seasons. They are supposed to remind Christians that our eternal home is not this world, and that we await Christ's final return, when suffering will, at last, end.

Boy, did I feel that in my sleep-bereft state. A severe lack of sleep has always made me very melancholy. In college I used to cry every Friday night simply because I was so exhausted by the end of the week. This seems like a good setup for sober reflection, but it was hard to reflect on anything except how much I wanted to lie down.

This rotten experience did, however, reveal to me more about the reality of what it means to wait for a perfect eternity. I typically like this world. I have a good life. We're not poor, hungry, persecuted, or isolated. So why would I look forward to the end of it? Why bother with change when the present isn't that bad?

But when your newborn child is suffering, and so are you, this world gets a lot less attractive. It made me yearn, once again, for suffering to end. Some day, it will.

Image by Jan de Graaf, with no changes.

Fear-free marriage

By Brianna Heldt
Just Showing Up

When my husband and I first began discussing the possibility of further growing our family through international adoption, it was 2005.  Our biological daughter was 15-months-old then, and our life was somehow manageable and flexible enough to consider jumping into the proverbial deep-end of paperwork, social worker visits, and parenting traumatized children.

Going into the process was exciting and hope-filled, but frightening and anxiety-inducing too.  You don’t know what particular challenges lurk silently ahead, nor can you realistically anticipate–as hard as you try, you really, truly can’t–how your family dynamic will change or what the emotional impact will be.

So when we brought our sons to the United States we became parents to three children ages two and under.  Adopting twin boys that were only eight months younger than our daughter was, I suppose, kind of a crazy leap of faith.  But we did it because we had discerned through prayer and discussion and research that it was right for us, and that God was–for whatever reason–calling us to it.  We said yes.

Even in spite of a relatively smooth transition for our sons and daughter, those early months of learning how to do life with three little ones afoot were intense.  There was constant movement, the addressing of countless medical and emotional issues, and mess.  Lots and lots of mess.  Crumbs and laundry and sippy cups and toys and diapers.  My husband and I would collapse on the couch at the end of each day, look over at one another and laugh–laugh!–at how positively tired we were, at how crazy life felt and at how strange we surely looked when we were pushing around a double stroller while also wearing a small child strapped to our chest.

But do you want to know what else we’d talk about in our living room at the end of long, toddler-filled days?  We’d talk about healing.  And progress.  We’d talk about the mystery of love, about how God was miraculously knitting all of our hearts together in a way that transcended biology and personal history.  We’d talk about joy and fulfillment and about how we’d sealed our fate as “that crazy family with all the kids”, which transformed into a public, gasp-worthy spectacle anytime we ventured outside our front door.  We’d talk about our sons’ birth mother, extreme poverty and about how no baby ought to be starving.  We’d recount the really hard things that happened that day–a post-institutionalized little boy, with no muscle tone and a failure-to-thrive diagnosis, having a panicked melt-down upon even the slightest glimpse of food, or my heroic attempts at crossing streets and navigating grocery aisles with three itty bitty kids in tow–and we’d remember the really good things that happened every day, like a sister and her brothers holding sticky, chubby hands, giving hugs, and laughing together.  Wanting to spend every single moment of the day side-by-side.

We were seeing redemption and mercy and the glory of the human family, happening right before our very eyes. 

We would of course go on to have two more biological children in the following years, and then adopt again in 2011, this time two little girls who’d been born with Down syndrome and severe congenital heart defects.  Then we had another baby this past spring.  So we have eight children, and they’re all relatively close in age, and I won’t tell you that our life isn’t messy or busy or occasionally hard.  Because (hello multiple heart surgeries and meal planning and homeschooling) it is.  But I will also tell you that it is GOOD.  It is happy.  It is marked by joy, and ups and downs, like most any life.

And yet I admit that every single time we’ve been given the gift of a child (whether by birth or adoption), I was a little bit afraid.  Afraid that we’d implode, afraid that we’d overextended ourselves beyond repair, afraid that we were certifiably insane–which, you know, maybe we are.  But crazy-town or not, every.single.time. God gave us a sweet little one, do you know what really happened?  Our family was renewed.  Each one of us grew in our capacity to love.  Our family life was strengthened.  Unconditional acceptance abounded.  Our family dynamic changed–for the better.  Sometimes we argue or yell or need a little bit of space, but then, doesn’t everyone?  My children are many, but they are happy.  I am happy.  And we are living proof that you don’t have to be a perfect mother, father or biped of any sort to live a marriage that is open to children.

I suspect that part of why we experience fear in this area is because we sense, on a very deep level, the gravity or weight of having a child–and that is, in many ways, good.  The God-given power of participating in procreation (or the ability to adopt) isn’t something to take lightly or be flippant about.  So in that sense it should be approached with awe, reverence and humility.  But I also think there is the potential for us to miss out on a whole lot of beauty, love and grace when we become crippled by fear, doubt, and the internalized messages of our modern age.  And I’m just as susceptible to that as anyone–I’m generally non-committal and am an imagine-the-worst-case-scenario sort of person.  The fact that I was a 20-year-old bride and am now a mother to eight are all examples of God’s delightful sense of humor.  But what I learned all those years ago, in the exhausting days of having three children ages two-and-under, was that God can do good things with our “yes”, that a marriage can endure and THRIVE in the midst of raising babies, and that large families can flourish in happiness–even in our modern age.  And they are especially needed in our modern age.

So let’s worry less.  Be not afraid.  Families are specially designed for nurturing children and marriage is particularly ordered towards openness to children, either through the miracle of birth or the miracle of adoption.  Shared bedrooms and crowded kitchens and full-to-capacity carloads may no longer represent the typical American family’s landscape, and may indeed necessitate sacrifice and adjustment.  But they also have the special ability to harbor a childhood’s worth of hush-spoken secrets, side-splitting laughter, and shared memories that will last a lifetime.  They potentially shape and form and soften and grow.

Love multiplies, right before your very eyes.

And then one day you and your husband collapse on the couch–years older and hopefully a little bit wiser–and you realize that, in spite of your many children thundering around like elephants in the next room, long past bedtime, playing a game they invented called “stroller tag”?  You really kind of had nothing to fear.

Brianna Heldt is a mother to eight and contributor to Ignitum Today, Catholic Stand, and Catholic Exchange. In addition to her four biological children, she and her husband are also parents to four adopted children from Ethiopia, including two daughters with Down syndrome. When Brianna is not busy blogging or homeschooling, she enjoys spending time with family and friends, reading good books, thrifting, and advocating for orphaned children with medical needs. She lives with her husband and kids in Denver and blogs at Just Showing Up, where this post originally appeared.

Motherly Love

By Anna Dunham
Anna-Bird

This weekend we reached 33 weeks! As we get closer to full-term, thinking about delivery is definitely starting to outweigh thinking about simply being pregnant. And there are a lot of possibilities to consider: I may be able to have our baby without any intervention or surgery. I may need to have a c-section, if the doctor is unable to remove my cerclage. Things may get more complicated if the baby comes especially early. The doctor explained this many months ago, and as a type-A firstborn who likes to know and plan as much as possible, I've appreciated having time to think about the various scenarios. 

One aspect of being pregnant that I've loved is the support I've immediately gotten from the mothers in my life. I feel lucky that this first-hand support has been so positive, especially since as soon as you move from your friend-circle to the internet-circle, support seems to be squashed by competition. I've been struck by the fact that people can in the same breath admit that each baby and situation is unique, and then assert that one method or technique is universally superior. Epidurals, induction, breastfeeding, co-sleeping....it seems like every aspect of parenting is open to criticism and censure. 

Going on TV = Basically Not Worth It

By Joy Pullmann

This afternoon, I was scheduled to go on a TV program to talk about government preschool. I told the producer I couldn't make it to a TV station to record, because my husband is taking a test from 1 to 5 (therefore gone with our only car) and the show window was 2:30 to 3:45. Luckily, we could do the show over Skype, as long as I had a hardline connection.

Pertinent detail: The children nap from 2 to 4. Also pertinent: Our router is located in our unfinished basement, so I had to rig up some makeshift background. I duct-taped a navy sheet to our heater vents.

We're Not Confused, We're Married

My husband and I have sort of a strange relationship. I happen to earn our main income and produce all the babies, but he's not one of those lazy-a** husbands who make their wives do all the big jobs while they sit on the couch watching porn or Simpsons reruns. I'm also not the career woman who spends 80 hours a week in the office while her kids languish with a nanny. We're both sort of a weird mixture of the other, unlike both the traditional and sensible husband-wife relationship where the man is the hunter-gatherer and the woman the homemaker, and the modern relationship where everyone works while outsourcing the kids to strangers.

My husband is not androgynous or effeminate. He's spent the past two weeks jackhammering and digging out our hideous concrete patio to make way for what I hope will be a nice new brick one. He handles all the home repairs, car maintenance, and financial matters (thank goodness). I'm also not very manly. I'm not the Cinderalla-Barbie-princess sort of girl, but I crochet, and bake bread, and squee at mice. He's also more stern with the children, and I'm a mushball. 

But my husband also does almost all of our grocery shopping and meal creation. I used to, but I got busy and tired being pregnant all the time, so he took it over.

Want More Babies? Stop Needlessly Terrifying Pregnant Women

By Carrie Lukas
Culture of Alarmism

Western democracies face a growing problem. No, it's not the ballooning budget deficits, swelling entitlement programs, or expanding ranks of the permanently unemployed. This time the problem is what's not growing: Too few women are having babies to sustain the population.

European countries have long posted fertility rates far below 2.1 births per woman, the level required to replace the population absent immigration. The United Kingdom and France have relatively healthy rates of around 2 births per woman, but Germany, Italy, Spain, Greece, Hungary, Poland, and Austria all have fewer than 1.5 births per woman. The United States had been an exception in the Western world, but the fertility rate recently dipped to 1.9 births per woman.

Low fertility has enormous economic implications. Too few babies today means too few workers and taxpayers tomorrow, and a stagnant economy. World leaders know this, so have tried a range of policies, from tax breaks and cash payments to subsidized parental leave and childcare programs, to encourage procreation. Such efforts have had modest, inconsistent impacts.

Here's one idea that Western democracies ought to consider and it won't take a dime from their strained government budgets: Try toning down the alarmism heaped on expectant parents to make pregnancy and parenting more appealing. Sadly, too much of society seeks to scare would-be parents into believing that danger lurks around every corner for any child they foolishly bring into this toxic world.

Musings of a Facebook Expat

By Laura Christine
This Felicitous Life

I deactivated my Facebook account two years ago.  At first, the thought of getting off Facebook was terrifying.  How could I stand being so disconnected from everyone?  I hate feeling out of the loop.

But I knew Facebook was feeding too many of my baser instincts to judge, to compare myself to others, to pry into personal details that are none of my business.  Worst of all, I was not fully appreciating my daughters’ sweet, fleeting childhood moments.  Instead I was engrossing myself in the lives of people whom I did not care much about.  How does Facebook do that to us?

I really don't need to know everything going on in the lives of hundreds of people I barely know.  It’s nice that a person I went to school with but haven’t talked to in ten years just had a baby.  I’m misprioritizing, however, if I spend time reading about that instead of loving on my own babies, or instead of bringing a meal to a new mom who lives down the street.

Deactivating my account has been so freeing.  I used to know a lot about people.  Now I focus more on knowing people.  People are my vocation right now—primarily my husband and children but also my extended family and close friends.

A Community Is Better than Experts

By Joy Pullmann

My three-year-old son learned a new word this week: Proud. I told him for the first time I was proud of him when he learned to ditch his diapers, all in three days. I'm not sure he understands what the word means--it's an abstract concept, after all, which is why he hasn't heard it before--but it was the best way I could think to express my approval.

My husband actually changes most of the diapers in this house, and makes most of the meals (we havesome role reversal going on because I'm currently the full-time breadwinner), so I wasn't as much relieved to get out of a big chore of mine as tickled pink my little boy managed to figure this out so fast. I mean, he went from peeing in his pants without thinking about it to marching himself to the bathroom at the right impulse, pulling pants down and up himself, doing his business, and cleaning up afterward. That was a lot to learn in six hours. But we haven't had an accident in two days (fingers crossed), and there were a few unintentional ones the two days before that.

Combating forced abortion and gendercide in China

By Mary C. Tillotson

Reggie Littlejohn, Women's Rights Without Frontiers

Today is the 33rd anniversary of China's one-child policy, which has been devastating for Chinese women and girls. I just got off the phone with Reggie Littlejohn, founder and president of Women's Rights Without Frontiers, an organization dedicated to stopping forced abortions and gendercide in China. Reggie has testified with governments around the world, and her organization is running the Save a Girl Campaign, helping families on the grassroots level.

I'm going to let Reggie take it from here.

Tell me about the one-child policy in China.

Reggie: Some in the Chinese Communist Party want you to believe it's entirely voluntary. That is not true. Women are forcibly aborted up to the ninth month of pregnancy, and also forcibly sterilized. Some of these forced abortions are so violent that the women themselves die with their full-term babies.

The coercion gives rise to gendercide. Because of the coercive low birth limit, most families want to make sure they have a boy. Sex selective abortion is practiced, and up to 200 million women are missing in the world today due to sex-selective abortion. There are 37 million more men than women living in China.

What that gender imbalance is doing is it's driving human trafficking and sexual slavery, not only in China but in the surrounding countries as well.

Why do they have a preference for boys?

Reggie: Preference for boys is something that's centuries or possibly millennia old. It's prominent in Asia, but especially in China and India.

In both Indian culture and Chinese culture, when a couple gets married, the girl goes over to the boy's family, and the young woman and young man together support the young man's parents in their old age. If you give birth to a son, you know that when he marries, you will be gaining a daughter-in-law, so you're getting an addition to your family, whereas if you give birth to a daughter, you're not getting a son-in-law, you're losing your daughter also.

If you can only have one kid and it's a girl, you don't have anybody to support you in your old age. [Parents often have to choose between] sex-selective abortion or facing poverty in old age.

What is Women's Rights Without Frontiers doing about it?

Reggie met Pope Francis last week.

Reggie: We are doing two things. Number one, we've been called the leading voice in the world to expose and oppose forced abortions in China - forced abortion, gendercide, and sexual slavery in China. We gather documentation and go around and sound the alarm all over the world about what's going on in China.

Most people understand China has a one-child policy. They don't understand the brutality of the way it's enforced.

We gather documentation from China about forced abortion, forced sterilization, human trafficking, murder, all these things that are committed in connection with the one-child policy, and we testify.

We have credibility and a voice in informing government bodies about the truth about what's going on in China, concerning the one-child policy.

Reggie has testified six times at the United States Congress and three times at the European Parliament; she's also testified to the British, Irish, and Canadian Parliaments. She's briefed White House officials, the U.S. Department of State, the United Nations, and the Vatican. She's also spoken multiple times at the United Nations Commission on the Status of women, an annual convention in New York; the commission made a statement condemning forced abortion, forced sterilization, and forced contraception.

The other thing we do, we have a Save a Girl campaign.

Tell me about the Save a Girl Campaign.

Reggie: We've got workers on the ground in China who identify women who are pregnant with girls who are planning to have an abortion, or who have just given birth to a girl and are planning to abandon her. They say, 'Please don't abort or abandon your baby because she's a girl. We'll give you a monthly stipend for a year to help support this girl.'

I understand, from my network, we have a 95 percent success rate. We're saving lives in China.

We also help women who are fleeing forced abortion. We are stopping gendercide in China one baby girl at a time.

The Save a Girl Campaign was launched last year on October 11, the International Day of the Girl Child.

What can regular people do to help?

Reggie: If people want to do something to help these girls, we have petitions to stop forced abortion, and they can also donate toward the Save a Girl Campaign. It's amazing how little it takes to save a life in China.

So much of our effort has to do with getting the word out, and people help get the word out by liking the article you write, posting it on Facebook, tweeting it - that's huge for us. It's the only way we can turn political opinion to understand what's going on and oppose the violence against women.

People are listening to us, listening to our message.

I Like Babies, But Not Pregnancy

When I was pregnant with my first child, I felt horrifically guilty for being so upset I was pregnant. And there was room for repentance there, as Christians believe children are a great blessing, and that God has the right to give you one when He wants (since he's the only one who can put a soul in a being anyway). I did not want a child then, and I really wished I could end his life. That was wrong, and evil.

But there's another aspect to not liking pregnancy that I think is not so much evil as human. Pregnancy is difficult, and annoying. It just is. And no one gains by lying about that. Right now I'm near month seven for baby three, and I do not look attractive in just about anything I wear. I look rotund because I am rotund. It's frustrating to be a 26-year-old young woman who is used to being skinny but really can't possibly look decent no matter how much makeup I apply, especially when my job involves lots of public presentations and interviews in which it is quite helpful to look at least not-hideous. As I have grown older and shared pregnancies with friends and been able to talk to more women about it, I have learned something that has made me feel a lot better: Lots of women don't like being pregnant, and lots of women are annoyed when we get pregnant, and we typically just get over it (right about when the baby stops being a bloodsucker and becomes a milksucker, and you can kiss his squashy little face and ditch the fat pants).

Privacy for Mom Bloggers

By Laura Christine

This Felicitous Life

In the blogging world, writers maintain widely varying levels of privacy.  Some bloggers write anonymously, posting no pictures or other identifying information.  Others reveal their and their children’s full names, birth dates, pictures and locations. 

Privacy is an especially important topic for those of us “mommy bloggers” who post about our families’ day-to-day lives.  Blogging implicates not only our own but also our children’s privacy and security.  I don’t claim to be an authority on what others should or should not publish.  However, I do want to share three issues that I think all bloggers should consider:

Three Things A Mama Doesn’t Need

By Megan Twomey
Becoming Mama Twomey

In movies about having babies, there is usually an obligatory scene exploring the worries of the future daddy. The sweating future father might pour out his soul to his best friend or maybe even to his glowing pregnant wife (who is, of course, smiling with preternatural maternal understanding), and says something like:  “What did I get myself into? I’m not ready for this.” In real life, he’s not the only one with those feelings. Having children can be a scary thing, and women are not often allowed to admit that they are worried too. 

I want to tell you, fellow women, future and current mothers, that it’s okay to be worried. I am a mother of two and, I’m not going to lie to you, I’m often terrified. Human souls weigh in the balance of this job. It’s worth a little worry. 

If you are thinking, “Gee, thanks, constant fear is a lot to look forward to,” then I ask you to hear me out. There’s going to be a lot of worries in your future if you become a parent, but there’s probably less than you think. Right now, I want to tell you what NOT to worry about. Things I worried about, but shouldn't have. 

Domestic by Choice

By Julie Baldwin

Yesterday, I set aside 30 minutes to write up a chore list for our townhouse. I had previously scoured Pintrest for hours, looking for one that would give me an idea of even how to go about setting up a chore list. And yet, nothing compared with my very own list that encapsulated our very own cleaning needs.

My first kitchen, on the even of destruction

When I lived with my family, my parents split up the house into sections. Between six kids, we could usually keep it tolerable. When I lived by myself, the apartment was so tiny that anything out of place would cause a cleaning frenzy to ensue. Now, I live with my husband and I waddle around at 33 weeks pregnant, cleaning sporadically because I forget what I was doing once I leave the room to put something away. Not always, but it can certainly feel that way. I needed a list, and I'm a happier lady today to have it.

Are women born domestic? Or do they have domesticity thrust upon them? I used to think I wasn't domestic, because people told me so. In a similar thread, I thought my mom wasn't domestic either. And so the quote from Albert Einstein now floats through my head: "Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid." The same with domesticity.

Not a War on Women, but a War on Mothers

By Joy Pullmann

An extremely well-spoken coalition of women descended on the U.S. Capitol Thursday to make some incisive statements. The contraceptive mandate that forces businesses and health insurers to pay for every woman's contraception and sterilization choices was the reason they showed up, but their comments touched on other things that matter to women, as well. For one (from World Magazine's coverage of the event):

“There’s no war on women, there’s a war on mothers,” said Washington attorney Cynthia Wood in fiery remarks that sparked cheers from the crowd.

And

“I’m tired of our government making it very difficult to stand up for the things that are good and true,” said Mary Ellen Barringer, a consultant for non-profit groups from Maryland. “I can’t send my son on a field trip without filling out all kinds of paperwork, yet teens have access to products and services that lead to all kinds of risky behavior—with no parental consent.”