A Suburban Mom: Notes from the Asylum - Softcover

O'Brien, Meredith

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9781932279511: A Suburban Mom: Notes from the Asylum

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1932279512 ISBN 13: 9781932279511

Publisher: Wyatt-MacKenzie, 2007

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A glimpse into the mind of a laid-back yet stressed-out, insecure, sleep-starved, TV-obsessed, news-junkie, Generation X parent navigating the labyrinth of modern parenthood with three young children, including a set of twins. From critiquing fashionistas who try to convince the pregnant public to buy maternity thongs and discussing whether at-home moms have sold out their feminist sisters, to tackling topics such as how to have a sex life while three kids are pounding on their parents' locked bedroom door, how to look cool while driving a mini-van (a clue: you can't) and what happens when a toddler eats trash, O'Brien's collection of 76 columns illustrates how parents are living their lives in the real American suburbs, not in the white picket fenced world portrayed in fuzzy, honey-hued greeting card ads.

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About the Author

Meredith O'Brien has worked at a number of newspapers including The Boston Herald and The Republican (Springfield, MA). A co-author of The Buying of the President with the Center for Public Integrity, a Washington, D.C.-based investigative reporting group, Meredith has written a number of in-depth studies most recently an examination of the 2004 presidential nominating conventions. A former adjunct faculty member in the University of Massachusetts Journalism Program, O'Brien has written more than a dozen magazine articles about the media.
In the world of parenting journalism, O'Brien was a contributing writer to the Boston area publication, Parents & Kids, for which she sat on the editorial advisory board. Her work has appeared in a number of parenting periodicals and web sites including: Chicago Parent, DallasChild, Baby Years Magazine, FamilyMan.com and BabyZone.com.
She was the parenting blogger for the Boston Herald's web site -- where she wrote the Boston Mommy Blog, formerly wrote the ClubMom's Parenting Pop Culture: TV, Movies, Motherhood and Apple Pie blog, and was a contributing writer to DotMoms.com, a web site which features writing about motherhood that was listed as one of Time Magazine's top 50 coolest web sites and was featured in Parenting Magazine.

Excerpt. � Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Honest. Flawed. Oftentimes idiotic. Sleep-deprived. Messy.

That's how I'd describe the real story of suburban parenthood, not the fuzzy greeting card vision of motherhood filled with smiling babies and rainbow days that we see in diaper advertisements. Not the here's-the-moral-of-the-story, simplistic TV sitcoms with canned laughter where Type-A moms know best and the well meaning dads are dunderheads. Not the adoringly gazing moms who peek out from the pages of parenting magazines with pitch- perfect craft projects to complete in the cozy confines of a well organized kitchen, right next to the freshly picked flowers - from a home garden no less - in an unsmeared glass vase.

Parenting circa now, in the 21st century American suburbs, can be wonderful and stressful, in a comedic, over-caffeinated kind of way. And, in reality, it doesn't look the way it does in parenting periodicals.

When I first became a parent, I was sucked into the parenting culture, a culture that fed me all the wrong messages about motherhood. As I struggled to care for my premature boy-girl twins, I got it into my head that my life parenting infants was supposed to resemble that of some wryly humorous script carved out by Hollywood writers on a back lot somewhere in Fantasyland. I thought I had to be a model mom who at least appeared as though she had it all together. I thought that if my kids weren't a close facsimile of the best that they could be, then I had failed. I thought that only if I routinely got up early, exercised, showered, dolled myself up, kept my house clean, made my own organic baby food, made wholesome meals, organized great kids' play dates and birthday parties, kept my children away from TV and only did educational activities with my cherished offspring with what remained of my waking hours, then I'd be considered a good mom.

Sadly, my life didn't adhere to the script I'd created in my head after having submerged myself in women's and parenting magazines. I desperately needed sleep for so very much of my first parenting years and was incredibly cranky through a lot of them. My daughter ate a half dozen diaper wipes when she was a baby, but, ironically, not the homemade baby food I slaved over. My youngest son ate cat vomit when he was a toddler while I was busy making a meal he too wouldn't eat. He was the child who wouldn't sleep through the night until he was nearly 3 years old despite trying literally everything to try to accomplish that feat. The second time I gave birth, the blessed event nearly occurred in the parking lot of the wrong hospital (i.e. - not the one in which I planned to labor) despite the birth plan I'd concocted after reading articles urging pregnant moms to come up with one and bring along the necessary supplies, like the all-important hard candies and back massager. My post-baby sex life . . . well, despite all those keep-the-home-fires-burning articles I read, I found that trying to actually find a time when my husband and I were simultaneously awake, in the mood and ALONE was not quite as simple as the magazines made it out to be.

"Is something wrong with me?" I wondered. "Am I just an atrocious maternal specimen?"

My response to the disparity between my real life and the faux lives portrayed in the glossy pages was to chronicle modern parenting in the American suburbs in essays, pointing out how and where my life differed from the life I thought I was supposed to be experiencing with my kids. This book contains the fruits of that effort, 76 essays dating back to my early days of parenting my twins, who were born in 1998, through today when those twins are in grade school and the youngest is going to kindergarten. These columns - most of which were previously published in a Boston parenting publication Parents & Kids and posted on the web sites BabyZone.com and FamilyMan.com -- trace the evolution of my life as a laid-back yet stressed-out, insecure, sleep-starved, TV-obsessed, news-junkie, Generation X parent navigating the labyrinth of modern parenthood.

"The Suburban Mom" essays are organized in five categories: Motherhood, etc.; Pregnancy, Birth & Other Bloody Things; Growing Pains; On the Home Front, and Random Ramblings. Topics run the gamut from social criticism (like the one on fashionistas trying to convince the pregnant public to buy maternity thongs and low-rise maternity jeans despite the teeny tiny inconvenient fact that pregnant women get hemorrhoids, and the piece on whether at-home moms have sold out their feminist sisters by not taking paying gigs), to commentary on the inane (like the essay on figuring out how to have that aforementioned sex life while three kids pound on the outside of a locked bedroom door, and the column about coping with school drop-off and pick-up car line rage).

This warts-and-all portrait of mommydom is for all the parents -- and for those to whom they are related -- who feel as though they're the only ones who routinely forget that it's school picture day and inadvertently send their kids to school with toothpaste and jelly stained shirts, who fret over their daughter's growing interest in transforming herself from an innocent girl to a pop tart who looks like a streetwalker, and who aren't sure if the nicknames they give their kids (like "The Thug") will become self-fulfilling prophesies. Or it's just for those who just need a good laugh.

And, while reading this, you can laugh.

I won't mind.

It's at my expense after all.

It's okay.

I can take it.

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