Writing Motherhood

There is a new columnist in our local paper who is writing the weekly parenting article. You know the one where she tells all the crazy cute little things that her kids do that drive her crazy. It is so belittling to women.
The last chick that wrote it wasn't half bad. I would read her stuff and usually relate. She had that same snide commentary about life with kids that I seem to have. She had the same problems with living in this town that I did, trying to deal with the traffic and the beaurocracy and the tourists.
But this new one....she is a little lack lustre. Of course I don't know her personally so I will judge her relentlessly. We don't want to hear a story about how your kid pooped in the back yard and you didn't yell at him. That's not real parenting. We don't want to hear how you are so much better that the rest of us, we want to hear how you're just like us. You yell and you feed them peanut butter crackers for dinner, you make them wear dirty socks to school often becuase you hate to do laundry and you hate even more trying to pair the various sizes and colors of socks for 5 different people in your household. That's what we want to hear. She seems like the perfect little minivan driving, ballet and soccer mom. She reads recipe books and she is a SAHM (the acronym that makes stay at home moms feel special). She reads parenting magazines AND books. She attends every field trip and she hates the idea of preschool since she just cannot stand to be seperated from her precious children for even 3 hours a day. She's the woman who is utterly stunned when her husband dies and leaves no insurance and she has no marketable job skills and has to send a video into Extreme Home Makeover to try and save her family from herself. Ughhh
We all have our dirty little secrets about motherhood and we want to hear those from other mothers who are trying desperatly to keep everything together and have given up the struggle to put on a happy face everyday to look like we are perfect mothers. There is no such thing. We are just being women who just so happen to have kids. It doesn't define us and our world doesn't reolve around them. We are trying to make a difference in this world and we are doing it ourselves right now. We are not cultivating our children to do the work for us when they are older. Our children are not ours for the molding or for the taking. They have their own distinct set of hopes and desires.
I would love to hear from a mother who can do more than just be a mother. Of course I would be perfect. I am a 32 year old mother of 3 who runs 3 businesses. I am an architect and I run my own architectural firm. I have so much to say and no where to say it. There are so many more interesting thing to be said about being a mother than telling the cute cocktail party stories. Maybe I'll start to post them here along with my architectural rantings. It will be an interesting pairing.

Oh and I just bought myself my own little digital camera so that I don't have to lug around the Canon Rebel to get photos on my blog. So soon eveything will be illustrated.