Category Archives: Washington Mommy Blogger

Kids Cartoons Make Me Cranky

So clearly based on the headline of today’s post, I let my kids watch TV. Sometimes I wonder if I let them watch too much TV – especially in the morning – but what can you do. A gal needs to survive and I don’t subscribe to mommy guilt. So while I’m confessing to letting my kids watch TV, I feel compelled to confess that I DESPISE some of the cartoons my eldest daughter LOVES.

And sometimes her top favorite show choices concern me.

Why does she love, for example, Max & Ruby? Why, God, why? Is it to punish me for regularly forgetting to go to Church? Is it because she wants to live in a parent-less house and boss around her sibling around the clock? Is it because she feels her grandmother is the only adult presence in her life? Is it because she thinks Ruby is likeable? Because Ruby is not likeable. She’s not even tolerable.

Truth be told: I can’t stand Ruby. She is bossy, preachy, annoying and bratty.

Wait.

Maybe I am like Ruby?

Could it be? Could I be successfully  making my child’s TV watching habits about ME?

I might be.  But writing this post actually prompted me to do a little online digging about the whereabouts of Max & Ruby’s parents and much to my amusement, I learned that there used to be an internet rumor that Max & Ruby’s parents were killed by Farmer McGregor. Have I mentioned how much I love internet rumors??

Anyhow, apparently their parents are deliberately absent because kids are meant to learn the lesson that they can work things out themselves.

Really show creators? Cause that lesson escapes me entirely, so my kid is meant to pick up on this very subtle lesson? We are all too busy being suffocated by Ruby and her attitude….

And then there’s the Berenstain Bears. A classic. A decades-long beloved classic.

I HATE THIS CARTOON.

I don’t mind the books. Really, I don’t. I get that there are valuable lessons woven through these books. But the cartoon – can’t stand it and my daughter actively seeks the cartoons out regularly. Why is Mama Bear the only one with a moral compass? Why is Papa Bear a useless thug of a man-cub? Is this family supposed to be reflective of a real family? Are sister bear’s and brother bear’s names as stupid as some of the latest and worst celebrity baby names? (Bing Bellamy – Kate Hudson’s new son?  Kase – Jewel’s new son?)

Why don’t they have names? I secretly snickered as I read one of the books where one of the kids made fun of Sister’s name – cause why wouldn’t they make fun of it? And why does Mama Bear incessantly need to be teaching each of them how to do the right thing, starting with her idiotic husband? Again, like Ruby, Mama Bear is so preachy and self-righteous. Why can’t she live a little?

So imagine my surprise and delight when I stumbled upon the Facebook Page “Is Mama Bear Bipolar?” I felt a true kindred spirit with the page’s founder upon reading the first sentence of the group description:

“For over six decades, Mama Bear has been killing all the joy within the Bear family in the Berenstain Bears books with her stuck-up, PMSy shenanigans.”
HILARIOUS.  And excellent use of one of my all-time fav words: shenanigans.
So, what kid shows do I like?
 
  • Word Girl. She’s cool and smart.
  • Any celebrity sighting in Sesame Street, especially Will.I.Am’s empowering and sweet song “What I Am” 
  • Phineas and Ferb, of course, because they’re creative, up to no good, and there’s a random platypus (but again, enter a moderately annoying and preachy older sister – what is that about, people?)

Could there be something wrong with me that I loathe shows woven with positive moral lessons and that encourage independence? For more talk of being bossy and offing preachy bunnies, be sure to “Like” the Wired Momma Facebook page.

Juggling Moms – is there a Shangri-La to work and life?

The law does not mandate work-life balance,” nor does it “require companies to ignore and stop valuing ultimate dedication, however unhealthy that may be for family life,” said Judge Preska this summer regarding the Bloomberg discrimination against pregnant and working mothers case.

“There’s no such thing as work-life balance,” Mr. Welch told the Society for Human Resource Management’s Conference a few years ago. “There are work-life choices, and you make them, and they have consequences.”

“Once you get off the escalator, you don’t get back on,” said my investor relations professor in graduate school, to a room filled with 20-something women who were eager to achieve career success and planned on eventually having children. We all looked nervously at each other after hearing what this woman, a wildly successfully IR PR professional for a Fortune 500 company, a Northwestern University graduate school professor and mother, had to say to us so very bluntly. Could she be right, we all worried?

Each of these statements are harsh, unforgiving, blunt and brutal. But are they wrong? Among the world of Type A, educated, successful, intelligent women, in this eternal quest for “balance” and “juggling” – are we creating expectations that just aren’t realistic?

Please tell me that this isn't what I look like handling my life

Balance implies equal parts, right? Juggling, well aside from the fact that creepy circus clowns are the only people who actually juggle, isn’t the idea of juggling meant to be fun? You’ve mastered a sport, you are having fun, you are showing off your talents. Do any of these things sound remotely like what it is like to have a career and a family?

Not in my experience.

Welch might hail from an 80s-era business philosophy of good-old boys and face-time in the office, things that we are slowly chipping away at with time and technology but is his statement actually antiquated and incorrect? I don’t think so. We individually decided to have children knowing that it would change our lives forever and dramatically. And from my almost 6 years in, the biggest consequence is not the lack of sleep, the unwanted lines appearing on my face, the amount of time I’ve spent cleaning hynies or even having to say that word, or wasted hours watching the same “Backyardigans” episode on repeat. The biggest consequence is the fundamental change in my career.

But I don’t view it as a permanent one or that I’ve been victimized in the work place. I actually disagree with my grad school professor that once you get off the escalator you can’t get back on. But it would be naive for me to think I’d get back on in the same spot and continue on the same path. The thing is, if I wanted that, I wouldn’t have stepped off.

Ultimately, we can “mommy track” ourselves and have more time to see our kids after school, take them to playdates, get them to the doctors when they are sick, volunteer in class and all these other things that happen during the business day. What I don’t understand is why this is viewed as a bad thing instead of the reality of choosing to create more time for our kids, to the detriment of our career.

Or, we can remain on the upward trajectory of high-achieving business success, the kind that shatters glass ceilings. And in making that choice, we know that someone else will spend more time raising our children than we are. But that is our decision. I guess what I’m saying is I don’t disagree with Welch and I don’t disagree with Judge Preska. Ask someone without children how they feel about working parents getting promoted above them if the working parent spends fewer hours in the office, travels less, and comes in late more?  Those people don’t care about our reasons because we decided to have the family.

Doesn't she look confident and in charge?

The good news is I think that we don’t need to be making final and ultimate decisions right now. I think the work place has evolved into an arena where you can stay in the game, take on less, but in time, ramp back up. I think that instead of spending our time on this eternal quest for the shangri-la of motherhood, the ultimate in work-life balance, we need to do what we talked about a few weeks ago -see the whole picture – see that there are ebbs and flows to life and own our decisions, be proud of them, and be at peace with the consequences of them. So may of us have periods of work intensity but perhaps it can follow with a period that is more family focused, we can get promoted but then maybe we want to remain at that level for longer than our pre-children selves imagined we would. We can try to stay home, realize we don’t like it, and return to work with more vigor and dedication than we had before but with a peace of mind that we are proud of this decision because we’ve tried the other way. We step off the escalator and let our future selves worry about how and when we get back on, knowing the financial implications this brings to our household.

I firmly believe that what makes you “supermom” is owning your decision, recognizing the consequences and accepting the reality that you can’t give it all to both. “Balance” is for the birds, as my mom would say. Own it, be realistic about the consequences, realize life constantly changes and be proud of it.

What do you think? Is there such thing as work-life balance? Can you be wildly successful at work and also have “enough” time with your kids? Do you think you can step off the elevator and get back on?

Twitterizing the News, Secrets & Brattle

I don’t  know about you but I am in love with this new page that’s appeared recently in the Sunday NYT Magazine…in the first few pages of the magazine. I think of it as the Twitterizing of the News of the week.  They crammed over a dozen snippets of news onto one page along with some excellent visual aides and in one page, I can learn a little bit about a lot. It’s like Twitter for a fancy news magazine. Sure, some wonky types might object to the Twitterization of the news but for a gal like me, who tends to fall asleep about 1.786 pages into anything, no matter how riveting the topic, it’s perfect.

So as I was perusing Sunday’s magazine last night, before falling asleep, I stumbled upon two news blurbs on this page that I LOVED. Frankly,  if the exhaustion from a 3-year-old who balks at sleeping past 4am weren’t crushing down on my brilliant mind and totally telegenic night-time face, I would  have rushed to the computer to update you all immediately on this important news.

Secrets don't make friends...unless your nails look this amazing when telling them

First up, in case you didn’t know this, us women LOVE to tell secrets.

Who moi? she asks innocently…..

C’est vrai.

I’m going to venture to guess that really anyone who blogs pretty much sucks at keeping a secret. But it’s not just bloggers. According to a survey of 3,000 women on the average time of betrayal before sharing someone’s closely guarded and important secret – you tell me what it is. Is the average skin care betrayal time (I am taking this from the NYT Magazine):

a. Never

b. 32 years

c. 32 minutes

Come on smarty-pants loud mouths…..this is way easier than the SATs…..we all know the answer is…drumroll….C. Isn’t it ALWAYS C?

Frankly, I wondered why 32 seconds isn’t on there because that might be about right depending on just how juicy the gossip  secret is. Bottom line, the amount of time Dora pauses after asking which path to take is too much time wasted before blabbing a secret in most people’s books.

Don’t you love it? Isn’t the NYT Twitterization of news just grand?

Next up, I learned a new word: BRATTLE. It is a verb. I am guilty of “Brattling” all the damn time. To Brattle is to “discuss one’s children, often at length. So as you head into the hectic holiday cocktail party season, I suppose we’re all supposed to check our Brattling at the door and stick with just looking super fly in our cocktail outfits? Other new suggested words: spamily – Facebook or Twitter updates about kids – ahem – also guilty. And finally, spawntourage: a group of approaching strollers.

Typically I struggle with tone but even I can guess that others don’t view a “spawntourage” lovingly.

I suppose I don’t care but I am bratty enough to love these new totally anti-parents words.

Go off and brattle, spew your spamily but just don’t do it while power walking with your spawntourage. Instead, be sure to tell your spawntourage all those cool secrets you just learned and vowed you’d take to the grave……

DC is Ranked #9 for Working Moms

As much as I would love to dish about whether Beyonce is faking her baby bump (and her age) – and is actually 37 and using a surrogate – and as much as I’d love to discuss how anti-woman these deceptions are if they are true – I will instead focus today on the Forbes ranking of top cities for Working Moms. For the third year, Forbes Woman has ranked the top cities for Working Moms in the country and this year Washington DC fell from the ranking of 2 to 9. Anyone who follows my blog knows I was highly suspicious of Parenting Mag’s ranking of DC as the number one city for families. So, I certainly eyed these results dubiously.

Is this how a top working mom city ranking is supposed to look?

First, Forbes Woman is right to factor things like cost of child care, employment, salaries and then time – specifically time spent commuting – into their criterion for what makes a top working town for mothers. I am actually really proud to learn that working women in Washington rank one  nationwide for income levels – this is a great thing for everyone, including our kids, and hopefully many of these women are affecting public policy and influencing positive change. But when you are averaging a higher salary than any other city nationwide, that comes with a price tag. A hefty one – one that is more than just a lot of time spent commuting (where we ranked 49th, a contributing factor to the fall to 9th place).  A high salary translates into a demanding job which translates into a lot of working hours – which does not equal to work-family “balance” and time spent with children. All of this, in turns, makes me highly suspicious of how this is a great town for working moms? Cause we work a lot?

These types of rankings are so attractive for media coverage and bloggers like myself. We love to see where our city ranks, we love to pat ourselves on the back. But there is not emotional ranking to these surveys – it’s all just facts and figures – and it’s the emotional component to working for moms that comes with the heaviest price for all of us.

So, I applaud Forbes for digging a little deeper this year and really looking beyond the surface at things like commuting time, cost of childcare, crime and ranking of physicians (DC ranked 8 for that). But what I’d like to see is a closer look from DC employers at why we fell from #2 to #9 and the repercussions of  time away from family, demanding working hours and commuting time: what is the price we pay for these things in terms of our stress levels and our health?

And instead of applauding DC’s placement in the top ten, let’s spend more time looking at employers like the State University of New York at Buffalo who gives employees (including fathers) 28 weeks of time off for the birth of a child, including adoption. That’s a true attempt at work-life balance, something I’d prefer not to call a “benefit” and warrants a top ranking.

What do you think of these types of rankings? Forbes is asking what metrics they can change or should add to gauge what is really “best” for working moms?  I’d vote they add a job flexibility ranking – isn’t that what so many are seeking?