Boundaries and the Blog as Confessional

I cannot help it.

Despite putting my writing 'out there' for public consumption, I cannot get over the fact that certain parts of my private life should remain private.

So, I've taken down my more recent efforts at autobiography.

Sorry to disappoint, but Midwest Moms was never supposed to be solely about me. It is a platform to for me to translate my parenting experience into a form that could help other parents. Putting my own story into narrative form serves an entirely different aim. And while I may continue that writing privately, I feel uncomfortable with making it available here.

My apologies to those friends who have been so encouraging. But sometimes second thoughts make sense. This is one of those cases.

- Julia

Update and Classic Novel Request

Christmas has officially left the building.

This weekend, we worked like crazy. And so, completed the long-dreaded chore. We also cleaned out the basement (thereby filling the garage with items to give away...)

In fact, did I have a weekend?

I must have, because I distinctly remember going swimming with the children at some point. And my husband was present for most of the work we did, so those days must have been Saturday and Sunday...

* * * *

Our Story, Part II is in the works. I'm finding I have to outline a bit to make sure I approach the story correctly. Sometimes, I will write for a good long while and then realize that I need to go back and lay the foundation for something... Writing is such an interesting process. I'm having a lot of fun with it.

* * * *
I'm exploring the idea of going back into teaching. It's been a while, but I'm finding that I'm excited at the prospect of it.

* * * *

This week's read is The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway. One of my goals for the past year has been to read more classic fiction. I've enjoyed it so much, that I'm continuing into 2010.

My last classic read was Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston. It was written in dialect, which was tough at first, but once my mind adjusted, I was swept away by the story itself.

Now, I'm wondering what classics you would recommend? What are your favorite reads that should absolutely be included on my 2010 reading list? And why?


- Midwest Mom

Pick Up and Dust Off

People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make them.

- George Bernard Shaw

Lately, I have been a terrible coward.

It's difficult to admit it, but there it is.

You see, this Fall, I took a chance to do a kind of writing I haven't before. I wrote a weekly feature article for an online publication. It was work I enjoyed, and my writing was well-received.

My feature highlighted blogs and bloggers whose work deserved to be showcased. In return, I was supposed to receive compensation. But benefits promised never materialized, and my sense of trust in the people I had devoted time and work and energy to promote eroded.

In the end, I stopped writing my weekly feature. Stopped cold. The response?
Silence.

Looking back, I understand that I was taken advantage of. It's awful to have to admit that, because it was the most recent of many failures 2009 held for me. But worse than just 'not panning out', it truly made me feel foolish to have trusted untrustworthy people.

Afterward, I lost my motivation to write altogether. Even though I wouldn't admit it, in some way I blamed myself for the dishonest behavior of others. (And thanks to Stacy at 4everMom for picking up on my funk almost immediately. You're quite an insightful friend.)

But it's time to stop moping.

So, here I am again. Back at Midwest Moms. And, quite honestly, it feels good to be writing in my own space. Here, I write to my own deadlines and standards. My work is driven by my own sense of creativity and purpose. And the friends who come to visit and leave a note are exactly that -- friends.

So, let's agree to pick up and dust off. I have a feeling 2010 will be a better year.

- Midwest Mom

Celebrating New Friends and Old

I have two new spotlight pieces on BlogCatalog to tell you about. One I wrote last week, called the Autumn Mosaic. It is a celebration the season and my discovery of several new bloggers who are writing about Fall in their hometowns. It was such fun to write about my favorite aspects of Autumn -- I hope you'll enjoy it, too.

The other I just posted today, about a great blog I've known for a while -- Little Four Eyes. AnnZ created Little Four Eyes after her daughter (at age one) needed glasses. She has done what so many of us really hope to achieve with our blog -- that is, create a community of involved parents. She regularly invites families to write about their own experiences with their child's diagnosis and glasses and hosts kids activities and photo gallery to boot. So, if you get a chance (and want to learn something about positive blogging and creating an interactive community) head on over. AnnZ's door is always open.

And to my regular readers, if you don't already have your blog listed on BlogCatalog, you're missing out on the chance to meet and learn from some terrific, well-established bloggers. Joining is free and provides a boost in getting your articles indexed and searchable. (Besides, I can't feature you if you're not a member... so get on over there!)

- Midwest Mom

Celebrating One Year of Midwest Moms

These days, it seems like everyone is starting a Mommy blog -- that strange hybrid of family scrapbook, confessional, parenting manual, and late-night comedy routine.

We're a hundred thousand Erma Bombecks.

Who knows why we do it? I can answer only for myself.

I started Midwest Moms one year ago because I was the only one in my family raising children far from home. The transition from single life to married motherhood was one of the toughest life-altering transformations I have ever experienced. Through the highs and lows, after the tremendous the changes I underwent on the outside and the inside, I became stronger and tougher and more loving and patient than I ever thought I could be. Motherhood was like a trial by fire; it transformed me, not because I wanted it to... just because that's what becoming a Mom does to a woman. And once it did, once I was a Mom, I was surprised to find I had gained entry into an amazing sisterhood of strong women who had all undergone the same metamorphosis.

But motherhood is isolating work. It makes a grown woman spend the entire day speaking in two-word sentences, just to be understood. It turns a woman with a master's degree into a trained parrot, teaching her son or daughter to speak by repeating every phrase twice. It forces former professionals to resort to discussing the consistency of their little ones' diapers, the price of bananas, and how to get our whites whiter instead of using our time together to talk about the real challenges of mothering -- balancing love and discipline, raising responsible resilient children, fostering communication in the home, battling our need for appreciation with the reality that true appreciation most often comes only from our sisters in the trenches.

We don't talk about those things in the produce aisle. Or at PTA meetings.

We blog about them instead.

We blog to give a voice to our family journey, to document the challenges and the victories, if for no one but ourselves. In the process, we find friends we never knew we had -- women who live in other places, but who understand the people we are and were and hope to be. For me, blogging is a way to reach through the isolating work I do, to move past the everyday even as I write about it.

In the process of writing Midwest Moms, I have found a voice I didn't know I had, an outlet for my weird sense of humor, a way to convey my experience of the world. I find it hard to believe I've only been at it for a year -- it has become so much a part of who I am.

So, thank you for coming by Midwest Moms and sharing this strangely, surprisingly meaningful journey with me. I never could have imagined the past year of writing would be so, well, important. But it is. It continues to be.

Many thanks for a wonderful year.

- Midwest Mom

Mom-Blogging Basics at BlogCatalog

Some of you may know I'm a frequent participant over at BlogCatalog. There is a great (and varied) core group of bloggers there from whom I have learned a lot.

psst... If you're not listed there already, you should be.

At any rate, the bigwigs at BlogCatalog recently asked me to write a piece about Mom-blogging for them. I was honored to do it. It was fun to sit back and reflect about why I write and how and what I've learned from writing Midwest Moms. If you're interested, head on over and let me know what you think. I love thoughtful comments.

Have a great four-day week!

- Midwest Mom

Fun Feature on TwitterMoms!

I was so surprised yesterday to get a message from Lea Curtes-Swenson, one of the featured bloggers at TwitterMoms -- the Influential Moms Network. She wanted to put Midwest Moms in the spotlight and write a profile of me as Twitter Mom of the Week.


The Twitter Mom Of The Week interview went a little something like this:

TMOTW: So, Julia, tell me a little about yourself so I can write this piece...

Julia: Well, I was born on a cloudy afternoon in 1971 in Northern Virginia. There was a gentle breeze blowing in from the Southeast and the scent of camellias filled the air....

[an hour later...]

TMOTW: -sigh- Yes, yes... how interesting. [rolls eyes] I'm amazed that you learned to walk at such a young age... You spoke 3 languages by age 5? Really??!?? [looks at watch and wonders how much of this she can actually use.]

Julia: Well, I don't like to brag... but... blah blah first place jump roper blah blah first to earn a crochet-a-potholder brownie badge blah blah blah...

TMOTW: [jolts awake] Have you done anything more... recent? What about your blog?

Julia: Oh, sure... I've written about Ants in my Pants and Lotion... You know -- important stuff all Moms need to know. I teach people how to make Mud Puppies or find buried treasure in their yard. blah blah very useful blah blah

[sounds of roosters crowing]

TMOTW: -yawn- Well, I guess that covers it. By the way... how long has it been since someone's asked you to talk about yourself?

Julia: Oh... about a hundred years. Why do you ask?

TMOTW: [snort-giggle] No reason.


Seriously, though. The Twitter Mom of the Week Profile was a real honor. In the few months since TwitterMoms began it has grown to over 8,000 members. After the welcome I have received, it's no wonder.

If you don't know much about TwitterMoms, here's the 411.

TwitterMoms -- the Influential Moms Network is an active social networking site that provides blog hosting and photo sharing for its members. It features a variety of Discussion groups that cater to diverse interests -- from Healthy Moms to Moms of Multiples to Work-At-Home-Moms [WAHM] and Stay-At-Home-Moms [SAHM]. Some groups are great for parenting tips -- like one I'm in called Raising a Reader. Others are just for fun, like the fan groups -- Grey's Anatomy Moms, Twilight Moms, even Martha Stewart Moms. TwitterMoms was founded in September 2008 by Megan Calhoun, the original influental mom. It is a supportive community of intelligent women that I feel proud to be a part of.

So, head on over. They're always looking for more smart and talented women (which, of course, if you're reading Midwest Moms, you must be!) Becoming a Member is easy, and it's a great way to meet other fantastic women in the Sisterhood of Moms.

- Midwest Mom

Be Careful What You Leave Behind

You know, graffiti is a wonderful thing. Anytime I see interesting graffiti, I try to push back any sense of annoyance at the defacement of property and just appreciate the art of it.

The thinker in me believes that what a person chooses to write for all to see says something about him or her. Maybe Midwest Moms is my own, carefully crafted form of graffiti.

Years ago, I lived in Washington, D.C. I was a carless college student. My job was far from campus, so I had to take the metro and a couple of buses to get there. Any bus or traincar I rode in always had graffiti from someone called "Cool Disco Dan."

Cool Disco Dan's mark could be seen anywhere the public transit system went. It was scrawled in the traincars or spray painted on the concrete barriers outside the train windows. It was on one or more of the seats of any bus I ever rode in the District. I always wondered about Cool Disco Dan -- who he was and why the heck he was riding the bus all the time? What was his day job? All I knew was that he was cool and he really dug disco. Maybe that's all I needed to know.

I like to think that graffiti says something about the person who writes it. My parents tell a story about when my oldest sister was in kindergarten. They noticed one day that she was in the bathroom for a long time. They checked on her a few times and she said she was fine -- she just needed more time to 'finish up'. When she finally emerged, apparently, she was grinning from ear to ear. My mother thought nothing of it.

Later that day, my mother went into the bathroom to clean and what did she find? My sister's name scratched deep into the toilet seat. From the way it was facing, it had to have been written by the, shall we say, toilet sitter. My sister may have blamed it on her younger siblings at first. But she was cornered into admitting the truth by the fact that, well, they couldn't write yet. And it was her name.

Which brings me to something else I've noticed about graffiti: often, it is truth-telling, even when you don't want it to be.

If you're wondering why I'm exploring this idea right now, I'll tell you. We've been renovating our children's bedroom this month. This weekend was spent cleaning up the mess from some of the renovation, including cleaning my boys cherry bunk beds. The beds were made by my husband's grandfather and first slept in by his dad. My husband and his brother slept in them as children, and now our boys do. As a way to honor the wonderful heritage of this particular piece of furniture, I thought I would give them a good washing.

I removed remnants of fossilized bubble gum and old adhesive from countless stickers. I washed and washed, and when the washing was done, I rubbed down the wood with linseed oil. The beds were beautiful.

As I started to move them back into their place, I thought, "Why just wash the beds? I should clean up the slats, too. After all, whoever is in the bottom bunk has to look at them all the time."

It was then that I found it -- a treasure-trove of graffiti from my husband's boyhood. Apparently, he had been the bottom bunk kid for a while and enjoyed writing from time to time.

He had drawn in pencil and crayon, and much of it was undecipherable. But one particularly prominent item stood out.

It explains a lot -- especially about my boys and what they get from their father.

In dark crayon in large capital letters was a word my husband, apparently, valued so highly that he wanted to look at it before bed every single night. As his lasting gift to future generations of our family that might sleep in the bed where he once slept as a boy, he wrote the word...






FARTS!




Yes, we had a hearty laugh at it and I couldn't bring myself to wash it off. Certain things should be kept sacred, especially those things 'passed on' from father to son.

Don't you agree?


- Midwest Mom

My Interview at 5MinutesForMom

Recently I was interviewed by 5MinutesForMom. It was fun to share my thoughts and have them published.

So, if you're interested in my take on motherhood and why I started Midwest Moms, please pay a visit. The site is a great place to find other blogs on parenting from moms across the country.

Happy Thanksgiving, Everyone!

- Midwest Mom