I found unexpected Father’s Day fodder in the films Mary Poppins and Finding Neverland; here’s an excerpt from my latest column:

As my family counts down the days to a summer trip to London, I decided to prepare my sons the way I know best: by watching movies about the place. Of course, my choices might not be the most realistic visions of the city, but we’re not ready for A Clockwork Orange or The Elephant Man here (we may never be). I wanted to show them the London created by my childhood reading, the London of corner flower shops, chimney sweeps, and nursery tea, the London of Mary Poppins. I’m planning to read the books with the boys on our trip, but at home we started with Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke in Robert Stevenson’s 1964 musical film.

You can click on over to Literary Mama to read the rest!

Girl w/Pen and her cohorts ask, “When are men giong to care about work/family balance? And what is the role of men in the feminist movement anyway?” Join panelists Deborah Siegel, Courtney Martin, Gloria Feldt, and Kristal Brent Zook in a Father’s Day conversation at the Brooklyn Museum, this Saturday, June 20 at 2 PM.

For a taste of their work, you can check out this YouTube video from one of their past events:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zcrsg256bLA]

Novelist Masha Hamilton started the Afghan Women’s Writing Project to allow “Afghan women to have a direct voice in the world, not filtered through male relatives or members of the media. Many of these Afghan women have to make extreme efforts to gain computer access in order to submit their writings, in English, to the project.” She writes,

“Many of our students and women writers, especially outside of Kabul, cannot get to an Internet cafe due to security considerations. A laptop at home and a jump drive would allow them to write their pieces, and then ask a male relative to send the work at an Internet cafe. A $20 donation will buy a flash drive and $500 in donations will buy a laptop for our women writers. No contribution is too small.”

Cari Luna is holding a literary raffle, with many great donations, to support the Afgan Women’s Writing Project. Some of the prizes: four signed paperbacks from Junot Diaz, one year subscription to the Kenyan Review, one year subscription to Tin House, a bunch of wonderful signed CDs from Diane Krall, Melody Gardot and others… All donations are tax-deductible. Please spread the word!

For those of you in San Francisco and near by, don’t miss the screening next week of Who Does She Think She Is?, the documentary by Pamela Tanner Boll which profiles several mother-artists; the film will play at the Red Vic Movie House on Haight Street, Wednesday June 10th (2, 7:15, 9:15 PM) and Thursday June 11th (7:15, 9:15 PM). Pamela Tanner Boll will be present for Q&A; following screenings Wednesday at 2:00, 7:15 and Thursday at 7:15.

I’m just a little bit of fond of this film, as you may be aware; my column on it is here, and my interview with the director, Pamela Boll, is here. The film’s not out on dvd yet, so make the trip out to see it on the big screen!

Stuck in a rut? Try baking a wedding cake (number 17), creating a sacred space (number 40) or blowing off the day (number 99). Have some money to burn while you shake things up? Then try hiring a personal shopper (number 47), painting your house a wild color (number 70) or have a cosmetic surgery procedure (number 33). If you need to spark things up on the cheap, then maybe spending 24 hours in bed (number 89), kissing a total stranger (number 60) or living with less (number 93) is the way to go. The List: 100 Ways to Shake Up Your Life, by Gail Belsky, offers 94 other ideas, ranging from serious to silly, for ways to jump start a slow day or a sluggish period in your life. I’ll give away a copy of the book to one commenter who offers their own idea for shaking off the blahs. As for me, I’m off to join an ambulance crew (number 7)…

As a college student, I interned with Women Make Movies, an organization that helps female filmmakers at every stage of their projects. I caught a glimpse of how difficult it was for women to get their stories to the screen, but I never saw into these women’s private lives, didn’t know if any were mothers; now that I’m a mother myself, I think about the intersection of motherhood and creativity all the time. So after I watched and wrote about the documentary, Who Does She Think She Is?, which profiles several mother-artists, I decided to interview the woman behind the film, director Pamela Tanner Boll. The result of that conversation has been published at Literary Mama this week; here’s a brief excerpt:

Caroline: How do you write a documentary film? Do you start with a loose script and then adapt based on interviews? Are there certain questions you have in mind before you begin, or do you leave yourself open?

Pam: I did not “write” the documentary until we began editing. I had a very firm conviction that I would follow these awesome amazing women as they made their way through their days, their art studios, their breakfast dishes, and errands, and loneliness and see what happened.

I wanted to stay open to the story. I did have certain questions, the main one being, what made it possible for these women to not give up on their dreams? What made it possible for each of them to believe in their voice, their talent, their truth despite lack of support and often, little recognition?

Caroline: Who are some filmmakers and writers you admire, or who influences your work?

Pam: I am more influenced by writers than filmmakers. I grew up reading, reading, reading. Some of my favorite books and authors are Virginia Woolf, especially To the Lighthouse; George Eliot’s Middlemarch; Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston; The Color Purple, just to name a few.

I was an avid movie watcher all throughout my childhood and early adult years. I loved all the Walt Disney films and the Tarzan series with Johnny Weismuller and Bonanza — big family dramas.

Click on over to Literary Mama to read the rest!

Bedtime was not going well.

I’d already marched down the hall three times to put an (albeit temporary) end to the boys’ conversations and waited through Eli’s long explanation for why he was still up: it was the stuffies. Moosie goes to bed at 8:30, he explained, but Bunny stays up till 9 and Ringo the lemur is a night owl with an 11:00 bedtime. Eli wanted to keep Ringo company, but his chatting was bothering his brother and driving me to distraction. I was at the end of my rope when Eli held up Moosie.

“Mama?” said Eli-as-Moosie.

“Moosie, I can’t hear it!” I snapped. “You’ve been talking way too much tonight! It’s bedtime!” (You know it’s bad when you’re shouting at stuffed animals.)

Eli crumpled and started to cry.

“Oh, Eli,” I said, instantly chastened. “Please don’t cry. Tell me what Moosie wanted to say, just this one more thing, and then we all need to stop talking and go to bed, ok?”

Well. I should have known that given an opening, Eli would jump right in.

Through his tears, Eli told me it was Moosie’s birthday, and we had forgotten. We hadn’t done any of the special things we’ve done during the recent run of birthdays: Ben’s in March, Tony’s in April, and Eli’s just last week. We hadn’t hung the birthday letters, nor baked a cake and served it on the family-heirloom musical cake plate. There had been no special breakfast, no gifts, no singing. As Eli spoke, Ben sat up, his annoyance gone, and started to chime in along with me, trying to comfort Eli.

We would celebrate Moosie’s belated birthday (Ben helpfully explained to his little brother what “belated” means). We sang Happy Birthday right then, to make Moosie feel better, but we would sing it again in the morning. We would hang the birthday letters and set out some treats. And we would celebrate Bunny’s birthday, too. Bit by bit, Eli’s tears stopped and his sniffling slowed. Both boys were excited (but not too excited) about our celebratory plans. They snuggled back down in their beds. They stopped talking.

When Tony got home from his meeting, he set to work making cut-outs of Moosie and Bunny. I got out the cake plate, a relic of Tony’s childhood, and set it with small bowls of peanuts and carrots. We felt silly and indulgent, but why not? It doesn’t take much to provoke a smile, to send a kid to bed with happy dreams, and this was one of those times it felt pretty easy to say yes to a happy, silly plan.

The next morning, Eli announced it was Ringo the lemur’s birthday, too, and that Ringo likes to snack on eucalyptus leaves. With some quick work, we expanded the celebration to include Ringo (Eli need never know those were bay leaves in the lemur’s bowl). When Eli saw it, he grinned broadly, and then sat the stuffies right down to enjoy their birthday snacks. Luckily, nobody asked for any presents.

The hardest aspect of editing Mama, PhD was not editing the selections, nor working with the publisher to fine-tune essays, nor copyediting, nor even coordinating all of this work with a coeditor living 3,000 miles away who had two (now three!) kids of her own. No, I think really the hardest part was actually getting the essays. We sent out a call for submissions to our friends, and asked them to send it to their friends; we published it on list-servs and websites and broadcast it as widely as we knew how. It wound up in places that we didn’t even know existed, like the Women and Crime mailing list. But still, many of the essays came from women of similar backgrounds and in similar disciplines as ourselves. For Mama, PhD this wasn’t a deal-breaker: the collection winds up accurately reflecting the diversity of women in higher education. Still, I know there are more stories out there that we didn’t manage to uncover, and I’ll always wonder how we might have found them.

Yvonne Bynoe, who edited Who’s Your Mama: The Unsung Voices of Women and Mothers, found an amazingly diverse group of women to contribute to her anthology. The women are different races and ethnicities; they are single, widowed, divorced and partnered, gay and straight, mothers and childless, at home with their kids and working outside the home. The women are not all professional writers, but they contribute deeply-felt stories which are powerfully told.

Mary Warren Foulk’s piece, “Which One’s the Mother?”, beautifully traces her complicated road to lesbian motherhood, and I loved Kathy Bricetti’s sweet essay, “The Baby Bank,” about going with her partner to a sperm bank, way back in 1992.

Christine Murphy is resisting friends’ and family pressure to jump on the “baby train” in “Mommy Maybe…” — and wondering if she’s making the right choice. Liz Prato writes poignantly of her decision not to have children in “Is Life Without Kids Worth Living?” With a mother who died at fifty-eight and two aunts who passed away in their forties, she feels that “knowing the parent-child relationship can come to such an abrupt end has shut down our desire to have kids.”

In “The Mother I Always Wanted,” Robin Templeton describes how her pregnancy makes her finally confront the reality of her own troubled mother; sitting on an airplane on the way back home, she writes, “I fanned myself with the laminated safety instructions, closed my eyes and a neon warning scrolled behind them like an interruption from the Emergency Broadcast System: Beep. This is a test. Beep. You are your mother’s chid. Beep. Your baby will be raised by a woman raised by your mother.”

Eileen Flanagan also addresses the legacy of difficult mothering in her essay, “A Pellet of Poison: I Don’t Want to Feed Racism to My Children the Way My Mother Fed It to Me.” Untangling what she was taught from what she wants to teach her children, she searches out slave narratives, abolitionist histories, novels and songs; she writes, “In the realm of race, I can also face the heat of my family history, sweating out whatever I’ve absorbed and teaching my children to do the same. Stories are like saunas that can help draw the poison out of us.”

And I loved Lisa Chiu’s essay “Ching Chong!” which hopes her son won’t hear the playground taunt that haunted her childhood: “Nico’s classmates haven’t yet asked him where he’s from. But when they do ask–and they will–I hope he will answer the question with clarity and confidence. I hope he will respond in a way that educates people, informing them not just of his own cultural background but of a world that is multi-hued, complex, and complicated.

“It took me years to come up with my own succinct answer to the question, replying that I’m a second-generation Taiwanese American woman who was born in Canada and raised in Cleveland. It took a long time for me to learn how to define myself. Now, it is time for me to guide my son along his cultural identity journey. I know where we’re from. And I’m gaining clarity in knowing where we’re going.”

I like these essays for asking good questions rather than presuming to have all the answers. These are women in the midst of journeys, and it’s interesting to follow along with their thinking.

Want to read this book? Leave me a comment by Saturday, May 30th, and I’ll choose someone at random to receive my advance galley.

I always imagined that my kids and I would watch loads of movies together. We would start at home with sweet animated features like Toy Story or movies I loved as a kid, like The Red Balloon. Then as they got older, we would go out regularly, settling in with our salty buckets of popcorn to watch the latest family flick. It hasn’t worked out like that, though. Ben, at seven, has only seen one movie in a theater, a special screening of The Polar Express for a friend’s birthday. He lasted about ten minutes before he came out to the lobby, overwhelmed; the loud soundtrack and the huge projected images were just too much for him. Meanwhile, although I managed a few mom and baby movies when Eli was still a tiny nursling, I had to quit those screenings before he was nine months old; instead of sleeping quietly while I caught up on the latest releases, he wanted to watch and chat with the figures on screen. At four, he’s happy to watch the same movies at home that Ben has been watching for years: Curious George; Toy Story; The Little Prince. But I’m getting bored, and wanted to find something new that might suit their very different temperaments.

Read the rest of the column over at Literary Mama!

As reported by Tony:

Ben and Eli were digging around in the closet and found an old craft project they’d made probably a year ago — a couple plastic cups connected with a string — the old classic “phone.”

So they stretched it out in the living room, and Ben reminded Eli to put his mouth into it for speaking and put use his ear for listening. And then the following transpired:

Ben: Eli? Can you hear me?
Eli: What?!
Ben: Can you hear me?
Eli: Yes.
Ben: Hi Eli.
Eli: Hi Ben.
Ben: What are you doing?
Eli: Um…. sitting on the couch.
Ben : Oh. OK, bye.
Eli: Bye.

Who needs a cell phone when cups and string will do?!

Image source.