After a perfectly fine but very long week, it was time to go to the movies. Paris, Je T’aime recommended itself as one a) that I probably wouldn’t need to write a column about and 2) set in Paris. It’s a collection of eighteen 5-minute films from a range of directors (the Coen brothers, Gus Van Sant, Wes Craven, Alexander Payne, Isabel Coixet, Alfonso Cuaron — a total all-star list) and starring a range of actors from around the world.

Now, I love to read anthologies (so much that now I’m editing one!). The first that really made an impact on me was Twenty Under Thirty, edited by Debra Spark (which I read when I was, in fact, under thirty). This is the book that introduced me to Lorrie Moore; I read her story “Amahl and the Night Visitors: A Guide to the Tenor of Love” over and over (I can still quote it) and tried (unsuccessfully) to steal from it in a recent essay (ah, she’s still the master). Lately, there’s been a fabulous run of parenting anthologies, from the excellent Toddler to It’s A Boy, and of course the Literary Mama anthology. Then there are the food anthologies, the Best Food Writing books and my new favorite (which is really too heavy to read in bed but I do anyway), Molly O’Neill’s American Food Writing (an anthology with recipes; my dream come true!)

The appeal of the literary anthology, of course, is the range of voices. But it works, for me, because you can put it down. Pick it up, read a selection, put it down, reflect. Lovely. Perfect for bedtime reading. But you know, the anthology of movies, it’s a tricky thing. The putting down and reflecting moment isn’t available to the viewer, you just have to let the whole thing wash over you and hope that you retain something when it’s over.

So while on the one hand, you could just let Paris Je T’aime wash over you — it’s a series of love stories set in Paris, after all — a couple of the stories are just trying so hard that they’re irritating. And then they start to blend together a bit. After the sixth, I confess, I checked my watch, because that one had been so annoying (and the fifth one so perfect) that I wanted to leave and just remember the beautifully sad face of Catalina Sandino Moreno singing to her baby in the fifth story, Loin du 16e. But I stuck it out to the end (because I’m optimistic enough to rarely walk out on a movie; Scoop and Wild at Heart are the only two I can remember every leaving) and I’m glad I did, because Alexander Payne’s contribution, 14e arrondissement is also perfect. (Hmm, the two I really liked feature a single actress and hardly any direct dialogue.) So 2 for 18 is not great, perhaps, but only two were truly annoying, and the rest, like most movies, were just fine.

Every other Thursday, I manage a day without children. I leave the house early to meet my writing group, allowing an hour to drive 17 miles through rush hour traffic. If I’m lucky I arrive in time to pick up some tea at the Peet’s on the corner. We circle our metal folding chairs in a kindergarten classroom decorated with posters defining “community” and “friendship.” Some of us bring our kids—the nursing toddler, the preschooler on vacation—and we set out crayons and Lincoln Logs to keep them occupied while we catch up on our personal and publishing news, then settle in to discuss and critique each other’s writing. Even when I haven’t shared my work, I leave after 90 minutes recharged and full of ideas for my own writing. I spend the afternoon holed up in a café with my laptop and my latte.

I’ve been feeling particularly grateful for my writing group since watching The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio (Jane Anderson, 2005), the true story of a woman who “raised ten kids on twenty-five words or less.”

Read more of this month’s column at Literary Mama.

When I first read about Momsrising.org and learned that they’d produced a film version of their book, The Motherhood Manifesto, I knew I wanted to write a column about the documentary. What better movie, after all, for a mama at the movies, than one expressly focused on the situation of mothers in this country today? I ordered the film via momsrising.org and drafted my column. But something was missing. This is a consciousness-raising movie, an organizing tool. Watching it by myself, I was missing a critical component of the film’s intent.

Before I could make plans to host a house party screening myself, I found an invitation in my inbox from a woman on my prenatal yoga teacher’s email list; my youngest child is almost two but I’ve stayed on the list for the supportive community it offers. I rsvp’d, interested in meeting the other mothers.

I arrived with a pan of brownies just as the other women arrived with snacks and drinks. Our hostess’ toddler was roaming around in his pj’s, happily greeting the other mamas, an entertaining reminder of why we’d come. We quickly fell into the kind of easy playground talk common to mothers everywhere. We could have gone on for hours, though, because this time we weren’t being interrupted by our children, only slightly distracted by our hostess’ sweet boy, who roamed from one of us to the next, clambering up on the couch for a cuddle, or lolling on the floor with his dog.

When we finally sat down to introduce ourselves properly (playground chat rarely involves the background basics of name, number of children, work, etc), the conversation quickly turned more significant. We have six children between us (ranging from 20 months to 5 years), and two more on the way; one of us is pregnant with her first child, and we admired her activism and foresight in attending this screening before even becoming a mom! All of us work in some capacity, all of us are struggling to find the right balance between our jobs and our children. One of us felt she’d lost out on a job opportunity because, interviewing when she was pregnant, she was seen by the employer as an unreliable prospect. Two of us have first-hand knowledge of the better family benefits offered to working mothers in other countries (in this case, England and Canada), and have no good answer for friends and family members who ask why the US makes it so hard on working moms. One of us actually concealed her motherhood while she worked on a graduate degree in order to maintain her status in the competitive, family-hostile program (another of us has heard so many of these difficult stories about women in higher education that she is co-editing a book on the subject.) We looked forward to seeing what the movie would say to us, how much of our own stories we would recognize in the stories on film. Our hostess, having already watched the first half of the movie in preparation for this moment, started the dvd, and took her son off to bed while we settled into watch.

I won’t go into the details of the movie here, in favor of describing our reaction. I am not exaggerating when I say that the film made us laugh, and it made us cry. We all appreciated the movie’s busy mom-friendly length (just an hour), and its clarity: organized around the six-point motherhood manifesto, each section of the film presents an entertaining mix of personal stories and statistics to dramatize and elucidate the difficulties working mothers face. We sat very quietly for a moment or two after the film ended, then our hostess got out some ice cream and as we dished it up and passed the brownies around, we started to talk again, but this time with more urgency, more focus.

As we discussed what aspects of the film hit most closely home, we focused particularly on healthcare, moved by the mother in the film whose child’s medical costs bankrupted her family. It is shocking that this country doesn’t offer universal healthcare for kids: it’s a truly affordable (since kids tend to be healthy), even money-saving government expenditure (universal child healthcare would result in healthier adults.)

We discussed the vulnerability we feel as women who have altered career plans to care for our children and then wind up financially dependent on our husbands. It puts a burden of stress on us and on our marriages. We all want to work, to offer role models to our children, to contribute to our family’s financial stability, and to maintain our sense of self. Yet we continue to struggle with combining work and family in a way that gives us time for both, and we weren’t at all surprised when the film tells us that lack of family time is the main reason mothers leave the workforce.

We shared how legislation really can affect us. One of us related how a change in California’s family leave between her pregnancies means that now her husband is also considering the logistics of when to take parental leave; “he has an empathetic understanding” of the challenges she faces, she said, and it has brought a new sense of balance to their marriage.

And finally, we discussed the tricky navigation we all face between public and private life, how protective we are of the time we give as volunteers and activists because of our desire for family time, and our sadness about feeling less generous “out there,” for society, because of the powerful claims on our private time. Meanwhile, we often feel so isolated, as mothers, we’re looking for a connection beyond the connection with our children, a way to extend our nurturing beyond the boundaries of family in order to improve the world for our children and our neighbors’ children.

Momsrising.org is savvy. They know they’re trying to organize about the most exhausted, overworked segment of the population, so the film suggests quick, strategic ways to help: send an email; sign a petition; write a letter. For those of us wanting a middle ground between internet activism and street demonstrations, the website suggests tips for organizing your own local activist group. Our small group quickly wrote up a wish list of three improvements we’d like to see for families in our city, exchanged email addresses, and promised to meet again. The Motherhood Manifesto inspired the activists in us.

cross-posted at Momsrising.org

What does The Motherhood Manifesto have to do with baking bread? Here’s a taste from this month’s column:

When I was a little girl, I’d stand in the kitchen at my mom’s side, “helping” her make bread every Saturday. She’d measure warm water, yeast and honey into a big yellow bowl, then a few minutes later stir in a bit of salt and several scoops of flour. She’d give the mixture a few brisk strokes with a wooden spoon and then, as the dough held together, turn it out on to the table to knead. This was the part I loved. Dusting our hands with a bit of flour, we’d push and fold the dough until it was smooth and satiny. A couple hours’ rising, a bit more kneading, an hour in the oven and then: fresh bread for the family to eat.

Bread making, like childrearing, isn’t particularly complicated. The ingredients are cheap, the process is simple. But they both require time and attention. Childrearing of course wants very focused time and attention; it can’t be squeezed into intervals of free time like bread making. So when my mom went back to work full-time, when I was old enough to spend the full day in school, bread making fell by the wayside, replaced by breadwinning. Her forty hours outside our home didn’t allow the time at home for both bread making and childrearing; she had to make a choice (and I like the choice she made!).

But we really shouldn’t have to make that choice. There should be time for childrearing, breadwinning, bread making, and whatever else a mother wants to do. This is the radical claim of The Motherhood Manifesto.

Read the rest of the column over at Literary Mama, and then sign up at MomsRising to stop discrimination against mothers and help build a more family-friendly country.

It didn’t hit me when, after seventeen hours of mostly calm and gentle labor, my baby, the child I was thinking of as Charlotte (or maybe Josephine), burst out with a splash, my waters breaking with the head’s emergence. I heard my doula exclaim, “Look at him!”

It didn’t hit me when Ben came to visit us in the hospital the next morning. I couldn’t take my eyes off my first born, so suddenly grown-up next to his baby brother, so proud in the button-down shirt Tony had chosen for the occasion. Ben didn’t even glance my way; he went straight for the plastic terrarium and hovered his hand over Elijah’s soft head, unsure about touching this unfamiliar creature.

It didn’t even hit me the day I was changing Eli’s diaper on the bathroom floor while Ben was sitting on the toilet, and Eli took advantage of the diaperless moment to shoot a pale fountain in the air, and Ben started laughing so hard he missed the bowl and oh, it all hit me. But it didn’t hit me.

It didn’t hit me until Tony and I went to see The Squid and The Whale (Noah Baumbach, 2005), several weeks after Eli’s birth. Watching the film’s mom talking to her boys, calling one Pickle and the other one Chicken, I leaned over to Tony and whispered, “Hey! I’m the mother of sons.” And Tony gave me a look that said, “Well, duh!” and ate another piece of popcorn.

Read more about The Squid and The Whale in my column at Literary Mama.