Mind Body Mama: A few things I learned from Momalom’s Half Drunk Challenge

Remember the Momalom Half Drunk Challenge? A week long period of blackout level stupidity and online overload just before Christmas? Here are some reflections.

1. When you write more, you have more to write. Even though writing every day in the week running up to Christmas was an idea singular in its insanity, the experience demonstrated beyond a doubt that when I write more I have more to write about. As my friend the Blunt Christian has put it, “I think in sentences again.” Writing every day, even briefly, turned my head into a tumbler of ideas and words and phrases that worked on its own between and during my domestic and workaday duties. This might be why Ellen Snortland and Kate Hopper and practically every writing teacher I’ve ever had or heard about endorses daily writing as necessary practice. Point taken.

2. I do not want to be a blogger, I want to be a writer. I’ve always been clear that I didn’t want to be that kind of blogger—the product-endorsing, one-woman brand machine that’s about following and being followed, creating a scene, turning myself into a channel of new media.

But I have credited blogging with saving me from the lonely writer’s room, for making it possible for me as a middle-aged mom to write without desperate isolation. I’m grateful—so grateful—for the connections I made with other bloggers during Half Drunk. I am delighted to witness their writing, to consider my computer part of the energy and space that holds their creative process in the midst of their crazy mom real lives.

But my real mom life is crazy too, and I don’t want to spend much more of it sucked down the monitor. My life is enriched by holding an open heart for the other mama writers I’ve met online, but not more than it is enriched by driving up to the hilltowns to lunch with my new friend the brilliant and gifted writer Erin White. It is too easy for me to stay home thinking I am not isolated because I’m chatting with—or maybe not even chatting, just peering into the life of—another mama writer. I’ve got to put on my hat and go out in the cold, hear my own voice somewhere other than inside my own head.

The Half Drunk also showed me a dark side to the blogging adventure. Erin named it for me over soup and sandwiches: the pitfall of cheekiness. My voice changes insidiously when I write to an audience as I imagine them. I feel compelled to play a character, to alter my narrative to conform with a self that is bright and sarcastic, dark and quirky. My friends and family will be quick to tell you that I am actually bright, sarcastic, dark and quirky. But I don’t want to write myself into caricature. I want to be a careful, precise writer, I want a voice that is true and strong, not trying to please. I want to be an essayist, sometimes a humorist, occasionally a preacher. I want to be a writer.

3. Feminism saved my life. (I’ve got to credit Erin on this one too—it showed up in an email she sent me a few weeks back.) I find the mom-o-sphere—whether online or in real life—stunningly and surprisingly different from the women’s community in which I’ve lived my adult life. That community is overtly feminist, anti-violence, anti-racist, supportive of economic and social justice and—in the words of my first karate dojo, The School of Come-the-Revolution, “unapologetically pro-lesbian.”

Not so among the moms of my daughter’s contemporaries, which is why I often feel like a shadow of myself among them. In my real life, I am almost never the only lesbian in the room—unless I am hovering over the Cheetoes at a seven year old’s birthday party. In my real life, I am almost never the only woman in the room who doesn’t shave or wear makeup or color her hair—unless I am at my daughter’s school. In my real life, I am almost never the only woman in the room who doesn’t speak disparagingly of her body—unless I am waiting with other moms outside of a ballet class.

Online, I encounter moms writing from their hearts, so far past the cocktail party chatter of the playground that I almost want to weep with gratitude. But even here, the personal doesn’t leap to the political. For all the hand-wringing and heart ache we each experience—around our agonizing about how to balance childcare and paid employment, for example—most don’t see beyond ourselves to understand the condition of women—of mothers— as collective. "Motherhood is a labor issue" I want to whisper while slipping copies of Miriam Peskowitz’s The Truth Behind the Mommy Wars into diaper bags around the country.

Twenty years ago when I came out as a lesbian and feminist, a relative expressed his distaste for my political ilk because “they make themselves out as victims.” I didn’t have the chops to answer flippantly, “Just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get me.” I wish I had. I’ve aged, and mellowed, and gotten married and had a baby and seen my world shrink to a domesticity I could not have imagined in my rabble-rousing days. I’ve failed to keep up with the women’s movement and find my credentials challenged in new radical circles, as my politics on gender and disability and race and the environment and globalization are not sophisticated or embedded enough, stalled as they are in the 1990s of my youth.

But I know that my experience as a woman and a mother in this time and country are not just an expression of my rugged American individuality. I know that my life is an expression of my time and culture, that my path is forged as much by my privilege and limitations; as much by my race and class and gender and sexuality and ability as by my abundant creativity and will. I might not always have a cogent analysis, I might not be at the forefront of today’s radicalism, but I don’t imagine myself the only architect of my condition. I know my life reflects my world as much as it reflects me. When we don't talk about that, I feel a part of myself left in the shadows.