One Year Later

One year! This blog began one year ago, yesterday. Oops, please excuse the passive voice. I started this blog one year ago, yesterday. (Surely, the "I" is central in blogging: something that still makes me nervous). One year of sharing my reactions to dramas big and small in my family, in the media, and in the world.  I'm not sure what possessed me. I'm sure it doesn't feel like a year.

This is actually my second blog. The first one was meant to be an expat-family-log, and only lasted a few posts. When we were preparing to leave New York, a friend told me I should blog about our experiences, and it seemed like a good idea. I stopped because I felt very self-conscious writing about tiny everyday things as they were happening. Our two-and-a-half-years in London were enlightening, life-changing, even--but I was barely able to register how, and in what ways, back when we first arrived.

I knew I wanted to write while we were there, and instead of journaling about the present, I began writing fiction. I wrote story after story, and then, a novel. Just about everything I wrote took place back home in New York. Interestingly, though I had two young children and was pregnant within that time, I wrote very little, if anything, about motherhood. My writing tended to focus on young adults, forging their emerging identities. Perhaps part and parcel of the impulse that kept me from writing about my life in London. Ah, to live the life of the expat writer, examining the familiar from afar.

So, thinking back to a year ago, I wonder what changed. I began this blog soon after I decided I wanted to be a childbirth educator (and have since, indeed, become a LCCE -- Lamaze Certified Childbirth Educator). I imagined a forum in which to write about why birth is important, and why every mother deserves a good birth experience. Identities are formed and re-formed throughout life, and the identity of mother is a big one. How that begins, those first minutes and hours and weeks of motherhood, matter.

But then, as I began to write about the world through my two central identity lenses (that old classic, the Jewish mom), I found that the topics on here varied far and wide from pregnancy and birth. The becoming is still interesting to me. But the journey is equally important.

I love reading everyone's responses to posts, and the feeling of community--that we're all in this together--is heartening, indeed. Thanks for reading, and for giving me the support I've needed to keep it going.

Creative Ambition in Mommyville

Did you ever watch a TV show, or see a movie, or read a book, and think: whoever wrote that knows about my life? (I wish I could say that about Girls, but alas, not so much these days.)

Well, that was essentially my experience at a recent staged reading of Anna Fishbeyn's play, Sex in Mommyville. Despite the headline-grabbing title, the play isn't (only) about sex. It's about an under-appreciated writer and mother (Artemis), who struggles with her own intellectual, feminist identity while wrestling with the demands of her family: an over-worked husband (Zeus), two exhausting kids, and overbearing parents. It also happens to be laugh-out-loud funny.

I was delighted to realize how much Artemis and I had in common: advanced, under-utilized degrees in literature, novels under the proverbial bed, successful husbands whom we love but sometimes seem to have grown Blackberry tumors on the tips of their fingers. (The similarity ended with her insatiable randiness, it must be said.)

The play is autobiographical fiction: similar to the story of the playwright's life, but with significant changes of her choosing (an age-old genre, really). And it is very brave. Like some of the very best humorists and essayists, Fishbeyn is not afraid to mine her own life, and the lives of her family members, for humor and pathos (think: Nora Ephron or David Sedaris).

While the struggle of the mother at the center of a busy family might have been generic--an everywoman--Artemis is not every woman. She is frisky, not cold. She is intellectual, staying up all night reading philosophy, not watching Real Housewives. She has Russian immigrant parents, whom she loves even though they take her husband's side and let themselves into her apartment at exactly the wrong times.

A lot has been said about the gulf between feminist ambition and the reality of motherhood, and this play adds a whole new thread to that discussion. For writers and artists who can't or don't escape the home to an office, finding balance and maintaining ambition can be herculean tasks.

Sex in Mommyville is currently in pre-production, and hopes to come to an Off-Broadway theater soon. Here's hoping lots of other mommies (and daddies) get to see it.