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Saturday, January 14, 2006

 

As mothers, we talked

Last night MotherTalk--a salon started by writers Miriam Peskowitz and Andi Buchanan--came to San Francisco, and I had the pleasure of attending this empowering event. I met, listened to, and conversed with a group of amazing women: some writers, all mothers.

Miriam writes about MotherTalk on the MotherTalk blog. Here's an excerpt:
What I love about MotherTalk is that we get to talk about real issues. There's something about talking at night, when mothers revert to grownup time, that's very special. Yes, there's a theme here, about reclaiming our evenings for inspired talk and vision. Moms get together. After the last one, in which Faulkner (Fox, author of Dispatches from a Not-So-Perfect Life) envisioned the end of mothers judging each other, and the start of feminist revolution, I wondered how many such gatherings would be necessary to really start the buzz, to start a cultural shift in which we know our issues as moms, and we have more strength to shoulder the confusing political and cultural times in which we live (front page NYTimes, anyone?)

For the San Francisco MotherTalk event, Andi was joined by Literary Mama Creative Nonfiction Editor Jennifer Margulis, editor of Toddler: Real-life Stories of Those Fickle, Irrational, Urgent, Tiny People We Love and author of Why Babies Do That: Baffling Baby Behavior Explained. Literary Mama Reviews Editors Rebecca Kaminsky and Sybil Lockhart were in attendance as well as about fifteen other Bay Area mothers who gathered to discuss the good, the bad, and the ugly aspects of being a mother.

As mothers, we talked about being writers and how therapeutic it is to put our thoughts and feelings about mothering into words, how important it is to share our words with others.

As mothers, we talked about having sons and Andi read an essay she wrote which can be found in the recently released Literary Mama anthology Literary Mama : Reading for the Maternally Inclined.

As mothers, we talked about having daughters, about having easy babies and having hard babies, about having one baby, about having two babies, about having three babies.

As mothers, we talked about the politics of the playground, about other mothers, about comparing ourselves to others, about judging ourselves and others.

As mothers, we talked about our fears and our strengths, our love for our children.

As mothers, we talked about fathers, about lack of adequate paternity leave, about division of labor, about our striving to remember which of our feminist ideals brought us to this place in our lives.

As mothers, we talked about working and about staying at home, about striving to find a balance, about sharing our experiences with other new mothers.

As mothers, we talked; as friends, we listened.



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