In February of 2004, the American Academy of Pediatrics released a statement that children under two should watch no television whatsoever. In a twist of fate, nine months later, New Line Cinema released the final Special Edition DVD of its "Lord of the Rings" Trilogy. Unrelated? Incompatible? Having nothing to do with maternity and art? Read on.

Why does writing about motherhood have to be either funny or about postpartum depression? A friend of mine asked this very fine question, and I had to think about my own slide into humor when discussing the ups and downs of the married- and mothering-life. Why, indeed? Men manage to write about all sorts of ridiculous things very, very seriously, whereas women, writing during their children’s naps, tend to either make light of parenting difficulties or else draw them out to the point of depressing and alienating readers. Naomi Wolf’s diatribe on motherhood, which I bought while pregnant, made me anxious and unhappy, as I worried first about the way my pregnancy and birth process were going to be managed and appropriated by people who had their next golf date and not my or my unborn child’s best interests at heart; and also about the dire effect a child would have on my perfectly equal relationship with my husband. It made me so blue that my husband wisely advised me to put it away, which I did with a sigh of relief. That bit of advice, well-intentioned and exactly what I needed, would probably set Wolfe off. Pregnancy and motherhood are very, very serious; their impact on your life is very, very serious; and life in general is very, very serious. Looking the other way won’t help. And no man should dictate your reading matter.

I am a thirty-one year old mother of an almost-three-year old. My partner and I and our son moved to the Netherlands from Boston two years ago. It was very much my idea, and for me it was very much about not wanting to raise my son with the constant anxieties about health insurance that I had experienced for years (thank you Aetna! I had to call you so often that you were #1 on my T-Mobile “top 5”! I wish I were kidding!).

When the smoke from the Columbine High School massacre cleared, fourteen students and one teacher in my school district were dead, and dozens were wounded. Fortunately, two huge bombs that had been planted in the building didn't explode. Shock waves rippled through the culture and our educational establishment. How had American education gotten to such a terrible and tragic turn? In the wake of Columbine, all of us teachers, veteran and novice alike, were forced to make brutally painful evaluations of our educational goals and means.

At 19 I read Adrienne Rich as she struggled to put into words the isolation and terror of being the solo parent of small children all day. I saw her essays as the record of a historical moment, the cusp of change between an era of rigid gender roles and frustrated housewives, and my own time of working mothers and egalitarian divisions of parenting labor. I treasured her insights into how destructive the old system could be to the spirit of mother and child alike. Reading Rich and Audre Lorde, I appreciated their deeply feminist understandings that the children-- even boy children-- were not the conquerors in this system, but equally trapped and isolated.

The difference between me and Adrienne Rich is that she didn't get to read Adrienne Rich in college. She didn't enter into stay-at-home mothering already armed with a rich feminist analytical vocabulary to describe to herself exactly, precisely, incisively, why it sucks.

Back in the day, frustrated mothers were pacified with Mother’s Little Helper, barbiturates, to be cured of the restlessness that would later be diagnosed as the beginnings of the women’s movement. That movement was the reason I fell asleep as a child listening to Marlo Thomas sing “Some mommies drive taxis/ or sail on the sea, yeah/ Mommies can/ be almost anything/ they wanna be!” And I believed it. The restlessness and frustration had been cured by social change.

Thirty-five years after Marlo’s 1974 record, I’m navigating the labyrinths of 21st century HMO authorizations to ask a psychiatrist whether I need to go back on Prozac, or just wait for my son to start kindergarten.

I have a graduate degree. I married a feminist man. I am mothering a toddler at forty, when I might be imagined to have more resources than when I was younger. I even work outside the home; currently, on much the same terms my own “working” mother did, alternating full-time parenting with periodic part-time work scheduled around when my small child won’t miss me, usually while he’s asleep.

My adult life and identity are not defined by mothering. When I begin to wonder why I’m reading “Blue Hat Green Hat” for the ninety-fifth time straight, I can derive irony, but also comfort, from remembering that I’ve filled many other roles in other years, other decades. I’m not afraid that I’m only this. As an adoptive mother, I haven’t felt, as many birth mothers do, that parenting has redefined my body and my function in the world at the most basic physical level. When I am holding a bottle, singing “Twinkle Twinkle,” or hunting for an elusive pacifier, I am not worrying that the world has passed me by. I have only to fire up the Internet (another saving resource Adrienne lacked) to touch base with professional colleagues and old friends, all of whom validate that there are other sides to me than this, more dimensions of personhood than just Mama.

And I wanted so much and for so long to be someone’s mama. Every day that I waited, I found it incredibly painful to hear fertile women complaining about the burdens of mothering their babies—like listening to Warren Buffett complain about his taxes. What wouldn’t I give! I thought, to have their problems.

When my son was tiny, I felt like a brilliant mother. There were only three things he wanted: food, dry pants, and to be rocked to sleep. Miraculously I was able to provide all three.

Now he is two.

Five mornings a week, the door closes behind my husband, who will not return for ten hours. Minus a two-hour nap, whose beginning time is not dependable, that’s eight hours of solo parenting a toddler, five days a week.

It’s like standing in a hurricane? Lately I feel as if I’m walking into a stiff wind, all the time.

Here’s the thing that’s hard: my son has learned to walk, run, climb, throw, smear, and dismantle. He has not yet learned to construct sentences or follow instructions. He is not autistic, or developmentally disordered, or emotionally damaged. He’s just two. He wants to be Doing Something every second that he is awake, and he does not want to do any of it alone, and he does not want to do any of it sitting down. If I start him stacking blocks, and I walk into the other room, he leaves the blocks and follows me. If he is sitting at the table eating lunch, same thing. There is no autopilot with a two-year-old. He is doing what I’m doing.

When I focus on something other than him, he works at engaging either me or whatever I’m doing. This has its benefits: he’s learning to do housework while he’s learning to speak. My son is going to be a man who can’t remember when he didn’t unload the dishwasher, throw away trash, clear his dishes to the sink after meals—and so far, he takes great satisfaction in doing those jobs himself. But his single focus also means that when he’s alone with a mother who is thinking about something else—subtracting expenses in the checkbook, say, or cooking pasta for his lunch— he becomes increasingly desperate, grabbing the pen or the spoon, or my arm, or my face. If I persist in asking him to wait, I get a poke in the eye, which gets him a time out.

His father and I have absolutely agreed that we must teach him not to hit; that we must teach him with consistent and age-appropriate consequences; that hitting children to teach them not to hit is kind of problematic and likely to backfire; and that the appropriate consequence is a time-out for a number of minutes equal to the child’s age in years. My husband read that somewhere and it sounded sensible to us both.

After two minutes, a toddler has forgotten about whatever he was doing before you put him in a room by himself. After three, he’s found something else to play with. After ten, he’s flinging himself at the door and screaming because obviously nobody is ever coming to let him out.

After two minutes, the cortisol in my bloodstream is at pretty much the same level it was right after somebody hit me in the eye two minutes ago.

In these moments, I cannot recall a single exact quote from Adrienne Rich,while a line from the gothic thriller, The Crow, repeats in my head: "Mother is the name of God on the lips of all children." I'm all too aware that I am not just structuring my son's daily reality, but I am shaping his brain and teaching him about love and power. Am I teaching my son that God abandons him for five times as long as he can understand? Or that God is shaking with fury, unable to look at him?

Who decided that the two of us should be each other’s only companions for ten hours in a row? Who decided this was safe? Am I saying I’m a danger to my child? Am I saying I’m an unfit mother? Am I saying I’d better fill that Prozac prescription? Am I seriously saying that a forty-year-old woman with a graduate education in a helping profession cannot handle two four-hour blocks of interacting with her own beloved, long-awaited child?

I’m saying that by the time his father comes home at night, I’m so dissociated all I want to do is curl up in an office chair and drink margaritas until I fall asleep. Instead, I cook supper and surf the Internet while his father gives him a bath, a bottle, a book, and a bedtime kiss. “You seem so distant in the evenings,” he says, “I love to have my whole family together at night, won’t you come sit with us?” I think how lucky I am to have a husband who’s willing to come home from work and take over completely, who doesn’t mind diapering, picking out pajamas, giving piggyback rides. I think what a good dad he is, how fun, how at least my son has this pleasure to offset my gritted demands to eat one more bite of oatmeal or spit out a mouthful of playground dirt. I sit beside them on the sofa. I can’t remember what I was thinking about.

At 19, I thought naming a problem solved it. I never imagined reaching 40 and finding that while women have named and pointed and sometimes gesticulated wildly, I'm living in the same questionable circumstances that Adrienne Rich described before I was born. Market work has not changed, and policies and supports for care-takers, who are often also workers, are nonexistent. In our current culture, every family is still an island. Though I have co-workers and neighbors, and even a church, I still find most days my son and I are stranded without relief boats in sight and I am past the point of caring whether they arrive with on site day care or anti-depressants, as long as they arrive.

Anne Neville has lived all over the United States; both coasts, the deep south and in the great lakes region. She's worked in tech, retail, food service, office administration, education and health care. She's currently settled with her son and husband in a little yellow house on a sunny street.

I was born and raised in the rural south, where racial difference was like oxygen. You inhaled it, you exhaled it and you learned about the function and composition later. While my family checked the white or caucasian box on forms, my county was predominantly African-American, a term that did not exist yet. I learned to say "colored", which my mother said was polite, and then to say "black", the term preferred by my classmates to whom it referred.

When I started first grade, my elementary school had been integrated for only three years. That year, we were grouped at our four top tables alphabetically and to create gender and racial balance, girl and boy, white and black until the teachers ran out of white children. People identified as white or black by the same one drop rules that governed slavery and then segregation. This continued throughout school.

Picking teams in middle school, the white and black team captains alternated choosing one black child and then one white child. In high school, the homecoming queen ballot always listed two white seniors and two black seniors. In the classroom, no one talked about moving beyond race. Black teachers and students wanted white students to recognize the achievements of their ancestors in the face of our ancestors' attempts to keep them enslaved and after emancipation keep them as far away from the benefits of education and elections and employment as possible.

Like many parents raised in insular communities, I wanted my child to have a broader sense of the world than her own backyard. At eighteen months my daughter, Emily knew more people from diverse religions and cultures than I did at eighteen years. We read myths and stories from many traditions and skimmed our huge book of photographs of families all over the world.

I read essays that warned that a child who thinks of everyone as different on the outside but the same on the inside becomes a child who defaults to thinking of everyone as "white". Coming from my necks of the woods, I didn't believe that was possible. Until last year when I discovered that the color blind children in my daughter's kindergarten class told a biracial classmate that she had to pick the "light" not "brown" skin color in a class art activity. The teacher intervened. At home, I emphasized the rudeness of challenging the classmate's choice, as a person and an artist. My daughter, Emily understood the artist part, but when it came to race she remained perplexed.

Honestly, so was I. As I age, more people use the adjectives "multiracial" and "biracial". What if I told Emily to use the wrong words? What if she hurt someone's feelings? Did I want her to start assessing and categorizing people? What if one day she rolled her eyes and corrected me on my archaic and racist language just as I rolled my eyes and corrected my mother. I did not want to teach Emily anything that would ever make her ashamed of me or ashamed of herself.

Over the summer, Emily's confusion about skin color came to a head. One morning on a remote island, we visited a museum with an exhibit honoring the 100th birthday of the last remaining member of that island's one African-American family. As Emily gazed at handmade textiles and family photographs, I read the commentary on the segregated school. I asked Emily to imagine being on that tiny island. Teachers come to your house in the afternoon, but the law says that because your grandparents were slaves from Africa you can't set foot in the school house where every single other child on that island spends their day.

In the afternoon while digging in the sand, Emily asked "Now that I am getting tan again, am I a brown skinned person?"

Without thinking I replied "No. Your skin color doesn't change when your skin color changes." Emily looked at me like that sounded as ridiculous as it sounded.

Then, I knew. There was no way around it. Emily needed the whole story. Trying my best to discern what was vital information from what was detail, I covered four hundred years of history in about forty minutes. I started with slave ships leaving Africa with captives who would never see their families ever again. I ended with me learning all this in my newly integrated schools.

I made it abundantly clear that slavery did not happen far away, but where we lived. And segregation did not end long ago, but in my lifetime. When I finished, Emily wanted to know - Who? Who were the people who believed that children shouldn't go to school together?

Those people were us; my grandparents, my mother, my brother.

I know I am not the only mother ashamed that her family resented the civil rights movement instead of embracing it. As a child, I struggled to understand the disconnect between what I learned in school and what I heard at home. My mother tried to change with the times, but her little triumphs over her prejudices only reveal how deeply ingrained those prejudices run. As a child, I saw this, and I became scared, as a mother, to speak for fear of my mother's blind spots and revealing a similar one to my child and then that became my blind spot.

My daughter's elementary school class does not resemble mine. There's more than two races; there's three just among the children from Burma. The students are assigned to tables based on who distracts who the least. Emily's teacher, an African American woman the exact same age as I, ended her lesson on Martin Luther King Jr. by saying that with all he dreamed, at the time, we could not imagine seeing what we will see today, the inauguration of Barack Obama.

As a child, I could not even imagine a Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday, whereas Emily can not imagine why anyone would oppose one.

Watching the childrens' increasing fluidity of interactions across gender, race and language lines and witnessing their unanimous enthusiasm for Barack Obama, I can almost forget that the people who drew those lines still exert influence, but I've learned even when their beliefs do not, the shame of them can, if we can't own it and speak of it.

At age seven, my daughter is beginning to understand the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. and her heroine, Rosa Parks, but I still need to fill in the blanks about the challenges they faced.

I draw on my awful heritage of living among people who retreated into an engrained racism even when they attempted otherwise. Their language and thoughts, being simple, are far easier for Emily to grasp and reject than fifty cent SAT words like inferior and institutionalized.

She's also learned that her mother weeps constantly when reading books about slavery or talking about this year's election or watching the inaugural concert clips. I found underneath my shame, there was a deep grief and I may weep for the rest of my lifetime - and one day my daughter may weep that I wept. Or she may frown and talk about what an idiot I was. I've grown comfortable with that idea.

This morning, I am proud to belong to my generation and to celebrate the changes of our lifetime, but I am more excited about what is yet to come.

Maria Rowan lives in North Carolina with her husband and daughter, all natives of the state. This morning they are thrilled to have not just a new President, but several inches of snow.

I spend much of my online time catching up with insane things conservatives say, and this election year has been more insane in that regard than usual. American conservatism imploded in 2008, and nowhere is this clearer than in the heights of fantasy and illogic reached in the political conversation of rank-and-file Republicans. You expect some lying and lunacy in these matters, not restricted to any particular ideology or party. This week, for instance, marks the thirtieth anniversary of the Jonestown tragedy, so old stories about clandestine government sponsorship of Jim Jones and People’s Temple are flying around. Many Americans of varying political stripes will believe any horror story – no matter how absurd - with the initials “CIA” attached to it. It happens.

What you don’t often see, even in presidential election years, is the grand scale panicked denial gripping US conservatives lately. You don’t usually see one party or another’s followers descending into a despairing willingness to believe and do anything and everything similar to their favored campaign. I have seen this everywhere, online and in real life as the McCain campaign crashed: conservatives making claims that negate themselves as they are saying them. I don’t know how many Republicans I’ve seen in the last month saying that George W. Bush wrecked everything he touched as President, he is also a socialist (no kidding) and he is simultaneously the second greatest US President (guess who’s number one). The desperation is palpable.

Which brings me to one of my favorite recent Republican scare stories, one combining fevered imagining about shit that just ain’t going to happen with instant self-rebuttal. There is nothing funnier than watching conservatives simultaneously condemn an imaginary monolithic "biased against us media" and piss and moan about one of their favorite fears, this year: “The Fairness Doctrine is Coming Back.”



For people too young to be aware of "the news" before Reagan and friends fixed it for us by getting rid of caps on media ownership and shitcanning the Fairness Doctrine, it didn't used to be this way. Even in the nascency of CNN and the "24-hour news cycle," anything like a celebrity journalist was rare and this was a distinction reserved for, say, the guys who broke Watergate and emerging attention whores like Geraldo Rivera. TV news was a staple, but not a particularly exciting one, like white bread or potatoes. And every news program featured discussion of controversial issues with the expression of opposing viewpoints required by law.



Americans' relationship to "the news" was entirely different back then, due largely to these standards. The news didn't consume us the same way, and this was really not about a lack of access and opportunity - that's increased wildly since, but you had a few cable and other choices if you wanted to sit around and take in news all day when you could be watching more amusing TV or seeing a movie or getting drunk, instead. Most of us did not. Satirical claims in Network to the aside, television news had not really morphed into an mass entertainment option, not yet.



Now it has, and this is a long-done deal, and this is what makes late conservative paranoia about the reinstitution of the Fairness Doctrine an absurdity: there is so much money made in TV and radio news programming at this point, often precisely because it's biased, just like we are. There's a lot of personal joy to take in listening to people who don't like Palin or Obama like you don't echo your own mockery of either. It's compelling. It keeps people watching and builds massive fan bases.

Broadcast news never made this kind of crazy-ass money before, and nobody’s giving that up willingly. 

It’s not like broadcast news was bereft of partisans, prior to 1987. Talk radio existed, shows pushing lines between journalistic and other network content existed. It's just that Joe/Jane Partisan broadcaster couldn't deliver a constant stream of his or her own opinions with no dissent. Try and imagine this: Rush Limbaugh has to stop for five minutes at the end of his show because yesterday, he spent all day calling Barack Obama a "socialist.” He has to provide a few minutes for somebody from the Obama campaign, or somebody who at least pretends to support Obama, to explain why that's idiotic and Obama is in no sense a socialist.

You can understand why this would be a big pain in the ass for somebody like Limbaugh - his act would not have worked. (Until Bush II, actually, a last vestige of the Fairness Doctrine remained, in that outright attacks on persons on news programs had to be reported to those persons by the network, to at least give them some kind of chance to respond, even though by then the station was no longer required to invite them to rebut. W. got rid of that one for Limbaugh and Fox first thing after taking office. What a nightmare the nineties must have been for those assholes. "Dear Chelsea Clinton: I said you were ugly again today on my show. Ha ha ha, you suck, kid. Love, Rush.")



Which was the whole point of destroying media ownership caps, along with every other sensible corporate regulation lately, and getting rid of the Fairness Doctrine: allowing the wealthiest right-wingers in the US to say whatever the fuck they wanted, all day, every day, without the remote possibility of a counter-argument. Because that's what the "fair" in "Fair and Balanced" means, and this is a key philosophical distinction.

When American conservatives talk about fairness in media, they're talking entirely about the supply side of a business deal, and how unfair it is to not let people with all the money steer all the public discourse. When American liberals talk about fairness in media, they're talking entirely about the audience side of mass tech that necessarily limits discourse even as it promotes, and not allowing single viewpoints to dominate public conversation.



Republicans don't hate the old American broadcast media model because it ever persecuted them or denied them a voice - they hate it because it thwarted their own desires to persecute and alienate. That's what "The Liberal Media" means, not media that displays a constant Democratic or progressive or left bias, but media that's liberal in principle and practice, in that it allows and encourages a multiplicity of voices. That’s what American conservatives hate and always hated and it shows in their choice of media, in these post-Fairness Doctrine years.

Fox News Channel and right-wing talk radio are exactly the imaginary corrupt and exclusionary liberal monoliths conservatives harped on for decades, except they’re opposite, ideologically. When Republicans these days talk about that sort of liberal media monolith as though it ever existed, they're telling you they're ill-informed. When they claim any such thing exists now, they’re telling you they’re liars. When they complain about Keith Olbermann, kick them right in the nuts.

They demanded this shit and made it happen. They birthed and embraced what they claimed as their own worst nightmare and have no one to complain to when they don’t like the long-term results. 

I can't say I hate what's happened to broadcast news since I was a kid. I find Olbermann’s shtick a little hammy, but he says some cool things on his totally biased news show. I like Rachel Maddow’s new show better, although I don’t watch it every night or every week, even. There is, as I said, a comfort in turning on the TV and watching a newscaster talk about politics in roughly the same manner I might.

I do miss one thing I didn't appreciate at the time, and often found dull, to be honest. The show would halt and the host or announcer would say "Last week, we ran a story about US involvement in Nicaragua. Here is Manuel Ortiz from the Boy, Do I Love the Contras Foundation to offer an oposing view." Everything else dropped away and for a minute or two, a single voice became the focus, a voice saying simply "I do not agree with the way you presented this issue, and here is why." Nobody could interrupt Manuel during his allotted time or call him stupid or a fascist or tell him to shut up. Nobody argued with him in absentia when he finished saying his piece, either.

It was almost religious, the respect paid this moment given to an unpretty, unfamous and otherwise unheard voice. It isn’t the moment I miss, so much as the reverence. 



I miss that a lot.

Robert N. Lee is a Pacific Northwest exile in Florida, and a designer and illustrator who occasionally writes stuff that gets published. He has two teenage children, a girlfriend and two cats and a pug named Henry, Beezus and Ramona. He also likes to say “fuck” a lot, and you can witness this fuckitude on a daily basis at http://vee-ecks.livejournal.com

When I was 19, I was in a car wreck. As a result I had a spinal fusion that was successful for two reasons. First of all, I can walk and second, the fusion is in excellent shape twenty years later due to an excellent surgeon and prudent care on my part.

However; this puts me in a category known as "pre-existing condition" to insurance providers. Once you have one, you must stay insured at all times or you will never be insured again.

On the news last night, following the $700 billion dollar bailout talk, it was mentioned that 25% of Americans are struggling to pay their bills every month.

Let me raise my hand and say hello, I am one of those Americans, and my actual debt is a miniscule fraction of this bailout… but it is a real, day to day, emotionally and psychologically draining financial struggle.

I think that a huge part of the frustration and anger on the part of so many Americans at the entire notion of a bailout is that we're being told that the government has to do this to "protect us", to protect the U.S. as well as the now deeply interconnected global markets from failing... they have to do this so that we can stillget credit. That is, so the banks will still loan us money, give us mortgages, give us credit cards at 8-25% interest (what a bargain!). Leaving aside the fact that the government doesn't even actually have this money and is just raising the debt ceiling on our national debt to cover these bad investments -- the kicker, the part of this bitter pill that is so goddamn hard to swallow is that we the American people are so desperate for bailout ourselves.

I'm gonna lay it out here, my friends. This is where I am at.

With all the media and political talking heads yakking about teen, unwed, or single mothers these days, I have a wake up call for everybody...

I have been a teen mother. I have lived with a man just to keep my baby. I graduated from a high school for teen mothers. I have been a single mother for eight years. I know a bit about this issue. Most of these politicos and talking heads have never lived my life, never had an inkling of what it's REALLY like to have a baby at sixteen and another at nineteen, and I cannot be silent about this subject that has, for the last few days, replaced the MISSING WHITE WOMAN headlines or CELEBRITY O.D.s on 24 hour "news." This does not happen often. Maybe in the last year, teen moms have been on the radar, in the form of US Magazine or whatever trash people are reading these days, because of what? Britney Spears, our tabloid queen, with more covers than Princess Diana, her little sister got pregnant at sixteen, sold her story to a trashy magazine for a million dollars, and suddenly teen pregnancy is a hot topic again--that and the fact that it has, for the first time in decades, increased. If the topic of teen/single moms can only be brought up because of some chick I've never heard of, in a National Enquirer-type magazine, which sadly is more widely read than newspapers.....Well, I quote Thomas Jefferson: "I tremble for the fate of my country."

I am not Jamie Spears. I am not a millionaire fake celeb. I am not Bristol Palin. Do you think either of these girls will walk into their local welfare office and wait hours, just for that extra $100 a month in foodstamps? Will they ever spend week after week on the phone with operators hired by a privatized Medicaid system, trying to find a doctor who will actually see their asthmatic child? Will they spend years fighting the Attorney General's office for child support, waiting a year just to get to court? Will they ever try to pay for their generic can of beans with WIC coupons and be treated like a leper? Have someone roll their eyes as they buy food with food stamps after they just got off an eight-hour shift standing on thier feet, cutting nasty hair?