by Joyce Slaton posted in Mom Stories
If you want to see how much motherhood is valued in our society, try telling someone at a cocktail party that you’re a stay-at-home mom. Skidmarks ensue. People assume you’re going to whip out a phone-ful of adorable pictures and tell poo-poo stories.
And it’s not just at cocktail parties. If you dare to write about your life on the Internet, you’re given a cutesy nickname (“mommy blogger”), categorized and typified so that your work can be appreciated by the type of people who can appreciate it. The only kind, in fact: Other mommies. You’re not women writing about a vast and all-encompassing part of women’s life. You’re a mommy. Who writes! Isn’t that cute?
Sometimes, it is. Sometimes moms are adoring and madonna-like. And sometimes we’re rageful, regretful, confused, or amused. All those emotions got a full airing at last night’s Listen to Your Mother stage show in San Francisco. LTYM features a different stage-ful of moms reading selections of their writing at each city in which it performs; Vagina Monologues-like. When it started in 2010, founder Ann Imig just intended it to be a one-off in Madison, Wisconsin. But the videos of the Madison performance proved so popular that women asked if they could produce LTYM shows in their own cities.
In 2011, there were five cities with Listen to Your Mother shows. In 2012, ten cities, and I live in one of them. I wasn’t sure quite what to expect. I ended up laughing, and then crying, and then laughing through my tears again, listening to a dozen women (and one man!) read their essays, stories, and blog posts.
Margaret Elysia Garcia absolutely slayed me with a tale about her lesbian mom, who eventually became a lesbian grandma who confused her granddaughter by not having a single dress to wear to her lesbian wedding. Tears puddled in my bra for Melissa Arca, who admitted that when she couldn’t do it, Breastfeeding Broke My Heart. And Lorrie Goldin gave me premonition-shivers for my someday-girl-in-college-maybe with her tale of weathering homesick calls from her daughter at university in Phone Home (But Maybe Not So Often).
All the shows are over for the year (they usually take place around Mother’s Day) so ha ha you can’t go. Put it on your calendar for next year. There were a lot of mom-and-daughter pairs in the audience, and a lot of excited hugging and crying afterwards. I went home and gave my own one baby, asleep in her bed with Daddy typing away next to her, a giant kiss, and felt really good about being her mom. What a nice thing for a show to do for you.
Read more from source:“babycenter-com-baby”
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