Scott is handing over to Hoggle, he concludes by turning to me.
“I’ve had a bit of an argument with EMDC. They wanted me to leave him on his back, but I wanted him in recovery…”
I look down at the patient, his mouth and nose smeared in drool and vomit and shrug.
“Until we get here, it’s your airway mate. You do what you think you need to.”
“But they said…”
“The instructions aren’t written for people who know what to do. They reckon it’s easier to notice a respiratory arrest if you keep him supine. With no kit? I’d have him on his side too.”
Hoggle is pinching the patient hard.
“Kal, I’m getting nowhere.”
I step to her side and deploy my complete range of painful stimuli.
I also get nowhere.
There aren’t many drunks you genuinely can’t wake up, but this guy’s done it. I suddenly realise that this may not be your average D&I.
We never learn what happens to the patient, who is transported to the hospital. I suspect this is too common an occurrence for Kal to address in this post. But we do learn of his respect for Scott, who seems to have instincts for more than the medical side of his job. While attempting to help the drunk man, Kal notes that he doesn't have a proper place to dispose of a used needle, which Scott handles immediately. Here we get a glimpse of the seriousness of Kal's job, and the challenges.
Kal agrees to let Scott "observe", or attend a shift with him. We end here, eager for what we will experience with the team next.
Thanks to everyone for continuing to send in your nominated posts. Remember to nominate individual posts, not entire blogs, and keep them coming! If you want to check out all the BlogHer of the Week posts, check out the BlogHer of the Week archive
.
Best,
--Jory
For Elisa, Jory and Lisa BlogHer Co-founders
]]>
"You're so pretty," Ivana's mother used to say to her. This was the last thing she said before slipping out of consciousness and dying. These words were often lost on Ivana:
It was like I had planted a rosebush in a pile of sand. I want to be angry at myself. I want to look in the mirror and say terrible things about how I failed at the most basic human capability. But something is stopping me.
What stopped Ivana was a lipstick. She believed she had given it to her mother before she died. She put on the lipstick and the realization hit: she could not hate herself.
"...as I looked in the mirror, I saw my reflection and the face of the person who has kept me from what I want most in the world. But it is also the face my beloved mother treasured so much she used her last words on this earth to complement it."
Ivana's simple, but profound, realization has compelled her readers and us to select her as the BlogHer of the Week.
Thanks to everyone for continuing to send in your nominated posts. Remember to nominate individual posts, not entire blogs, and keep them coming! If you want to check out all the BlogHer of the Week posts, check out the BlogHer of the Week archive.
Best,
Jory
For Elisa, Jory and Lisa
BlogHer Co-founders
]]>
"I remember instead, walking in the old stone downtown of this tiny city, her hand and mine together as we rushed across the street, her lips tight and her purse close. Or the soft warmth of her hips against my head as I leaned close in the kitchen. The curve of her body beside me, lazy Saturday’s on the brown couch, watching Hitchcock, her arms securing me to her."
Her mother didn't die at home, like her family wanted. The sadness behind this fact contorts reality and makes things right.
"Bereft, the house bent itself and wept. She had come home to die after all."
Matt of Matt, Liz and Madeline grieves in undercurrents following his wife's death after childbirth, when he realizes his daughter, Madeline, lives in the "after" and is entirely disassociated from the before.
"for the past
few weeks
i’ve been thinking
that maddy
has been pointing
and saying,
“mama”
to the photo
of her mom hanging
near the front door.
but on thursday i realized
that she points at,
and says,
“mama”
to every photo in
the house.
Grief is yielding, however, and won't allow such a separation. Small things, like Madeline's clapping hands, remind him of his wife's mannerisms.
"...someday i’ll make
fun of our daughter for
doing the
same things her
mom
used to do,
and remind her
that she knows
her mother better
than any of us ever
could have imagined."
Thanks to Matt, Thordora and Lesbian Dad for taking us, sometimes painfully, through grief, but with glimpses of what lies on the other side.
And thanks to everyone for continuing to send in your nominated posts.
Remember to nominate individual posts, not entire blogs, and keep them
coming! If you want to check out all the BlogHer of the Week posts, check out the BlogHer of the Week archive.
Jory
For Elisa, Jory and Lisa BlogHer Co-founders
]]>In a post that could provide a month's worth of fodder for Passive Aggressive notes, The Bloggess takes us into her hilarious world of wet towels, cat vomit and empty pizza boxes with her post, "A series of helpful post-it notes I left around the house for my husband this week". All guffawing aside, her creative, epistolary approach is the stuff that made us all agree that Jenny is The BlogHer of the Week.
Never mind the size of the font one must use to really write the kinds of notes that The Bloggess leaves for her husband, Victor:
Dear Victor: This bath towel was wet and you left it on the floor and it was the last clean one in the house. I’m pretty sure this is how tuberculosis is spread. I’m writing all this in my blog in case I end up dead because of your carelessness.
We get more glimpses of The Bloggess's dissatisfaction, which begins to feed on itself and snowball into a diatribe as circular and clever as a Laurel and Hardy routine. Who knew that the everyday annoyances of marital co-habitation could spin into such ridiculousness and yet ring so true?
Dear Victor: I’ve poisoned something in the fridge. Good luck with that.
Dear Victor: I’m sorry. I think I might have PMS. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.
Dear Victor: That was an apology, you asshole! Now there are two things poisoned in the fridge. Because you don’t know how to accept an apology.
Dear Victor: I am so sorry you are sick. I swear I was just kidding about poisoning shit in the fridge. I mean, I did leave the yogurt out for like a half a day but that really more by accident because I was so distracted by the wet towel on the floor. If anything, you brought this on yourself. Once again, I apologize.
The notes continue, even after Post-Its run out, on wet towels on the floor, and then on the cat. At this point the spinning of this story is making us giddy. And then we are let go to fall in our own fit of laugher.
The Bloggess clarifies: "Most of this post was exaggerated except for the part where Victor left a wet towel on the floor. That shit totally happened. I’m still working through it."
Thanks, Jenny, for the spit-out-what-we-were-eating humor at the end of a long week.
And thanks to everyone for continuing to send in your nominated posts.
Remember to nominate individual posts, not entire blogs, and keep them
coming! If you want to check out all the BlogHer of the Week posts, check out the BlogHer of the Week archive.
Best,
Jory
For Elisa, Jory and Lisa
BlogHer Co-founders
]]>
Flox begins with a conversation with her post-divorce lover, someone who is ready to be more of a presence in her life. But she's not ready.
I explained I preferred to spend time one-on-one. Lovers are kind of like start-up ideas. You don't share them until they've crystallized and are off the ground. I don't want to spend the discovery process playing Virgil to a Dante newly navigating the spheres of my life or, worse, trouble-shooting the issues that often result from adding more variables to the relationship equation.
I've always been like this. Friends are forged in a great furnace, they are solid and light as titanium, complete with that impressive fatigue limit. Lovers are like spiderwebs—gorgeous structures of spirals and radials, powerful in their own way, of course, but delicate, too.
We follow Flox into her spider web, which at times is exhilarating and erotic, and other times deeply analytical. Flox has goosebump-inducing, passionate sessions with her lover, and confusing, circular debates:
“It doesn't feel like we're really dating,” he tells me. He doesn't feel integrated into my life. He wants to go places with me and the people I know. He wants the whole experience. I want the individual experience. I analyze the situation in terms of needs, needs that everyone has, but which differ from person to person, and go met or unmet.
He objects to the description of the situation as a question of needs.
“It's a reaction to your behavior pattern,” he says.
“But it originates in your need,” I say. “Which is not being met.”
“I feel like you're putting this on me.”
“I'm not putting this on you or me,” I say. “I'm saying you have a need, which is not unusual, but which nevertheless I am not meeting.”
“I prefer 'dynamic.'”
I sigh. “I feel we're debating the emotional equivalent of the double-slit experiment. Particles or waves? Both!”
Flox's post doesn't offer up advice for the newly separated, or empty words of hope. She's only providing an account of herself, someone not defeated by a relationship and willing to be taken up like a piece of flotsom into this sea of emotion until she builds her own vessel and can navigate it with certainty.
For her fearless approach, and some really amazing writing, we congratulate AV Flox for being the BlogHer of the Week.
Thanks to everyone for continuing to send in your nominated posts.
Remember to nominate individual posts, not entire blogs, and keep them
coming! If you want to check out all the BlogHer of the Week posts, check out the BlogHer of the Week archive.
Best,
--Jory
For Elisa, Jory and Lisa
BlogHer Co-founders
Anticipating the return of her husband from an extended business trip, she attempts to make their home a place of comfort and ... adventure.
]]>Anticipating the return of her husband from an extended business trip, she attempts to make their home a place of comfort and ... adventure.
I knew exactly what it was I needed to do to surprise my husband home in a manner he’d never forget.
I was going to dye what little hair remaining on my body blue. That’s right. It was time to turn the old landing strip into a runway he’d never forget.
The story resulting from this Herculean--or perhaps Fekkain--effort elicits our laughter and wincing in ways we never thought possible from just any dye job. If for any other reason than because she managed to find 25 ways to refer to the pudendum and three visuals to evoke pubic hair, we have selected Tanis, author of the post "The Tale of Blue Thunder" from her blog Attack of the Redneck Mommy, as our BlogHer of the Week.
Perhaps it was extreme patriotism and anticipation of the Fourth of July that also inspired Tanis, whose pale skin and severe pain, coupled with her new shock of color, instantly reminds one of the colors of our nation.
Tanis encounters more obstacles on her journey to re-invention than Jason and the Argonauts: Navigating the "trim" and failing to avoid bleaching the "sensitive skin". The true test comes as she withstands the ultimate test:
Just as I made peace with standing like a statue with my legs wide apart, there was a knock on my door.
Imagining it was my father who would likely just barge in (as he’s been known to do), see my blue plastic-wrapped muff and then keel over dead, I wondered how I would explain this to the authorities so I grabbed a robe and ran to the door to try and stop my dad from buying the farm.
Except it wasn’t my father, it was the UPS driver. He must have thought I was a tad freakish what with the robe on in the middle of the afternoon and the way I sorta bounced up and down as once again the toxic chemicals burned their way into my female folds. I quickly signed for my package, ignored his polite chit chat and all but slammed the door in his face as I tossed the parcel onto the couch and beelined back to the bathroom.
With a newly shorn, Smurflike "box of love", Tanis expects to surprise and delight her man upon his arrival. Finally, the time of the Big Reveal. Her husband,:
...Laughed so hard tears poured down his cheeks. He laughed so hard I wondered if he’d ever be able to get it up. If I had gone through all the torture of ripping, stripping, coluring and burning my beaver all for naught.
Of course, some journeys can only be appreciated in the re-telling. What could not be appreciated in the moment will go down in our books as a most worthwhile endeavor. Never will we see a bikini wax or a Smurf the same way again.
Thanks to everyone for continuing to send in your nominated posts.
Remember to nominate individual posts, not entire blogs, and keep them
coming! If you want to check out all the BlogHer of the Week posts, check out the BlogHer of the Week archive.
Best,
Jory
For Elisa, Jory and Lisa, BlogHer Co-founders
]]>PPR's post--the second installment of a three-part-series on her blog This So-Called Post-Post-Racial Life entitled "Working With Black Women", is told as a series of hypothetical movie sequences. PPR casts herself and others she's encountered in her real working life in a series of re-enactments.
In her first one, she (or the actress Raven Symone, in this case) and her professor (played in this post by Sigourney Weaver) engage in a dialogue:
The professor seated at a desk a few feet from me is played by Sigourney Weaver. “Who’s coming in this weekend for your graduation?” “Everybody,” I/Raven say/s, looking up for a moment from the stack of papers I/she am/is grading. “My sister and her son, my mother and grandmother, father and stepmother.” “That is wonderful,” Professor ____/Sigourney says, a wistful look in her eyes. “I know exactly how you feel. I was the first person in my family to graduate from college, too.”
The word "too" has so many implications. "Too" means the professor assumes that because she/PPR/Raven is black that she is the first in her family to get a college education. It implies that if the truth were known that, in fact, PPR is not the first person in her family to get a college degree, that she would "lose some of her realness" in the professor's mind. That she would not be perceived as a "real black woman".
The following re-enactments illuminate other misperceptions by PPR's black peers and by a black, female employer. She creates her own ending to this movie:
If this scene from my life were a movie, all three of us would be dressed fabulously…we’d be walking side by side in slow motion…a funky soundtrack would be playing loudly in time with our steps. The heads of the White colleagues we pass in the halls would literally turn as we glide by. (Well, actually that would not be artistic license, as in real life the heads really did turn; conversations really were halted. But back to the movie version.) I’d be played by Gabrielle Union. To my right would be Queen Latifah and to my left would be Halle Berry. Though previously suspicious of each other—each for our own reasons, based on our own backgrounds—we are now, after cafeteria wilted salads and stale sandwiches, united in a powerful front. There is no stopping us now. The powerful White folks watching us pass in the hallway are defeated. Their efforts to play us off against and keep us apart from each other have failed….
She acknowledges that this ending may not happen, "But this is my movie. And I like the vanishing fake Black cards ending."
PPR, we loved your ending, and so did your blogging peers who nominated you for BlogHer of the Week.
Thanks to everyone for continuing to send in your nominated posts.
Remember to nominate individual posts, not entire blogs, and keep them coming!
If you want to check out all the BlogHer of the Week posts, check out the BlogHer of the Week archive.
Best,
Jory
(For Elisa, Jory and Lisa
BlogHer Co-founders)
Later, in 2000, I read another story about coaching that featured Laura, who at this point was THE career coach. Though the story refers to coaching as "the Wild West of HR" Laura was critical to bringing in to the mainstream. She was the first career coach on Oprah. She'd written a book called Take Yourself to the Top, which spoke to this emerging need to make sense of the globalizing business world while still maintaining a sense of sanity. The title suggested, however, that though we might need to re-think our obsession with succeeding, we still couldn't jump off the treadmill. Rather we needed to learn to enjoy it. As a young professional at an emerging Web start-up with no family obligations or hobbies, this was music to my ears.
In 2002 I was introduced to Laura through a consulting partner and wondered how, in a short meeting, I should suck all of her knowledge out of her brain and store it for myself. We were meeting to discuss how we might help Laura, who at this point had forged a path for thousands of newly annointed career and life coaches and was seeking to understand the next step for herself. I was fascinated by her story, not only because I would consult for her, but because I was afforded an early view of her next transformation.
Laura's life had consisted of flying to Fortune 500 companies to speak en masse to employees, building a coaching program for coaches, and writing books. I was convinced that Laura was leading the life I wanted someday. But she seemed, in some small way, over it. I noticed that she worked harder than I'd seen anyone work to fit it all in while still being availble for her husband and three children. She was tired. I saw that, even while she spoke and wrote, and continued to be a force in the personal development world, she was looking for the next big thing. Not the next big trend, but the next personal revelation. She was no longer as passionate about simply succeeding.
Her work began to reflect this soul-searching. She enrolled in the seminary to become an Interfaith minister; something that I only marginally understood and chatted with her about from time to time, thinking her classes were like my semi-weekly meditation stints, which I took up to help me write and ended when I saw that they held no "professional" value. But Laura stayed committed to it, despite securing a contract for a new book that I--and likely most of the people who had been displaced during the downturn of 2000-2002--was dying to read: Now What?: 90 Days to a New Life Direction. Having emerged from my start-up's dissolution and second-guessing what I could bring to the corporate table, she couldn't write the book fast enough for me.
I went back to the corporate world and had to hang up my consultant hat. I'd been in touch with Laura here and there; she's a fiercely loyal holiday card writer. But several months ago we connected on Facebook, and I saw that she had another new book out, The Little Book on Meaning: Why We Crave It, How We Create It. I've got a stack of books on my dresser from PR folks that I intend to get to, but this one I knew I needed to read NOW. I waited a few weeks to bring it on my vacation earlier this month, and I ended up devouring this book in two days.
So why did this book sing to me? Like Laura's other books, she's hit a nerve of the collective sub-conscious. Sure, we want to do our jobs better and avoid being laid off, but somewhere deeper we want something else, just as Laura herself wanted to go deeper with her practice. We want to know that regardless of where this economy leaves us, we can find peace within ourselves. In my case, I've reached a place of greater satisfaction with my career direction and want to continue to find ways to tie all the areas of my life together. I'm finally understanding what Laura was experiencing in 2002.
I can best describe Laura's book by telling you what it is not: It is not inspirational without being practical. I recall titles like Neale Donald Walsch's Conversations with God and Deepak Chopra's Creating Affluence--all fine for quotable doses of spiritually uplifting concepts, or a taste of quantum physics, but Laura approaches spirituality like a buddy, willing to share deeply personal stories that tugged her in directions of understanding. You aren't reading a "guru", but someone on a familiar level who is incredibly gifted at sifting through the differences between unquestioning, fear-based faith in a higher being and simple moments of divinity.
I was particularly moved by how Laura shared deeply personal facts about her life that I was not aware of before. Coaching was, for Laura, a second choice of a career, and one that she entered having felt she'd failed at being an entertainer. It makes sense to me now, when I went to see her speak in the Bay Area and she ended her talk singing, why she had been seeking the next step in her coaching. Though she'd attracted audiences by educating them, she personally needed to inspire by emotionally and spiritually moving them. Readers will also realte to her own struggles with parenting, judging others, and inner-peace (yes, Interfaith ministers can still be rankled by obnoxious people on airplanes). Like memoir writer Elizabeth Gilbert, she takes a naked approach to enlightenment, and tells her story with a mommyblogger's candor.
Born Jewish, Laura backs away from dogma that no longer makes sense to her. She recalls going to temple as a child and then having a moment of clarity:
By the time I was sixteen, one particular sermon ended my particiation in any organized religion for a great long while. I still have the image vividly available to me of the rabbi leaning over the pulpit--white-knuckling both sides of it with his aging hands. He jutted his face out to the audience, squninting his eyes closed behid his Coke-bottle glasses, and said: "You don't do good deeds because you are a good person. You do good deeds because you are a good Jew. ...I no longer blame Judaism for my earlier disdain of organized religions, but it was those early experiences that made me realize that all the religions claim the same virutes to be their own and claim their path as the ultimate one to God.
She approaches some of the big questions of life using a multitude of belief systems and cutting them with common sense. In approaching the question, "If God exists, why do bad things happen?" she had to explore her own doubts, in no small part stemming from the suffering of her son, whose struggles with epilepsy has posed one of the greatest challenges to her belief in the necessity of evil to illuminate good.
This book felt to me to be the missing piece for Laura, who has now completely surrendered to a stronger calling than even she could have realized 10 years ago. We keep hearing that this recession is signaling a reshuffling of the deck, not just in terms of industries re-creating themselves, but in our own journies toward meaning. Unlike previous books in which she engaged us as an expert, Laura provides us no blueprints for finding the next step, but creates a space where we may discover it for ourselves.
]]>Those who had the record--remember the hot pink cover?--might remember some of the song lyrics.
]]>"It's alright to cry..."
"William wants a Doll! William wants a doll!"
Those who had the record--remember the hot pink cover?--might remember some of the song lyrics.
"It's alright to cry..."
"William wants a Doll! William wants a doll!"
"In this land every boy grows to be his own man, in this world every girl grows to be her own woman ..."
These catchy tunes imprinted messages that our older minds were able to appreciate, and in many cases emulate.
The nostalgia and hilarity evoked in her post, "I Know What Boys Like", is why we selected momtrolfreak as our BlogHer of the Week.
Says Momtrolfreak, "...we weren't going to prescribe to those silly gender notions, with pink OR blue, and dolls OR trucks. We were ENLIGHTENED. We were MODERN. We were feminists...I was certain we were both having girls and that each would be a modern-day Rosie the Riveter, Every Woman, Working Hard for the Money, Bringing Home the Bacon ANNNNND Frying it Up in the pan."
But the stereotypes she fought became reality for both her and her friend. And momtrolfreak finds that there are some things that can't be controlled.
Momtrolfreak had a boy, and her friend Penny had a girl. For Penny: "The message was clear: NO PINK. NOPINKNOPINKNOPINK." The result: a daughter who left to her own devices would wear all shades of pink. She loves dolls and accessorizing. She's what you might call a girly girl.
Momtrolfreak says, "I thought I'd give it a shot, though. In true Free to Be, You and Me fashion, we bought him a dollhouse."
Observing her son playing with the dollhouse, she picks up her camera and documents her discovery that her son is, in fact, the anti-William. He doesn't want a doll. He wants cars and trucks. The pictures speak for themselves.
When you stop laughing you get the lesson: we can't make our girls into Enjoli women, or our boys into doll-appreciating men. We can just make them free to be who they will be.
Thanks to everyone for continuing to send in your nominated posts.
Remember to nominate individual posts, not entire blogs, and keep them
coming! If you want to check out all the BlogHer of the Week posts, check out the BlogHer of the Week archive.
Best,
Jory
For Elisa, Jory and Lisa
BlogHer Co-founders
]]>
Says Julie,
"I walked past them, just like the other people on their way home. I admit it. I saw her and sailed on by. ... But I had seen the tears in her eyes, too, and so halfway down the block, I yelled at myself inside my head for being an asshole and went back. I had $30 in my wallet and gave it to her."
This Samaritan act might have been enough to get the woman what she needed for a motel room, but what else? Julie has a conversation with K and her children. K had tried to seek shelter for her family at a number of places but couldn't get into any of them. She cannot go home because it's too dangerous. Julie asks K if she can blog about her situation, even take some pictures. K agrees,
"It can't be any more embarrassing than what I'm doing now," she says.
From here, we see portraits of a family that we cannot ignore or forget. Julie gives K's older children the camera, and we see their playful smiles and wonder, when will they stop smiling for the camera? When will they have tears in their eyes? When will they understand that they can't go back home?
Julie asks her readers for help, and her readers respond--some with donations, some with contact information, some with support.
But again, that's not why we chose this post. We chose it because conversations are powerful, but not if they are not shared powerfully. Julie found a way to extend K's voice, to tell her story without K having to painfully do so. We've seen how new media can be a platform for helping others, but by allowing her subjects to participate in telling their story, Julie adds another dimension of immediacy. Her readers are compelled to give K's story the happiest ending possible.
Julie, thank you for your post, and for your ingenuity.
And thanks to everyone for continuing to send in your nominated posts.
Remember to nominate individual posts, not entire blogs, and keep them
coming! If you want to check out all the BlogHer of the Week posts, check out the BlogHer of the Week archive.
Best,
Jory
For Elisa, Jory and Lisa
BlogHer Co-founders
The Blogosphere was abuzz with the rumor, verified last Monday, of several Mombloggers participating in an episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show. It was exciting to see our blog buddies on one of the most influential trend-watching programs on television. But the show garnered mixed reviews; while mombloggers were featured, there was nearly no acknowledgement of mommyblogging as a phenomenon. Some thought the angle of the show, entitled "The Secret Lives of Moms", made Moms seem more duplicitous, and perhaps crazy, than they collectively are. OK, so ONE mom could claim she wore her child's diapers in a desperate situation, but all in all, moms' lives are not so secret (at least, not since we started writing blogs).
Is there really a "secret life" Mombloggers live?
In her post, "On The Sex and the City-ification of Motherhood", our BlogHer of the Week, Anna of abdpbt, shares her painstakingly derived opinion, one she qualifies upfront:
Everybody knows I’m insanely jealous of these people being on Oprah, but this is the part where I acknowledge that fact up front and cross my fingers that it won’t dilute the relevance of my opinion completely. Yes. I’m still super jealous, even if they didn’t publish web addresses up for most of the people. Even if the Skype reception made some of them look like they had bad skin. Obviously, I am a petty person who is dying to be on Oprah. Let’s not kid ourselves.
What follows is Anna's not-so-jealous take on the program, and it starts with a memory from her junior year in college, when she realizes that her interest in Camille Paglia stems from her sensing a wave in the backlash against the notion of "having it all" motherhood:
Was [Paglia] being sincere, truthful, or were her outrageous claims just exaggerated reaction the limitations of 70s feminism? Was it just Faludian backlash, after all? ... if the brand of my feminism didn’t change that night, perhaps my understanding of how the waves of feminism work did.
Perhaps, Anna argues, we are just smack-dab, in the center of yet another wave in the continuum toward enlightened motherhood, and that there are no "secrets"; we just need a name for this still-shady side of our understanding of this evolving phase.
Anna likens this exaggeration of motherhood to one perpetuated in the '90s and early '00s with the show Sex and the City. The program got the credit for liberating a class of women from repressing their sexuality. Anna argues that these women were already quite expressed; the show simply exploited a wave that had already happened.
...I hated ("Sex and the City") for reasons that are separate from the show itself ... I hated it because everyone acted like it was so ground-breaking, when in fact it just served to reinforce the same gender and class hierarchy as has every other show in the history of time–but it did so in a superfically subversive way, a misleading way. How do you make your life completely revolve around men (how to attract, how to catch, how to keep, how to seduce, how to marry, how to leave, how to forget) but make it seem as though you are a feminist? I know! Make them sexually liberal! Make them drink pink drinks, have spa days! They’re sluts, but they’re upper middle class sluts!
While you may or may not agree that the characters in SitC were sluts, or that moms today are dancing on the edge of sanity, we agreed that the media does like to throw a dart in time and proclaim a trend where it lands. We liked Anna's post because it went beyond simple analysis of Oprah's "Mommy" show, beyond the perspective of someone who had not been included and wished she had. It went to a core questioning of where we are really in the continnum of "liberating" ourselves from the constructs of what it means to be a mother.
We are all riding on the front of the feminist wave, whether it's because we admit to being a little drunk during a playdate or don't write about motherhood at all. Our "secrets" are out; it's our insistence on sharing them that is revolutionary.
Congratulations, Anna!
And thanks to everyone for continuing to send in your nominated posts. Remember to nominate individual posts, not entire blogs, and keep them coming! If you want to check out all the BlogHer of the Week posts, check out the BlogHer of the Week archive.
Best,
Jory
BlogHer Co-founders
]]>He said,
"There's NEVER a perfect time to have a child. If you wait for it, you will never have one. It's very much a 'leap now and find the net later' mentality. You pretty much just have to be completely mental to want kids, but it is a beautiful insanity, I assure you. Even with the straightjacket."
]]>He said,
"There's NEVER a perfect time to have a child. If you wait for it, you will never have one. It's very much a 'leap now and find the net later' mentality. You pretty much just have to be completely mental to want kids, but it is a beautiful insanity, I assure you. Even with the straightjacket."
So, I'm not averse to change, or risk. Most entrepreneurs thrive on both. But the kid thing is different. When it comes to parenting I'm a voyeur--I like to watch. I marvel at how parents do even the most mundane activities while being responsible for little people. And if the parents both work I'm even more fascinated: See Mommy make lunches; see kids scream for seemingly no reason, and Mommy continuing to make sandwiches. see Daddy get the kids in the car. See Mommy and Daddy fall asleep on the couch that evening during the first minute they have together alone. See them do it again in the morning.
Add to this mix Mommy going to a job that has penalized her for having her kids. She still works, but she wonders, if she's only making a percentage of what she did and won't get a promotion (because often "part time" is re-interpreted by HR as "part competent") then maybe she should have just stayed at home. Add to this mix Daddy having to come home late several nights each week for client dinners, or because of a critical proposal that's due the next day.
I've seen this play out, time and time again, with people I know, and I wonder how it could be done differently. And I realize that these are the advantaged ones who have the option of one or both parents working. And who have, perhaps unconsciously, made the decision of whose career was more pliable, or sacrificeable.
I've also seen the kid-less version of domestic cooperation played out in my own home. And though it's simplified without children, the mold that determines who would do what is being set, and that has terrified both of us. As the one in my relationship who travels more and cooks less, I wonder how I could make up for what I don't contribute to the household. And would I be available for my children the way I envisioned I would be, before I understood the difference between a job and a career? My parenting ideal was set back in 1982, when my career aspiration was to live at the top of a really, really tall skyscraper in Chicago and to have front-row tickets to all the Cubs games. I just assumed I would be the boss of something. So some of this was off, but one aspect was self-prophesying: I assumed I was going to work so hard as an adult that my husband would beg me to work less so we could spend more time with our family. It seemed very romantic at the time.
I didn't dream of being a ballerina when I grew up, or a housewife; I always expected to work. I never struggled to offload some of the housework; I never expected to do it. Clearly there are blank spaces on the canvas of my grand vision of cooperative parenting. I just never expected to sacrifice for my career. And just like many working men with working wives, I'm seeing that that's not realistic. For one thing, if we decided to be parents I would be the one physically having the child. Even in the most barbaric circumstances I couldn't just procreate then hop back on my concall. Parenthood is interruptive, period. And even the most self-absorbed people are transformed by it. But while asserting my rights as a woman to have a fully realized career and a family I'm unwittingly nudging my husband away from his aspirations.
The latest study by the Families and Work Institute confirms why we need to explore options that allow both partners to achieve in their careers and tend to their families in equal measure. The report showed several shifts over 30 years, including a growing number of women who are making more than their spouses, thus making it essential to allow them to fully realize their careers. And there is no dip in career ambition among young mothers. We want our careers, regardless of whether we have kids.
Sharon Meers and Joanna Strober's book, Getting to 50/50: And why it's great for your marriage, your career, your kids and you, interests me as someone who expects to have a career with or without kids, but also because reading it, I've put myself in my husband's shoes.
"I would have to work less," I said to my husband, thinking of the adjustments necessary for children.
"I would have to stop working," he retorted.
I will ask him to read the book now that I've finished, not so that he can appreciate my right to a career, but so he can see that I understand his rights as the spouse that doesn't work seven days a week.
I've often become bored with the circular debate around women and the workplace. It seems the conclusion extracted from the trendier, Third-Wave feminist crowds, is that we all have a right to full-time, well-paying careers, but there are no shortcuts to achieving them, and parenting is no joke either. Without some really good household help, or a husband with no career aspirations of his own, you might as well give up your career or run for Vice President of the U.S. under the Republican Party. There is no satisfactory middle ground. One of my favorite career writers, Lisa Belkin, digs into more "alternative" formats, where both parents cut down on work and bring more commitment to their families. There still remains in this equation the desire to achieve outside the home. Fast Company ran a cover story reprinted online, "Balance is Bunk!" that confirmed our fear that greatness isn't achievable without being obsessive. By extension, balance is possible only when one isn't doing anything that meaningful.
Both Meers and Strober, successful executives in the demanding finance industry, have a keen understanding of the issues at hand for dual working, dual-parenting couples. Their facts from the ground level are refreshing. In the first chapters of the book, they debunk several myths around working mothers: No your kids won't likely be failures because you weren't there during every waking hour of their formative years. Studies show that children of dual-income earners have more confidence and are more self-reliant. However, increased involvement from Dad makes a big difference. And couples who both work, and who both have fulfilling careers, have better sex lives. I found it interesting that divorce is not most commonly a factor of wives spending more time at work as much as it is a factor of how much or little working husbands will share the home load. The authors argue that the closer couples can get to a 50/50 ratio of effort between career and household responsibilities, the better off their marriages and parenting will be.
The middle of the book delves into deeper issues for women. There is no denying a steep on-ramp for the majority of women who opt back into the workforce after having their children. Some of the stories of demotion, unworkable situations meant to edge out working mothers, and even outright discrimination depressed me, but the authors bring them up to show where women often get pulled down into the muck. In a chapter called "What Happens When Women Don't Tell the Truth," we see how women corroborate bosses' assumptions of their inability to handle post-maternity work because they don't share their desire for a full-time commitment.
Say the authors:
It's going to take a lot more straight talk to help men over another hump: Men often want to believe women leave voluntarily. It's more convenient to believe that it's all okay, that women gladly depart, so nothing needs to change. ... Stanford researchers found that some men had a hard time with the results of their study... Interviewing men, both old and young, they found that men embraced the belief that women "choose" home over work for reasons of both comfort and competition. "When older men hear from a woman that she is leaving 'to spend more time with my family,' they are relieved," the researchers wrote. "Their notions of what is 'proper' for women are re-inforced and they need feel no guilt..."
A strategy that Meers and Strober offer is rethinking the rules at work. Women tend to suffer by sticking to them and not seeing what isn't working. We struggle to make meetings that coincide with picking up the kids, or to have counterproductive face time. One of their interview subjects, a man, shares how for four years he would leave the office in the middle of the day to carpool his kids, and none of his colleagues were the wiser. He "got away" with it because he never assumed there was something wrong with it.
In a chapter called "The Girl Scout Tax" the authors describe another common tendency of women, even at the executive level, of handling time-sucking administrative matters because someone has to own them. One executive found herself cross-checking the addresses on her team's holiday cards because her mostly male counterparts' attempts were so error-prone. The authors ask, why not just let them fail and learn to do it right the next time? The same thing goes for parenting:
Unless you are successful fighting the "I'll do it myself" urge, you have to make a conscious effort to give your spouse some breathing room, especially if he's as new to parenting as you are or if he's taking over a new task. You may intervene if the baby's diaper is slipping down to his knees, or if your husband mixes bleach and ammonia while cleaning the bathroom, but every time you correct your spouse's "errors" or criticize his way of doing something, you're dealing a blow to 50/50.
This book, which pulls from the wisdom of some of the best thinkers in this space, women such as Margaret Heffernan, Anne Mulcahy of Xerox, and Cathy Benko of Deloitte & Touche, provides an empowering, but realistic take on navigating shared responsibilities, and shared ambition. Rather than read this and bristle at the thought of giving up my stake in my hard-earned career I find this to be a potential strategy for both me and my husband. The real fear isn't the responsibility, it's the underlying sacrifice that has, time and again, come with the responsibility of children. This book makes the "leap" that my friend described to me very possible, without the straightjacket.
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We, an increasingly overweight society, love our shortcuts; but then we have our doses of reality, sometimes a pinch in the arm like an unflattering picture from a friend’s wedding, or a punch in the face, like the death of a loved one, to remind us that shortcuts really don’t work. Our BlogHer of the Week experienced both.
In an installment of a blog memoir she’s writing, Ding, a writer on feminist blog Bitch Ph.D., recounts her battle with weight and her decision to simply change. Her post, “A Blog Memoir in 25 Things: The Other Side of 200” begins with the pinch in the arm, the fear-inducing visit to the physician:
Sitting on the crunchy white butcher paper in my doctor's office, I was worried about butt sweat when I really should have been worried about the little frown on her face.
'Well, Ding, this is where we are.' She pointed to a chart. 'For your height and weight, you are in this area.' Her finger circled a bunch of red squares.
'And does this Red Zone mean I'm going to drop dead in the next couple of weeks?'
Her smile was just as brittle as the paper I was sitting on. 'Let me put it this way. You need to be on the other side of 200 - I don't care how long it takes, that's where you need to be.
Conveying the outcome of her appointment to friends later that day, Ding shares nervously how her weight could contribute to problems later on: hypertension, heart disease, diabetes, stroke, and potential blindness. Ding makes the declaration, “I don't want these things. I DON'T want these things.”
We also learn that her decision to lose weight is not a foregone conclusion but rather a self-debated one. A feminist blogger, Ding rejects the notion of dieting to adhere to a skinny societal ideal.
“We can talk about 'fat acceptance' but as a now diagnosed, official, Fat Person I am saying that I don't want these things and if it means sacrificing my socially unacceptable fat on the altar of Not Dying, sign me up. If not dying means losing a tire or two around my middle, then so be it. I have no affection for them. I am not wed to these rings around my middle. If it's going to be a choice between me and my fat rings, I choose me.”
Next, the punch in the face, which we learn actually came well before Ding’s doctor visit: A memory of her now-deceased mother who had diabetes, and who, Ding shares, neglected to take her insulin.
“My mother may have been a fast driver but she was a slow suicide...”
So now Ding must overcome two legacies—her family’s medical history and their denial of biological facts. What follows is Ding’s journey to “the other side of 200”, consisting of simple eating, activity with friends, and some edits to her usual regime, which she chooses to consider just that: edits, not punishments or adherence to crushing societal norms. In her simple structure she describes what a true act of commitment to oneself looks like; a choice, not a struggle or a surrender of ideals.
To me, this isn't 'dieting.' It's living. Not 'living' in the Oprah-sense: all blurry light, white clothing and huge gusts of breath about one's 'best life.'
What I'm doing is less glamorous than that. It's, literally, living -- inhaling, exhaling, heart beating. …
… I'm changing the way I've been living because I fucking don't want to die like my mother.
When we perceive full-scale change as sacrifice and self-denial, we resist, but Ding has simplified her change to a choice for healing herself. In overcoming the destructive aspects of her past and her politics, she’s found the path to the other side of 200.
Ding’s post is relevant to so many of us who define ourselves by our ideals but need permission to selectively abandon the ones that are literally and figuratively killing us. Ding, we’re looking forward to the next installments of your blog memoir, especially if they are as inspiring as this one.
Thanks to everyone for continuing to send in your nominated posts. Remember to nominate individual posts, not entire blogs, and keep them coming!
Best,
Jory
For Elisa, Jory and Lisa
BlogHer Co-founders
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My organization, BlogHer, was one of many sources for the Forrester study that recommended considering compensating bloggers; we need to acknowledge our own role in this debate, one that is increasingly brought up among social media evangelists inside companies and smart marketers weighing the question: Should bloggers ever be compensated, in some form, for coverage? Our answer is yes: Paid reviews by influential people can play the same role in social media as they do in every other medium. The keys to success are context and disclosure.
We don't believe that the discussion is being framed properly for organizations to come to their own best conclusions. It's time to look at the finer distinctions between compensated programs that have emerged as social media enters awkward adolescence. To us, the question is not whether anyone should ever compensate bloggers, it's under what circumstances should you compensate them? And if you do compensate them, what are your obligations, and theirs?
We've noticed that some of the debate around this issue stems from oversimplifying terms. For example, "Sponsored Conversations" has been used to refer to any blogger/influencer coverage that results from any form of compensation: cash, free product, even conference swag. BlogHer also uses the term "sponsored conversations", but wouldn't apply that term as broadly. Forrester includes not only authentic, interactive discussions but also product reviews and even paid linking under the umbrella of "sponsored conversations." This all-inclusive approach triggers wholesale suspicion and rejection, because we all intuitively know some of the examples aren't really "conversations" at all, authentic or otherwise.
BlogHer's opinion: Say what you're doing and where you're doing it via transparent guidelines, disclosures and standards. Sponsored conversations can't be confused with organic conversations that happen to mention a brand, but such campaigns can still be entirely valid, provided it's transparent and relevant. As "traditional media" veterans, my partners and I hold editorial as sacred. According to our community guidelines, we could never place even relevant conversations in our editorial areas if they were initiated by brands. Instead, we developed a section of the site -- BlogHer Special Offers -- devoted to opportunities to discuss and, yes, endorse product. We disclosed how and why we launched Special Offers to our community. Segregating our sponsored content has never hurt our site or our sponsors; the most highly-trafficked areas of our community Website are often our clean, well-lit, sponsored discussion pages.
Reviews, compensated or otherwise, can be done well, but we distinguish reviews as a different animal from sponsored conversations -- we conduct and present sponsored conversations differently. For example, when we held a sponsored conversation for a brand that wanted to be associated with smart, economical grocery spending, we didn't ask our community to join us for a discussion of how the sponsoring brand contributed to smart spending. That would make for a pretty lame conversation of limited value to users, and certainly wouldn't lead to authentic word of mouth. Instead, we hosted a conversation in BlogHer Special Offers about smart spending, no brand discussion required. Comments ensued. As did sponsor happiness. Everyone wins.
Let's apply this logic to one of Forrester's examples of a "sponsored conversation" -- a recent Kmart campaign in which a blogger was offered a $500 gift card to write about his shopping experience with the retailer. In our opinion, the campaign's problem was not that it was a "sponsored conversation" rather than an organically generated event that just happened to tie to a brand experience. Instead, the problem with the campaign was that the sponsored conversation was integrated with the organic (or what we would call "editorial") conversations happening on the chosen blogs. Therefore, it was confusing and out of context with the kind of content usually found on those blogs. If the wrong kind of comments ensue -- those from confused and alienated users -- everyone loses.
So, if sponsored conversations are different from compensating bloggers to review a brand experience, then how or when is it okay to compensate bloggers? The truth is that many bloggers want to review stuff --sharing opinions on products, services, media, political candidates -- that's second nature to bloggers. And sponsors want to be reviewed. Companies knew, even before our 2008 social media study quantified it, that women online turn to their blogging friends for product advice and purchasing recommendations. What we wanted was to ensure balanced coverage, full disclosure of the relationship, and appropriate, clearly marked, contextual placement on our site and theirs.
Our analysis resulted in two kinds of review programs:
Paid reviews: Writers are selected based on demographic relevance and compensated by us at a standard work-for-hire rate, regardless of her opinion of the product. Reviews must be posted on a blogger's openly disclosed paid product review blog, or in a separate section of her main blog that she designates for paid reviews. She must disclose that she was compensated in her post, she must post a button on her site that discloses her reviewer relationship to BlogHer, and she must not run any advertising on the review pages. There are many bloggers who will no longer entertain any other model, because they consider themselves writers, and want this kind of financial acknowledgment of their quality writing.
Open/Unpaid reviews: Writers are self-selected and, though encouraged to do so, are under no obligation to write a review after receiving a product or service. BlogHer cannot guarantee the number or demographic relevance of the bloggers who do opt in, or that reviews will be balanced, but we will not allow content that is factually incorrect or abusive to be posted to our site.
We believe there are advantages to each option, and that both are valid. Either way bloggers are not being paid to endorse products, but to honestly test, try and transparently review products. Paying our reviewers increases the likelihood that a client's product will be reviewed by a relevant, influential blogger.
Even organizations that oppose the practice of paying bloggers for anything acknowledge gray areas in defining compensation. Many brands that don't pay bloggers to write about their products do provide free samples, expenses-paid trips, even link love in the form of a shout-out on the corporate blog.
We applaud Forrester for taking on a very complex subject that has become increasingly relevant to marketers and publishers seeking the most viable models. We must also help in the effort, not by refusing to innovate or rejecting opportunities to partner with bloggers, but by requiring disclosure, insisting on contextual relevance, and working with both the brands and the bloggers who feel the same way.
Jory Des Jardins
Co-founder and President of Strategic Alliances for BlogHer
for Elisa, Jory and Lisa
BlogHer Co-founders
Originally posted on Jack Myers - MediaBizBloggers.com.
]]>Reader and reporter alike have arrived at point of reckoning for newspapers, a point we didn't anticipate actually would happen -- despite the shinking circulation rates. And at this point, where we still see the decline of print like we do an unfortunate victim that doesn't affect our everyday lives, Stella Haven's post is most relevant. You see, she's in the dust-up on the road, and she and her colleagues are clinging to survive, even heal and thrive. Reading the perspective of someone initimately involved in one of the Recession's most damaged industries we are reminded that we are all involved in this atrocity of a traffic accident. We all may lose.
Haven, a reporter for the beleaguered San Francisco Chronicle and writer of Just a Girl in San Francisco, reminds us that her loss is our loss. In her piece, "Why Newspapers Matter, or, Where Do You Think the News on the Web Comes From?" she writes, "Exactly who do you think gathers that news, vets it and delivers it to you online? Without The Chronicle, there is no SF Gate, one of the top 10 most visited news sites in the country."
The loss isn't just the media's, or avid online readers'. Haven opens her post with a story from the beginning of her career, when her news story of an insurance snafu allowed a family to take their terminally ill daughter out of the hospital to die at home, and she learns the power and importance of her profession.
A college classmate of mine, Dino Ciliberti, said to me once that he chose to go into journalism to help people. At the time, I thought, "Then be a doctor." But I would go on to learn that he was right: newspapers (in my case The San Francisco Chronicle) can help people.
More recently her colleague's work led to the amendment of Obama's housing relief plan, which will allow many more Californians to keep their homes than before the Chronicle's coverage of the bill.
Stella, your post, a sober reminder of what we stand to lose, by a woman who is on both sides of media's digital divide, is why we selected you as the BlogHer of the Week. You gave us the story behind the people in the accident, who they are, and who they saved before being in their own tragedy.
I hope that you will get to continue to share your story in whichever medium you want to--print or online. We can't live without either.
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