Note – in addition to being in the RBF I am in a webring called Crazy Hip Blog Mamas. This post is the topic du jour about which we are collectively writing. Stay tuned for news of my big bike ride and a minor snyopsis of the Oscars.
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A couple of years ago I watched the movie ‘The Magdalene Sisters” which is a fictionalized account of a real order of Catholic Nuns who took in “wayward” girls and enslaved them in their laundry business. This movie follows the story of a couple of girls, one of whom was sent there when she got pregnant out of wedlock. When her baby was born they let her have him until they found an adoptive family and then they lied to her and just took him away. They never gave her a chance to try to make a life or be his mother. They just took him away. The filmmaker was able to interview this woman in her 70s and when she talked about how they took her baby away she broke down in tears. More than 50 years later that incident still cut like a knife even though she was ultimately reunited with her son when he was in his 50s. Today I read a story about a woman who lost a child at birth in th 40s. She went on to have a couple more kids and to foster over 100 babies but she still remembers the face of that sweet baby who died like she saw him yesterday.

And that’s how motherhood is for many of us. The strength of the bond we hold with our babies makes carbon fiber look like cheap crepe paper. I have always felt that way about my kids no matter what I have done in my life. I’m an ardent feminist and I have had a pretty robust professional life but I identify myself primarily as a mother and a really successful one at that. I adore my now adult kids and they adore me, too. They also think I’m pretty hip and maybe just a little bit crazy.

I started this blog intending to be the voice of experience and success and to write about what it takes to be a successful parent in the 21st Century. I didn’t get far, though before I realized that the world is changing so fast that you all will have a different and probably worse set of problems to cope with. The sex, drugs and rock n’ roll of my youth morphed into oral sex at an early age, enhanced drugs that are even more addictive and toxic than anything I ever ingested and a horrible set of STDs that are life threatening. And the beat goes on. On top of all of that we are constantly threatened with the loss of personal and civil freedoms and a world that could easily erupt into WW III – it really could. I don’t feel so qualified to help you navigate these waters any more and I also don’t see that you need me. You, the young mothers who are filled with the joy little kids bring into your life have each other and are doing a fine job picking your way through the minefields of modern life. I may pipe up once in a while with a post related to raising kids in this unpredictable and confounding world we live in but it isn’t the reason I keep a blog any more.

I love it that the Internet has provided a global platform for sharing our triumphs and fears, our experience and our need for counsel. I’m probably one of the more senior members of Crazy, Hip, Blog Mamas and I’m as likely to write about running or politics as I am to write about parenting but no matter what I write about I’m really happy to be here.