OK, the new recipes will have to wait. The bags are packed with sand toys and the collapsible fire truck and many books that we won’t have time to read, because it’s vacation with the kids! But it’s still a vacation, and that is good.
See y’all later.
1 comment June 15th, 2006
I know, I know, we’re all a little tired of the housewife chic shtick. So don’t read Flanagan, read Jen Lawrence’s thoughtful, balanced review of
To Hell With All That and her fascinating profile of Caitlin Flanagan.
Here’s a taste of Jen’s essay:
[Flanagan] writes the way she writes — gorgeous, inclusive prose, followed by a surprise sucker punch to the kidneys — because she knows it will incite rage, generate buzz, increase her stock, and allow her to call the shots with her publisher and the media. She presents the way she presents so that she can, in fact, have a successful writing career and still be at home in time to make a hot meal. She has constructed a persona that works for her; that her words leave deep wounds among her fellow mothers is irrelevant. Heat sells better than light.
And now I’m going to post some more recipes here so you aren’t stuck making Flanagan’s burritos.
1 comment June 15th, 2006
Cooking energy and writing energy never used to go hand in hand for me. When I was working on my dissertation, I would fuel my writing with periods of Snapple iced tea and Hershey’s kisses (my very-vanilla stimulants of choice), not stopping to cook a proper meal for a while. Then when the writing was going badly, I would cook and cook and cook: breads, cookies, elaborate, multi-course dinners. It was always one or the other.
Lately, though, cooking and writing energy seem to be coming together. Recently I was in a lull with both, though I didn’t realize it until one day when I got annoyed with Tony for cooking the boys scrambled eggs for lunch, the dinner-of-last-resort I’d been counting on making them. Thinking back, I realized we’d pretty much been alternating pasta and eggs for several days.
As for my writing, I’d heard an interview with Kenji Yoshino and decided that his new book, Covering, would give me the perfect structuring metaphor for my essay in Mama, Ph.D. Except I hadn’t read the book, nor could I find it in the local bookstore, and I kept forgetting to order it on Amazon (yes, I can give you the link but I still haven’t purchased it). It was all quite elaborate procrastination, of course, an excuse to avoid writing.
Thankfully, the lull seems to be fading. We went away for the weekend with good friends, and the prospect of a weekend at the beach got me digging out magazine recipes I’d been meaning to try. For our two nights away, we packed one small duffle bag of clothing and five bags of groceries. I made this baked egg dish (delicious), grilled zucchini pizza and mushroom pizza (pizza on the barbecue! a first for me, and a hit with the kids) and also these maple sugar breakfast rolls (which I’ll make again, because they’re easy, tasty, and I only used about a quarter of the maple sugar the recipe called for, so I have plenty left over). Finally, I made these nice almond shortcakes, which are so much like wheatmeal biscuits or hobnobs, I may never have to buy them again (delicious with raspberries and cream, or just get out the Nutella jar).
As for the writing, well, I’ll still go look for Covering. But in the meantime, my first column’s up, my second is suddenly drafted, and I’ve got some other ideas percolating. So in fact, I should stop with this and get to that!
2 comments June 11th, 2006
At bedtime sometimes, Ben and I play the “I love you…” game. You know, “I love you brighter than the sun,” “I love you deeper than the ocean.” That kind of thing. Though sometimes we get kind of silly: “I love you crispier than potato chips,” “I love you fluffier than a pillow.”
Tonight, Ben said “I love you saltier than capers and bacon.”
Yes, even the fakin’ bacon is nice and salty.
June 8th, 2006
Reading Beyond Beowulf put alliteration on my mind, and now I’m seeing it everywhere. Enjoy this fabulous sentence from Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma (a book we should all read, by the way):
“It remains to be seen whether the current Atkins school theory of ketosis–the process by which the body resorts to burning its own fat when starved of carbohydrates–will someday seem as quaintly quackish as Kellogg’s theory of colonic autointoxication.”
June 5th, 2006
The academic year 2001-2002 marked the first time that American universities granted over half of their earned Ph.Ds to women. Yet in that same year, over 70% of faculty teaching at the nation’s top institutions were male. (Wilson, Robin. “Where the Elite Teach, It’s Still a Man’s World.†Chronicle of Higher Education 51 (2004): A8.) American universities consistently publish glowing reports on glossy papers stating their commitment to diversity in the workplace, showing statistics of female hires as proof of their success. But the facts remain: women in the university make up a disproportionately large number of adjunct and non-tenure-track faculty, while the majority of tenure-track positions are granted to men. Women who do achieve tenure-track placement tend to report slow advancement, income disparity, and lack of job satisfaction when compared to their male colleagues.
The disequilibrium between male and female university faculty is perhaps seen at its strongest when looking at those who choose to be both professors and parents. Like in many other workforces, mothers in the academy stand at a significant disadvantage to their male and/or childless peers, as they struggle to balance the vagaries of academic life with the demands of biology, reproduction, and offspring. Women who choose to embrace both halves of this divide – the body and the brain – often find themselves caught between the demands of their families and the demands of the academy.
We are looking for essays from women who have faced, in any way, the challenges of raising or considering a family within an academic setting. We wish to hear stories from students, professors, and adjunct faculty, writing about their experiences having children, delaying children, or choosing not to have children at all. We are seeking essays about how women’s positions in the academy have influenced their decisions about mothering, and how their positions as potential mothers, in turn, have impacted their academic careers.
Editors: Caroline Grant and Elrena Evans
Deadline: August 30, 2006
Length: 1,500 to 4,000 words. Feel free to query first; complete essays also welcome.
Format: Essays must be typed, double-spaced, and paginated. Please include your name, address, phone number, e-mail address, and a short bio on the last page.
Submitting: Send essays saved as a Word or Rich Text Format file (with .doc or .rtf extension) to submissions@mamaphd.com. Put “Submission†in the subject line.
For more about the book & the editors, head on over to Mama, PhD.
1 comment May 27th, 2006
20 inches at birth
19 pounds at 19 weeks
18 days old for his first movie outing
17 hours of labor
16 days old for his first playground visit
15 hours of sleep each day
14 days old for his first trip to the beach
13 people in his family
12 weeks old when he slept through the night for the first time
11 potential names on the hospital whiteboard
10 fingers, 10 toes
9 diaper changes a day
8 meals a day
7 rolls of fat along his arms
6 flights across the country
5 hours in the ER when he dislocated his elbow
4 teeth
3 words
2 dimples
1 sweet year
4 comments May 21st, 2006
Ben is well known in his small social circle for his love of kitchen appliances. Over the years he’s been given two toy handmixers, two toasters, one stand mixer, and a blender, and before he had his own stash we used to let him play with the real ones, too. He’d ask to play with our friends’ appliances also, always reminding them politely to take out the sharp blades, first, please, and make sure the appliance was unplugged. He could give you an inventory of who has what appliance; one friend, not much of a cook, was surprised to learn from Ben that she even had a particular mixer. Stand mixers, stick blenders, hand mixers, milk frothers – he loves them all.
Ben’s always had a lot of sit and study in him. We never worried that he’d hurt himself or break one of our appliances by playing with it. When he got the toy ones, he would put his wooden vegetables carefully in the toy blender or mixer bowl, turn the machine on, turn it off when he was done playing with it. He always, that is, pretended to cook with these toys. I was surprised when a friend’s son used the toy blender as a crash-landing rocket ship; it had never been so abused.
Now Eli is quite a bit younger than Ben was when he first got a toy mixer, but he’s just altogether a different kind of person. To quote from Parenthood, he likes to ram things. For instance, knowing only that occasionally the toy hand mixer makes a nice noise, he will sit, pick up the mixer, look at it briefly, and toss it on the floor. Pick it up, look, toss it on the floor. After a dozen or so tosses, the mixer lands on its switch and whirrs to life. “Dah!” crows Eli, satisfied with his work, and watches happily as it buzzes along the floor.
Where the real appliances are concerned, however, we’ve learned he shares his big brother’s passion. Eli enjoys making cappuccino with Tony so much that when Tony comes downstairs in the morning, Eli dispenses with any hug or greeting and crawls straight to the kitchen, sitting on the floor near the machine gazing up at it like a pointer. The other day he was in the kitchen when I used the food processor to make biscuits. I feel like I’ve neglected his education, but obviously this was the first time he’d noticed another major kitchen appliance at work . He ran, if you can say that a crawling person ran, to the corner to watch, calling out excitedly “Dah! Dah! Dah!” For the rest of the day, he would occasionally go check out that corner of the kitchen, the first time that side has interested him as much as the side with the cappuccino maker, and he keeps “asking” me to turn the machine on again.
It wasn’t until Ben’s third birthday that I planned his birthday feast by how many kitchen appliances we could use together, but with his first birthday coming up, Eli has me thinking along those lines already…
May 20th, 2006
The scene: The dinner table.
The players: Ben, Eli, Tony and me.
The meal: Pasta puttanesca and chard.
The line, from Ben: Thank you for such a healthy dinner, Mama.
1 comment May 18th, 2006
The day begins around 6:30 when I hear Eli’s quiet “Tah! Tah! Tah!” from the next room. I roll out of bed, shrug into my robe, and open his door to see him sitting in the middle of the crib, the tag of his silky blanket clutched in his hand. He holds it up to show me: “Tah! Tah! Tah!” Then he drops it and pulls up on the side of his crib, suddenly impatient to nurse.
Ben usually wakes up before Eli and I are done – nursing only twice a day now, Eli takes his sweet time—and either joins us with a book or gets right to his trains. We’re downstairs eating breakfast by 7:30 or so, and embarked on an imaginary trip, via the collapsible firetruck-airplane, to Chicago or Connecticut by the time Tony, who sleeps in to recover from pulling the night shift with Eli, comes downstairs.
When Eli sees Tony, he bolts on all fours toward the kitchen, occasionally stopping to point toward the espresso machine. “Dah! Dah! Dah!” he repeats. He loves making cappuccino as much as he loves nursing, I think. When he’s querulous in the car we can calm him by asking, “Eli? Did you make a cappuccino today?” “Dah!” he laughs. We slowly narrate the whole process and can distract him enough to make the ride a bit more tolerable.
Eli’s ready for a nap around 9, and usually that’s when Ben gets to watch a video and I head out for a run. But this morning Ben got me; “Mama, will you cuddle wif me?” The sun was warming the couch and I couldn’t resist cozying up, inhaling the buttery nut smell of his head, to watch Rudolph, the seasonally-inappropriate video of the week.
By the time I got out, an hour later than normal, the sun was high and hot. I’ve been running in the arboretum this week, enjoying the heavy scent of azaleas and rhodedendrons. The sprinklers were on full-force. The cranky voice in my head wondered about the wasted resources, all that water evaporating in the heat, and groused about my painstakingly straightened hair, springing right back into its normal corkscrews. But the cool water on a hot day quickly silenced cranky voice. I felt a bit like a kid who’s only pretending to dodge the sprinklers, and I ran around to get sprayed again.
May 15th, 2006