Tag Archives: motherhood

L is for Listen to Your Mother

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LTYM badge-2015Listen to your mother:  Good advice, unless your mother is the toxic sort, in which case you should ignore what she says.

But no matter what kind of mother you have—or are, or even know–Mother’s Day is coming! And so is Listen to Your Mother, a national live performance event coming to a place near you (if you happen to live near one of this year’s 39 venues) in the run up to Mother’s Day

LTYM is the brainchild of writer and founder Ann Imig. Its tagline is “Giving motherhood a microphone,” and it does just that to local writers sharing their stories of motherhood from the heartbreaking to the hilarious. Some of the writers have been published before; some labor in obscurity; some have never put pen to paper before they submit to LTYM.

There’s no better topic than motherhood to spawn perpetually fascinating stories and a perpetually fascinated audience. When LTYM first debuted in 2010 before a live audience in Madison, Wisconsin,  almost 300 people laughed and cried as a dozen women shared stories about every aspect of motherhood.

Since then LTYM has mushroomed—not just to this year’s 39 live performances (all produced by volunteer producers with the help of local sponsors),  but to thousands of videos, and now even a book collecting some of the best stories from LTYM shows. A portion of the proceeds from each show is donated to a local charity supporting families.

I first found out about LTYM in 2012, when someone in my writing group put out the word that LTYM San Francisco was holding auditions. Late to the party as usual, I submitted a short humorous piece at the 11th hour, auditioned via Skype, and was selected! (You can watch me sharing one of the guilty secrets of motherhood live at LTYM SF 2012.)

It was incredibly fun meeting my fellow cast members—we were 11 women and one man in all—at our two rehearsals and of course for the event itself, in San Francisco’s historic Fort Mason’s Cowell Theater. Our producers, Kim and Kirsten, who met at BlogHer, epitomized kindness and grace while never seeming to break a sweat as they pulled a million details together. (Of course—they’re mothers.) Our stories ranged from the poignancy of having no mother to listen to after she dies to the comedy of persuading young children that yes, their gay grandmothers can get married even though they never wear dresses. (It turns out that as long as there’s cake, it’s a wedding.)

Now, several dynamite women of the Write On Mamas, to which I belong, are producing this year’s LTYM SF, May 9 at the Brava Theater Center in San Francisco’s Mission District. It promises to be a wonderful show. You might even want to bring your mother.

I just bought my ticket, and you can buy yours by clicking here if you’re in the SF Bay Area, here if you live elsewhere, and here if you want to buy the book–far more meaningful than flowers or chocolate for a Mother’s Day gift.

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Do you listen to your mother? What’s the best and worst advice she ever gave you?

 

 

Muse on Strike

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On Strike signSince everything is copy, we writers appropriate everything—conversations with friends and colleagues, snippets from eavesdropping, news, movies, domestic and geopolitical dramas. Sometimes this habit of appropriation tempts us into being inappropriate.

Mothers who write, especially those who find their children to be a reliable Muse, face even greater challenges. Such as, “How do I mine all this rich material without leading to (a) lawsuits; (b) children needing to be in therapy all their lives; or (c) children writing another Mommie Dearest, assuming they’ve benefited from all that therapy and have inherited a knack for writing and retribution?

Caution is the watchword, at least once your child learns to read. Just as adorable nude shots of your toddler must be removed from photo albums before dating commences, so, too, must the experience you co-opt not be too embarrassing or revealing. Remember, just as some zealous Walgreen’s clerk might misconstrue your innocent pictures and report you to the child pornography hotline, so, too, may your writing land you in trouble.

Long ago I acquired a fig leaf of maternal decency by asking my daughters how they felt about my writing. Emma said, “I don’t care what you write as long as I don’t have to read it.” Ally, always the go-getter, said, “I don’t care what you write as long as I get a cut.”

I took that as full license. Exercised with great sensitivity and familiarity with libel laws, of course!

Recently, though, Emma remarked, “I read somewhere that you should never write about your children.”

A better mother might have responded, “Oh? Tell me more.” Or, “How are you feeling about my writing (which you never read) these days?” Or even, God forbid, “OK, I’ll stop.”

Instead I cried indignantly, “You’re changing the terms!”

Looks like it might be time to renegotiate the contract with my disgruntled muse before she walks out on me altogether.

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How do you handle writing about your kids? And what’s it been like to read about yourself in someone else’s writing?

Ten Minutes

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Diet Coke can

“Did you know that every Diet Coke takes 10 minutes off your life?” my daughters asked.

Their campaign to break my habit reminded me of myself at their age, on a crusade to get my mother to stop smoking three packs a day. My daughters never tried to flush my Diet Coke down the toilet, as I often did with my mother’s cigarettes, but their worry was the same. And although I generally only quaffed a can a day and did not poison them with second-hand backwash, I was the same as my mother: I ignored the concerns of my loved ones.

“Ten minutes!” I replied. “So what?”

I did a quick calculation. If I drank one Diet Coke a day for 40 years to come, that would mean 101 days off of my life. Double that, to allow for hyper-caffeinated days plus all the diet soda I’d imbibed since adolescence till this moment of truth with my adolescents. We were still only talking about 202 days off the long life I envisioned ahead of me.

“That’s way less than a year!” I told my daughters. “It’s worth it.”

Years passed as I merrily sipped away. Then I was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of uterine cancer. Different calculations preoccupied me: Would I see my daughters marry? Get to babysit their children? Make it to my youngest daughter’s graduation from college in a few months? How long till Christmas? I craved every one of those 202 days I’d been so blithely willing to forfeit. Every ten minutes might help me reach some important milestone.

I swore off Diet Coke the day I was diagnosed, and haven’t touched a drop since. It’s not that I think it caused my cancer (“If only figuring out what causes cancer were that easy!” said my Kaiser nutritionist). Since Diet Coke was about my only vice if you don’t count chocolate, I spend very little time blaming myself. Cancer happens. To a lot of us.

Since those dark early days, I’ve learned that my cancer was detected at the earliest possible stage, and that my prognosis is excellent. I should have many, many good years ahead of me. But they’ll be free of Diet Coke.

It’s my pledge to my daughters. I can’t promise them that I won’t eventually succumb—to something, if not cancer. But I can promise to give up Diet Coke.