hey Mika? Dr. Laura wants her schtick back.

Mika Brzezinski, the long suffering eye rolling co-host of Morning Joe, wrote a blog today on Huffington Post. in it she revealed some of the tips she shares with "young women about life lessons and TV career choices." for the most part, it read like the script from Up Close and Personal, but things really got good when she got to her coup de grâce: don't "forget" to get married and have some kids, girlfriends! and start in your 20s if you have to!!!



oh, yes she did.

Mika explains that if you think finding a good job is hard, wait until you get a load of how hard it is to find a descent mate to marry and procreate with:

"Bad news, girls. The odds are definitely better on getting the right job than getting a good partner for life...Don't push away that chance if you're one of the lucky ones who find that partner. And remember, you can always change a job. I hear it's much harder to switch out a husband."

and


"But let's talk about the greatest gift a woman can receive: being a mommy. For professional women, there simply is NO good time to have a baby. Putting it off only makes the challenges greater. Having babies after 35 increases medical risk and is, lets face it, exhausting. It is also trying on a marriage and a career."


*headdesk headdesk headdesk headdesk!*


here it is, 2009, and some people refuse to grasp this very simple concept: not every woman is foaming at the mouth at the idea of being someone's mother. and the false belief that a woman who isn't worked up about the notion is lying to herself is insulting and boneheaded.

no really: some chicks couldn't possible care any less than they do about having children. so please.

and how antiquated is the advice of "if you find a good man, girls, you better latch on and never let go because there might be plenty of fish in the sea....but most of them are floating by dead"?

another newsflash! not everyone is 1) HETEROSEXUAL and 2) INTERESTED IN GETTING MARRIED!

and also? Mika? having a baby at any age is exhausting, i don't care if you're 15, 25, or 35. you still get your world jerked around when you have to function under extreme sleep deprivation. i didn't burst into tears at the social security office while trying to get a rush job on my kids' cards because i was 35...i did it because i was delirious with exhaustion. don't even go there!

she managed to be insulting, patronizing, ageist, out of touch, and hetero-privileged in one neat little maddening blog post. in a way, isn't that too a victory?

Mika and Huffington Post could have completely missed me with this. but there is one idea that has definitely crystalized for me. Between Joe's smarmy frat-boy smirk, Pat Buchanan playing the role of everyone's favorite insane racist uncle, and Mika's Donna Reed outlook on what REALLY matters to working "girls," i need to just keep watching the Today show Blue's Clues (keeping it real).

Something I Can't Get My Head Around...or...a decidely unfunny post

thanks to the generosity of a friend, i was able to read the book Push, the story of Claireece Precious Jones and her struggle to learn how to read.

well....that paragraph is like trying to describe a christmas tree by only talking about the 3rd ornament 2 rows from the bottom.

actually, Push is about a young girl who struggles with the horror of sexual, physical, and emotional abuse and the hands of her mother and her father. A father who ends of dying of AIDS...but not before infecting Precious with the virus.

and not before causing two pregnancies, one resulting in a child with Down's Syndrome.

and i'm not even going to go into Precious' knowledge of and reverence for Louis Farrakhan and Harriet Tubman, her disdain for dark-skinned blacks, and her lack of awareness of the hypocrisy of these thoughts...

this is by and far the most devastating read i've tackled in quite a while. i thought Back Roads was a toughie, Push threatened to completely crush my mood as i fought my way through the stream of consciousness style of story-telling and it's graphic, horrifying accounts of abuse.

reading this book opened my eyes in a lot of ways. it reminded me that survivors of this type of abuse are walking around, some functioning, some still struggling, but among us. when i debriefed the book with the friend who loaned it, she said she didn't think she knew anyone who had gone through the things in the book.

but probably we do. we probably all do. the story is right there under the surface.

i thought about Tiffany Wright, Keara Hess, and Mackenzie Phillips, all victimized, the crimes committed against them making the news within weeks of each other.

i thought about the case in Alabama in which the husband, father, Preacher killed his wife and hid her body in a freezer for several years after she caught him sexually abusing their daughter.

Roman Polanski's distasteful attempt to get everyone to forget that he orally, anally, and vaginally raped a 13 year old girl after giving her alcohol and Quaalude. (really, Whoopi? are you serious?)

and then today, this comes out.

i don't know what the answer is. can parent education fix a person so broken they'd damage a child in this way? can court-mandated therapy? why are there so many men and women who see children as sexual objects and prey upon them??? and why are there so many apologists lining up to go to bat for the adults mistreating children.

Precious often asks why those terrible things had to happen to her. Why the schools didn't teach her, why her mother abused her, why she had to have two kids by her father, why one had Down's Syndrome, why she had to have HIV.

i don't know how to tackle this issue but i do know just thinking about it isn't going to solve the problem. it's not going to affect a change. but maybe if more people keep the physical and sexual abuse of children on their radar, maybe if more people start speaking out against it instead of acting like it's either not happening or the child victim's fault...

well, then maybe we can finally make a difference.

National Association to Prevent Sexual Abuse of Children

the sanfords are wack

just when i thought the clusterfuck that is mark sanford imploding and basically sending love note missives to his maria in arhentina through hastily assembled press conferences couldn't get any more clusterfucky, now the one person i was hoping had a grasp on reality has let it be known that she too is a total loontard.

Picture it, South Carolina, 2009....your husband sneaks out of the state for 5 days, flies to Arhentina to visit his mistress, then comes back and tells everyone with a microphone the mistress is his soul mate but he's gonna try to fall back in love with you, refers to his affair as a love story at the end of the day, tells everyone how he even tried to get you to meet the mistress once or twice or eight times, and then further puts your business on the street by admitting there were other women floating through your marriage of 20 years.

so what do you? well if you're jenny sanford, you say something cuhrazy like this:

"Mark has stated that his intent and determination is to save our marriage, and to make amends to the people of South Carolina. I hope he can make good on those intentions, and for the sake of our boys."

ya hearing this? he SAID it's his intention of saving the marriage...even though he lied about his whereabouts over father's day weekend to fly to south america to kick it with maria belen. AND AFTER HE WAS EXPRESSLY FORBIDDEN TO DO IT, THAT CAD!

well there ya go, that's got sincerity written all over it.

Jenny Sanford: going from American Hero to typical politician doormat in 1 easy step.

eighteen months later....

today is a pretty awesome day. it's the 18th month in which everything in my life changed: eighteen short months ago Trixie and Dixie made their grand entrance into this city and my world.

to say that it has been a harrowing adventure is putting it mildly. over the last year and a half i have experienced:

* tiny size 1 diapers with giant poops

* LOCHIA

* a daycare provider who was out of her complete and total mind

* the sorrow of immunization shots and ear piercings

* three hour crying jags. in stereo.

* the evolution of Caesar hair styles, to DC fades, to full blown little girl curls

* rolling, crawling, standing, walking, running

* baby teeth and morning breath

* diaper rashes from hell

* happy shouts of "hiiiiii!" in the morning and when picking up from daycare in the evening

* arm waving jam sessions in the backseat listening to Janet Jackson sing about Control

* the evolution of pretending to use the remote control like a phone to holding a thumb and index up to the ear to mimic a bluetooth

* the never ending joys (for her!) of reading Brown Bear over and over and over and over and over and over and over and....

* hugs and kisses out of the blue, complete with mmmmmWAH sound effects.

while experiencing all these great things, i have also experienced the lows of self-doubt, fear, anxiety, depression, frustration, and immobility. i have been fortunate to have a good core set of friends who i can call and can prop me up and talk me through the disaster, whether real or imagined.

when i look back at how much my life has changed, i gotta admit there are a few things i miss. like being able to get up and go when i feel like it, happy hour, waking up an hour before i have to be at work and still making it to work on time, buying myself a party shirt and going out over the weekend, not being exhausted all the time, not doing laundry CONSTANTLY, not having to cook dinner, going to the movies more than once every 13 months, okay did i say a FEW things i miss?

but taking the sum total of all those things, i wouldn't trade them for anything with the joy and amazement i feel when i'm spending time with my kids.

*but Boca! what about those moments when you are bitter and angry and exhausted from the pressure of 2 toddlers running all over your house like langoliers?*

yes, dammit, even then. underneath it all.

i'm glad i accepted this mission, raising these two little girls to be strong, intelligent, funny, fearless women. i hope this works out for us all, because it's way too late to try to take them back to the hospital for a refund.

and speaking of money spent, did you know that you can easily keep track of the cost of supporting a child over her lifetime by simply converting her baby book into a spending ledger?

i learned that from Married, with Children.