I Joined Mom Bloggers Club!

Typically, I carry a book or a magazine into the office with me just in case I get a free moment to read during my lunch. I carried one in yesterday, but found myself remembering a newstory I heard on NPR on the evening of July 27 between my daughters questions about what I did all day. the story was about Mom Bloggers Club, an on-line community of moms who blog. I made a note to myself to get to that website and learn more as soon as possible. Well, I didn't get to it until last night at about 9:00 pm, but I finally got there.

What a wow!!! I joined immediately! I couldn't believe that there actually existed a site for mothers who blog through all stages and styles of motherhood - regardless. "What a gift," I thought! I spent three hours moving through the site, dipping into a group site here, reading a blog site there. I felt inspired, after all that dipping and web diving, to keep my blog going as strong as I can. The best part of the whole adventure was when sister-mom bloggers began to welcome me to the site and the groups I'd joined in friendly, brief e-mail messages. My lesson: Community is not so hard to find when you keep your ears open and your fingers on the keyboard!

The Professional

This blog is supposed to be about motherhood. That's what the title says, most certainly. But, in my case, and I suspect this is true for many mothers, motherhood is set in a living and contantly changing context. Motherhood does not exist in a vacuum, but is one of the identities I juggle with many others.

I think the greatest challenge for me is being a professional, working Monday through Friday, nine-to-five, outside our home. Moms who work at home, and moms whose work is home, have similar concerns, but I don't know their experiences firsthand. I'll just talk about what I know.

I enjoy working and always have. The idea of being productive on a regular basis, giving my mind's best and being creative in different ways everyday has always been exhilarating to me. I enjoy the competition, the chance to shine, the evolution of challenging projects, the give and take of working with talented people on projects and programs that can and do make a difference in other persons' lives. I really enjoy working.

When I became an adoptive mom, I dove into that with the same enthusiasm. I wanted to write a book about the process, tell others, counsel folks who were on the fence about adoption, spread the good news about creating a family through adoption to single African American women, especially. Everything revolved around the joys of single adoptive motherhood. The beginning was an exciting time! I would do it all again, too.

But, as my child grew, I recognized that my job and joy as her mother was getting much more complicated. Am I living in the right community for a growing and active girl? How will I send her to school? Where will I send her to school? How do I surround her with the right boys and girls so she can make good friends? Dance? Soccer? T-ball? Computers? What about discipline? Motherhood was becoming more of a full-time job. Once she started to walk, I really had to begin planning ahead. It is not like I hadn't been doing that, but the experiences I wanted her to have took more of my energy and time than my job seemed to permit.

The conflict for me was between my own sense of professionalism, my desires for professional growth and development, and my desire to be a good, focused, smart, and planful mother who mothers with love and patience. How do I do it all? How do I do it all with one paycheck? How do I do it all without depending on babysitters all the time? I spent many sleepless nights worrying, talking with friends and relatives, praying, and hoping for the best. Mostly, though, I spent nights and days struggling to change my own expectations, my own sense of what was necessary and what wasn't. I labored (and am still laboring) to judge myself less harshly.

Being a mom and a professional requires grace. From a theological perspective, grace is freely given, unmerited favor and love from God.It is not something we deserve or earn, but something we are simply given. It is "the influence or spirit of God operating in humans to regenerate or strengthen them," according to dictionary.com. The sort of mother I want to be requires more strength and more patience (with my daughter and myself) and more energy than I can muster in any single day. I want to give my best at work because that can bring me joy and recognition (maybe even a bigger salary!), and I want to be my best with my girl because that brings me joy and peace. I also want to be my best for me. Because I believe grace happens, I believe it is possible to have these things: a good job, a great family life, and the comforting knowledge that I am doing my best.

None of this is easy. It takes prayer and quiet listening. I am grateful that I am living during a time when even single women can enjoy motherhood. I couldn't do it unless I worked everyday. In my life, then, motherhood and professionalism go together like a hand and glove. What grace!

On turning 50.

Tomorrow, I will celebrate fifty years of living consciously on the planet and among people. Fifty years. I remember when twelve years felt like a goal I would never reach. I simply could not imagine what my life could conceivably look like, who would populate my world, what I might look like, whether I would get any taller, any thinner, in the years that stretched ahead of me. Still, I feel that way. My hair has begun to silver some, and if it follows the pattern set by most of my older relatives, it will continue to silver, strand by strand, very slowly, over the next twenty, thirty, or maybe even forty years. Or, will it become a head of soft white cotton, as my dad's mother's did? I simply can't imagine. I simply can't wait!

A few years ago, maybe ten or fifteen, I would have said my life has been uneventful, nothing to write home about. I was at least a decade younger, and a million years less wise about many, many things. [The joke is that today, I am less wise than I will be in another decade or so!] So much has happened; I've had so much to think about, and have so much more experience to stand on now.

In the past five years, I've adopted a girl. She was just thirty-three days old when I stood in a corporate parking lot speechless, spurting tears, staring at my little, bitty Boopsy. Her five pound majesty slept through my total personality freeze, and I tried desperately to pull myself together in the few moments before we all went up to sign the papers and take our first official photos together. That was the day my world changed, my destiny was altered, my stars realigned, and my future truly became unimaginable. Motherhood is that gift that renders everything else a second-tier priority.

Becoming a mother, adoptive or birth mother, is a type of stewardship that is profoundly humbling. As I have watched my daughter grow over the past five years, I have seen myself become, at times, my own mother, and at other times, myself as a mother. What I mean is, I have had a chance to review my own childhood and my understanding of my mother from my childhood perspective. I have had an opportunity to review every scene from an adult, active mothering perspective as well. The picture is not pretty. It is lovely.

My mother was not an ordinary woman to me, but a special woman. Her hands, her voice, her creative mind, were all bent to the work of raising me, my sister, and my brother. My dad's time and energy were similarly directed, but, now, I want to tell you of my mother. As I remember back over the three decades I spent with her, I recognize now that her life was very much about trying to keep her feet on the ground as she lifted us up to reach the treetops and then the sky. She lived long enough to see us all reach the treetops knowing that the sky was promised.

What I think her death snatched from her, though, is a chance to see herself reach a sky she may have wanted to redefine after we left home and truly and earnestly began lives of our own. I was so busy growing up, and, toward the end, watching her die, that I forgot to ask her what her next dreams for her own live might have been. I forgot to ask her what sort of a grandmother imagined she might be, and what she would have wanted her granddaughters to call her when they chatted with her on the telephone.

Though I was forgetful then, I am thoughtful now. I wonder what she would say about motherhood if I asked her to reflect on her own mother. I wonder what she would say as she watched me become a mother. I think I can guess. I think she would say it is hard work, especially if you do it by yourself. I don't think she would have chosen to do it alone. But, since that was my choice, I think she'd say it is hard.

If I asked her what she believes is so hard about being a mother, I think she'd say that the everyday living of it is not the challenge. You simply get that part done. The challenge is in the theory and philosophy of it. You raise your kids, and you simply have to trust the hard work you've put in over the years and hope they use what you've taught them well.

Then, I think she'd say, you have to think about the way you've done what you've done. Have you been true to your own principles? Have you been true to the principles your mother taught you? Have you grown beyond the mother whose home you left to create your own? She would assert strongly that you should have grown, motherhood should have pushed you to become not your own mother all over again, but the mother of your unique children, and the mother of the woman you were destined to become. We mother children for their lives, for the future. We do not mother children for the past, for times they will never know. My mother was a strong believer in progress, as risky as it can be.

So, I believe my mother would conclude if she were with me today, raise your children to grow away from you and into their own lives. Love them enough that they will return with their own children to reminisce about mothering in her day and their parents' youth. After all, the desire to be a grandmother grows directly out of the work of being a mother.

So, I am grateful to be fifty on June 27. I am grateful for the first day of my born life, June 27, 1959. Thanks, Mom. Thanks, God, for letting me see this many days, and for letting me spend so many of them with my mother, Melba. Amen.

Hello!

Being a single, middle-aged mother is not easy. I will be fifty in three days. My daughter turned five about six weeks ago. The nearly forty-five years between us is like a wormhole, the type they traverse in Star Trek and other science fiction space movies. The years collapse and expand at will. They appear as a long and lengthening corridor down which I can slide and perhaps end up somewhere completely different. At other times, they are that impossible distance that I dare not attempt to overcome because I am the Mom. That counts for something.

This blog is about being a single, middle-aged mama, African American, educated, and working. It's not a complaint page, though there will be times when I complain. More, it is my opportunity to talk about the life I'm living. I don't think many people really think about the lives of well-educated single African American mothers. We are swept into the same category as poor and working class single African American mothers. Those are hard working women with fewer opportunities for money-making and further education than I have. Grouping me with women whose prospects in this economy and culture are quite different from mine is not fair to either of us. To take my case as representative of the lives of African American single mothers is to misrepresent the lives of a class of women whose lives deserve elucidation and respect. I am of the group who has been given a modicum of class privilege.

Nonetheless, I recognize and acknowledge my sisters' struggles. In some important ways, her struggle is distinguishable from mine, especially economically. In other ways, these matter most, perhaps, our struggles are identical.

Here, I will write and read (hopefully) the experiences of women like me. I won't write everyday. But, I will write as often as I can. Write back. Enjoy!