My daughter Maya turns 10 today.\u00a0 You may not remember what it feels like to hit double digits, but take it from me: this is a big deal.\u00a0 Maya might say that hitting 10 means that she is definitely ready for a cell phone (not that she has one, however).<\/p>\n
Now that I can talk about motherhood in terms of decades (well, at least a<\/em> decade) instead of just years, it feels like a big deal for me, too.<\/p>\n In fact, motherhood has been getting a lot of media play these days.\u00a0 If recent coverage is any indication, we\u2019re either too harsh or too self-involved.\u00a0 Consider the controversy surrounding Amy Chua\u2019s Why Chinese Mother\u2019s are Superior<\/a> <\/em>excerpt in The Wall Street Journal<\/em> and Judith Warner\u2019s roundup of recent memoirs<\/a> in The New York Times<\/em>. Warner claims that in contrast with their own feminist moms, today\u2019s mothers are turning inward and embracing home and family with a \u201cdeep desire for rules and regularity\u201d<\/p>\n Neither the overbearing mother nor the self-involved ones hunkering down at home sound especially new to me (Freud, anyone, or Cinderella?<\/em>).\u00a0 But I am wondering where I fit into these public accounts of motherhood and how to define my own mothering.<\/p>\n For example, learning to ski would certainly have been low on my list of life pursuits before parenting despite growing up in the Northeast Ohio snowbelt.\u00a0 Now as a steward of my kids\u2019 (I have a 7-year-old son as well) health, I try to cultivate an active lifestyle and exercise habits that can serve them throughout their lives.\u00a0 Thus the skiing lessons, which I have found that I love, and which allow me and my kids to learn something together.<\/p>\n And while I have given a lot of thought to teaching students about social constraints and feminist responses to them, I have also discovered that it\u2019s altogether different teaching my children how to be change agents.\u00a0 For one thing, I have my children for more than a semester, so if I get things wrong we can always try again!<\/p>\n Last year Maya ran for class representative and found herself in a runoff, which she lost, much to her disappointment.\u00a0 Talking at home later she explained that she voted for a classmate in the first round because she \u201cwanted to give someone else a chance.\u201d<\/p>\n Although her generosity of spirit is one of her admirable qualities, I explained that it is sometimes fine and even important to pursue what you want.\u00a0 That is, if you want to be class representative, vote for yourself.<\/p>\n This year, I\u2019m happy to report that Maya was<\/em> elected class representative.\u00a0 But before you congratulate me for offering a successful lesson on assertiveness, I should add that Maya explained that she did not<\/em> vote for herself in the first round of balloting: she voted for a friend, and the friend voted for her.<\/p>\n That same friend and Maya spent their Martin Luther King Day \u201con\u201d by selling \u201cCocoa for a Cause\u201d at our local sledding hill and donating the proceeds to an area soup kitchen.\u00a0 They raised $47.<\/p>\n Sometimes working together is the best way to make a difference.\u00a0 That\u2019s not a bad vision for either of us to have as we enter double digits as mother and daughter.<\/p>\n And GWP readers, what\u2019s your take on the latest mommy wars? Do you have favorite accounts of motherhood to share, and what does <\/em>feminist mothering look like?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My daughter Maya turns 10 today.\u00a0 You may not remember what it feels like to hit double digits, but take it from me: this is a big deal.\u00a0 Maya might say that hitting 10 means that she is definitely ready for a cell phone (not that she has one, however). Now that I can talk […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1905,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21103],"tags":[8959,245,21395,21575,3109],"class_list":["post-2004","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-girl-talk","tag-families","tag-feminism","tag-girls","tag-memoir","tag-motherhood"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2004","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1905"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2004"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2004\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2004"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2004"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2004"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}