Turns out Disneyland is the real world....

I am back from Los Angeles. It's taken me a few days to get my blogging mojo back. I had a fantastic time with Momma Zen author Karen Maezen Miller, both at our Sierra Madre Books event, and just hanging out with our families.

You see, it turns out that even Disneyland, even life in Los Angeles the day Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett died, is more real life than sitting behind a computer all day, looking for material to blog about. For a week, I really was where I was, in the world, not in cyberspace. Here Karen and I were waiting in line for Pirates of the Caribbean (with our families, who are out of the frame). No mouse ears for us, just MojoMom.com caps!


This week away makes me realize that I need to carve out separate time for writing projects, and blogging. I still want to blog---I cherish this opportunity to reach out to readers on an instant basis. But I may begin to rely more on short-form communication like Twitter and Facebook to share links that I do not have time to write extensive posts on.

Too much web-surfing is really affecting my brain. I need to take my own advice about "Reclaiming my mind space" and really look at my mental environment. For example, I came across these idiotic new Microsoft ads. The first one is just gross and stupid. I am not going to post it here. You can see it on the link if you wish but I warn you, it involved internet porn and projectile vomiting. The second ad pretty much sums up how my brain feels after a day of surfing. This is what I am trying to avoid:



So here's my commitment to you: For quick communications and interesting links, I will share info through Twitter and Facebook. And when I have something more substantial intelligent to say, I will blog about it! If I am not blogging, I may just be offline, writing my next book!

Los Angeles area, June 23, Mojo Mom & Momma Zen's Summer Reading Salon

Mojo Mom and Momma Zen, together for the first time!
Hi Los Angeles-area fans, I hope you can join me for a Moms' Night Out on Tuesday June 23. I am teaming up with my friend Karen Maezen Miller, author of Momma Zen, for a Mother's Reading Salon at Sierra Madre Books, from 7 to 9 pm in Sierra Madre.

Karen and I have become great friends through our writing but we've never met in person! I told Karen I'd come all the way out to California if we could create an event together. We feel that putting together good books, Moms, and a summer night out is a can't miss combination. I imagine we'll have a dialogue among the group about motherhood, writing, creativity, and finding Zen in the midst of family life. And I have tons of book recommendations to share, after all the research I did while writing Mojo Mom.

It would be great if you could join us, invite friends, and help us spread the word. Here's the invitation as a Facebook event.

About ten years ago I attended a Japanese tea ceremony and was told that "each time is the only time." The leader pointed out that each ceremony is truly unique, because it would be the only time that this exact group of people ever gathered in this way. That's how I feel about this event, especially since it is the first event that Karen and I will ever do together!

Mojo Mom Chapter 4: Am I Just Being Selfish? Letting Go of Guilt, Worry, and Anxiety

In Chapter 4 of Mojo Mom we explore the emotional landscape of mothers. How did guilt get woven into the fabric of motherhood? I truly believe that we need a shift in consciousness about guilt, worry and anxiety. We can spin our wheels and constantly drain our emotional reserves if we get into the habit of feeling worried, anxious and guilty. When it comes to these destructive emotions, I say that it is important to examine the feeling and the situation and ask whether there is something that truly needs to change. If so, change it. If not, let it go.

The threat of being called a "selfish Mom" also controls us in unhealthy ways, and I turn that around to talk about self care, and developing a centered self. Self-preservation is an important lifelong skill for mothers that will prevent burnout and resentment, and guide us to develop a sustainable parenting style.

Am I Just Being Selfish? Letting Go of Guilt, Worry, and Anxiety takes a look at mindfulness, and learning the difference between true danger signals we should pay attention to, as opposed to the "mental static" of free-floating worry and guilt that distance us from our best selves and genuine concerns.


I loved pulling this bookshelf together (Momma Zen, I imagine that the baby Buddha in the photo is saying a cheeky hello to you). Some of my favorite books are included in this chapter's list of recommended resources:

When You’re Falling, Dive; There Is Nothing Wrong with You; and Time Out for Parents by Cheri Huber

Momma Zen: Walking the Crooked Path of Motherhood by Karen Maezen Miller

Mommy Guilt: Learn to Worry Less, Focus on What Matters More, and Raise Happier Kids
by Julie Bort, Aviva Pflock, and Devra Renner

12 Simple Secrets Real Moms Know: Getting Back to Basics and Raising Happy Kids by Michele Borba, Ed.D. I really appreciate Michele Borba's writing. You are in good hands when you read any of her books, but this one is my favorite.

Momfidence: An Oreo Never Killed Anybody and Other Secrets of Happier Parenting by Paula Spencer

Brain, Child: The Magazine for Thinking Mothers

What are the realistic concerns we should have about our children's safety, and just as importantly, what are the SKILLS we need to teach our kids in order for them to develop into independent young adults? Protecting the Gift and Kidpower training provide these vitally important answers.

Protecting the Gift by Gavin de Becker

Kidpower, website of the international organization.

I believe in Kidpower's safety skills training so strongly that I became a Kidpower instructor myself and started a local program, Kidpower North Carolina.

My After the Ecstasy, the Laundry moment

April has been a whirlwind, or maybe I should say that last year, since I started revising Mojo Mom, has felt like an extended spin cycle. Now that the new book is out, my mind is insisting on coming to a full stop.

This doesn't feel good. In fact, it feels a lot like losing my mojo. But I think it's important to listen to my mind and body. The past three weeks have felt like sprinting a marathon. I've done 26 radio interviews, one bookstore event, and co-led a 40-woman retreat. The radio tour was a wonderful opportunity to reach people across the country, and it was a singularly exhausting experience. I called in to more than 20 interviews in a three-day span, so it felt like the world's longest cocktail party, having between 5 and 50 minutes to discuss my work over and over again. I drew upon all my extrovert powers to keep going (and I tackled the interviews one at a time rather thank thinking about how many I had to do), but by the end of that week my brain was fried.
The daylong Recharging Your Mojo Retreat on April 18 was fantastic--the realization of a plan that the ten women in my own Mojo Mom Advisory Circle had been working on for over a year. During the retreat I felt energized and honored to share the room with 40 amazing women. But as soon as everybody left, my energy level crashed, and it has not yet recharged. I had spent the whole week leading up to the retreat sweating the details, poring over my to-do list, trying to figure out everything from how many sandwiches we needed, to what kind of sign to make to help people find the retreat center. That was all on top of figuring out what to say during the parts I led! Thankfully, my assistant Patty was in town and she helped out a lot, (saving my sanity, in fact) but even so, my mind was consumed for about a week ahead of time. It will be easier for the next retreat, now that we have had our successful pilot event.

But still, the fact is that since then I've been trying to decide whether to rest, or to fight my inertia. I am definitely having an After the Ecstasy, the Laundry kind of week, literally and metaphorically. This is a book by Jack Kornfield that talks about getting back to reality after having an intense spiritual experience. I've also been thinking a lot about Momma Zen and her "Hand Wash Cold" themes in her Cheerio Road blog, and I was turned on to the book A Broom of One's Own by Nancy Peacock, a memoir of a critically-acclaimed, North Carolinian writer who still has a day job cleaning houses. I resisted reading this book for a long time because when my husband Michael recommended it, saying "it's about writing and cleaning," I heard "writing and CLEANING, hint hint." But the good news is that this week I picked it up (borrowing it from our piano teacher, reading during Mojo Girl's lesson) and discovered that it's about WRITING and cleaning. This is the perfect time for me to read it, because Nancy Peacock talks about the writer's life, and how three hours a day writing and keeping a day job can be more effective than writing "full time." Cleaning allows her mind time to rest and wander, so that her characters are more willing to show up when she sits down to write. Plus, it's steady work that gets the bills paid, which helps because even a successful writer's paydays often come in irregular chunks.

Writing Mojo Mom required a lot of enlightened thought plus putting in the hours at the keyboard. In the process of focusing intensely to meet my deadline, I left a lot of real-life details undone.

So Michael and I have talked about the need to get back to the tasks in front of me. I aam open to this discussion and agree with his point, but I also said "this can't just mean that Amy does a ton of housework now!" So I need to find other nourishing things to do as well. I am loving cooking, still hating organizing and cleaning, and tennis is saving my sanity. I am spending more time with my family and really looking forward to a mellow summer. I will have a week by a lake in July all by myself for the first time in years. I am probably addicted to stress and rushing, because my biggest fear is that if I relax too much, I won't be able to get my creative engines revving again when I need to. But I know I do need to relearn how to relax, and trust that it will be good for my writing in the long run.

But I have realized that the laws of physics do apply to me, and it's time to take my own basic Mojo Mom advice--back to square one almost like I am back in those early days of motherhood. The other day I was literally doing laundry, piling it higher than the top of the laundry basket, and the whole thing toppled over. I didn't get mad or frustrated, I just realized, "Hmmm, if you pile it that high, it falls over." It was so basic and elemental. Then I realized that if I don't eat, I'll be hungry, if I don't sleep, I'll be tired, and maybe I should be patient with myself and accept the fact that my mind is spinning, and it will take a little while to figure out what's next for me.

Mojo Mom and the Oprah Mom bloggers

This week's Oprah episode about The Secret Lives of Moms made me think about where I fit in to the constellation of motherhood writers.

The Oprah discussion really caught my attention because Mojo Mom was originally inspired in part by two Oprah episodes in the fall of 2002, where Naomi Wolf talked to small groups of women about "What Mothers Honestly Think about Motherhood" and "What Your Mother Never Told You about Motherhood." I appreciated the catharsis and truth-telling that went on, and I was surprised to see a backlash develop in the audience from other women who thought Moms should never complain about motherhood. At the time I was craving an honest conversation about motherhood, because my daughter had just turned three years old, and I was just starting to recover from burnout and get my mojo back. I decided to write the guide book I had wished I had when my daughter was born.

Back then, when I started researching Mojo Mom, many of the other books about motherhood were quite serious and academic. With the exception of Vicki Iovine's lighthearted Girlfriends' Guides series, I was mostly reading books like Naomi Wolf's Misconceptions, Susan Maushart's The Mask of Motherhood, and Susan Douglas & Meredith Michael's book The Mommy Myth. All good books, rooted mainly in feminst writing and sociology.

I wanted Mojo Mom to be thoughtful and well-researched, but written in a more conversational Mom-to-Mom tone, a book you'd be happy to give your sister or best friend for her baby shower, or discuss with your neighborhood Moms' group.

So just as I've reached my book launch with the updated Gotham Books edition of Mojo Mom, Oprah comes out with another show that is in theory very similar to the 2002 discussions.

But you can see how much lighter the conversation has become. It's all about truth-telling ("hilarious and outrageous" True Mom Confessions!), the down and dirty details of a Mom who peed in a diaper because she couldn't get out of the car on a road trip with children in the back. Actress Cheryl Hines talked about motherhood as an identity crisis, which I could really relate to, then showed off her home, her nanny, and her 5-year-old daughter's birthday party, with the mandatory alcohol to keep the adults happy (the whole "Mommy needs a drink" angle could be its own literary subgenre). Dooce came on an was her irreverent self, accompanied by other writers and bloggers from Momversation.

The guests experts on stage were Amy Nobile and Trisha Ashworth, authors of several books including I Was a Really Good Mom Before I Had Kids and I'd Trade My Husband for a Housekeeper. These guides come across as sugary confections with the cupcakes and gingerbread men on the covers. I can understand why they are popular, because some days we all need a bit of commiserating. But in my view they only go so far--like the whole Oprah episode. The show never quite took that next step past the funny stories, to talk about how we might actually get beyond black humor to make our lives better.

That's the niche I see Mojo Mom filling. I write about a path that starts with self-care but keeps moving forward from there, to developing a partnership with your spouse, to thinking about your lifelong career path, and directing your mojo into a leadership and activism.

So dessert is fine, and you may even want to eat it first, but once you get your fill of cupcakes I hope you'll check out my book to think about your own life and how motherhood fits into the bigger picture.


Mojo Mom may be just right for you if:

You are a mother of reinvention, in your personal or professional life.

You are going through a life transition, such as kids going to kindergarten or leaving the nest for college.

You are willing to explore creativity as a way to jump-start your mojo, even if you haven't always thought of yourself as "artistic."

You'd like to develop a true partnership with your spouse and want to know where to start.

You want to end the Mommy Wars and debunk the myths of Opting Out.

You have an entrepreneurial spirit.

You are a social or political activist, and you want to work for causes that will help all families.

***
Who do I count as my writing peers now? Some of the women I read or interviewed for Mojo Mom include Karen Maezen Miller (Momma Zen); Cooper Munroe and Emily McKhann, founders of TheMotherhood.com; Joan Blades and Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, founders of MomsRising.org; Zainab Salbi, founder of Women for Women International, Amy and Marc Vachon of Equally Shared Parenting; and Dr. Pamela Stone, author of Opting Out? Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home. And I want to thank kindred spirit PunditMom for blogging about the Oprah show today, which inspired me to sit down and write out my thoughts, rather than go take a nap this afternoon!

Reminder that I've already succeeded

I've made many wise friends through my work as an author. During the ramp-up to book release week, I asked my friend Jamie Woolf for the wisdom she's gleaned from the experience of her Mom-in-Chief book release this past February.

Jamie reminded me that it's important to decide what I specifically hope to get out of a book release. What are my goals, in addition to selling a lot of books? I think it's important for every writer to come up with at least 10 definitions of success that have nothing to do with getting on Oprah (as much as we'd all love that, too!).

This morning I saw that another of my friends, Momma Zen's Karen Maezen Miller, wrote a blog post that moved me to tears and made me realize I have already succeeded, just by having the experiences that came with the writing process and getting to publication. Right now my brain is as frazzled as my vocal cords are frayed, so I will let Karen's eloquence speak for itself by linking to her Cheerio Road blog post, The Mother at the End of My Block.

Karen, thank you. And I can't wait to see you in California in June...

...dear blog readers, you are invited to join us at 7 pm on June 23 for a Mom's Summer Reading Salon at Sierra Madre Books. Our first ever Momma Zen & Mojo Mom event!

Even Mojo Mom gets the Blues

I am so thankful for Momma Zen this week. I've been feeling really down, and when I have a challenging day I check out her Cheerio Road blog to see what she's up to. I always find something that helps me. (And as it happens, today she's also the Quote of the Day on MojoMom.com!)

This week the post that spoke to me was My BFF has PPD.

I am feeling like I am going through PPD...9 1/2 years after the fact. I guess technically that would just be plain old D. (I hope not.) Momma Zen made me feel not so nuts for thinking of it as PPD:

Seems like everything in life is post-something else, and nearly all of it is depressing. Someone far more ordinary than me once observed this truth and called it, of all things, noble! BTDTGTS!

Recently I said as much to a friend and mother. "Every mother has PPD. I don't see any other way." In some cases, PPD is medically diagnosed and treated as such, in other cases, not. I say it is universal not to make less of it, but to make more of it. Motherhood is a profound spiritual transformation. It is a passage that shatters your physical self, emotional self and psychological self, and thereby your total self image. Your every idea of self. Poof! To say it is depressing is to say it mildly. We are, in PPD, dead mothers walking. NUFF.

So what's going on with me? I am feeling burned-out and so responsible for things that are largely out of my control. I don't want to transform again, yet life keeps dishing up new responsibility. Being part of the sandwich-generation feels crushing and suffocating. It's not polite to admit that, but it's how I feel. And when a crisis comes up, I often feel like I have to fix it all, on my own. I know that is not truly the case, and I am searching for the right support. My husband is great, and he's working with me on the practical issues, but being the only child of divorced parents is becoming its own kind of loneliness now that they are getting older.

For now I am reaching for the Serenity Prayer, which really makes sense when it comes to crazy-making situations:

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.

I know that my resilience is at a momentary low, and I am trying to build it up again, because I know that is what I need. (I think the qualities we all need to develop right now are authenticity, resilience, and commitment, which I will write about later.) For now I just feel so tired, and vulnerable.

My daughter had a mishap with a pencil on Tuesday. She basically fell toward a pencil tip and it scratched her eyeLID, enough to make it bleed. I am so thankful that it missed her eyeBALL, yet rather than genuinely experiencing that gratitude, I still feel all shaken up and scared by it. I haven't felt so fragile about her well-being in a long time, not even the time she went in for elective surgery. That was controlled. This was pure, terrifying accident, and it happened when I was sitting in the same room with her.

My theme this week, when it comes to the tragic news on the radio, the economic meltdown, and the crisis within our extended family is that I don't want to look for the silver lining. I don't want to learn important life lessons or gain wisdom. I just want life to be easier. I wish I were a kid again, instead of a "responsible adult," and I want to scream that I DON'T REMEMBER SIGNING UP FOR THIS. I know it's a temporary tantrum, but possibly one that I need to have.

The thread I want to follow that I can't quite trace yet is the anger that is involved, especially the anger that when it comes right down to the wire, women are left in charge of so much caregiving, the work that no one accounts for. (Time to go back to read classic feminist literature, because it feels like the same old story over again.)

I need to yell, dance, swear, cry. But for now I am sitting in silence, with only the blog to scream for me.

Linda Hirshman on one shoulder, Momma Zen on the other

I am immersed in the writing process but frustrated that I don't always have time to sit down at the keyboard. As always, LIFE takes a lot of time. The background work that doesn't even make it onto my calendar or to-do list wants to expand to take over my work days. I have been enjoying time with my family this summer, but occasionally my frustrated mind plays a few tricks on me in the process of trying to get my work done.

My mind has been thoroughly colonized by the Mojo Mom revision process. I find that to hold such a big project in my attention at once, it really has to seep into my brain. The other night I dreamed that my literary agent was trying to recruit me to work for them and I was trying to figure out how to tell my husband that I could realistically commute between Chapel Hill and New York on a daily basis. Most days I wake up thinking about my writing one way or another.

Over the Fourth of July Weekend I had a truly surreal experience. My daughter and I went shopping at our local big box retailer shopping center. It was a descent into retail hell but so we dove in to a few specific things, tying up several loose ends in one trip. Our last stop was at the craft store A. C. Moore. I avoid it as much as possible, because crafty clutter is the last thing we need in our house. They might as well call the store CRAP I DON'T NEED. But we went in because I wanted to get some Crayola Model Magic. This stuff is a tactile delight--it's like a spongy cross between Play-Dough and clay. We're going to a family reunion and I needed something that could entertain an 8-year-old and a 3-year-old together, and take the edge off the tension of a family gathering. It's my favorite stress-buster toy in disguise.

So we found what we needed and got in line to pay. There were about five people ahead of us, and a grand total of one register open in the store. We stood there for a while and were not making any progress. The check-out woman called for help over the loudspeaker about four times, "Linda to the front register....Linda to the front register...." The line grew to over a dozen people and there were in fact two A. C. Moore employees in line behind us, but no one to come up and help check us out. It was truly the nadir of retail hell (with dramatic storm clouds gathering outside ready to break loose into a thunderstorm, by the way). I noticed that the other people in line were all women. Mostly elderly women. Women who looked like they were used to waiting...in doctor's offices...at the bus stop...waiting for something to happen. And they were here at A. C. Moore, waiting to buy something they could work on to pass the time while they were waiting somewhere else.

I heard a voice inside my head. It was my inner Linda Hirshman speaking (and believe me, I didn't realize I had an inner Linda Hirshman), like an angry little orthodox feminist cartoon devil sitting on my shoulder. She said, "If making crappy crafts is so great, how come there aren't any MEN in here?" I told her to shut up, reminding her that I didn't even want to be here and had stopped in for one specific thing. This was a little detour--it wasn't supposed to take all day long.

Luckily my inner Momma Zen spoke up, like an angel sitting on the other shoulder. She reminded me to breathe and said, "Relax. Just be here. You're having a fun day with your daughter. Yes, retail hell is exhausting, but who cares if you have to wait five extra minutes? It's no big deal. Don't let it get to you."

I did my best to shake off my sense of hurry and consumer huff about the fact that the store was so poorly run. It wasn't the fault of the woman behind the cash register. A second cash register finally opened....just in time to be no help at all to us, but that's just the way it goes.

So we got out of there with our Model Magic, but there is probably not enough squishy compound in the world to calm my racing mind right now. I just need to harness the energy of this mental cyclone to fuel the book revisions, find time to sit down and write it all out, and then look forward to a calm weekend later in the fall when I can relax...and give both Linda Hirshman and Momma Zen some time off.

Mojo Mom Podcast: Momma Zen

We'll be producing new, original Mojo Mom Podcasts throughout the summer.

You can listen to the podcast without an iPod, but from time to time my co-host Sheryl and I get in such a good mood about the podcast that we decide to give away a 4GB iPod Nano to one of our loyal fans. Listen in to this week's show to find out how to enter our July 1 drawing.

Mojo Mom and Momma Zen

Amy has big news--a new edition of Mojo Mom coming out spring 2009 from Gotham Books. Amy and Sheryl celebrate this development and then announce a new iPod giveaway.

Then from the material to the spiritual....Amy talks to Momma Zen author Karen Maezen Miller about writing, creativity and motherhood. Karen shows us all that it's possible to become a writer even if we never find "more time."

For more of Karen's wisdom, check out her series of "Zen Writers' Workshop" entries listed in the sidebar on her Cheerio Road blog.