I just read Elizabeth Gilbert's Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage in its entirely on a transatlantic flight. In contrast to my typical thrifty ways, I paid the full $26.95 plus tax, a sum so exorbitant that the woman at the airport bookstore confirmed the price before she even rung me up.
As I've gotten older, my love of reading has been tempered by the fact that I spend so much of my time reading and writing in front of a computer. I recall the lazy summers of sitting in my grandparents' house and reading two or three books in a day with great fondness. Now I have to cram for my monthly book club, and even then I'm lucky if I read even half of it. For awhile reading gave me headaches until I realized I needed reading glasses. Now I'm always misplacing them, or getting fingerprints on them. Even if I do manage to sort out the glasses part, reading for more than five minutes often puts me to sleep.
But there are a few books that have captivated me in recent years, books that spoke to me in such a way I read them in a matter of hours or days. These books have much in common. They're part story, part non-fiction. They're written by women in their 30s who could be friends of mine. Reading them feels like talking over a great glass of red wine with a friend.
My first experience of this is a vivid memory of reading Peggy Orenstein's Flux: Women on Sex, Work, Love, Kids and Life in a Half-Changed World when I was the only single mother in my Stanford MBA class. Despite the fact that I would sometimes take my son to daycare in my pajamas when it opened at 7:30am, and that I cried regularly because I was so overwhelmed by the work, and my life was scheduled in 15-minute increments and printed out from Microsoft Outlook, I sat and read this book for hours until I was finished. Although no one in Orenstein's book had my experience exactly, I felt comforted and reassured that so many women were struggling and wrestling with making difficult choices, balancing a love of independence with a desire for being taken care of.
Several years passed before I had the same experience with Eat, Pray, Love, long before it became a megahit. Elizabeth had joined Peggy and me in my living room, and we poured her a glass of wine in anticipation of hearing her story. Neither writer disappointed with their follow-up books. In Orenstein's case, Waiting for Daisy recounted her journey with infertility. Ironically, I became a mother quite accidentally at the age of 26, yet I connected with Peggy's search for herself as she searched for her daughter. Now, the subtitle of Gilbert's Committed is something that could be a subtitle for a memoir chronicling the last year of my life: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage. Although Gilbert's love story ended very differently than mine, the thought process she went through could have come straight from my journal.
I could go on and on (Ariel Gore's Hip Mama, Anne Lamott's Operating Instructions), but you get my point. The memoir with a modern feminist thesis speaks to me. At the same time it speaks to me, I'm frustrated, because I, too Have Something to Say. And so often, these ladies have beat me to it, and said it better than I would have.
On the airplane and then the train that finally took me to my destination 14 hours away from home, I spent time writing and reflecting on Gilbert's book, my own life, what I've learned and where I am. And it occurred to me, I should write a blog.
This first entry is just a first, feeble attempt to experiment with my own voice, and to understand where this urge is coming from. As Oprah would say, "what I know for sure" is that I want to tell my stories, and I hope that they will resonate with some of you. I'm quite certain that our histories don't match (I've yet to meet someone whose set of major life milestones mirror mine), but I do believe there are places we connect.
I struggled longer than I would like to admit with what to call this blog. Why did I ultimately call this "Not your mother's single mama?" One glaring aspect of my life that's hard to miss is that I have an eight year old son, and I'm single. As I thought about what I have to say, a lot of it centers around this topic, and it's easy for readers to quickly know something about me. It also gives you a clue that I'm not the average "single mom," if there even is such a thing. I find that people assume a lot of things when they hear I'm a single mom - that I'm divorced (I've never been married), I'm financially dependent on others (I have an MBA and a great job), that life is a struggle (which it is, but not in the ways people assume).
If you haven't picked up on it already, please know I have issues with this term. The "single" refers to my marital status, not my parental status. My son lives with his father half of the time. We make joint decisions and we talk nearly every day, so as a mother, I don't feel "single." There's no good term for that - the best I can come up with is "co-parent."
But more on that later. Suffice it to say that "Not Your Mother's Single Mama" was the best I could come up with to share a bit about myself. I'm single, I'm a mama, and I will almost certainly surprise you. If you have a better title let me know.
Should be fun.
