MotherPie

Friday Favorite: Cat Stevens...

I fell asleep in college to his tunes; the album belonged to my roommate, B.  It was Cat Stevens or Boz Scaggs most nights.
Lisa, Lisa

Wine & Cheese, Yes, Please...

They say you can't go home again, but what if home is a moving target and friends sprinkle every place?  How do you keep those threads?  How do you keep those friends?  As a mom, as a woman, friends are most precious. 

Thanks to one of my dearest friends, a fun simple wine and cheese let me stay in touch with Houston friends.  All it took was an idea and an email and an afternoon putting it together, together.  I appreciate all of my girlfriends who took the time to come.  They all have an open invitation to come see me in NM!

Friends echo ourselves.  We are mirrors for our friends. 

What defines us most?  A place? A passion? Friends? Family? Talents? Accomplishments? Circumstances? Shared time? Special moments? Memories?

Childhood Best Friends...

My parents were with me as I watched my childhood best friend walk down the aisle last May. She was 50 and, as the mother-of-the bride, she was beautiful.  We wore the same uniform in gradeschool.  We had the same hair cut in middle school.  We married our college sweethearts, who were fraternity brothers.  We were pregnant at the same time and she had her first child, a girl, three months before I had mine. Her baby girl walked down the aisle three months before mine will.  I had a huge lump in my throat the whole time.  Her daughter was so stunning. How could that little darling baby now be a stunning bride.

My friend, yet again, will tell me how it will go.  I'm so glad she will be here.  I'm in full wedding mode, loving all these ties that bind, friendship, familial and matrimonial.  I do, I will, I woo, I dill.

Prince Charles: Ahead of His Time?

He met his love ahead of his wife.  He was into organic before the rest of us were.  Maybe the King-to-Be is just one of those who operates ahead of things - even himself, the Prince of Quixotic Timing.  Prince Charles marches to a different drummer and perhaps when the Queen sings her last, he'll have a wee bit of time to wield his influence.

His thoughts on organic farming were way ahead of his time and his idea that 70s/80s architecture was a carbuncle on the face of London was spot on.

Prince Charles created Duchy Originals in 1990 in his effort to promote the advantages of organic farming through the  production of natural and healthy foods and sound husbandry which helps to regenerate and protect the countryside.  The land he owns in Gloucestershire, near his Highgrove country home is his place to farm organically. His Duchy Originals Oaten Bisquits and Gingered Bisquits came out in 1992 and they were sold in outlets like Harrods, Selfridge's, Fortnum & Mason as well as smaller outlets throughout Britain.  My favorite: Organic Lemon Biscuits.  You can buy them through The British Shoppe, based in the U.S.

He might have tried to be inspiring in 1980 when he shared that he talked to vegetables, but his use of heirloom seeds and his approach to agriculture are worth respecting.

Regardless, I like the fact that we call them cookies here, thanks to the Dutch word winning out over the British term in Manhattan. The public relations effort is on to prepare the public for the Prince to be King.  Some stuff is fluff.  Some is stuff to notice and chew on.

Ramble: Girls, Friendship and China...

Nu shu  is a secret language used by Chinese women.  Lisa See, who is part Chinese and grew up in L.A.'s Chinatown, has written about it online and in her book, Snow Flower and The Secret Fan.  My mother gave it to me for my birthday and I will pass it on to a young woman from Texas who is in love with a Chinese man.  It is a novel mostly about female friendships in rural China when emperors ruled and when females held no value.  They still don't, which is the reason so many girls are available for adoption in China, especially with the one-child policy.  Female friendships were the cultural salvation that made living palatable for many of these women.

Girlfriends, Are We Wierd or What???

My blog friend Claude in Paris has become a memer for the first time.  I, too, have never done a meme thing. She didn't tag me but she did put the idea of this I am wierd meme in my head so my fingers itched to write about weirdness.  She wrote about her personal weirdness on her blog yesterday.  She is the most unbelievable talented photographer and posts her photos on her photo blog - another blog she runs - where she captures photos on her daily walks in Paris.  Claude thinks she is weird because she has posted some 13,500 photos on Flickr.  I don't think she is weird.  I think she is unbelievably talented and is an inspiration for following our passions.

So here is my meme thing and I challenge you to do it too.  I think you are supposed to tag people like "you're it" but I'll forgo that. 

Am I weird, too????

• I like broccoli and enjoy decorating food with edible flowers and I'll eat dandelion greens as long as they are organic and not toxified with pesticides.  That is the goat in me!
• I can not tell a joke.  I forget the punch lines or ruin it by getting it wrong in the delivery.  I also am slow in "getting" jokes.  However, I do get silly giggly sometimes, especially with my husband and my oldest daughter and sometimes my mother. It is terrible to have this happen in church.
• Moving is not easy for me, nor is being a "corporate wife," and I feel somewhat alone in this and probably gripe and blame way too much and grieve for the friends and family I leave behind.
• I get my syntax mixed up, sort of like Bush does.  My Dad does, too, so it must be a genetic weirdness.  It happens with numbers, too - sort of dyslexic.  I'm so not a math person because it requires detailed logical thinking.
• I have a habit of humming when I exercise -- from my years of being on the swim team.
• I can't stand Barbie dolls or Cabbage Patch dolls.
• I do love love love babies to the extreme.  I had to go work/volunteer with needy little ones to satisfy my mother urges.

OK.  Enough of memes.  Am I the only weird one?

Happy Trails...

Do you have a scene or an experience that you can recall that gives you peace, and helps you to relax? Something where the memory of it takes you to a good place and you want to hold it in your mind's eye forever? Yesterday was that for me. A beautiful day with blue sky, white white clouds and their shadows as they moved across the mountain wilderness were all seen from sitting in the saddle of a horse with a smooth, smooth gait for half the day.  My better (cuter) hat made it through the day  probably because we were on more cleared-out trails and it didn't rain or hail.

If you care to know, I'll share my passion for horseback riding...

Make New Friends, But Keep Thee Old...

Girlfriends.  Don't they mean so much to you? Do you cultivate these friendships?

Isn't it great how you can share things with old friends that you don't feel comfortable sharing with new friends who can't put anything in context? A lot is left unsaid and still, they understood the context as only fast old friends can.   

To have friendships that you can pick up where you last left off -- what a blessing! 

Breast Cancer/Breast Friends...

Breast Cancer.  No one ever plans on getting it.  When it happens it is so traumatic, stressful and disrupting.  When it happens to our mothers and sisters, we are more at risk.  When it happens to us, our daughters are at an increased risk.  When dealing with it and living with it, best friends are often Bosom Buddies and Breast Friends.

Susan G. Komen had just died of breast cancer and Nancy Brinker was making her sister's death her cause when my mother was first diagnosed.  Until then breast cancer was an unmentionable.   My mother had cared for her aunt through her bc illness and death and had hosted her sister-in-law when she came to the city for bc radiation treatments.  Everyone she knew with bc had died.  One of my best friends' mothers, years and years past bc, came to visit my mother.  My mother then discovered that bc was something to live with, not die with.  That was 22 years ago and at a time when my father ran out of the surgery waiting room to pick up my brother from camp, leaving me to tell my mother of her diagnosis. 

Breast cancer is and was a scary thing.  My mother is still nurturing others who are diagnosed.  Her best friends are many of her Breast Friends and Bosom Buddies.  They celebrate milestones and share bonds of experience.  They learn that it is just a speed bump.  They are more than their breast cancer.

When my mother was diagnosed, I spent hours at the library trying to learn what we needed to know to understand and deal with the treatment options.  Information is more easily available and support so easy to find, compared to the early 1980s when the volunteer ladies came to her bedside with brochures of bra-stuffing options and my father had only his brother, recently widowed, to console him.

Breast Cancer Sources/Resources: There are two links in the left-hand column of MotherPie's site under "We Think Links" for BC.  The top one, MotherPie's Breast Cancer Board (Password Free) has easy access for a bunch of links and here it is if you want to check it out: MotherPie Breast Cancer Board (Password Free).  The second link, Breast Cancer Resources, needs the password "PieinSky" (type it just like that with the caps) for access.  This is a collaborative site where you can help add to the resources and edit the information provided.

MotherPie's BC links include: the Harper's Magazine article that mom writer Caitlin Flanagan found to be very helpful, Welcome to Cancerland, by Barbara Ehrenreich;  an article on a study about tamoxifin (with which my mother was treated) and raloxifene; a new gene discovery that could lead to breast cancer treatment breakthroughs; links to the Komen Foundation and Race for the Cure, and blogs by women who have been diagnosed with bc: Two Hands (diagnosed two years ago) and Well, it's not going to kill you, (just diagnosed and entering treatment); and this... Marjory and Gordon Cameron have come up with a unique way of coping with Marjory's breast cancer - they're blogging their experience in the hope that sharing their cancer story will help both themselves and others to deal more easily with breast cancer treatments. Their website is Beating Breast Cancer.  If you face bc or other illnesses, Caring Bridge is a non-profit site that lets you create an onsite platform to keep friends and family informed.   Attu writes about a performance that supports bc research.  All of the above links are posted on MotherPie's breast cancer board - both links.

My friends who suffer through bc... my heart is with you.  Since one of eight women will be diagnosed with bc, it is nice to see other women like Amy of Gazelles on Crack who care to do the Race for the Cure.  We work and run the Race for the Cure -- and my husband runs with the name of my mother on his back and my daughters work the water tables and donut tents.  I am forever grateful for the doctors and friends who have supported my mother these 22 years (and many more, hopefully) that my mother has lived beyond her diagnosis.     The surgeon told me this, right before I had to tell my mother her diagnosis: "There is good and bad news.  The bad news is that the lump is cancerous and you are at a higher risk, too.  The good news: advances are happening very rapidly in this field."

Claude started blogging to take her mind off of her breast cancer and treatment.  She now walks every day in Paris and posts her photographs on Claude's Daily Snap.  What an inspiration to see (as my mother would say) how one person made lemonade.  How she looks at the world and what she sees and how she shares her life... my words won't do it justice.  Go see.  The illustration of the surreal face, sinking in the water, seems to symbolize the sudden loss of self and identity crisis that a bc diagnosis seems to bring.  It is one of Claude's  Parisian photos, the Fontaine Medicis.

That surgeon was right.  We are lucky.  These are better times.

Flickr images: Fontaine Medicis from Claude.

Mes Amis Sont Ici? Netsphere & Bog Rolling...

Friends are here...in the blogosphere! Robert Putnam's book, Bowling Alone, continues to stay relevant regarding cultural change (ranked #2323 yesterday by Amazon - not bad for a book published in 2001).  His premise is that American activities in civic and community life have eroded because of societal changes including urban sprawl, the shift of greater numbers of women into the workforce, high levels of divorce and...television. 

Networking has a new connotation and blogrolling is one of those tools.  Blogrolls are ways to list one's online idea/clique aura.      It is socially noosphereical and many have questioned if online spaces can create civic engagement.  A blogroll, a blogger's list of his/her sphere of recommended other bloggers listed as links on the blog site .    There are also other ways to blogroll offsite such as at Blogrolling. A bog roll in the UK is slang for toilet paper but the term "blog roll" has caught on, anyway, as language and terminology are altering quickly due to tech changes.  Could it be the blogger's runs to other blog thrones?  Or is it a UK semantic way of thinking about long lists and social roll-outs?

The auras in the ideasphere of the blogs... something quite socialistically new and different, might be filling the vacuum of lost affiliations.  Some people "hang out" at certain blogs or in certain commentary spaces.  Some people comment to get attention. Friendship (or at least connectivity)  opportunities are real...virtually.  In the blogosphere, the conversations and play operate differently. The pats on the back, the encouragement, the talk-backs and talk-tos seem to be in terms of links, shout-outs and trackbacks not to mention commentaries and look-sees.  David Sifry, founder of Technorati, mused about the problem of blog spam over a year ago. 

My blog studies have been more theoriteical than personal but now, through force of a class project,  MotherPie has suddenly launched into the netsphere without looking off the high dive as to exactly how to do it.  Cautious about blogroll malaise...Are these my friends?  Une ami, Mamacita, ici--peut-etre.  She lives near me? She says "gag me with a spoon"  ...10-4 sista. 

BlogTalk - a fluidity more similar to conversation and colloquial dialogue than formal writing or traditional MSM writing.  The Economist quoted Davie Winer, author of the longest-running blog, as saying the essence of blogginess is "the unedited voice of a single person", preferably an amateur -- it is all about style.  "Blogs, in otherwords, usually have a raw, unpolished authenticity and individuality," The Economist's new media survey notes. 

Online treasures such as Jill Fallon, active beyond her blog, Legacy Matters, most recently writing about Stories of Cancer Moms.  MotherPie's blog bog -- she's there. Not sure of the audience yet and which of the humongous blogs in the regular study pool might apply here.  Commentors are an indication of deeper engagement.   Dextrous femaloggers? Readers only? Geeks and nerds?  Geeky guys? Another subject. Mama blogs?  Hadn't followed those until this blog launched with this defined niche format in two days for the new new media project two months ago.  Resources - the BlogHer conference: learn about the Radical Act of MommyBlogging, Next Level Naked, or learn if the web itself is a feminine construct.  Seems to have lots to offer.

Well, Web 2.0 is all about the two-way conversational abilities and collaborative applications.  Will it change with more females entering the fray?  Social relations are not your mother's bridge game or potlucks anymore.  How can you have watercooler conversations at your home office?

You can't talk back to the TV! Praise be the blogs.  Amen.