Almostgotit.com

Written especially for the web, the (very) short-form comedy series, “In the Motherhood,” is just begining its second season. Scripted by Hollywood professionals and with an all star cast featuring Leah Remini (”The King of Queens”), Jenny McCarthy and Chelsea Handler, the hilarious and edgy story ideas for each episode are submitted by real-life mothers from across the country. It’s a terrific concept.

And the episodes are FUNNY.

In the Motherhood hopes to become a major destination site, and so far it seems to be succeeding. I love the boldness of pairing the collaborative nature of the web with the professional production values already used by the television and movie industry. And all of this effort is aimed not at the still-highly-male-IT-industry, but at mothers. Hurray!

Oh sure — it’s still a marketing ploy. Nevertheless, it is also truly entertaining while managing to avoid the condescension and banality that still plagues so many “mommy” websites.

So hats off to ‘em, is what I say.

* The “Invisible Woman* essay was, indeed, written by Nicole Johnson, is fully subject to copyright, and her publicist tells me they were “deeply sad” when it “went global” without Nicole’s name on it.

* The Mommy Monk is one of several blogs which posted Nicole’s “Invisible Woman” piece without her name on it. That blog’s tagline is “MommyMonk: A woman attempting to find inner solitude in the daily self-denial of motherhood.” However, the blog’s author also claims to be a speaker/writer/teacher in addition to being a wife/mother. Not really the MOST solitary or anonymous person, then..

* Julie, who was very kind to comment here a couple of days ago, also posted Nicole’s piece without attribution. She claims this is not plagiarism as she doesn’t claim to have written it herself. Nevertheless, she also cites it as the central premise of her “Building Cathedrals” series of telecourses , for which she charges $20 per hour ($80 for the series). Which she markets under her own name. Nor does Julie seem quite so sanguine about folks resyndicating her own material: at the bottom of each page of her website it says © 2008 Julie L. Ford, All rights reserved

* It took me about 20 minutes to find the author of “Invisible Woman,” and 24 hours to contact and hear back from the author’s publicist. And I was just writing a post, not setting up a business. I’m just saying.

* My history-professor-husband tells me that we do, in fact, know many of the names of the artists, architects and builders who worked on medieval cathedrals. I am not done with this topic yet!

But I can talk about other things, too…

* I went out to lunch today. Why do waiters ask if you want “lettuce and tomato” but never if you want “tomato and lettuce?”

* It’s very funny to accidentally fall in step behind a man heading towards an adult bookstore. I did that today on my way home, and he kept turning around to look at me, nervously, almost as if *he* were the woman and *I* was a large, threatening man. When I realized where he was going, though, it all made sense. I should have followed him right into the store to see what he would do. Some day I’m going to do that, have been wanting to ever since that place opened a few blocks from my house. I think I’ll get all dressed up like a nice church lady, with a cardigan and hand bag, wander in as if by mistake, and start poking around, asking all sorts of questions, like “what is THIS is for?”

You may already have read “Invisible Mother,” (text below). As best as I can tell it’s been circulating online since at least 2005, via email, message boards, and dozens and dozens of blogs — but it is always credited to a nameless author.

Because she’s invisible. Get it?

I do not like to post things without an artist’s permission, much less without attribution. That’s called “plagiarism,” and is a form of theft.

Nevertheless, the hundreds of postings by hundreds of women all happily conspiring with the invisible author to keep her that way is wonderfully ironic, quite aside from the funny loveliness of the piece itself.
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Women still have an uneasy relationship with power and the traits necessary to be a leader. There is this internalized fear that if we are really powerful, we are going to be considered ruthless or pushy or strident—all those epithets that strike right at our femininity.

So begins an article on Women in Leadership, in which eleven women from different backgrounds tell their own stories about how they arrived at the place we call “success.”   Read it!  
Creative Commons  photo by Meretsoleil2

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Related Posts:

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“Fixing the Women” not enough to overcome pay inequity

Last Satuday, March 8, was International Woman’s Day (IWD).  One hundred years ago, in 1908, 15,000 women marched through New York City demanding shorter working hours, better pay, and the right to vote.

One hundred years later, IWD’s 2008 global theme is ‘Shaping Progress,’ in honor and celebration of all that women have accomplished in the past century, and with the hope that women around the world will continue to see advancements in their working and living conditions.

I celebrated International Women’s Day largely in the company of other women.   I blew off several afternoon errands to have tea with a friend instead, and later I dined with seven other fabulous chicks in my moms-only supper club, where we enjoyed several items from Cooking Light’s Tapas party menu and drank Cosmopolitans. 

Oh my.  Almostgotit LIKES Cosmopolitans. 

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Cosmopolitan Photo by “No Prawns” (Creative Commons Licence)
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However, she doesn’t like traditional Spanish tapas (the kinds involving lots of squid ink,  tentacles, and sea urchin roe), and as I was too late in signing up for what to bring,  the other fabulous chicks had already divvied up the good stuff from the Cooking Light menu.  So I googled tapas recipes until I found this spinach and chickpea recipe which sounded good.  It also turned out to be coincidentally-perfect for International Women’s Day as it is credited to Padma Lakshmi, the Indian supermodel-actress-author-cook who also happens to be Salman Rushdie’s latest Ex. 

Well.  Fabulous chick though Padma may be, hers turned out to be a pretty blah recipe, so below is fabulous-chick-Almostgotit’s new-and-improved version. 

My friend Peggy, aka the Career Encourager, has asked me to choose which of the following I would use to describe myself:

1 - I am a Working Mother

2 - I am a Woman with Children and a Career

3 - Other

Hmm.  How would you answer that, readers? 

The way I define myself keeps changing, is the problem.  I’m going to be out of the mother business soon enough and never quite made it to feeling like a “Working Mother,”  so I think the first option is out.

The second option,”I am a woman with children and a career” is a little better in that I was a “woman” before I was a mother, but it seems a little out of reach as well.  I might, someday, get to call myself ”a woman with children and a job,” and then a few more years after that, I’d really like to retain the ”a woman with a job” part, too.   But a “Woman with Children and Career?”  “Careers” sound like such permanent and uninterupted things, things people have expressly gone to school to prepare for when they were young, worked away at for a three or so further decades, and then eventually retire from.  Can the majority of mothers even do this?  **Having a Career** sounds so intense and single-minded.  While “intense” certainly fits me, what mother is ever free to be single-minded as well? 

What I am is chronically multi-minded instead.  And every one of my many minds is subject to sudden and unpredictable change as my children and my life and I all go lurching along together. 

Which seems to leave only the last option: “other.”  I’d probably have chosen that option anyway, being the obnoxious iconoclast that I am, but in this case I think it really is the only one that fits.   In the end I think I choose “I am a woman:” or maybe,  ”I (just) am,” period.

How about you?

Creative commons   Child’s Drawing Photo by an0nym0usmus & Giraffe Photo by Timothy K. Hamilton  (see great comment by Timothy, below!)

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My 11-yr-old daughter got braces today, and since I am currently the flexible, unemployed parent, I’m the one who took her to the orthodontist. Before taking her back to school afterwards, I took that cute kid and her new mouth out for lunch to try it out.

We found ourselves doing a mother-daughter “Gilmore Girls” act as we tried to guess at the profession of the women gathered at an adjacent table. “They look like plastic ladies!” my daughter whispered. It’s true… though their bodies came in the normal variety of shapes and sizes, they had strangely-colored helmets of hair, strangely-colored orange skin, and they were even shiny. One began passing around neatly bound notebooks to the others, with “Beauty Consultant Success!” printed on the cover.

What the heck is a “Beauty Consultant?” And please: will no one ever make me be one?!?
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Congratulations to my blogging friend Ann Bares, whose Compensation Force blog was just rated #1 in the recent HR Blog Power Rankings posted on The HR Capitalist!

Creative Commons photo by rossination

Girls can too play the tuba. Even skinny 11-year-old ones. And do you know what else? You can even play the tuba without a mouthpiece, because school band just started and we haven’t had a chance to buy one yet, but who could even stand to wait that long?

Of course, a tuba also takes up a lot of space in a person’s bedroom, which we hadn’t quite taken into account. Also, there is the small issue of travelling back and forth on a very crowded school bus. But there is this: one can make wonderfully effective noises that sound like gagging elephants and dying rottweilers, which TOTALLY scares the cat.

Plus? It will come in very handy for waking up an older brother on an early weekend morning.

One question remains, though: do you call a tuba player a “tubist,” or what?

Ann Bares of Compensation Force has written several good pieces recently about the notion of comparable worth and the push for pay equity. This notion has been getting a lot of press lately in the wake of several new studies which show that women earn less than equally-qualified, equally-experienced men do, even before they begin to marry or have children.

The research shows that one reason women don’t earn as much is because they don’t ask for it. Therefore, the logical solution may seem to be the one many experts have concluded: that is, women need to be trained to be more assertive in order to overcome the disadvantage they have due to a difference in genetics and/or upbringing.

Not so, according to a new Harvard study. In a series of experiments, researchers discovered, over and over again, that men and women get different responses when they try to negotiate a higher salary. A reluctance to be assertive, therefore, may be an appropriate learned response, if being assertive — by simply asking for more — may actually hurt a woman’s career.

And those who penalize women the most for asking for more? Other women. To be fair, women tended to penalize both sexes more for attempting to negotiate. Apparently, as a sex, we’ve internalized our lessons only too well.

It is a dangerous over-simplification to focus exclusively on “fixing women” so that they learn to negotiate more like men; moreover, doing so only perpetuates the problem society has always had with stigmatizing female wage-earners.

Nor (inconveniently enough) is it quite right to place the full responsibility for fixing the problem on employers, either.

The problem that needs addressing most is the whole social environment in which the risks of negotiating are demonstrably higher for women. Some of the salary inequities may seem small, especially as many insist on placing full responsibility for those inequities — still — on the shoulders of the women concerned.

But we’ve already been there. We already hold women “responsible” for damaging their own careers by choosing to be the sole-caregivers for their children or elderly parents. Which they must do without paid leave. And without resorting to damaging their spouse-and-co-parent’s career as well. (the highest paid workers of all are married men… most of whom are also fathers. Interesting?)

As small as the real, “after-adjusting-for-female-foibles” salary inequities may be, even differences of a few percentage points over the lifetime of a person’s career can add up, literally, to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

And that, in this USA of 2007, is simply not acceptable.