Julie Pippert: Using My Words

Every morning I'd get back from my laps and I'd see her, the mom with the baby in the stroller doing her daily walk around the neighborhood. We'd wave, two moms in shorts and tees, sweaty and a little red in the face from the exertion and heat. Me, unencumbered, she, pushing the stroller. Child in stroller is such a stage and age. Any parent knows it. When I had my first baby the awesome commonwealth of Massachusetts offered a lovely one year postpartum support and parenting program in the form of a mom-and-me program once a week at the education building adjacent to our local hospital. It was, of course, free. I came for one "give it a shot" group and stayed for the whole year and beyond. In my memory, when I pushed a stroller around the neighborhood, I always had at least one mom from a community of these moms with me. One time I walked with another mom on a gorgeous path through a park and her son reached out and held my daughter's hand. They were six month...

I'm really really glad I missed BlogHer this year. Every account makes it sound like a Self-Righteous Fest rather the the community building, sharing, learning, and fun I expect from that event. Then, that spilled over into the rest of the online community, and now moms who blog have garnered a reputation for being greedy, graspy harpies who cage fight for minor pieces of swag, like deranged parents beating one another up for the last Cabbage Patch doll. Way to further the rep. Even if people had fun -- and good for you -- clearly there was a major undercurrent I had been calling Culture Clash (which provided private amusement because it dredged up funny old 80s bands to mind) but have now begun calling the Whore Wars. You can subtitle it: That Same Old Mean Girl Judge and Jury Fest We've Had Since 5th Grade. It's because yesterday someone played the whore card in reference to the mombloggers + PR + Review = Sometimes Profiting/Being Compensated While Blogging. Don't be...

The other day I was looking at this gorgeous house. It was my ideal sort of house: sort of large and rambly, older but fully restored with the same character and time period architecture, a flowy floor plan but with a fair amount of openness, and lovely furnishings...just nice enough to be nice but not at all out of a catalog or showroom. Homey. Classy. Clean. Lovely. All of the sudden, with a hitch to my stomach, I thought, "I am just never, ever going to have a house like this." For a second, I mourned. I am never going to have a house like that because my husband is an architect and I am a writer, and we will likely never make That Amount of Money necessary. I am never going to have a house like that because my husband is an architect in the same way a doctor is a doctor and a plumber is a plumber: they do grand work for everyone except themselves. I am never going to have a house like that because I am Decoration and Flair challenged. I even once took a couple of courses ...