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Comic relief for suburban moms
Professional reporter turned award-winning humor columnist, Meredith O’Brien, has assembled more than six-dozen of her wittiest vignettes for a new book, which offers much-needed comic relief for today’s suburban moms. O’Brien’s new release, A Suburban Mom: Notes from the Asylum provides a realistic and humorous look at what life is really like for moms trying to live their lives and preserve their sanity while raising kids today. O’Brien began her journalism career covering city politics for the Boston Herald in the late ‘90s and soon after became pregnant with twins. When the twins were born 5 and-a-half weeks early and stayed in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit for three weeks she made a tough call. “I didn’t want to leave them,” she says, “so, I left my newspaper job, and several months later, launched my freelancing-from-home career.” She is the first to admit that she never would have imagined she’d be writing about parenting. “If you had pulled the ambitious, 20-year-old college journalist version of me aside and asked her if she thought she had humor essays about potty training in her future, she’d likely have laughed at you,” says O’Brien. “Life has a funny way of reconfiguring your perspective.” When asked about the pressures of being a “perfect” mom, O’Brien says the media, our peers, and ourselves contribute to the pressures mom face. She says many of today’s moms, herself included, think we have to present a perfect image to the world for fear we’re going to be judged harshly by society. “Most of us are not Bree Van DeKamp,” she says. “There are many of us who, contrary to the media images, hate cooking or baking or making crafts or going to PTO events. There are some of us who feel overwhelmed with all the stuff that’s going on with our families that we can’t keep our houses clean, remember if we’ve sent in the right permission slip with the right kid, and have somehow forgotten to buy milk for three days straight.” O’Brien’s approach to writing about parenting is realistic and refreshing, and it’s easy to see why her Boston Herald parenting blog, Boston Mommy, has become so popular. O’Brien says that other moms can find some humor in the often stressful realities of daily motherhood through many of these blogs. “Go online and find some mom blogs – honest ones, authentic ones,” she says. “Read about how one mommy serves PB&J for dinner a couple of nights in a row and has a load of dirty laundry the size of Jabba the Hut in the laundry room. In those blogs, you’ll find humor, and relief, that it’s not just you living an imperfect life.” O’Brien became a blogger after doing research for a feature story on mommy blogs in 2004 and says she became instantly smitten with them. “Inspired by their rawness and honesty, after my feature on blogs was published, I asked the folks at the Herald if they’d consider having me write a parenting blog for their Web site. And, in March 2005, I entered the blogosphere.” She thinks blogs can be a useful tool to help mom writers showcase their work, depending on how much creative control the writers have over their blogs. She chose to blog at two pre-existing organizations, the Boston Herald’s site and at Club Mom where she used to write a pop culture blog and had to adhere to certain standards. For those mom writers interested in starting their own blog, “figure out where the line is between the personal and public,” she advises. “The parameters are important so you can figure out the tone of your blog and where it fits in the blogosphere.” In addition to writing and being a mom of three young children, O’Brien is also an adjunct professor of journalism at a Boston-area college. When asked how she manages it all, she jokes, “Late nights. Caffeine – lots of it. And massive doses of self-deprecation.” O’Brien says she struggles sometimes with whether she’s been too revealing about her children’s personal lives. She hopes when her children are adults they’ll look back on her writing about their early childhood years with pleasure, not embarrassment. “I’m cognizant of trying to protect them and certainly don’t write about everything that goes on in our lives, but there are some things about which I write that are more revealing about parenthood in general and their examples are universal,” she says. “For example, everyone’s got some insane potty training stories to tell, so when my kids learn that I wrote about my attempts to potty train them, I don’t think they’ll be offended – fingers crossed.” She says her biggest reward as a mom writer has been being able to document funny anecdotes that she otherwise may have forgotten. “I also enjoy, hopefully, bringing smiles and maybe relief to other parents who share my feelings about this whole parenting gig: That it’s crazy, that I feel simultaneously unprepared and over-prepared, and that I’ve got to trust my gut and laugh more.” Her best advice for other mom writers: Take the time to write when you can; you can sleep later. Always carry a notebook to jot things down when they come into your mind because you think you’ll remember, but probably won’t. Make a list of goals and tell someone about it. “That makes it risky and public and will prompt you to go after those goals,” she says. You can read more of O’Brien’s witty bits of wisdom for moms in her new release: A Suburban Mom: Notes from the Asylum (Wyatt-MacKenzie Publishing). She also writes the Working Mothers in Pop Culture and Politics column for Mommy Track’d at www.mommytrackd.com. And be sure to check out her Boston Mommy blog online at: news.bostonherald.com/blogs/bostonMommy/. Stephanie McCarty’s Fumbling Toward Motherhood column appears regularly in print and online publications. One of her columns will be included in the upcoming release: Chicken Soup for the New Mom’s Soul (Health Communications Inc.; April 2007). Stephanie worked in PR and media relations full-time for more than a decade, before starting her own writing and consulting career. She says, "During my professional tenure, I have worked on political campaigns, in the halls of Congress, and in corporate PR – but nothing could have prepared me for the roller-coaster ride that is motherhood." Stephanie currently lives in Ohio with her husband and her daughter, who is the joy of her life. She credits her little girl with inspiring her to find her true writing passion. Read more of Stephanie’s work at: www.fumblingtowardmotherhood.com, or contact her at: Stephanie@fumblingtowardmotherhood.com
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