The following entry is a favorite from the archives of Badgermama:

Moomin and Hamster played "dragonslayers" all afternoon. I was on the phone a lot with my mom, because my grandma fell, and had apparently been in a chair all night not able to walk, but too full of pride to go to the hospital, not admitting anything was wrong. The phone calls flew... everyone was kind of mad at everyone else... All tensions came to the fore. I am afraid I was not very "there" for Moomin and Hamster. "Mom I need tape!" "You know where to find it." "Moomin's mom, um, Badger! Where is the tinfoil!" "You guys can move chairs around in the kitchen and look in the cabinets. Improvise. I'm too busy."

The crisis resolved somewhat when my mom made my grandfather call 911 for an ambulance. The depth of what was going on is just impossible to explain. My grandma is home now with some pain meds and a swollen hip, but no fracture.

In the evening I went to pick up Sophie and Eliz. from Squid's house, where Iz tried to make me take a stick of electric shock fake gum. I refused after she asked me if I were under 14, over 50, or had a pacemaker. OMG the mystery - how did I know!

On the ride back I enjoyed the kids saying that I had a "cool car"! We rolled down the windows and blasted the music, feeling deliciously naughty. We all described the ultimate cool car: this would be like a pimped-out James Bond Batmobile Chitty Chitty Bang Bang with a very loud thumping stereo. I deliberately drove past Eliz's school while blasting The Ramones' "Beat on the Brat". She stuck out her tongue at the school. All very proper. I'm a good influence!

Eliz. then bossed us all around until we behaved appropriately to be the audience to her magic show, which lasted almost an hour. Sophie sang all the way through in a horrid off-key voice to the tune of "Oh What a Beautiful Morning". Here is a sample verse that I ran in the house to write down:

I am a beautiful fat belly
i am a beautiful brain!
i am the beautiful guts of you,
i am a beautiful PAIN (in the neck)

Feats of memory (card tricks) and sleight of hand - Eliz was a good magician! I heard she's teaching magic to the other kids for half an hour every day at her summer camp - the counselors figured out they could use her and it gives them a break! Everyone is so proud of her around here!

Now we're watching Star Wars. More popsicles administered. I confess that during the pre-movie chaos, I meanly yelled "SHUT UP. EVERYONE, SHUT UP. Sophie, shut up." Dead stop on all sides. Four children looked at me with their mouths open. "Why did you... how come you... you said 'shut up'... to me... " Sophie said as if in shock. "Because I'm rude." "Oh." *silence*

Yow! It worked! I'm a magician too!

Continue reading "Magic Tricks" »

Posted by mommybloggers at 11:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Mommybloggers: We're so excited to have the chance to interview you, Liz... can we call you Liz, or do you prefer Badgermama?

LIz: Liz is fine, though I answer to Badger, Lizzard, Dr. Lizardo, whatever.

Mommybloggers: You're a published poet, and an all-around prolific writer. Is blogging an offshoot of your 'real' writing?

LIz: Blogging started that way, as an offshoot, but now I wonder if it has become my "real" writing. It's a little bit diary and a little bit epistolary. I have two book recommendations for women who have been blogging a lot and taking it seriously: 800 Years of Women's Letters edited by Olga Kenyon, and Private Pages: Diaries of American Women 1830s-1970s. Those are good starting points if you want to feel hooked into a literary tradition of writing women. Blogging is its own genre now, but it would be good for us to strengthen the connections in our minds between blogs and the amazing rich history of diaries and letters that have been important in women's literature for hundreds of years.

Before I had blogs, I kept paper notebook journals. Usually I had 3 or 4 at once: a main catch-all one to carry with me, a small one to carry in a pocket, one for especially significant moments that has lasted for years and is slow to fill up, and a dream journal. I also was used to working back and forth between two notebooks on drafts of poems and translations, and I still do this. Letters to my friends could run 20 pages handwritten, easy. My notebooks go back 22 years at this point. I wrote and published a ton of xerox zines. So it's not like my overblogulating came out of nowhere.

I do love my poetry best, and my poem translations. But it has always been my ambition to be one of those writers who does a little bit of everything. I can't help being heavily textual. Blogging is super exciting because it puts me into direct touch with other people who are like that.

Mommybloggers: Tell us how Badgermama came about - what inspired you to make the leap? How has the response surprised you?

LIz: I had been writing on my big old catch-everything pseudonymous badgerbag blog. I went to BlogHer's first conference, and really liked the mommyblogger panel and discussion. After that I felt it was important for me to identify at least partly as a mommyblogger, since I'm a mom and I blog sometimes about that identity and about parenting. I was a little frustrated at always being left out of the categories, because of writing about a little bit of everything, and not having a focus. there was (and still is) a lot of advice floating around the blogospher about how to be successful or popular or make money as a blogger, and one key concept was focus. I thought, "What if I go through my archives and pull out all the parenting and mom stuff, and put it together?" I did a little bit of that for badgermama, and then found that I wanted to write there, in that context. Once I made the blog and it had a concept, I wanted to write different stories, and say different stuff, than I wanted to write on my One Blog to Rule them All. I have found, now, the the importance of context.

So my own internal response surprised me. The same is true of sf.metroblogs.com; I sometimes write about my affectionate feelings for place and local geography, but as soon as I had the password for metroblogging, I found I had more to say than I had realized. Once I had a mommyblog, I found a little bit of a new voice.

I also felt that it might be important to let my freak flag fly in the context of being a mom. For other women, to say "here's what that's like - here's my experience - " By "freak flag" I don't mean "I have silly hair". It's that I approach everything intensely. I enjoy my life very intensely and I want to share that, in a way, to give validation to anyone else who has a hunger for life and experience.

It's that someday I hope I'll do something really cool and amazing and be able to write about that. For now, it's just my daily life and my thoughts. And our daily lives, the way we experience them, are important. We should value that now, as we live our lives, not later when we remember them from our hospital beds, or never, or only in the imaginations of our grandchildren after we're dead.

Here's a hard thing to talk about. One response I didn't expect was that other moms and other mommybloggers started acting like I was famous or something. That was just weird. But it made me realize it must be important to say what I'm saying. That people come up to me, and want to meet me, is really nice, but it can also sometimes be a sort of pressure; people want something from the experience of meeting me, they expect something. I want to be able to give it, whatever it is. I hope this does not sound stuck-up, I'm just trying to be honest, and it's a new thing for me. It's new for me to have people meet me and feel they know me, when I don't necessarily know them; and it's new for me to feel a certain responsibility for what I say, because I know people are listening or reading.

Continue reading "Mommybloggers dish with Liz Henry" »

Posted by mommybloggers at 12:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)