U is for Underwear (by Jennifer Van Santvoord)

For this year's A-Z Challenge, I am organising my writing group's participation for the first time. So I am posting each entry here as well as on the website, Write On, Mamas! who are a writing group based in the San Francisco North Bay area. We will have 25 Mamas and one Papa writing on a different letter of the alphabet during the A-Z Blog Challenge. Comments are always so appreciated here or it would also be lovely if you would comment on the Write On, Mamas! blog. Thanks and look forward to reading your blog.

Photography by Mary Allison Tierney

My son thinks that wearing underwear is optional.  He is four, so for him most articles of clothing are optional.  But in my house underwear is non-negotiable:  Unless you are taking a bath or a dump, your Fruit of the Looms must stay glued to your bottom.
But let’s face it, as hard as we try to institute rules with our children, they are trying equally hard to break them.

On a typical morning, I will hand my son everything he needs to get ready for the day:  shirt, pants, underwear, socks, shoes.  I then calmly ask, “Sweetheart, can you please get dressed while I get your sister ready?”

And the usual response to my request sounds something like an animal dying in the wild:  “Noooooo!  I don’t want to get dressed!  I want to plaaaayyyy!”  After much dramatic display, he finally starts removing his pajamas.

I return to dressing my daughter, and just moments later, I find my son totally naked with his day-old underwear stretched over his head, covering one eye.  He is running around yelling, “Mommy, look at me, I’m a pirate! Arrr!!”

 

I am already nauseated by this spectacle - his hair marinating in yesterday’s butt grossness- when he plops his bare butt onto the rocking chair, wiggling it wildly into the fabric:  “Mommy, Mommy, this feels cool!”

The day ends with a similar scene:  My two-year-old daughter declares it a clothing-optional dinner, stripping down to her diaper.  “Dahpuh off, dahpuh off!” she demands.  My son follows suit, and as he starts to pull down his underwear, I yell, “Underwear is non-negotiable!!  You can take off the rest of your clothes, but underwear stays on!!”

Sometimes I wonder who’s in charge in my house.  I’m pretty sure it’s not me.

Originally from the Northeast, Jennifer  now lives in Marin County, California with her husband and two children.  She writes a blog, Miles From Perfect, about her search for the perfect town to raise her children, and realizing how imperfect she is as a parent along the way.  She has also written articles as a guest blogger for various parenting blogs.

T is for Thanks (by Leslie Lagerstrom)

For this year's A-Z Challenge, I am organising my writing group's participation for the first time. So I am posting each entry here as well as on the website, Write On, Mamas! who are a writing group based in the San Francisco North Bay area. We will have 25 Mamas and one Papa writing on a different letter of the alphabet during the A-Z Blog Challenge. Comments are always so appreciated here or it would also be lovely if you would comment on the Write On, Mamas! blog. Thanks and look forward to reading your blog.

Photography by Mary Allison Tierney

For those who know me, I am sure you are surprised that I didn’t go with the ‘T’ word that has been at the center of my world for the last ten years. As a mother of a transgender child and a staunch advocate for that community, I’ll admit that was the obvious choice. But I wanted to devote my post to ‘Thanks,’ because it is a word that is never said enough, and a sentiment I find difficult to adequately convey.

This would be especially true in our family’s case, as we have found ourselves on a path less traveled. A path that some days feels riddled with hurdles and landmines, but yet has allowed us to experience the absolute best of humankind.

People like my son’s science and English teachers, who made their classrooms sanctuaries of safety at lunchtime when Sam was afraid to eat in the cafeteria.

Parents with children like ours, who lend support when the stigma is more than we can bear…who offer advice as we traverse the public school system with a child whose mind and biology do not match…who share amusing stories that only those in our ranks can understand, proving time and again that laughter truly is the best medicine.

Family members that circle the wagons to safeguard Sam’s physical and mental well-being.

Friends who use the correct pronouns without being asked.

And the neighbors that always greet us with empathy instead of sympathy in their eyes.

How do I possibly express the gratitude that runs so deeply through my veins for these and so many other gestures of kindness great and small? By extending heartfelt thanks over and over again, and hoping with every fiber of my being that they understand.

Leslie Lagerstrom is a proud mom of two children, who is a writer and advocate. In 2011 she created the blog Transparenthood™ which chronicles her family’s experience raising a transgender child. Believing the time is now to change hearts and minds, she volunteers to speak on a national basis, most frequently appearing in front of medical and teaching professionals.

S is for Siblings (by Mary Hill)

For this year's A-Z Challenge, I am organising my writing group's participation for the first time. So I am posting each entry here as well as on the website, Write On, Mamas! who are a writing group based in the San Francisco North Bay area. We will have 25 Mamas and one Papa writing on a different letter of the alphabet during the A-Z Blog Challenge. Comments are always so appreciated here or it would also be lovely if you would comment on the Write On, Mamas! blog. Thanks and look forward to reading your blog.

Photography by Mary Allison Tierney

One warm spring evening, when my younger son Oscar should have been practicing his lines for the class play or working in his vocabulary book, I allowed him and his older brother to shoot hoops after dinner. I figured these rare moments -- when Oscar is willing to join in typical play, when Abe is willing to adjust the game to Oscar’s level – are way more important than the class play and vocabulary words. I didn’t know if Oscar’s teacher would agree, but something told me she would.

They headed down the kitchen steps through our box-filled garage and out to the street, bubbling with excitement. I heard Abe tell Oscar that they were going to work on the “catch and shoot” to help Oscar in his lunchtime basketball games. Oscar’s low tone and slow processing speed make him neither fast enough nor coordinated enough to play on a real basketball team, but with help he can play in the informal school league.

After a few minutes I snuck downstairs and peaked out at them from behind a tall stack of boxes in the shadows of our garage. It was one of those warm evenings where the light settles on the neighbor’s house and casts a pink glow. The sky was painted with pink, orange and purple bands and I felt the tension of the day melt away as I watched my boys.

Oscar stood patiently while Abe positioned his arms. “Here Oscar, point your right elbow toward the hoop and keep your forearm straight. Put your left hand under the ball and just barely touch it. That hand acts like a guide as you shoot.”
 

“Ok, Abe!” Oscar giggled, hopping from foot to foot. He didn’t argue. He didn’t scream or stomp his foot or tell Abe he was wrong, like he did two summers ago when Abe tried to teach him how to putt at one of those tacky seaside mini-golf joints. Oscar had insisted on scrunching his body awkwardly over the club, elbows sticking out, as if holding a microphone. When Abe tried to correct his grip he yelled and flopped to the ground. He didn’t want help.

But something had shifted and Oscar was willing to listen that night on the street. He smiled and nodded while Abe demonstrated how to flick his wrist to maximize backspin. Abe’s voice was light and animated and Oscar glowed from the positive attention. I just wanted to stay hidden among the boxes, memorizing that moment.

Mary Hill is the mother of three, a writer and a medical and educational advocate for her middle son who was diagnosed at birth with Prader-Willi syndrome. She writes about raising a child with special needs and his two so-called typical siblings in between soccer and baseball games and all those darn medical appointments.

R is for Ripples (by Maria Dudley)

For this year's A-Z Challenge, I am organising my writing group's participation for the first time. So I am posting each entry here as well as on the website, Write On, Mamas! who are a writing group based in the San Francisco North Bay area. We will have 25 Mamas and one Papa writing on a different letter of the alphabet during the A-Z Blog Challenge. Comments are always so appreciated here or it would also be lovely if you would comment on the Write On, Mamas! blog. Thanks and look forward to reading your blog.

Photography by Mary Allison Tierney

It was a rather ripply spring, that spring when I was fourteen.  It wasn’t just because of all the sailing I had been doing that season.  The breeze on the San Francisco Bay certainly did cause the water to ripple as my dinghy cut through the small waves.  Every Sunday my junior sailing program met for the day for instruction and racing.  I had been doing this ever since I was ten. 

But that spring was different.  I know it sounds silly, but do you remember that feeling when you had your first crush?  Ripples going through you, like little electric currents?  His name was Seadon, Swedish Seadon, another fourteen-year-old in my sailing program. 

After a long day of sailing, the two of us wandered into the small boatyard after it had gotten dark.  (Our parents were still lingering at the bar of our yacht club.) The halyards clanged in the breeze against the metal masts of the boats parked on their trailers.  The stars twinkled above us.  He led me behind one of those boats, and pulling me closer, kissed me. 

Ripples.


For 20 years, Maria Dudley has been an elementary and middle school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area.  She recently opened up her own business, offering writing classes to home schooled students.  She finds that most of her own writing gets erased from the whiteboard she uses in her classroom, but hopes someday to submit her stories somewhere.

Q is for knowing when to Quit (by Dorothy O'Donnell)

For this year's A-Z Challenge, I am organising my writing group's participation for the first time. So I am posting each entry here as well as on the website, Write On, Mamas! who are a writing group based in the San Francisco North Bay area. We will have 25 Mamas and one Papa writing on a different letter of the alphabet during the A-Z Blog Challenge. Comments are always so appreciated here or it would also be lovely if you would comment on the Write On, Mamas! blog. Thanks and look forward to reading your blog.

Photography by Mary Allison Tierney

As I watched my 10-year-old skip down the Victorian-lined street in San Francisco, I blinked back tears. She’d just spent the day visiting a small school for kids with learning differences. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen her come out of school happy.

If you asked me a year ago if I’d ever send my child to a private school, I would have laughed. We weren’t private school kind of people. I equated them with snooty over-achievers, blah uniforms and hefty price tags.

Besides, we lived in a community known for its great public schools. The one my daughter had attended since kindergarten was among the best. I’ll always be grateful to the staff there for helping me recognize that her behavior and attention problems weren’t normal.

I wanted to believe that with their support and a tutor, she could make it in public school. And until this year, she was—barely. Within weeks, the increased workload, large class size and organizational demands of fifth grade left her floundering and depressed.

At first, the idea of calling it quits with her old school in the middle of fifth grade seemed insane. But as we headed across the Golden Gate back to Marin that afternoon, my doubts started to evaporate like the wisps of fog floating over the bay. My daughter bubbled with tales of the new friend she’d made, the small classes where teachers had time to help her, the kids who didn’t bat an eye when someone laughed too loud and long at a silly joke.

By the time we pulled into our driveway, I knew in my gut that my daughter belonged in that little school in the city. And that it would be crazy to let her struggle a second longer.


Dorothy O’Donnell is a freelance writer from Marin, California. She used to think training for marathons and triathlons was hard. Then she became a mom in her forties. Although she’s written about travel, health and business, these days her main focus is writing essays and a memoir inspired by her toughest, and most rewarding, endurance event--motherhood. Her work has been featured in the Marin Independent Journal, Mothering and on KQED radio.

P is for Proximity & Prevail (by Michelle van Kriedt)

For this year's A-Z Challenge, I am organising my writing group's participation for the first time. So I am posting each entry here as well as on the website, Write On, Mamas! who are a writing group based in the San Francisco North Bay area. We will have 25 Mamas and one Papa writing on a different letter of the alphabet during the A-Z Blog Challenge. Comments are always so appreciated here or it would also be lovely if you would comment on the Write On, Mamas! blog. Thanks and look forward to reading your blog.

Photography by Mary Allison Tierney

He calls it “when your numbers are up.”  Most of us simply call it “dead.” But “he” happens to be four and half with an emerging appreciation for the linear and rational. One day I’ll explain – try to explain – that sometimes being dead isn’t limited to how I frame it now.

A question about the Pixar movie, Up prompts a conversation along these lines.

With a concerned tone and woeful eyes, my son asks, “Mommy, why did the man’s wife die?”

“Sweetheart, she was really old and so her numbers were up.”

Curiosity about why a classmate’s older brother (a child) died  prompts this dialogue.

“Mommy, why did Pilar’s* brother die?”

“Sweetheart, he was really, really sick and so his numbers were up.”

Driving in the car listening to music provokes this exchange.

“Mommy, who is that man singing on the radio?”

“Bradley Nowell, the lead singer of the band Sublime**, he made really, really, really bad choices, so he’s not alive anymore.”

“He made bad choices and so his numbers are up.”

“Yes, sweetheart.”

“I won’t make bad choices.”

A deeper than usual breath, followed by “I know, sweet-man.”

Just like I know my son will make bad choices, I know that one day, in the wake of a tragedy, like the horrific bombing in Boston this week, I will be among wobbly parents faced with the responsibility to explain something – not only nonlinear and irrational, but evil.

“Sweetheart, we co-exist with bad guys, some people are the pestilence of Planet Earth – it’s terrible, but true. But, you know, the good guys outnumber the bad ones and so that makes us good guys even more powerful and strong.”

For as long as bad guys have used poisonous words, perilous threats and even, tragic proximity, it has not stopped the good guys. The good guys will prevail.

*Name changed
**Sublime song on radio was not R-rated

Michelle van Kriedt is a native Michigander who lives, loves, works and writes in Mill Valley, CA, with her husband & son. Her dual mantra is Family-Meaning. Tweets in between can be seen at @carmelmichelle.

O is for Outside (by Annie Yearout)

For this year's A-Z Challenge, I am organising my writing group's participation for the first time. So I am posting each entry here as well as on the website, Write On, Mamas! who are a writing group based in the San Francisco North Bay area. We will have 25 Mamas and one Papa writing on a different letter of the alphabet during the A-Z Blog Challenge. Comments are always so appreciated here or it would also be lovely if you would comment on the Write On, Mamas! blog. Thanks and look forward to reading your blog.

Photography by Mary Allison Tierney

Getting the Kids Outside – Sometimes There Isn’t a Green Hilltop in the Alps for You, Julie Andrews and Your Brood to Play On

My son’s schoolyard playground doesn’t have a blade of grass. Not a single, foot-stomping, bee-hiding, soft-landing cushion of Ma Nature’s finest carpeting….

No grass.

It’s all blacktop.

Hot, hard, odorous, steaming blacktop.

But that doesn’t stop my son and friends from hooting with yahoos!!! and wild and free abandon when that recess bell rings. Because, it’s still: Getting Outside.

I think to myself: Outside doesn’t just have to mean running around with backpacks on a gloriously, green hilltop in the Alps of Nature spinning and spinning and singing fa-la-la and doe-a-deer like Julie Andrews in a long skirt….

Creative play and imagination combined with small moments of nature’s gifts happen Outside on the hardtop, too. Fresh air wafts into the kids’ noggins as they bend their bodies into contortions on the swinging bars and smack that ball out and over our heads and into the street.

Hoppety-scotchety, jumppety-jump, four-square, tag-you’re-it!

All while the tree branches from the house next-door bend over the schoolyard fence, hovering over the blacktop, creating shade, and sprinkling their greeny leaves on the kids below. A black feather wafts from a nearby, sneaky crow who’s ready to pounce on the spilled bag of cheesy puffs . The school garden, small and mighty, struggles in it’s over-lovedness from tiny Kindergarteners pulling at its roots. Ouch!

Gifts large and small from the Outdoors can be found everywhere – on a green, grass mountain-top AND city street. Not just in Julie Andrew’s skirts.

So…. Get Outside!

Annie was recently voted Top #3 Outdoorsy Mom Blogger in the Universe for her blog OutdoorsyMama: Honest, Adventurous, Positive Parenthood with an Outdoorsy & Humorous Twist. She currently writes with the Write On, Mamas! and gets daily affirmations from her 3 kids, husband, and hiking shoes.

N is for No! (by Cindy Ash)

For this year's A-Z Challenge, I am organising my writing group's participation for the first time. So I am posting each entry here as well as on the website, Write On, Mamas! who are a writing group based in the San Francisco North Bay area. We will have 25 Mamas and one Papa writing on a different letter of the alphabet during the A-Z Blog Challenge. Comments are always so appreciated here or it would also be lovely if you would comment on the Write On, Mamas! blog. Thanks and look forward to reading your blog.


Photography by Mary Allison Tierney

Every year we travel to South Carolina to spend a week on the beach with family. This year we will be able to drive rather than fly to our destination. My kids agree that ten hours on the road in our own car beats the daylights out of flying the red-eye. Nevertheless, I am under no illusions as to how that day will go.

The day before we leave I’ll pack the car with snacks and DVDs and iPods. The children will spend that day in their cushy seats in my air-conditioned minivan, on what ought to be their dream day of sacking out with electronics, at least arm’s length away from any other warm body.

On the road, I will answer, “No, we are not there yet,” approximately 732 times. The question will be asked for the first time sometime before lunchtime, even though they know we won’t be arriving at our destination before 4:00 in the afternoon.

We all have our “barefoot in the snow” memories of childhood travel. Mine involves riding in the bed of a pickup truck, with a two-inch thick foam mattress below and a camper top above for safety, on the way home from Helen Keller’s Alabama birthplace in complete silence while I taught myself to fingerspell the alphabet in American Sign Language. My mother, the seventh of nine children, remembers piling into the back of her father’s 1959 Chevy sedan with all of her siblings.

Sometimes I worry about the memories I am costing my children by making life too easy for them. But that’s when I’m at home. On the road I’m really just looking to reduce the number of times I hear “Are we there yet?”

Cindy Brown Ash is a lifelong writer. She took a hiatus from writing when she realized that her fiction required a better insight into human nature to become something worth reading. Motherhood has corrected that deficit, and Cindy is now writing as much as the children permit to make up for lost time. She has participated in the Mama Monologues with the Writing Mamas, and maintains a blog, Simply Richer Living, which aims to bring cohesion to the idea and practice of living a simple, productive, sustainable home life.

M is for Moving (by Paula Chapman)

For this year's A-Z Challenge, I am organising my writing group's participation for the first time. So I am posting each entry here as well as on the website, Write On, Mamas! who are a writing group based in the San Francisco North Bay area. We will have 25 Mamas and one Papa writing on a different letter of the alphabet during the A-Z Blog Challenge. Comments are always so appreciated, but would be lovely if you would comment on the Write On, Mamas! blog so the author will read your comment. Thanks and look forward to reading your blog.

Photography by Mary Allison Tierney

Thirteen years in the same house. I have never lived in one spot that long in my life, and find myself itching to move onto the next place. A house and yard is easy to leave behind, but what isn't easy are the relationships made during that time. Parents of my son's friends who are now some of our best friends. Neighbors who we might not see everyday but are always there if you need them. Co-workers who lend a sympathetic ear over coffee. The writing group that offers a short creative retreat from life's responsibilities once a month.

For the first time, my excitement about moving will be colored with nostalgia about what we leave behind. No more elementary school fund raisers. No more big birthday parties for the kids in the backyard. No more speaking at LitCrawl with the Write On Mamas. No more shorts and flip flops during fall and winter (after all, we are moving from Marin to Minneapolis). Despite all of this, I am excited for the change. My son has never lived near family in his short ten years and can't wait to hang out with Grandpa and Grandma and his cousins. We can't wait to give him that opportunity.

Paula Chapman was a journalism major, spending many years in the world of corporate communication before taking a detour into the world of finance. Today she enjoys writing personal essay and memoir and has performed some of her pieces at LitQuake and The Mama Monologues.

K is for Kite (by Angelisa Russo)

For this year's A-Z Challenge, I am organising my writing group's participation for the first time. So I am posting each entry here as well as on the website, Write On, Mamas! who are a writing group based in the San Francisco North Bay area. We will have 25 Mamas and one Papa writing on a different letter of the alphabet during the A-Z Blog Challenge. Comments are always so appreciated, but would be lovely if you would comment on the Write On, Mamas! blog so the author will read your comment. Thanks and look forward to reading your blog.

I didn’t want to be on earth any longer.  We had received the devastating news that after doing the cooling cap therapy, nothing had changed.  “I’m so sorry,” Dr. Tannenbaum’s words repeated “There’s no brain activity”.  Lofty hopes, prayers, and wishes had been replaced with the hard and heavy reality that you were going to die.  I wanted it to be me, instead.

J took me to the Berkeley Marina that day in her car.  I couldn’t sit with myself in the hospital or in our apartment any longer.  I probably requested to be taken there, although I don’t remember.  What I do remember is feeling the uncomfortable weight of my body against the worn leather interior of her old green Volvo station wagon.  My post-partum body still looked very pregnant with you.  After all, it had only been a week since I birthed you.  I crouched into my soft empty belly, sobbing.  Wishing that you were still in it, where you had been kept safe.  Knowing that you weren’t even on that NICU hospital bed anymore, but just floating.  Preparing to be free completely.  Your father and I would have to decide when and where.  Soon.

“Do you want to get out and get some air?,” J asked.  I shook my head, no, still crouched. “Do you want me to open a window?”. I continued to shake my head.  I heard her opening the moonroof and looked up to see blue sky with pillowy clouds moving by.  I decided to let my weight come down into the seat by pressing the button to lower it.  I lay on my back, extended, looking up at the sky that I hadn’t looked at in quite some time.  My focus had been singularly directed on you on that NICU bed, on you getting better.  Now, I lay flat, surrendering to that sky, crying still but looking up.  As I let go, a flapping green kite flew by my small rooftop screen.  It hovered there, came down, almost touching the glass, as though it wanted to come inside with me.  I stared at it, my tears turning to laughter, until the winds picked it up and brought it higher once more.


Angelisa Russo lives in Sherwood, OR with her husband, Mimmo, and their two small children, Sofia (4) and Gabriele (2).  In between running their Italian restaurant, Da Mimmo, and raising the kids, she tries to find time to write.  She is working on a memoir about her firstborn son, Salvatore, who lived for 10 days and touched their lives forevermore.  Pictured here is her daughter, Sofia, at age 2, flying her first kite at the Berkeley Marina.