I'm delighted to participate in Blogging for LGBT Families Day 2010, coordinated by the good folks at Mombian.
I had the great good fortune to live in the listening area of the tiny Western Massachusetts radio station where Rachel Maddow hosted a morning show called The Big Breakfast before her Big Break. As I am not a cable television subscriber, I can honestly say I was more influenced by Dr. Maddow before she became truly famous than after.
I listened to Rachel daily throughout my pregnancy and in the first year at home with my baby. Like everyone who loves her now, I admired Rachel’s wit, warmth and politics. In the intimate venue of local radio she had an incredible knack for creating community and connection. I called the station often, attended promotional events and even brought my baby to her going away party—in a cigar bar, where I gave the departing dignitary a bag of chocolate-covered espresso beans and directions to my favorite Chinatown Vietnamese dive . I wanted to find a way to thank her for keeping me from losing my mind.
In my daughter’s first year, a six-foot-tall Subaru driving lesbian with a wicked cackle and self-described Don King hair, on the invisible verge of super-stardom, was one of my lifelines to sanity. Perhaps only a lesbian can appreciate the cultural phenomenon that is Rachel Maddow, but I hope any mama can relate to this extraordinary time of life.
Dear Rachel Maddow,
It’s been a few years now, and I know you’ve had a lot of exciting experiences in the intervening time. But you might remember me as the listener who brought her puking baby into the radio station when you were a morning dj and I was a stay-at-home mom, hanging on your every witticism to get me through the early daylight hours. Whole Foods sponsored a free breakfast buffet that morning; it took more than a little spit-up to keep this nursing mama from all the wheat-free vegan French toast she could swallow.
I called in a few times; once I told you my birth story, describing childbirth as sexual and religious ecstasy. I’m afraid I shocked us both. Prolonged sleep deprivation combined with the lactation hormone cocktail sure does a number on a person’s verbal inhibitions.
I misplaced the baby once when we were on the phone. She crawled off and I had to run through the house looking for her while trying to answer the quiz questions. I won the coffee mug though. Right from the start of this parenting adventure I’ve been a mean multi-tasker. I’m sure you can relate.
Your meteoric—and completely deserved, I mean no disrespect—rise to fame has dazzled me with what can be accomplished in half a decade: Get your own TV show! Influence the heart of a nation during an historic election! Become a Jeopardy question! My job, and I’m proud to call it that, is less quantifiable. But I conclude that I’ve done at least 1500 loads of laundry, and washed dishes by hand for 22 straight days. Such diversity in the human experience, even among women of the same nation, region, generation and sexual orientation!
It’s not like I haven’t been doing something important. I’ve been nurturing the soul of the next generation! I’ve had some set-backs, but I’m sure that’s true of anyone. I know it took you a while to get that MSNBC gig. So I won’t feel bad that I forgot to teach my kid how to hold a fork properly. Someday she’ll be able to eat a whole meal without biting her own hands. I can feel proud of my contribution to society, especially if I choose to forget that study that said kids want to spend less time with their parents, and the other one that said kids who go to daycare do just as well as kids who have a stay-at-home mom. Also if I disregard predictions that college tuitions, currently at a dollar figure curiously close to my household income, will continue to skyrocket throughout my daughter’s adolescence.
Fortunately, forgetting is not challenging. I seem not to have recovered the brain cells lost in the first three months of motherhood, a time that I fondly call baby boot-camp. Just this week I lost a basket of clean laundry, which inconveniently contained all my underpants. I draw a direct connection between events like this and that long-ago night when I couldn’t remember how a person might tell time if they were far from a clock, pinned in an armchair by a suckling parasite. I knew there must be a method; maybe I could invent something that would be helpful, a little later, when I was not so tired? (Hint: wrist-watch.)
Motherhood is indeed transformational, and it transformed me into the kind of person who can’t recall the basic technology of modern life or keep track of inanimate objects. It was a little rocky adjusting to this seismic change. The nights were long but they always ended, and then your show came on the radio! You were there for me in those first days of stunning stupidity and I’ll always be grateful.
Things are a little different now that my kid is more of a person than a parasite. Sometimes I can even form a thought, although she usually makes sure that I lose track of it with a well-timed interruption. I’ve read that you use earplugs so you can focus your brilliance on what you are reading and writing. If you ask me, your staff is a bunch of light-weights if they are bested by this trick; a champion interrupter like my little darling could easily bypass such a technicality. Have they tried climbing on your lap or breaking things around the studio? Jumping up and down right next to you is also effective. I’m just saying.
I know you’re busy now with all those radio and television shows, not to mention the book you’re writing. And I read in the New York Times that you still take the trash to the dump yourself. That’s nice. Sometimes my daughter helps with the compost. She says it smells bad but I make her do it anyway. How many bad smells have I endured for her sake, I ask you? But I do have all that laundry waiting.
Thanks for this trip down memory lane. We should touch base again sometime, maybe five years from now? I’d love to hear what you’re up to.
Warmest regards,
Your friend and loyal fan,
Lynne Marie
1 comments:
love it.
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