My Dossier

{ fleurdeleigh photography, fellow LookingGlassLane girl}

You won't find me here too often these days, as I've shacked up with four talented chicas at our new clubhouse on LookingGlassLane. But I still get all your emails, so feel free to peruse, comment and send me notes. I love them. And obviously, come visit us at the clubhouse. If you like Miss Ive, you'll love Miss Ive times FIVE. Yes I just stole the Body Imposters' tag line.

Meet the girls:

Morgan
Leigh
Ria
Suzanne


Jen's LookingGlass Dossier

Looking Glass Powers:
Finding and gathering extraordinary people. Just look at these girls. Voila.
The ability to simultaneously harness the uncensored voice of Henry Miller and the jaded acerbity of Erma Bombeck, and write it down whilst hanging from the limb of a tree.
The ability to shotgun a beer in such a fashion that even Emily Post would approve and add it to her "Things that will impress your mother-in-law" list.
The ability to reel in a fish and use her charm and wit to find someone else to take it off the hook for her.
The ability to pitch a tent in the pouring rain. And by pitch a tent, she means the canvas-and-pole variety, for the record.
The ability to groom so minimally that something as little as gloss on her lips garners accolades from the Queen. [Curtsy and bow.]

Dress-up Closet:
J.Crew. Hands down. Why? She WAY digs the rubber-boots-with-Irish-linen look. WAY.
J. Peterman Company. Why? She can never remember because the copy always leaves her fanning her face and somewhat disoriented. Yuh HUH.
Farm dresses circa 1940, in any condition, preferably paired with flip flops, in any condition.
Aprons. Any and all. It's a domesticity fetish. Is that oxy-moronic?

Disguise:
Burt's Baby Bee Apricot Oil in copious amounts and their not-to-bee-outdone Beeswax lip balm. Makes her lips tingle and she gets panicky when she can't find hers. Remember Napoleon's pleas to Kip? She's resorted to pinning arms behind backs to get information leading to her missing balm.

Go-To Gadget:
Two. One in each holster. Her iPhone on one side and a roll of duct tape on the other. Although she is currently in talks with Mr. Jobs about developing an app that will dispense duct tape, which would render the latter unnecessary. Cross fingers for major gadget consolidation.

Vice:
People Magazine. One copy can take her out of commission for a good three hours. If Jen and Ben are on the cover, make it four. How DO they keep the magic alive?

Magic Potion:
Starbucks RedEye and Gray Goose vodka, neat. Sometimes both, simultaneously. We don't recommend that she be reintroduced to the public for at least an hour after she's consumed this combination.

Battery-Recharge Hub (other than Looking Glass Lane, of course):
The tip-top of the tallest sand dune overlooking Little Traverse Bay, Michigan, and night trains racing across any open terrain.

Bratty Spoilers:
Extra long runs with no end in sight. Ben & Jerry's Chunky Monkey, microwaved for 37 seconds.

Owner's Manual:
Moby Dick, Melville. She has read Chapter XCIV, The Squeeze of the Hand, 12 and one half times. Also Bridget Jones's Diary, lest she get too full of herself.

Weapon:
First line of defense, her Wilson ProStaff racquet. Never approach the net when playing her. Never. Second line of defense, her overly-sharpened tongue. Again, never approach the net. Evahhhh.

How she gets to the Lane:
In her Mazda3, generally starting in first gear, but skipping 2-4 and shifting directly to 5 for expediency. And if she's extra eager to get to her girls, she'll opt for her Adidas SuperNova's and run through all yards standing in her way. Please watch your small pets.

Secret Ambition
This. Right here. Working creatively and collaboratively with a dream team of powerful DOERS. I heart my LookingGlassLane girls. Please join us as we pull off some seriously outta-this-world sh$%.

And recent inductees who have dared to write their own (so awesome, btw, especially John, the brave male adventurer in very girlie waters.)

Christeen Mary
Nakia
John
Jenn
April
Erin
Steph
Kim
Elora

And our honoree inductee, Rajesh Pancholi of R27 CreativeLab for his amazing design and generosity on LookingGlassLane.com

Naming Names

TODAY'S THE BIG DAY!!! Come here to see us talk live with Ayelet Waldman, author of Bad Mother, at Noon EST.

Those of you who have followed my journey here this year will know the name Ayelet Waldman. You'll know how I wrote about her controversial essay in the New York Times that landed her on Oprah. You'll know how we corresponded and that she was generous enough to send me an advance copy of her new book, Bad Mother. You may even have seen me read from it in my film, The Lark.




Well Bad Mother is back on my radar. It hits shelves and virtual shopping carts May 5th, and I can't wait to start talking about it with all of you.

I pulled it off my own shelf and started reading it again. It's A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace. It's about how we talk about moms, with names like good mother and bad mother. It's about how when we describe a good father, the discourse is sparse. The archetypes few. But when we talk about good mothers, omigod do we have thoughts, and more importantly, names for what she should be.

It's about why that may be the case, and becomes increasingly more the case every day. It's about lots of interesting things like how we use spectacle and "bad moms" like Britney Spears and Andrea Yates to soothe our private fears of bad mothering.

It's about, mom-on-mom crime and how grown women are also guilty of playground bullying. It's about how flipping the paradigm and becoming an openly bad mom, a confessaholic one might say, isn't quite the answer, either. Though it's fun, and you've all seen me do it here and on Twitter often, and you KNOW how I love me some Bombeck, as Waldman says "there is no inherent nutritional value in the antidote to poison." God, I love this woman. One smart cookie.

Most importantly, it's about understanding that in the daily question of Am I a bad or a good mother? Is she a bad or a good mother?, we are wasting precious time looking inward, that could be spent watching our children, and just being curious about them.

This book will make you think about the way you think, and here's what it made me think today. (Warning: I'm about to close my eyes and write, and you all know what happens when I do that.)

My oldest son was eight months old. We'd just finished our first winter together in a tiny apartment in a suburb of Detroit. Mostly, we read and nursed. Well, he worked on the latter, I on the former. I often read out loud so he could hear my voice. I read him Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises and DeLillo's The Names, something I was glad I read after naming him, by the way. I read him some Austen on gray days and some Wharton when I felt like crying anyway, so what the hell. I think he even got some of Foucault's thoughts on sexuality on days I felt particularly jocular.

But on this day, we were going to meet our people. The other moms. The other babes. And I remember thinking, as I approached a group of women, "Finally. Adult conversation." And then I distinctly remember hearing one mother say to the other three standing near the slide that Eddie Bauer's baby clothes had just been marked down. And I remember how surprised I was at the buzz that announcement generated. And I remember my upper lip curling and my eye twitching, instinctively. And then I remember, as I slowly backed away, thinking, "My poor son. He'll never ever be able to play at the playground, because his mommy growls and twitches when she hears other mommies talk."

And then I got over myself and learned to talk "mommy." I'm actually quite affluent in it now. Go ahead, ask me about my warrior-in-potty-training series. And as William grew, I even found comparing the stories interesting. I can do this, I thought. I can BE a soccer mom. But as Ayelet said, I was so "soul-crushingly bored" with the monotony, the lack of engagement, the conversations that refused to be provocative and rested on the safe veneer of re-establishing good-mommy goals.

And then I started blogging. (Big grin.) And then people found me out. And then guess what happens to all the names you've given yourself and all the selves you've become to different people at different times, and to all the names they've given you?

They . . . fall . . . away.

And you can just stand there, and say what you think. Ophelia wades out of the water. The fractured girl collects her parts—the daughter, the sister, the mother, the wife, the reader, the writer, the good mommy on the playground, the bad or sad mommy alone in her home. She gathers them all together, finds where they overlap, and says, "Yes, I like HER. Whatever her name is." And furthermore, I want my children to meet HER.

And I want to talk about that with all of you. So please, say something. Ayelet Waldman is saying something. ModernSingleMomma is saying something. Ria Sharon is saying something. Suzanne Tucker, ZenMommy, is saying something. Leigh Caraccioli, Fleurdeleigh, is saying something. Many of you are saying something on Twitter, by adding #badmother to your thoughts. You can join any of us on Twitter, by finding our Twitter links on our sites. Please keep talking.

I want to hear you say something here, too. But no name calling. Okay?

And if you want to hear us say something live, with Ayelet Waldman on Monday, May 11th, Noon EST, pop in here and watch.
Sign up below and we'll remind you that day, and send you the first chapter of Bad Mother immediately, so you can join the conversation. I can't wait to hear.