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women

Pearls with Purpose

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I wore pearls to my wedding, my mom’s pearls. They’re classy and dignified and I love the way you can wear them with jeans or an evening gown or even yoga pants. And now you can do more than channel your inner Julia Child when you wear pearls. Pearls with Purpose is changing lives by giving women in underdeveloped countries opportunities to learn the art of jewelry making.

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The women use the training, resources and micro-financing from Pearls with Purpose to become more self-reliant and provide for their families. Learn more at their website, and consider taking their pledge to do more good in the world, donating, or ordering gifts for loved ones… or for you. You love you, right?

*I did not receive anything in conjunction with this post. I just like them.*

The Personality

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ultrasound-012So, we did end up taking Laylee to the ultrasound and I’m so glad we did. She was fascinated by everything, especially the part where the baby peed right “on camera” and the doctor replayed it a few times for her in slow motion.

He then said, “You know what that is?”

“Is he spitting something out?” I asked.

“Nope,” he and Dan both answered, “Wrong end.”

Oh.

Laylee thought that was hilarious. And the doctor informed us that from the pee pattern it was very obvious that my 100%-sure-it’s-a-boy baby is actually female in nature and very healthy from all outward indications.

The doctor was extremely thorough, even bruisingly so, measuring every major bone and heart valve. When I asked if he was completely totally for real for real sure it was a girl, he said, “As I said,” with such authority that I had to believe him.

I was shocked at how happy that made me. All along I’ve thought this baby was a boy. Before I was ever pregnant, I KNEW our next little guy was a little guy. I had no doubt about what his personality would look like. I was fine with a boy.

But when my sisters left earlier this month, I told Dan through my tears that a part of me wished it were a little girl. This could be our last baby and I think every girl needs to have a sister. I know that boys would likely say that every boy needs a brother but I have never been a boy so I can’t vouch for that.

My mom knew it was a girl all along. She says it’s because of a premonition she had while picking out clearance baby clothes at Kohl’s. So her shopping wisdom trumps my parental intuition and two medical professionals’ ancient Chinese gender tests. She IS a great shopper.

So yay. Any baby name ideas? We had the boy named and ready to go. But little Wanda’s got nothing in the way of an offline name. If I use the name you share with me, I promise to email and let you know.

Drill Team, Princesses and the Best Mom Ever, Who is Me

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I’m always looking for great new ways to play the hero to my children, while expending limited money and effort. Sometimes I really have to search for these opportunities and other times they just bonk me over the head.

drill-team-comp-004The past week Laylee’s been really acting up. We’ve made some changes at home, I’ve been sick and she’s been looking for attention in less than helpful ways. Around Thursday we made up and she’s been sweet as pie the last couple of days, no snotty looks, cranky backtalk and picking on her brother for no particular reason. I’ve been trying to think of a way to give her some good positive attention for the attitude transplant.

Enter an email from one of the high school girls I teach at church and a mother-daughter date afternoon was born. Today Layee and I attended the high school drill and dance team competition — princess themed. For the cost of $5, both of us got into the event, Laylee dressed in an elaborate princess-meets-sorcerer-meets-flower-fairy costume. Our friends Eve and Missy joined in the fun.

drill-team-comp-001Keep an eye out for this kind of thing in the local news section of your paper because it was a fun, cheap way to support the community and have an unforgettable time together. Laylee was absolutely smitten with all the dancers whose routines ranged from modern/jazz to drill team to pom to hip hop.

Laylee enjoyed the drill team stuff, crisp as lettuce with fake hair bouncing smartly. I’m sure she wondered why their hands were glued to the smalls of their backs whenever they weren’t dancing but she didn’t ask.

She thought the modern/jazz dancers were beautiful because they did pirouettes and arabesques like ballerinas. But when they finished and were followed up by the pom girls, she decided she liked the pom dancers better. “They were just SO much happier!” It’s true. They were happier. While the lyrical dancers were serious and dramatic, the pom girls had smiles that could not be chiseled off. I think it’s in the international pom code of ethics. If your smile is not atomic, you will be stricken from the team forthwith. I mean, if you’re shaking glittery poms and doing high kicks, your face has to keep up somehow.
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At some point in the afternoon Laylee and Missy were eating snacks. Laylee had a giant chocolate muffin the size of her head and Missy was enjoying a dry white bagel. Looking for the perfect opportunity, she waited for Laylee to finish a bite and reopen her mouth before she shoved a giant piece of bagel into Laylee’s pie hole. Laylee sat in stunned silence, white carbohydrates completely plugging her mouth and Missy looked up at her mom proudly. “I always share,” she said. Laylee removed the bagel from her mouth and smiled at me confusedly.
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Now the whole afternoon we were waiting for them to call the girls up to be led in a princess parade by one of the drill team girls. It didn’t appear to be happening. Rumor was that the parade would happen at intermission but intermission came and went and there was no parade. “Maybe we should go ask the announcer,” I suggested to Eve. “I don’t want to bug anybody though.”

“It’s okay mom,” Laylee said, grabbing my hand, “I’ll go up there with you.”

So we walked up together and I asked about the event. They didn’t seem sure but said they’d do it soon.

A few minutes later, they announced it was time for the parade and called all princesses to the center of the gymnasium. Laylee and Missy marched up proudly, followed by….. nobody. In the end, one mother carrying a baby princess joined the group and our two little divas, not at all intimidated by the bleachers full of adults and teenagers, twirled and flitted about with princessly grace. Their drill team leaders attempted to lead them across the floor and they followed them… sort of. But they were defninitely not going to give up their spotlight easily.

I love this video passionately and if you’re my mom or someone who knows Laylee, you probably will too. Anyone else can skip it. Just believe me when I say it was the experience of a lifetime for our little highnesses. My favorite part comes at the end when the music has stopped but the girls just stand like deer in headlights staring at the crowd and refusing to move until they are gently escorted back to their seats by their drill team idols. Priceless.

Best line of the day — when Laylee was watching a ballet-ish lyrical number, she leaned over to me and said, “Mom. I picture myself doing that someday.” Good job Laylee. Keep visualizing. I’ll be there to cheer you on. I won’t have poms though. They’re just not part of my past, present, or future skill set. I could wave a hanky or a program or something and if you really want me to, I’ll get my teeth whitened.
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Into the Drink

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I dare you to find a more attractive picture of a specimen of humanity than this here likeness.Guess who swam across a lake at 7:00 this morning and now has algae-looking stuff in unmentionable places? Not naming names. Follow my eyes.

I’ve been casually training for a triathlon I’m not going to compete in because my ladies are doing it and I’m nothing if not a follower. Last Saturday and then again this morning we worked on our open water swimming. There are many signs that we are taking this athletic challenge of athleticism in a very seriously serious manner, which include but are not limited to:

-Giggling like wee girls.

-Squealing as we stand at the edge of the frigid drink and then eventually needing to be pushed in (This will go over well on race day, I imagine. The shotgun goes off. There’s a flurry of splashtastic activity. One lone spaztard in my heat stands with her arms folded, dancing from one foot to the other, “OOOoooooo… but it’s so COOOOLDD. Tee-hee-hee.” Grin. “I hope I win.”).

-Doing the back stroke most of the way, even though one woman warned us that when she switched to backstroke in her last race, the medi-kayak was deployed to see what was wrong with her.

-Periodically swimming up next to another athletic athlete and saying, “Shark Week,” in a most menacing way.

I’ll be going out of town when the other ladies take the plunge, ½ mile swim followed by an 18 mile bike ride followed by a 3.5 mile run and I’d be lying if I didn’t say I was just a teeny bit glad in the smallest corner of my heart to have a good excuse for my athletic truancy.

But it’s fun to train with them. Mostly. In the middle part. For a couple of minutes. After my body is numb and before my brain is filled with green water.
Trust me the lake is much bigger, much colder, and much more full of dead bodies than it appears in this picture.
There was even one sublime moment during Saturday’s swim when a duck swam past me in a not creepy, we’re-all-part-of-the-great-circle-of-life, kind of way and then a bald eagle swooped down and grabbed a fish right out of the water and glided off to munch on it’s still beating heart.

If I were Native American or even had a Native American name like Pocahontas or John Smith, I think that moment would have moved me into postponing my trip so I could complete the race, a mystical sign from my animal brothers that I had raw fish left to clutch or races to eat or something.

Alas, I am the whitest white person I know so what it actually did after the initial “WOW” wore off was remind me that lakes contain things, living things, things that are cold, wet, slimy and potentially man-eating. If a fish were to bump into me while I was swimming, I feel fairly certain that I would make no sound as my heart stopped and I slipped ignominiously to Davy Jones’ locker.

Not thinking of my neurotic aquatic terror, following the first race in which I had gotten a tiny piece of water in my eye, I went to Tarzhay and purchased a pair of goggles so that I could see WHILE SWIMMING. IN THE LAKE. WHERE THE FISH AND DEAD BODIES LIVE.

I’ve always been scared of dead bodies under dark water but after watching that one scary movie where Harrison Ford plays a villain and you spend the whole movie asking “Han Solo, why’s it gotta go down like this Homey?” I now know that dead bodies under water are true.

So today as I swam along, I kept catching glimpses of my paler than death, whiter than normal white people arm flashing by as I swam. At which time I would die just a little, thus partially self-fulfilling prophecy, and scream under water, sure I had seen the floating remains of some poor victim of Mr. Solo. This would result in the inhalation of said water and in a fervent vow to never ever EVER again open my eyes in those way-too-clear goggles of terror. Then I would swim with eyes closed way off course until my compatriots yelled my name and pointed back to shore. I repeated this zig-zag pattern all over the lake, getting worked up to the point where I was sure that the skirt on my tankini was really a giant strand of semi-sentient sea weed tangled around my legs and bent on my most hideous destruction.

One of my friends told me after the swim that she was only in it to get an athletic body like the other triathletes she knows. I thought about this and I realized that hers is an unrealistic goal for someone like me.

People who eat cheese will never have triathlete bodies. I mean, they can sample cheese betimes at cheese tasting events. But I’m fairly sure that people who EAT cheese will never look like that.

That’s why I’m in it for the glory.

Gender Roles in the ER

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On Sunday Laylee was in agony-induced meltdown mode over a sore neck which got more and more stiff as the day wore on. By noon she was unable to turn her head at all and sobbing every time we moved her an inch. Worried that the stiff neck might be indicative of the big scary M-word and unsure whether or not she had a fever as she’d been wearing a huge parka all day, we decided to take her in to Urgent Care on the way home from church. We called ahead and they said that we should take her straight to the ER.

I guess the urgent care doesn’t mess around with sudden onset neck pain in young children.

So we settled in for a nice long wait in an ER exam room full of sharps containers and other biohazards. Magoo was in heaven. Laylee laid perfectly still in the hospital bed while Dan spun Magoo on the wheely chair and sang hundreds of verses of Down By the Bay. I offered moral support, relieved Dan’s strained singing voice with my MP3-playing phone and occasionally threw peanuts at the children.

After an hour of waiting, we had a short visit from a female nurse who told us the doctor would be in shortly. The ER was fairly quiet besides the muffled conversations of the staff who seemed to be in no kind of hurry at all.

After our second hour of waiting, I commented on the lack of carnage I’d seen and told Dan that this hospital was nothing like the ones on ER or Grey’s Anatomy. Magoo commented on GOOOO HOOOME NOW AAAAHHHHH!!!!!!!

Dan said that for all we knew it was exactly like the TV drama hospitals and the reason we were waiting so long to see a doctor was because they were all in supply closets somewhere making out. He had a good point.

Eventually a man wearing a lab coat came in and briefly examined Laylee without introducing himself. He diagnosed her with Wry Neck or a sudden unexplained neck pain. Nice. I probably could have called that one. He prescribed an ice pack and children’s Motrin, which was then administered by a nurse. I wonder how much it costs to have your Motrin administered by a nurse in the ER as a cure for Wry Neck. Hopefully I’ll never find out.

There were a couple of strange things about our visit that the feminist in me cannot let go. First, the hospital staff went out of their way to ignore Dan’s presence in the room and only make eye contact with and speak directly to me. Never mind that he’s her father, that he was the one who’d been taking care of her all day, the one who had checked her in at the front desk while I was parking the car or that my hands were full when they brought in her release papers to be signed. They stepped right past Dan and handed me the clipboard, turning their back to him and explaining everything to the mother. I’m not normally sensitive to this kind of thing but it was really obvious.

Obviously as the mother and nurturer, I am the only one who can understand how to squeeze a dropper of Ibuprofen into her mouth. I mean if fathers could do that, then we might expect them to start periodically changing diapers and eventually women might begin to feel superior and demand the right to vote or something.

Secondly, when we looked over her release papers, we saw that the “doctor” they’d sent in was really a male nurse. So it seems that the female nurse had looked at Laylee, determined that calling a doctor was unnecessary, but hoped we wouldn’t ask questions when she called in a man in uniform, told us a doctor was on his way and sent in a male nurse wearing a lab coat.

Now it’s possible that all the doctors and interns were “busy” “getting” “supplies” and since she was fairly sure that nothing was wrong, she called in the senior grand poobah nurse (who happened to be male) and asked him to come have a look. It just looked fishy, especially in an ER where caring for children is considered solely women’s work.

My House Smells Better than a Dead Whale

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Do you have your very own marine biologist to change your Betta fish’s water? I do. I pay her with leftover enchiladas and stories about all the crazy people I’ve known in my life. She likes the stories and I like that when she leaves my house, it’s always cleaner than when she came and I always feel better about my life.

She does a good job hiding the fact that she may be judging me because I don’t eat organic biodegradable recycled soy milk or use free-range toilet paper. When I feed her and tell her not to ask what’s in the Mexican food, she doesn’t ask what’s in the Mexican food.

Tonight I invited her over to share some reheated culinary loveliness if she promised to close her eyes to the abundant evidence that I’d had several friends and their precious spawn in and out of my house all day, and hosted and cooked for a birthday luncheon. The main floor of my house was covered in a thick blanket of playdate sputum and I was seriously contemplating waiting 24 hours to remember what I wrote earlier this week and get my act together.

So while I rattled around in the kitchen, popping the pan of enchiladas back in the oven and nuking the other leftovers, she asked what she could do to help. Like any embarrassed woman would do, I told her not to worry about it and for heck’s sake to keep her shoes on when walking on my crusty kitchen floor.

She went into the family room and started picking up toys with unnatural speed. She picked up books, cars, blocks and spit-soaked Spiderman-flavored cheese crackers. She put away toys the kids thought they were still using and said, “Out of sight, out of mind.” In 20 minutes she managed to tidy up my entire main floor, the main floor that had looked like a tornado-ravaged Value Village. Then she joined me in the kitchen where I was ineffectually shuffling the dishes who were waiting for their turn in the magical automatic dish washing shower stall. In my house, dishes who are capable of washing themselves are never subjected to hand washing. It just wouldn’t be right.

She stepped to the sink and started rinsing the waiting dishes. She separated them according to shape, size and possibly color. As she went to dump some plastic silverware in an opaque pitcher of water to soak, she noticed something moving in the water and jumped, “AH! I almost dumped these dirty dishes in with your fish!”

I apologized for keeping JackAgain in a dish so near the drain board. He’d been there for 4 days because I was “cleaning his fishbowl.” In a miraculously non-judgmental tone, that somehow communicated “I want to save the dolphins but I still like you,” she insisted that he be moved back to his bowl immediately before he had a heart attack from the stress of his current living arrangements.

So she cleared out one side of the sink and brought his nasty stinky bowl of old ishy water over to wash. What happened next is a blur but there was a loud crash, Laylee had appeared out of nowhere, was now smiling up at me too innocently to really be innocent and the floor was covered in blech.

I muttered something about how much it stunk as I ran upstairs to get some towels. “It’s okay,” my neighbor called from the kitchen. “At least it doesn’t smell as bad as a dead whale.” She’s a marine biologist. She’s seen and smelled things I hope never to experience in my lifetime. She cleaned my house and saved the whales living in it. She ate my not-from-Whole-Foods food and asked for my recipes. She kept me company on another long lonely night and she told me I was a good mom.

I want to be that kind of friend. I know I’m grateful to have a few.

Too Much Slack in All the Wrong Places

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This weekend was my church’s big twice yearly conference. It’s a time when Mormons all over the world watch church at home in their pajamas for 2 days as it’s broadcast from Salt Lake City. The prophet and other church leaders speak, the Tabernacle Choir sings, and I make a big fat omelet and crochet a couple of rows on the blanket I’ve been working on since 1998. Good times.

The talks are generally uplifting and motivational and I finish the weekend with my head buzzing about all the great things I want to accomplish and all the ways I’m going to transform into the best neighbor, sister, wife, friend and mother ever in the world.

This weekend I mostly just thought about sleep. I had trouble staying awake, which made me think about sleep. I made a plan to start getting up early to read and meditate. I decided that in order to do this, I’d better start getting to sleep earlier each night. I resolved to be more patient with and attentive to my kids, making each moment with them count and taking advantage of all the little teaching moments I have. A well-rested version of me could be very good at this.

So sleep. If I can get enough sleep, I’ll become the best person EVER. That was my conclusion. Then came a talk by Julie Beck, the leader of our worldwide women’s organization, The Relief Society. Her talk was bold and specific about ways mothers can become exceptional at what they do. When she finished, I turned to Dan and said, “That talk’s gonna make a lot of people feel inadequate. I thought it was great but ”˜people’ might not like to hear about all the things they should be doing that they’re not. They’ll feel like they’re not good enough.”

Dan commented that he thought it was motivational. It gave people something to aspire to. Hmmm… high aspirations… I remember having those — incredible goals that carry the possibility for failure. Now it feels like I generally only want to attempt something if it has a VERY high chance for success, no great aspirations here, just hoping to stay afloat. If I start something and it seems too hard, I bail and switch my goal to something more attainable. Can’t lose the weight? I guess I’ll just learn how to make perfect fudge brownies instead. Not doing well getting to bed on time? Well then I’d better stop scheduling activities before noon.

I set my kids up for failure all the time because that’s how they learn and grow. After several attempts and frustrations they finally experience success and triumph. I would never let my kids learn to walk, do chores, ride bikes, read, use the potty, or compose arias on the harmonica if I were afraid to give them any task that they couldn’t master on the first try. If only I could learn to mentor myself the way I mentor my kids. I have big fat hairy goals and expectations for them but I love them no matter what the outcome and instead of berating them or giving up on their success, I applaud their efforts and encourage them to keep trying. I help keep their focus on the end goal. “Won’t your bottom feel so nice when you keep your pants dry every day? Let’s see if we can keep THIS pair dry, okay?”

Sure, kids need down time, time to just space out, time to focus on being a kid and having fun, but they also need goals and progress and learning experiences. Moms need downtime too but we also need goals and progress and learning experiences. I find myself craving downtime, hunting for recreation or “me time”, and focusing way too much energy on my needs. “I’m a selfless mother, for the love of green beans! Who’s gonna take care of me if I don’t?” I believe this attitude is good in moderation. You can’t help your family if you’re not functioning, but it really is a slippery slope to a pit of selfishness and spa pedicures. When spending quality time reading to and playing with my kids is a “break” from all the me-centered activities I have going on, I know there’s a problem.

I find that the longer I’m a mom, the more I feel entitled to “slack.” It’s sort of en vogue to be a slacker mom, to joke about how big your pile of laundry is, how long it’s been since you did dishes, how you’ve given up trying to feed your kids enough veggies or that you’re always late for everything. I really try to be real, not keep up pretenses and not pretend to be perfect when I’m clearly not. This seems to be a trend, getting real, being honest, talking about every hard little thing about motherhood and homemaking and sort of wallowing in the rough stuff. We want to make each other feel better by sharing all of our own inadequacies, which I think can be really helpful to an extent. But there should come a point where we progress from commiseration to encouragement.

There’s a fine line between being down-to-earth and wallowing in negativity and low self-expectations. I think we should all sit down and define what mothering excellence means to us personally and then set about planning and trying to achieve it. Then with each little hiccup or tumble along the way, we should encourage ourselves the way we encourage our children to reach major milestones, with tenderness, with mercy and with a gentle push to keep going.

When Elizabeth Edwards is Speaking at BlogHer, I’m a Conservative

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At church I’m a liberal.

I am repeatedly amazed at the complex nuances of personal political identity and the bizarre need we feel to categorize each other along party lines. This becomes confusing because the way I’m categorized changes dramatically depending on whom I happen to be sitting next to. In an LDS Sunday School class, I’m fairly liberal. In the BlogHer organization, I feel like some sort of right wing extremist.

elizabeth-edwardsElizabeth Edwards was the closing keynote speaker for the conference on Saturday afternoon. I knew in advance that I wouldn’t agree with many of her political views but was fascinated to hear her speak. She is an intelligent, strong, candid and passionate woman who has long been involved in blogging and maintains a blog on her husband’s campaign website.

I wanted to hear about how she balances personal opinion with the consolidated public message of a presidential campaign. I wanted to hear detailed examples of how the blogosphere is shaping political policy and how politicians are trying to carve out a niche online. I wanted to hear about her personal struggles with cancer and how she and Senator Edwards decided to carry on with the campaign. There were so many non-partisan issues I wanted her to cover in her speech.

However the questions very quickly turned to policy and much of the time was spent discussing her husband’s platform. The meeting came to feel very much like a campaign stop, with talk of how Senator Edwards’ positions differ from other leading democrats and even a statement that she assumed everyone in the room believed pretty much the same things with regards to women’s issues.

You cannot talk to a diverse room of women about your plan for universal healthcare and assume we all believe the same things. Growing up in Canada, I watched a friend’s mother die BECAUSE of socialized medicine. Although I want everyone to have access to health care, I’m not convinced that John Edwards’ plan is viable.

You cannot talk to a diverse room of women about your views on abortion, the Iraq War, gay marriage and other highly divisive issues and assume we all believe the same things.

Anytime we create an assumption of political consensus in a group of intelligent thinking adults, we’re headed for trouble. By saying, “I’m sure we all agree,” in essence what you’re saying is, “Any sane intelligent person would agree with me,” and I have a problem with that.

So although I vote for various parties at election time, register as a Democrat in the primaries and consider myself an independent, I raised my hand to speak to the fact that the discussion was being dismissive to conservatives. There was time for one more question and Elisa Camahort handed me the mic, potentially annoying several other eager people in order to let a conservative have a voice. I’m very grateful.

I’m not actually sure what I said since I was shaking at the time, standing in front of several hundred people and directly addressing the possible future first lady. The session video was uploaded to the BlogHer site but my question is strangely missing, an occurrence I assume was no more sinister than the video blogger running out of tape at the end of the session, but which strikes me as an odd coincidence.

Basically, I pointed out that the session had been dismissive to conservatives and that since I wasn’t planning on voting for her husband, I’d rather talk about blogging and technology than the specific policy of the Edwards campaign. My question was, “How many people review your blog entries before you post them to the internet?” Her answer was, “ZERO!”

I was amazed. With all the spinning and planning and message management that goes on in a presidential campaign, I am completely blown away that she is given total freedom to express herself on the Edwards 2008 website. Now I’m sure she is in constant contact with John and his many advisors and she’s smart enough to know which way the wind is blowing and where she should funnel it. Nonetheless, it was refreshing to hear this response from her.

Regardless of our political differences, I have great respect for Mrs. Edwards and feel strongly that she is sincerely doing what she feels is right and standing up as a bold force to promote her beliefs.

When I approached her at the cocktail party later that evening, she said, “I was just answering the questions in the room,” and it was true. She was just answering the questions in the room. I had a problem with the whole direction of the discussion, not her responses, and not the fact that she was a Democrat.

A friend (not a conservative, if that makes any difference) came up to me after and said she had the same problem. The whole discussion was too political and party-specific for such a diverse group, especially for the closing keynote of a blogging conference.

She gave the analogy that it was similar to inviting the head of Google to be the closing speaker and then letting him spend most of the time fielding questions about how to use Blogger software.

At the end of the closing session, someone asked me, “If a Republican had been the speaker and the conversation had gone the same way, would you have called her on it too?”

Absolutely yes. Although it’s hard to imagine that I’d need to. With the number of bold articulate women of the left in that group, people would have been tripping all over themselves to bring the discussion back on track.

I’ve heard Lisa Stone say that BlogHer is a nonpartisan organization and that if you have a different opinion, you should stand up and make it known. I often think those of us with leanings to the right feel so outnumbered that we’re afraid to speak up. I for one do not want to turn my site into a political blog because I enjoy the fact that I have a diverse group of readers and I like DaringYoungMom as a place for us all to come and be silly together.

However I’d like to be more of a catalyst for diverse political discussion among female bloggers in the future, if not on my personal site, then elsewhere.

Julie Marsh has written about this over at The Imperfect Parent and you can see most of Elizabeth Edwards’ interview on the BlogHer site, minus my question at the end. This is cross-posted to BlogHer.org.

Intolerance — The Panel I’m Still Having in My Head

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My Intolerace PosseBlogHer felt like an overwhelming success to me this year. I had cute shoes. The conference venue was gorgeous and things ran smoothly and were well organized. People were kind and discussions were thought provoking and respectful. (I’ve got a few words to share on the closing session with Elizabeth Edwards but that will have to wait till tomorrow.) I did not have to cook for anyone and the magical hotel fairies made the beds for me each morning.

My panel was on Friday afternoon, led by the excellent Liz Henry, a woman who can make anyone feel at ease and understood. How fun is she to be taking pictures of the panel and audience as she moderated it? That certainly helped relieve some of the nerves I’d been struggling with that morning. To be honest, I felt a little like a fish out of water in that group. There was Laina who writes about race, ethnicity and culture on the BlogHer website, Liz who seems to know everyone, blog on every topic and have one foot in nearly every social group and Tish who regularly stands up against The Man in a male dominated communications blogging culture.

I like this picture because my mouth is open, my eyes are red and I look very intense.

Then there was me with my charmed life, writing a non-issues-based funny mom blog and periodically being touched by drama because of my religious beliefs. I’m much more comfortable being a smart-alec than having a serious discussion about social issues.

what a cute audience!I think the panel went well. We had some good discussion, although I feel that it would have been more productive on a small group level. I wanted the chance to look my fellow panelists in the eye and really come to an understanding of what they were saying, something I’m sad to say didn’t happen.

In my closing statement, I said that everyone is intolerant of something. In fact, if you’re not intolerant, I’m not likely to be your friend because you’re either lying or you’re so relativistic that you don’t know who you are anymore. We tend to call each other on intolerance when our intolerances don’t match up. Personally, my main intolerance is towards mean people. Why can’t we all just respect each other?

Then I said something that I’m not sure about. I said that through my experiences, I’ve learned that what I love about the internet is that it is a great equalizer, giving everyone the freedom to speak their mind and to form communities of their choosing. I think that the people who spoke out against me because I’m Mormon had the right to do so and can form any exclusive group they want. If I want to have a blog for only people who like lima beans, I can do it and if they want to draw lines based on the Nicene Creed, more power to them. I said that if they didn’t want to include me, then there was no reason for me to want to be included, to beg to be part of their group. That statement doesn’t sit right with me.

In that particular instance, I’m happy for them to have their own little group because it doesn’t affect me in any significant way. However, I know there are so many cases in the world where people are being excluded in a way that is materially harmful to them and to the world at large and some situations need and deserve some direct intervention.

After the panel, two such situations presented themselves. Stefania spoke up in the State of the Momosphere panel and mentioned that she is constantly being pitched marketing opportunities on her various websites but receives none of the same offers for Kimchi Mamas, her successful blog for Korean moms. Kelly from Mocha Momma had started teh converstaion because she has experienced the same kind of exclusion from marketers.

Does it offend me that I am excluded from writing for Kimchi Mamas because I’m white? No. There are approximately one billion places a white woman can blog. I fully believe Korean moms should have access to an exclusive community. But I think it’s wrong that women of color are being excluded in so many other communities. If Club Mom or Parenting were making a point of only hiring white bloggers, I’d have a serious problem with that. So, is it only okay for minorities to be exclusive? I’m not sure where the line is. I just know that some exclusive groups are right and some are wrong.

Another example comes from my co-panelist Laina, who went out to dinner in downtown Chicago and was denied service when a black friend asked for a table but a moment later a white friend was able to get her name down on the waiting list. It blows my mind that things like this are still going on in places other than Uncle Bubba’s small town café in Backwardsville, US. Seriously? How can this country have come so far, and still have such a disconnect between our perceived shared values and the way people actually treat each other?