OT Moms and Books

[theteach <theteach@theteachonline.net>]

A friend sent me this article from Slate, suggesting it is reminiscent of 
Erma Bombeck.

There are a few active links on the website.

http://www.slate.com/id/2165993/pagenum/all/#page_start

Mother-Load
We wade through the Mother's Day books so you don't have to.
By Dahlia Lithwick

Posted Friday, May 11, 2007, at 5:15 PM ET

Mother's Day is upon us and you haven't bought a gift yet?! Me neither!!! 
Not for my mom. Not for my mother-in-law. Nor have I yet bought a gift for 
myself from my sons?ages 2 and 4?who will want to have bought me a gift 
come Sunday morning, when they lurch in with the bowl of Superman Life 
Cereal and the buttercups from the back yard.

I am a bookish mom. My credo has always been: If you can't learn to do it 
from a book, it's not worth doing at all. And having raised bookish boys 
(or, rather, one bookish boy and one tiny Visigoth), the best place for me 
to shop for my own Mother's Day gift seemed to be the local Barnes & 
Noble, where I quickly counted four tables teeming with books "Just for 
Mom." So, to help me help you choose the very best of this Mother's Day 
bounty, I pretended to be an exhausted and overextended mom and picked a 
few. My unscientific conclusions follow:

Disclaimer: I do not claim to speak for all moms. No doubt that for every 
worn-out mother of small children who shudders at the notion of a book 
about how to start your own dude ranch, there are seven others who 
desperately crave such a thing. If my efforts to steer you through the 
highs and lows of the Just for Mom section lead your mother or partner to 
burst into tears on Sunday, I apologize. I haven't had a proper night's 
sleep in four years.

Upon quick inspection, here's how the Mother's Day books shake out: There 
are stacks of books that urge Mom to do something else, and stacks of 
books that urge Mom to be something else. One way or another, it seems, 
the entire object is to keelhaul her out of her own momness and shoehorn 
her into something else. (By way of contrast, the table of Father's Day 
books, for you way-in-advance shoppers, features many, many books about 
golf.)

Let's start with the books that are bad for Mom. In decreasing order, let 
me suggest that no mom alive, whatever species, whatever phylum, wants any 
of the following:

Diet books: Please. "Happy Mother's Day. You're fat." Why it is that books 
like this are billed as Mother's Day fare is beyond me. Ditto for the 
makeover books and the You-dress-like-Gollum books. New dads, a warning: 
Buying the book about how your ravaged and sleep-deprived partner might 
regain the scorching body of her youth for her first-ever Mother's Day is 
the worst idea you've ever had. Go with the stretchy pants or the hedge 
clippers instead.

Organization books: "Happy Mother's Day! Your house is a landfill." Don't 
get me wrong. I love the feng shui, declutter, and time-management books 
as much as the next mom. But I don't want to own one, unless it is 
preprogrammed to declutter my residence itself or to disintegrate the 
moment it reverts from thoughtful gift to maddening clutter. On the one 
day a year we set aside to celebrate our moms, demanding that they get off 
their duffs and start creating a workable home filing system is the wrong 
impulse.

How-to books: Caveat: If your mom is a rabid crocheter, beader, 
scrapbooker, or felter, these books may be perfect. But before buying any, 
ask yourself this: "Has my mom put away the mittens and the winter boots 
that have overrun the front hall closet yet?" If the answer is no, you may 
not want to buy her a book suggesting that if only she were a bit more 
competent (see item above), she would have ample time to take up Wagashi, 
the Japanese art of hat-making.

Microscopic books: For some unknown reason, publishers believe that what 
moms really want for Mother's Day are books that measure a single square 
inch with fonts the size of dust motes. Books like the itsy-bitsy In 
Praise of Moms or the mini version of It's a Mom Thing seem like a great 
idea. They are, after all, on the Just for Mom table. They have the word 
mom in the title. But know this about the teeny books: If your mom spends 
the better part of her days sorting through microscopic socks and 
well-nigh-on-invisible Lego pieces, the last thing she really wants to do 
at the end of the day is crawl into a great big bubble bath and squint at 
a "gift" the size of a tortilla chip. Go the other way: Give her an 
enormous book. A Shakespeare concordance or a King James Bible. Something 
improbably permanent in a universe teeming with tiny plastic things that 
cannot be found when needed and are invariably underfoot when not.

Books about other people's cute kids: Again, this may be a matter of 
personal taste. Clearly somebody is buying these. But all the many, many 
books that celebrate motherhood with cute pictures of other people's 
babies strike me as strange. Because every mother worth her salt thinks 
her kids are far cuter than those in Motherhood Is Not for Sissies, or the 
funny little moppets in the Baby-gami wraps. Same goes for books full of 
cute sayings from other people's children: I love the idea behind Why We 
Love Moms. Little ones do say the darndest things. But since we all 
secretly believe that our own kids are even handsomer and say even cuter 
things, the only purpose of such books is to highlight the fact that our 
own extremely cute and witty children actually need a haircut.

Homework books: The Barnes & Noble tables groan under piles of journals 
and scrapbooks that one is meant to give one's mom to fill out, perhaps 
once she's finished putting the boots and mittens away. One example is 
Motherhood: A Guided Journal (it comes with a 60-minute CD of inspiring 
music). But there are dozens more out there. Pass on these, even though 
the thought is a nice one. The last thing Mom needs on Mother's Day is 
homework. After all, she already has yours to finish.

With the do-not-buy list out of the way, let's launch into some books that 
might work for your Mother's Day gift, so long as you recognize that at 
bottom, many of these ask Mom to change. Depending largely on her 
tolerance for escapism?and bearing in mind that Brad Pitt is allegedly 
back in play?perhaps the perfect Mother's Day book could remake your 
mother into one of the following:

The Sex in the City mom: Scores of books feature the ubiquitous chick-lit 
pink cover and the ubiquitous chick-lit black-line drawings of skinny moms 
in boots with a clever little line drawing of baby on her hip. If your mom 
wants to indulge fantasies of being one of a posse of "warrior women ... 
with chic hair, well-toned triceps in tiny tees" who lunch on salads and 
serve on charity boards, Living the Posh Mom Life is for her. Ditto The 
Hot Mom's Handbook.

The Summers in Nantucket mom: If Mom dreams of J. Crew seersucker flapping 
in an ocean breeze, there are scads of sweet books out there referencing 
the need for summers on the Cape and trips to a crab shack. She'll enjoy 
The Fun Book for Moms, even if there are no lobster huts in Denver. Same 
with Anne Morrow Lindbergh's Gift From the Sea, still my all-time favorite 
book about mothering, ever.

The Food Channel mom: Lots o' cookbooks on the Just for Mom tables, I 
think because the one area of "self-improvement" that still feels like 
pure porn for most moms is cooking. So I say bring 'em on. Bring 'em, 
bring 'em, bring 'em. Keep your Brad, Angelina. Real moms heart Jacques 
Pepin.

The Buddha mamma: Perhaps because they are the only books that don't try 
to change us (or, to put it as the Buddha might, because they are the only 
books that acknowledge that everything changes), I'm a sucker for the Zen 
mothering books. There's a lovely new book called Mommy Mantras that 
distills?in small read-while-they're-bathing units?great wisdom about the 
madness and mindfulness of parenting. Same for the wonderful Blessings of 
a Skinned Knee, as well as Myla and Jon Kabat-Zinn's Everyday Blessings. 
(I confess here that if Jon Kabat-Zinn wrote a book about starting up my 
own dude ranch, I would read that, too.)

Now, I'm no Buddhist, but it does seem to me that the greatest cliché of 
motherhood, "I don't need anything but you, my darlings," is also one of 
its great truths. If I've learned anything from my own mom, it's that 99 
percent of Mother's Day is reveling in the clichés: the tea with milk and 
lemon we'd reverently serve up each May; the weird Taurus necklace we 
bought one year (she's a Sagittarius), and the Krystle Carrington beaded 
sweater we got her the next. So, even if you bring us weird sex books or 
auto-repair books with the soggy cereal and the buttercup, all we really 
do need is you. But maybe, maybe this year, you'll let us sleep in 'til 
8:25 before you do.