Momasphere’s "My Mother’s Work Project"

In honor of Mother’s Day, and to honor our mothers, Momasphere is launching the My Mother’s Work Project, a national campaign to collect stories about our experiences of OUR working mothers.  Whether your mother’s work was in a traditional job outside the home, a less conventional work scenario, or as a homemaker, our observations of our mother’s work ethic, habits and experiences have no doubt played a part in shaping who we are.

The series will not only entertain, but will also illuminate interesting questions of how modeling behavior plays a role in our development, work-life balance, generational changes and a host of issues that most of us have not even begun to explore. As work-life balance, or the lack thereof, and happiness, or the endless pursuit thereof, take center stage for many mothers today,  we are dedicating the next few months, and longer if need be, to  creating a  repository of reflections- happy, sad, sentimental, irreverent- to share with our visitors and stimulate a dialogue.

If you are interested in participating in this project by contributing a 200-600 word piece, please send an email to ellen@Momasphere.com with My Mother’s Work Project in the Subject Line. Within the body of the email, please include your story, title and a short 2-3 sentence bio., including a link to your website if you have one. If you have a photo you would like to share, please attach it as a jpeg (the highest resolution you have), and let us know you’ve done so, though we may opt not to use it. While we appreciate every single submission, we may not be able to publish everyone’s story. Please make sure we have a good way to get in touch with you.  We will contact you to let you know if and when your piece will run so you can alert your fans, friends, family and maybe even your mother!!!!

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Long Before the Term Was Coined, My Mother Had the Work Life Balance Thing Under Control

By Ellen Bari

My mother was a lifelong educator. Unfortunately, her life was not as long, or as easy, as it should have been. By the age of 17, she was not only orphaned, but also had a license to teach Judaic studies. She taught girls only a few years younger than herself, including the mother of my close childhood friend.  I found this shocking, because all of my own teachers at the time seemed so old (and probably were).  

During my pre-school years, my mother continued to teach two afternoons a week and on Sunday mornings. She had a fur coat that she had reversed by a tailor, so that the exterior of the coat was an understated, tan gabardine and the lining was the softest mink any child could imagine. We had a ritual for the days she taught: after she put on the coat, I would crawl inside to experience that luxurious fur, and from inside this warm cocoon, give her a big farewell hug.

The summer I was six years old, my mother took a job on the educational staff of a sleep-away camp in the Catksills. She was the division head of my group and I was the youngest kid on the girls’ campus. I was overjoyed to have her around, but she asked me not to call her “mommy”. She did not want to upset the other little girls whose mothers were not there.  How odd it felt to call my mother by her first name!

At around that time, my mother decided to get her master’s degree in education, which meant she was often busy on Sundays with teaching and her own schoolwork. I felt a little sad that she was missing out on all the Sunday fun, but she was never discontent. She was on a path and that seemed to make her happy.

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Mainstream Media's Bias Against Mom Bloggers

A recent article in The New York Times has the mom blogger community in an outrage.  The article titled Honey, Don’t Bother Me. I’m Too Busy Building My Brand is being criticized by many as being another attempt by media to marginalize the mom blogger industry.

The article draws attention to a popular all day conference called Bloggy Bootie Camp that took place this month where 90 percent of the attendees were mothers. They paid $89 and many traveled across the country to take place in the sold out first part of five-day tour to learn how to take their blogs to a higher level. All in the hopes of generating ad revenue, sponsorships, or parlaying their skills into paid journalism or marketing gigs.  A sample excerpt from the piece, shows why many mom bloggers are viewing the remarks as smug and snarky:

Heed the speaker’s advice, and you, too, might get 28,549 views of your tutu-making tutorial! Whereas so-called mommy blogs were once little more than glorified electronic scrapbooks, a place to share the latest pictures of little Aidan and Ava with Great-Aunt Sylvia in Omaha, they have more recently evolved into a cultural force to be reckoned with.

Mom 2.0 Empire Builder, Kelby Carr wrote a great discourse about this article on her site www.KelbyCarr.com. She remarks, “Why is it so shocking that moms would discuss something besides parenting? How ridiculous. Why was this even in the Style section? If it were a tech conference for men the tone would be entirely different. It would go in business. It would not mention minivans. And I won’t even get into “glorified electronic scrapbooks.” I know many moms who have blogged about topics such as business and social media and politics for years

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Momasphere Goes Behind the Scenes with Melt Executive Chef Mark Simmons

 
By Ellen Bari

Just imagine being able to wander through the kitchen of your favorite restaurant to watch what goes on behind the scenes. The word wander might be a little misleading here, considering the size of the kitchen at Melt, but that’s just what an intimate group of Park Slope moms did on Monday night. Momasphere and Melt’s gracious owner and longtime Momasphere supporter Muguette Siem A. Sjoe, hosted a unique cooking class and dinner party with Executive Top Chef  Mark Simmons. The restaurant was closed to the public, creating an extremely relaxed atmosphere for an insider’s view of how to prepare one of the restaurant’s signature dishes, at a fraction of the cost.

The menu for the evening consisted of beer and honey braised lamb shank served with truffled polenta and charred asparagus. While seated at the elegant bar, nursing glasses of Pinot Noir, the Chef demonstrated how to prep the lamb. Being a native of New Zealand, Chef Mark has a deeper understanding of the ingredients, especially lamb, than traditionally trained big-city-bred chefs. Chef Mark maintains the unique position that “spices are the spice of life!” He believes foods must work in concert, like a symphony, where the spices play the strings, the herbs, the percussion and the vegetables make up the woodwinds.

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Undomesticated Mama

By Paula Bernstein

      “My mom is the best cook,” my 4 ½ year-old daughter Ruby recently boasted to her buddies.

      Every mother likes to hear her child proclaim her the best of anything, but for me, Ruby’s comment was particularly satisfying. Until fairly recently, I didn’t know how to cook at all. I burned microwave popcorn and could barely decipher the directions on the Annie’s mac and cheese box. In short, I was a hazard in the kitchen and did my best to stay as far away from pots and pans as possible.

      My own mother had always served up a warm meat and potatoes meal promptly at six p.m. without complaint. But I knew from the time I was young that I didn’t want to be chained to the stove. To me, the kitchen was a trap. If I learned to cook, I feared I would have no choice but to cook. It was safer, I figured, to just never learn. Luckily, I married a domestic superman who happily shops, cleans, and cooks.

      My friends envied the fact that my husband is so helpful around the house, but I felt guilty.  Plus, my kids were beginninng to say stuff like “Dad does everything around the house.” I was beginning to get a complex about my lack of household skills. Why didn’t I let my mom teach me a thing or two about cooking? As the kids began to grow and my husband’s work schedule got busier, I soon tired of preparing the same mac and cheese every night and ordering pizza.

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