All the best,
Memoirista

I LOVE the way you are using your blog to think through the challenges of writing your memoir while at the same time sharing your thoughts with readers. This is a fabulous and much appreciated use of a blog, that adds not just entertainment but insight in exchange for the time I spend reading it.

Jerry Waxler
Memory Writers Network

So, one of the things I’m doing tonight is putting up such links. Yours was first on my mind this morning, when I thought of doing this.

By the way, I also have a blog reviews.memoirista.com. I have a hard time finding your reviews on your blog site; I’d like to invite you to do a guest review, or we could do paired reviews, say, of Angela’s Ashes.

Welcome to process.memoirista.com.

All the best,
Sigrid Peterson
process.memoirista.com
reviews.memoirista.com

Your journey brought you right down the road to my home town. Welcome! At least one aspect of Dorothy’s story is about the allies she meets along the road, who form a community to temporarily replace the one she left as well as give her wisdom she bring home.

If you want to see another process blog, check mine out. I’ve been hacking away at the memoir process for 17 months (but whose counting), analyzing memoirs and the memoir process as part of my own journey.

Good luck with your work.
Jerry
Memory Writers Network

I like your concluding paragraph: “I think that if the media (writers included) portrayed mothers in a way that says `you can think in different roles’ maybe more mothers would believe that they could. In describing my mother as a SAHM, I didn’t add the rest of her legacy. I used to say, in changing careers, that when she was my age, my mother had not yet taken up her fourth career, that of librarian. Or that she said of my father, who encouraged her to study and develop work skills, “he gave me myself.”

So, indeed, I know, as you have said, that women who are mothers take on many roles. I can only hope to reflect that in my writing.

My ideology is that all women make their own choices — that may be to stay home, work out of the home, work in the home, or not have children at all. The choices are limitless. What I don’t agree with is the overplayed SAHM have no brains theory. I see it virtually everywhere. I do get that this may be your perception. If it is, you should write it that way.

But in all honesty when I see that it’s a turn off to me personally, because I do see it everywhere and it gets old. I’d rather see mothers portrayed as women who can and do use their brains no matter what roles they may have. Although, that’s not always the truth. I don’t like to see lies either — so I agree people should write their perception of a situation. But I think that the retelling over and over of this particular perception does perpetuate the theory. Does that make sense?

I think that if the media (writers included) portraying mothers in a way that says “you can think in different roles” maybe more mothers would believe that they could. But I see where you’re coming from better now; from your comment.

To me, SAHM has two connotations: of course it’s the acronym of a new breed of women who proudly flaunt their calling as mothers who do not work for wages or salaries. To me it also describes a generation of desperate housewives imprisoned between the washing machine and the dishes in the sink and the ironing board, whose husband worked and commuted, and was away for twelve hours a day, who had no adult source of intelligent conversation, who was segregated with other women when she did go out, and frustrated that all they did was trade recipes. These women didn’t choose their roles, they were trapped in them. My mother chose my father, and the life of travel they were going to lead, that didn’t happen because of World War II. So I am describing SAHM as the unattractive fate I saw as I was growing up, and wished to escape. And saw no role models to do so.

I don’t know how you can say “I hope you don’t mean that your mother had a brain she never got to use because she was home.” Do you, in advocating for SAHMs, want to suppress other choices for women? Even to the extent of writing their own lives and their own perceptions dishonestly, so that they favor your ideology? That is how you came across.

I’m in favor of women being empowered to write and speak and live their own lives. This is my own life, and the lack of attractive real-life role models with which I could identify is, actually, a perpetual part of my story. My mother did make the life of the mind attractive, but would then qualify that to say that “women can’t . . ,” be astrophysicists, or mathematicians, or other things we were both good at doing. How would I work at home as an astrophysicist?

I wrote the portrait of “Marty” on http://www.hadabrain.net/” to indicate the complexity of her life and times and talent.

And, I appreciate your comment about cause and effect. There is a nuance here: Marty did not get to use her talents as a man would have done, and was always frustrated by that. Her talents were buried not because she chose, or was forced, to stay at home, as you do. Her talents were buried because the only role she could take in life was that of homemaker and the full-time parent in the family, and community volunteer on occasion.

One, I’m a little confused where this is all going. Are you trying to connect your story to the Wizard of Oz or not? Or are you trying to figure out if you should connect it? If it’s the latter I say let your own story connect itself and let people come to their own conclusions about the connections that relate outside of your world.

Also, I really hope you don’t mean that your mother had a brain she never got to use because she was at home. That seems backwards. I read the post twice and thats what it seem to say to me. Which is a little disconcerting as a SAHM. Yes, I write too. But even when I was on a break I used my brain all the time for all kinds of issues. I just hope that’s not the point you’re trying to make because I think it will alienate female readers.

This whole journey you’re on seems pretty interesting though. Take care.