Book Soup window display.
And of course, the door...
Uncle Frank catered the event immaculately, dear friend.
My parents drove up with my Aunt Fran and wine! Lots of wine!
It was an all-ages show! The unstoppable Lila Garrett even stopped by with her daughter, Eliza Roberts (here with Uncle Frank)
One of my oldest friends, Jamie Krell here with Jordan Feldman, looking gorgeous.
Archer watched me read... For a minute, anyway...
...Before joining me at the podium, sidekick style. After a minute, though, Hal had to cart his ass off... I was sweating like a mule up there under those lights and holding a child during a reading isn't the most comfortable of situations.
Sandwiched between Mary Wollstonecraft and Virginia Woolf. Just... wow....But Woolf shows readers her warts-and-all journey from rebel child to rebel mom in order to prove something else:
That mothers don't have to let the responsibilities of child-rearing dim their dreams or damage their spirit.
"A mother who sacrifices her livelihood for children is risking not only her own loss of identity but also the well-being of her children. No child deserves to be resented. It is possible to do it all well."
She's prone to big pronouncements like that, which smack of the idealism of youth. But she actually bases her stance on child-raising advice she's gotten from her grandmother.
"Let the baby adapt to you," the grandmother insists...
...Forget adapting your life, schedule, decor to the baby?
Isn't that akin to blasphemy nowadays, when every infant chortle is charted, every childhood danger foreseen and counteracted, and there's a product available to meet a kid's every potential need?
I wonder what moms of all ages think about Woolf's mantra. Is it realistic or wishful thinking?
Is it a brass-tacks truth working-class moms have always understood or a millennial-mom paradigm?
Is it naive of me to think that parenthood doesn't have to change us to such a degree that we must drop everything and become solely "moms"? The author of the piece seems to be asking whether or not I am idealistic or a new breed of thinker. I'm neither, in my opinion. I think every mother feels pressured into complete transformation when becoming a parent and that plenty of us disagree with throwing ourselves out with the bath water.
I mean... right?
