The only thing funnier than watching your husband build a play set out of household appliances or returning the video to the library and the library book to the video store is realizing that you’ve done all these things yourself. Laughter truly is the best medicine!
Debbie Farmer was born in San Francisco, California, but claims she is much too young to remember "The Summer of Love." She spent most of her life living in the Bay Area and graduated from Tennyson High School in Hayward in 1984. According to her mother, Debbie began her publishing career by writing the word "obseqky" in forest green crayon on the living room sofa.
However, Debbie claims her first major writing gig came when she was eleven years old, when she was given her own column in her sixth grade class's newspaper. There she dazzled the local literary scene (aka: the rest of the class) with her witty insights on baby hamsters and Shaun Cassidy.
Since then she has expanded her subject matter and earned a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and Creative Writin …
DON'T PUT LIPSTICK ON THE CAT is a book that I will be recommending to all the "mom's" I know! Debbie Farmer shares the ups and downs of motherhood with honesty while never forgetting that through the madness, you never stop loving your kids with all your heart and soul.
Within the pages of Debbie's book are quirky anecdotes taken straight from the author's life. You?ll be able to relate to many of them---from hiding on top of the washing machine where they can?t see your feet under a door to one of my favorite experiences ? making fruit salad with a group of kindergarteners! Every word she has to say on that experience is spot on.
Do yourself a tremendous favor and buy this book. For me, it was refreshing to see that I am not the only mom to have endured some of these experiences! I'm probably not the only mom around to hem her kid's pants with a stapler! It's great to hear that for some of my life events, I'm not alone!
Q. "On days when my 20-month-old son doesn't take a nap, I have to admit: I don't really like him by dinnertime. My one workday away from home is a break. I give my baby and my 4-year-old son and my clients my all, but I'm so tired I don't even know my name." --- a Tennessee mother.
A. The tie that binds mothers: Sleep-deprivation laced with guilt.
The cure: More sleep and laughter. Chuckling about what your kids do and say. Fewer time-outs and more time-ins. Less hovering and less fretting about the quirkish "purple only" phases.
"When you're going through it, you don't realize how much fun it is to have children," says a great-grandmother who has six children. "In so many ways, it's a difficult job to raise a house full of kids. Then all of a sudden they're raised."
For more sleep to find joy in parenting, make adding zzzzz's a priority. Snapping at your kids and spouse? Lack of sleep increases stress, anxiety and depression, research shows, and reduces reaction time and judgment.
For a jump-start to humor, put Debbie Farmer's "Don't Put Lipstick on the Cat!" (WindRiver Publishing, 2003) on your holiday wish list, along with Allison Pearson's novel "I Don't Know How She Does It" (Anchor Books, 2003).
Add this request: Time to read alone. In peace.
As Pearson's character Kate says: "When I was younger, I wanted to go to bed with other people. Now that I have children, my fiercest desire is to go to bed with myself for a whole twelve hours."
Not just the longing and need for sleep, but everything changes when you have kids, even the meaning of Thanksgiving, Farmer writes. From pride in America to "I am thankful for Velcro tennis shoes ... for microwavable macaroni and cheese ... to finish a complete thought without being interrupted."The expensive lipstick on the cat, her daughter dressing her son in mom's good negligee, and the "me" and "boots only" phases --- Farmer finds it's therapeutic for herself and other parents to share their kids' antics."When you're out there alone, you think you have the only child who does this," says Farmer, a first-grade teacher and mother of two in Antioch, Calif. "It's easier to deal with the behavior when you realize you're not alone."
Farmer is open about her mother guilt: How could she have forgotten to send in a teddy bear for her son's kindergarten picnic? Why does she turn in library books to the video store and videos to the library?
The guilt trips continue in Pearson's novel, which opens with Kate Reddy admitting to forging pastries at midnight. A sleep-deprived hedge-fund manager and mother of two, Kate roughs up minced pies for her daughter's class so they'll look homemade.
Pearson, a columnist in London and mother of two, encourages parents to share what she calls "Kate Reddy moments" such as this one paraphrased from her book:
On a rare family vacation, after wrestling with her son's baby buggy rain cover, Kate's too irked and soaked to be charmed by her 5-year-old daughter's queries in the rain in front of a cathedral: "Baby Jesus has got a lot of houses hasn't he? Is this where he comes on his holidays?"
Kate's response: Go ask your father.
She dodges other questions from her daughter: Are you going to put me to bed tonight? Why don't you pick me up from ballet? And from her husband: What about me?With all that mothers juggle, Pearson said at a recent seminar in Charlotte, N.C., they have the know-how to invade a small country. But as they stay up late and get up early for their 24-hour-a-day jobs, mothers put themselves last on the list repeatedly and risk their physical and mental health.
"I Don't Know How She Does It" ends with Kate Reddy mentally cycling through her to-do lists. Then she pauses: "I know there was something else. What else?" For once, don't ask.
Betsy Flagler, Parent to Parent (United Media); Nov 10, 2003
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Debbie's interview will be aired 391 times on 3 networks in 199 markets across the U.S.