UPDATE: Congratulations to Jennifer Smith! You won the pair of LTYM tickets. I'll be emailing you shortly.

Last year, I had the huge honor of being part of the inaugural Kansas City cast of Ann Imig's national Listen to Your Mother Show. Reading my piece in front of an audience was incredible, but the life-changing part of the experience? The friendships branded the minute I met these women in Erin Margolin's basement for a read-through. 

You call me up, because you know I'll be there.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyyx9Bv2PUM] 

This year, I'm excited to sit in the audience with my girlfriends and let the experience wash over me. And I'm giving away a pair of tickets! Here are the details about the show:

 

LISTEN TO YOUR MOTHER is a live show of readings by individuals that celebrate the guts and gore and glory of motherhood.

Each production is directed, produced and performed by local communities. In 2014, 32 cities will host a LISTEN TO YOUR MOTHER show. The show is co-produced and co-directed by Erin Margolin, Sarah Guthrie, Leslie Kohlmeyer and Lisa Allen.

The show will be at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, May 3, 2014 at Unity Temple on The Plaza. Tickets are $15 in advance, $20 on the day of the show. Ten percent of ticket proceeds will benefit Women’s Employment Network.

Here are the women reading this year:

Lisa Allen

Katherine Bontrager

Amy Carlson

Debra Carter

Mary Carver

Natasha Ria El-Scari

Kathleen Fisher

Sarah Guthrie

Debi Jackson

Mary Katherine Kerbs

Renee Lawrence

Stacey Lukas

Amy Zoe Schonhoff

Liz Tascio

So .. you gotta go, right? To be entered to win, comment below. You can comment as many times as you like. I'll close comments at 5 pm CT on Friday, May 2 and email the winner (so make sure when you fill out the comment thing, you include your email). Tickets will be fulfilled at the door. Your name will be on a secret list, which makes you EXTREMELY IMPORTANT. Go!

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQYrLR1aauk] 

Thanks to my friend Nordette for making me aware of the existance of these two awesome ladies. BAM!

My girl showed me this last night. LOVE.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6I24S72Jps] 

I really want someone to come clean my house for me. I don't want to pay $100 for it. This is what leads me down the Groupon road, over and over, except this is what happens every single time.

1) Get email from Groupon that includes some half-price home cleaning service.

2) Buy Groupon. Think giddily about clean house with no effort on my part. Print Groupon out and stroke it lovingly.

3) Schedule cleaning. Always at least three months out, because whatever. Put appointment on calendar.

4) Day of cleaning arrives. So excited. 

5) Time of cleaning service's arrival arrives. Peer out window hopefully.

6) Hours go by. No cleaning service. Call cleaning service. Email cleaning service.

7) Days go by. No call from cleaning service. No email from cleaning service.

8) Email Groupon and ask for refund.

Three times this has happened. THREE TIMES. The only thing that I can determine is that cleaning services do not think through what will happen if they suddenly get a whole bunch of new customers. I can't imagine just ignoring an assignment for my work without providing any explanation at all. I would not be upset if someone had called me a day ahead and asked to reschedule. But just to have nobody show up at all is beyond bizarre and irritating. 

One would think that I would stop eagerly buying the Groupons that turn into Groupon credits when once again a completely new and different cleaning service just fails to show.

I have to get this through my thick skull, so I am writing about it so I will have this post to look back on when once again I am tempted to think I can get someone to clean even part of my house for $40.

It ain't happening, is it? No, Rita, it is not. You have to clean your own house. The end.

My daughter steals my iPhone when she's bored. I keep taking all the games off, and she keeps putting them back on. I don't like to play video games, and they suck a ton of space. 

Every time she grabs it, I think about how much she could learn about me if she wanted to. 

How much of ourselves we carry around on these little machines. Not only whom we call but how we choose to name those people in our contact lists. I actually labeled Beloved as "husband" in my contact list because I am a paranoid worrier and I thought it would be handy for someone searching through my phone to figure out whom to call when they found my mangled body by the side of the road.

(those are called "instrusive thoughts," but at least I have my husband labeled in my phone)

I have receipts for all her birthday presents in my gmail, as well as long conversations I've had with friends about different aspects of parenting her. My banking app tells how much money we do or don't have. My pedometer shows how far I ran last, how long it took me to do it and what the altitude of my climb amounted to before I was done. And that's not even touching Twitter, Facebook and Goodreads.

I wonder if she realizes all this information about her mother is in her hands when she opens the Games folder and chooses between Monster Hair, Crazy Facts or Subway Surf. I don't ask, because I don't want to plant that suggestion. And yes, I often think about whether or not I want to give voice to something I don't want someone to do because I'm afraid the mere mention of that thing will make them stop at nothing to achieve it.

So I do what I usually do when I'm having intrusive thoughts, which is to tell myself thinking that thing is completely ridiculous and nobody else would even have that thought. And I hand over the phone and hope she doesn't realize how much of our personalities we store in those little glass rectangles.

Buried my father-in-law. Buried some grief. Ready to move on.

This weekend I cashed in a Christmas gift from my husband: two wonderful tickets to the Indigo Girls with the Kansas City symphony. I took my sister, of course. I heard The Wood Song, which I had hoped to hear. The Indigo Girls with their layered two-part harmony is the perfect accompaniment to a multi-layered symphony, and really I wish for every singer to have such an opportunity to be accompanied by classically trained musicians. It must truly be amazing.

But beyond their talent, I was struck, as I always am, by their songwriting. Both Emily and Amy featured a song they had written recently while they just happened to be thinking about dying blackbirds and the macabre nature of children's nursery rhymes or the intersection of prayer rugs and tanks. That someone could be that aware and also that talented both musically and literally really blows my mind.

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Today my daughter was afflicted with existential angst, as is occurring more and more in her tenth year of life. She asks me what to do when she is sad for no reason, and I don't know how to explain what to do when one realizes the rotation of the earth and all the animals that fell extinct before us. It's easier to wait for a commercial break. But there are some of us unfortunate ones who sense the underpinnings of all that came before. So I just tell her to breathe, and something about hormones. I'll tell her the rest when she's old enough to know.

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Tonight I watched a special on Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding. Seeing where they are now is enough. Really, seeing where any of us ends up is enough. We should worry more about where we end up.

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Today I had to put myself in time-out. I'd had enough of being made fun of for any number of various things, and looking forward to another week of single parenthood without Beloved with the temperatures falling sub-zero just pissed me the fuck off. I'm tired of winter, and I'm tired of parenting and working alone, and I'm tired of pretending like it doesn't matter because I'm super-cool. I'm not. I'm married, and single parenthood sucks, and I didn't sign up for this. But this is the new economy, and we should all be happy we have jobs.

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The moon is really beautiful tonight. So there's that. And maybe that is enough.

Today I read a really interesting post on BlogHer by a blogger with spina bifida regarding what she shares or doesn't share on Facebook. She said people often tell her they wish they had her life because of what she shares on Facebook, but there is so much she doesn't share about her disease. She writes:

Because, God forbid I should choose the joyful family Christmas dinner in Puerto Rico as the venue for disclosing how I’ve totally slacked off on my neurosurgery stuff and am now desperate to schedule a follow-up with my neuro to find out the results of my MRI, which I had done before the holidays.

That got me to thinking about what I share, but more importantly, what I see other people sharing. This morning I got onto Facebook to check notifications. I almost never read my feed, because I feel like if I respond to one person's post that doesn't specifically name-check me then someone else might think I should respond to theirs. Of course, this is extremely self-centered of me to think people will care what I do or don't "like," but I don't think I would know when to stop. I don't *want* to spend hours on Facebook every day, and I don't want to worry about whether or not someone liked my profile picture change or what have you. In that way, Facebook is too transparent for me. I don't know who reads my blog from day to day, and I really prefer it that way. I don't want to wonder if I offended you or you've just been trapped under three feet of snow trying to get through the day for the last week.

Today, though, I read my feed for about five minutes and immediately was happy and sad for people (some of whom I barely know) and felt like I should say all the right things and click the appropriate emotion buttons and I got totally overwhelmed and just shut down the tab, pretending like I'd never opened it.

We share so much information now, and it's overwhelming to me. I've been thinking about why for several years now, and it's finally occurred to me it's because I get the news when I don't have time to process it. If I go to lunch with a friend and she tells me her dog died or she's been diagnosed with cancer or she's just in a slump, I'm already there, focused on her, with time set aside already in my schedule to talk. When I hear news, good or bad, I really want to respond immediately. I'm an extrovert and I really love being with other people. So when there is so much in the feed that there is no way on earth I'll ever be able to keep up, it actually makes my stomach hurt. Thus I avoid Facebook, only checking in every day or every other day to see if there's anything specifically directed at me, because I also have a fear of ignoring someone without giving them a reason why. Even then I find I've ignored invites to events or what have you because Facebook is the only place they were announced.

But that's not all of it. Not really.

I was immediately relieved when I closed the tab, because I noticed that in the five minutes I'd been reading, not only did I feel sad and happy, I felt jealous of some of the announcements and photos I saw, even though I know damn well we all edit the selves we present in social media and because of it, the standards for what our houses should look like or the presentation of our home-cooked dinners or the outfit we wear to Target go up and up and up. The standards I once thought applied only to the landed gentry suddenly feel like they're applying to me sitting here in my home office in suburban Kansas City with plans only to buy my daughter a new pair of tennies and maybe hit a family-friendly pizza place on the way home tonight. I used to feel really proud of myself for baking anything and this morning I felt guilty for making my daughter a Valentine's Day breakfast of chocolate chip muffins because it was a mix and I didn't put them on a cute plate and the muffin liner thingies had Christmas trees on them.

My fucking muffin liners aren't even good enough.

I blame Facebook and Pinterest. I really do. The television was always there. The catalogs were always there. The magazines, same thing. I didn't know if my friends were watching or reading those things, and if they dressed better than I do or cooked beautiful meals, I chalked it up to personal taste or income levels or interest differences. Now because I see everybody doing those things, I feel like it's the new norm.

Are seasonal wreaths really the new norm? Why does everyone have such cute boots? When did I get left behind?

Is it okay I don't care about a lot of those things? I mean, I care a little, but well, I still go to the grocery store in yoga pants and a hat All.The.Time. My cooking has improved dramatically since we started eating in as much as possible, but I'm really proud of myself just for using fresh vegetables instead of canned or frozen or God forbid insta-mealed. It doesn't have to look pretty, too.

I reject you, higher standards! I want to feel good about my not-matching wood and my non-mermaid hair. I want to feel like what I surround myself with can be just functional sometimes and doesn't have to also be gorgeous and flawlessly maintained. I have no servants who live downstairs, and I'm TIRED. 

I want to be good enough.