It is wonderful thing to be a mother. At least that is my staunch belief based on my own fabulous experience. Of course, it is dangerous to base one’s beliefs solely on individual experience–something both more convincing and less germane than any further evidence unimaginable.
Regardless, I am no longer a mother. You see, my former daughter, Phoebe, reached an age that made her eligible for a prestigious and well-deserved promotion. So, I promoted her. To be my sister. My substantial and uncalled for vanity was at stake. I came to realize that I was entirely too young to have a daughter her age.
My memories of motherhood are prevalent and fun and possibly delusional. In my memory I was extraordinarily talented at the mothering game which by referring to it as such, I lost the respect of those who were unlikely to have given my mothering any respect in the first place which is a loss so ferocious that it makes me yawn.
Among my threes and threes of readers, my sister, formerly my daughter, actually reads New Media Martini in useless and sisterly abandoned hope that she will read something I have written that is worthy of thought or glean from me some knowledge I don’t possess or receive some empty optimistic reassurance that a sometimes hellacious world can become a tiny bit cooler after a sip of a new media martini.
That, Darling Reader, is the end of this post. Next in the height of pretentiousness, I will paste in the Chinese symbol for “The End,” which will thereby become a new feature of this darling, feature-filled blog, New Media Martini. I shall do this with the bold unproven claim that I am not Chinese and that I don’t speak nor write in any Asian languages which makes me both more clever and less clever than I would prefer.
Now, having ended this post in a totally transcontinental fashion, I can reveal to you what I intend to write about next, as is my unavoidable and largely unheeded custom. I am planning to write about actual advice that I once gave my former daughter. It was back at a time when neither of us anticipated that she would soon qualify to become my sister. This is advice which is largely responsible for her financial ruin had she listened to me which fortunately she did not.
What you have just read could qualify as a “teaser” which might become yet another new feature of this darling, darling blog, New Media Martini, which you are reading shamelessly at this very moment unless you are not.
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When I turned 30, my father sent me a birthday card. On it, he wrote: “At 30, you are now my niece. At 40, you are going to be my cousin. And at 50, you will be a close friend of my ex-wife.”
Damned if it hasn’t come true, exactly as he predicted.
Oh, Michele. Thank you for providing my darling readers the perfect solution when a child is long in the tooth and/or approaching childhood old age and, yet is unworthy of a true promotion. Apparently you were undeserving of promotion which surprises no one who hangs out here for time to time and knows that you have written a controversial and confessional book, I Am Not Superwoman: Further Essays for Happier Living, quite popular among those who have read it.
My own former daughter, being my former mini-me, actually happens to be Superwoman unless I am mistaken and will hear nothing of it. Of course, she is not the one about to embark upon a multi-city seminar-based book tour of her own creation, but she joins you and me in wishing you well on yours.