So, the Motrin™ Moms are all in a tizzy about a commercial that was on the intertubes. And drunk with the mighty mom power they exerted to force Motrin™ to remove said offending commercial. Please.

As always, I wanted to see what the shooting was all about and watched it. It cracked me up.

I wore both the kids in one of those front carriers and hauled the youngest around in a baby carrier that detached from the base of her car seat. And you know what, hauling kids around hurts, which ever way you choose. Back, neck, arms, shoulders–they all hurt. I swear some days even my hair hurt.

One child liked the front carrier more than the other, but I’m not going to debate the relative merits of attachment parenting versus any other kind. And that’s not what Motrin™ was doing. And despite the baby-wearing-specific rancor that the commercial stirred up, I don’t believe that the moms’ reactions have anything to do with that aspect.

The problem here is ambiguity, the ambiguity that is inherent in modern motherhood. And it has been my experience that most people can’t handle ambiguity. Ambiguity, grey areas, uncertainty, don’t sit well with most folks. We want the world and all of its myriad experiences categorized, listed, corralled, classified, organized, neatly put into little labeled boxes. Why do you think home organization is such big business? Not to keep our houses uncluttered, but to keep our souls uncluttered. We long for simple answers in a world of increasingly complex questions.

Motherhood is one of those increasingly complex questions. And it didn’t use to be that way. Used to be that if you were a woman, married, and physically capable of having children, you did. It was a given, a certainty, just the way of the world. Then various, reliable means of family planning were developed, giving women and their partners the ability to have children or not according to their own schedules. Motherhood was no longer a given, but a choice. And since having a choice between two options, have a child or don’t have one, is more complex than having no choice at all, one layer of complexity was added to motherhood.

Then there’s the issue of mothers working outside the home. This used to be a no-brainer–if you needed to work, you did. If you needed to stay home with your kids, you did. And nobody thought anything of it. This notion of being a stay-at-home-mom by choice is a relatively new thing.

Throughout history, mothers have worked, usually at jobs that earned them little or no recognition, for paltry compensation. You’ll often hear social conservatives decrying the feminist-inspired influx of women into the work-place, with the resultant taking of jobs meant for white, christian men. But that’s just stupid. Women have always worked: on farms, in factories, in the family business, in other peoples’ homes, in one-room schoolhouses, in hospitals, in restaurants. And even women who didn’t receive paychecks worked, behind-the-scenes, doing all the hard, tedious, thankless tasks that keep life running smoothly.

Of course there were wealthy women who never had to lift a finger; women with housekeepers and nannies to do all the slog-work of mothering. Doubtless these wealthier women had a much different experience of motherhood that did their poorer counterparts.

It has always been thus, and thusly, it ever shall be.

Now we have a largely manufactured mommy war, bitterly waged by who exactly? The average mom, of the working or stay-at-home variety, does what she has to do to keep her family running. Working moms work outside the home because it makes sense, economically, to do so. No splurging on luxuries, the average working mom works to put food on the table, clothes on backs, and gas in tanks. For the average stay-at-home mom, staying home with the children, for at least a few years, also makes sense economically. We found out that almost my entire salary would be eaten up by childcare costs, so it made sense to stay home. Now I have a part-time evening job that makes sense, because I can carry the Prairie Family’s health insurance.

No, the combatants of the mommy war appear to all be women of above-average earning potential. We have one camp accusing the other of sacrificing family and farming out motherhood to strangers. And on the other side, we have accusations of betraying the feminist cause by giving up lucrative careers. But these are all women most of us are never likely to be able to emulate financially.

So how does this manufactured war affect the rest of us? And, more importantly, what does it all have to do with Motrin™? We are stuck in the cross-fire. Pow pow, we should all have rewarding careers. Pow pow, we should all be spending every waking moment making our children’s lives more enriching. Pow pow, betraying the cause. Pow pow, betraying our children.

No wonder most of us feel beat up. We are trying to live up to standards set by women with impeccable safety nets. Nannies, housekeepers, private schools, private tutors, spa days. It’s an impossible standard to meet, but being mothers we blame ourselves. There must be something wrong with us if we can’t be all things to all people.

Motherhood should be all-fulfilling, dammit! We should be blissfully happy all the time, dammit! Nothing should ever pierce the veil, dammit!

And when something comes along, like that commercial, and reminds us that motherhood is not going to make us all happy, all the time, then we get uncomfortable. We get belligerent, we join together to shout, “HOW DARE THEY!!!!!” But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Once you embrace the ambiguity of motherhood, you’ll find this commercial as funny as I do. Once you realize that the responsibility for your happiness cannot be dumped on your children’s shoulders, you and your children will actually be happier. Once you understand that the complexity of motherhood has no simple answers, then the better off you will be. Too bad there’s not a pill for that.

Every life must, inevitably, come to an end. For our majestic silver maple, which took such a beating in last year’s ice storm, that end came this week. I had tried so hard to bend reality to my denial, refusing to entertain the hideous notion that the Queen had to go. Once tall and proud, Her Majesty had become a doddering old dowager, given to shedding her limbs in a most untoward fashion.

Silver maples grow tall and full very fast, faster than they should. Unlike her slower-growing neighborhood peers, the Queen was never destined for longevity. And like many girls forced to grow up too fast, she did not age gracefully. While her trunk was sturdy, her largest branches were hollow and her smallest were frequent casualties to the wind that comes sweeping down our plains.

I did not know her in her youth–the Queen was a stately old matron when she came into my possession. But the past year has really aged her. Even though the ice storm was unavoidable, it saddens me that it happened on my watch; that I could do nothing to protect her. She just could not bounce back from such a devastating blow. The Queen had to be felled, to be put down.

One more winter could have seen her topple over, finally, onto the House. As much as I loved the Queen, I love the House of the Burning Prairie that much more.

It is quite a bit of work to take down a 50-year old silver maple; luckily there are people who do just such a thing for a living! So I farmed out the onerous task of taking the Queen down, as well as two other, less majestic trees that had suffered the same damage, to people who know what they are doing.

The Queen came down in uneasy stages. The first day all of her still-leafy branches were cut away. Then on the second day, her trunk was cut into more manageable pieces. Those more manageable pieces are still quite large and are now sitting at the curb, waiting to be hauled away. Her branches, however, were cut and stacked in the back yard, where they will stay, seasoning, until spring. While those branches will no longer shade the House from the summer sun, they will warm our House next winter.

I think the old girl would be pleased.

So far today, Pumpkin has pee-peed in the potty twice. TWICE! She decided she was wearing the Hello Kitty underpants I bought (six months ago) for her as a bribe. They seem to be working. I told her she can’t get her underpants wet or poopy so she has to use the potty. I have no idea how long we can keep this momentum going, but twice in one day is a big step!

It is a beautiful, warm, Oklahoma fall day, perfect for casting an historic vote. I proudly, and with tears of joy welling in my eyes, cast my vote for Barack Obama and Joe Biden. And all the other Democrats on the ticket. I vote straight-party ticket, always have, always will.

I even managed to escape without injury!

Honestly, I don’t know how any person of good conscience could still vote Republican, especially after the past eight years. I am utterly baffled and truly wish that someone could explain it to me. How can a so-called “values voter” find common ground with the robber barons of the right? How can a so-called christian reconcile the teachings of Christ with the depredations of the GOP? How can a struggling family ally themselves with personification of the economic policies that authored that struggle?

Do people honestly believe that the party that gleefully sacrifices the lives of our valiant soldiers and innocent civilians and licks its chops at very thought of lethal injection or the electric chair shares their views about the sanctity of life? Anti-choicers, you are being used and you will be jettisoned when they find you no longer useful.

How can folks who claim Christ as their savior reject His instructions to love our neighbors as ourselves,  to clothe the naked, feed the hungry, heal the sick, to not stand on the street corner to pray, to be peace-makers? And by the way, that’s “suffer the little children” not make the little children suffer. The Republican party stands at direct odds with the teachings of Jesus, and yet so many of the faithful cling to false hopes that the GOP feeds them, lapping up the lies that ooze out of the mouths of the right wing pundits, preachers, and politicians. Starving at the feet of their masters, they pant after whatever crumbs fall off the table of the greedy.

The only thing I can understand is that the GOP feeds the fears, petty hatreds, and ignorance of its base, the basest of its base.

As for me, I will not be a prisoner of fear, I will not allow hate to rule me, and I forcefully reject ignorance. I vote for the future, not the past. I vote for bright hopes. I vote Democratic. And I voted for Obama!

The Prairie Family is back home! The House of the Burning Prairie may still be a little rough and smoky around the edges, but we are sleeping at home tonight. And the next night, and the night after that, and so on and so forth. It will be a long time before I willingly sleep in another hotel,  so our next vacation had better be in easy driving distance from the House.

I love you, silly old ghost-lousy House, I promise to never take you for granted again.