Imig - Listen to Your Mother

ANN IMIG

Founder and National Director, Listen to Your Mother

L isten to Your Mother: Its a clich, its the fifth commandment, and its an imperative for curbing children young and old from poor life choices like jaywalking and sixty-four-ounce sodas. Because I am a mother myself, the word listen looms largest in the phrase, and not only due to my constant attempts to redirect my childrens faces from a screen to my eyes, to hear my words, for the love of God. I listen for and seek out the wisdom in my mothers words. In the glorious moments when my mom friends and I get a reprieve from patrolling our young, meting out sustenance, and Tetrising our family schedules, we listen to one anothers truths, and to the experiences we share as women navigating motherhood, daughterhoodand, well, peoplehood in general.

Listening, in fact, makes for effective motheringwhether we heed advice passed down from our grandmothers, obey a parent, attend to a child, companion a loved one through a difficult time, or expand our experience of the world through the simple act of hearing someone elses story. Listening forges bonds between people, strengthens connections, and builds community.

Listen to Your Mother is also a spoken word phenomenona live-staged reading series born of women who write online and now sweeping the nations stages, leaping from the Internet to podiums across the country in community celebrations. Listen to Your Mother gives motherhood a microphone, voicing the realities of mothers and mothering, of non-moms and caretakers, of sons and daughtersmany of whom never considered themselves writers or performerswith stories so urgent they press from the hearts of people to the page and then to the LTYM stage, a small selection of which return again to the page, here in this book.

Geographically speaking, modern motherhood has become more isolating than ever, finding many parents without the benefit of extended family living under one roof or even in the same city. For some, the Internet likely feels as revolutionary as the first long-distance calls must have felt generations agoconnecting us with catharsis, commiseration, information, support, and, best of all, laughter, at any hour and from the comfort of our own homes.

Thanks to the Internet, however, now we need only Google parenting keywords like special needs, single parents, or my four-year-old growls at anyone who says hello to him, and might find ourselves less alone by forming connections through reading blogs as varied in topic as the aisles in any bookstore. We create online peer-support networks, chat over virtual cocktails, and collaborate in online writing groups. Some of those connections bloom into confidants and friends. For some of us, writing through our days and nights, we not only make pen pals, we also find encouragement and inspiration, sometimes leading to professional connections and even careers.

My mothering coming-of-age coincided with the mom-blogging boom. My husband traveled constantly for work, and parenting a baby and preschooler alone through six-month-long Wisconsin winters (plus crib sheets, times stomach viruses) drove me to desperation. I took solace in squeezing humor from my sleep-deprived stay-at-home existence, and found comfort in writing through the chaos of a daily obstacle course that often started with a child poking me awake by my armpit stubble before 5:00 a.m., and by 5:00 p.m. found me laid prone on our Lego-strewn shag rug, allowing my darling sons to quite literally walk all over me. I shared my stories first with friends over e-mail, and then by staking out a little Internet carrel of my owna blog that I named