Imus, I Must With everyone in the free world weighing in on the comments made by Don Imus, who on his radio show called the players on the mostly black Rutgers University women’s basketball team, “nappy-headed ho’s”, I felt I must have my say. As a woman with my own nappy hair and the mother of two girls with those naps Imus spoke of, I wanted to take this opportunity to commend the intolerance we have witnessed over the past week. Don Imus was fired yesterday from both CBS radio and MSNBC, swept away by a tsunami size wave of intolerance over his vitriolic comments. He was fired because we showed intolerance to thinking that confuses hatred with entertainment.

Cross-posted at Everyday Mom So glad I squeezed in a moment to scan the NY Times Op-Ed page this morning, in between puring cereal, warming up soup for Samira's lunchbox and handing the baby a sippy-cup of milk (and let me tell you, if the NYT were based on mothers' reading it over busy morning routines, they would not publish on those huge oversized pages).

Leslie Bennetts' new book "The Feminine Mistake" has generated a lot of controversy and discussion. I expected to be the last person to defend her, as I was personally offended by Bennetts' overly critical characterization of stay-at-home Moms. She operates with a sledgehammer rather than a scalpel, but her core message is unmistakably important: A man is not a financial plan. Every woman needs to wake up to this reality. The cost of being caught without a personally-constructed safety net is a stiff penalty. I am not surprised that a book as polarizing as "The Feminine Mistake" has generated a lot of love-it-or-hate-it reactions, but I have been taken aback by the willful financial denial voiced in some of the Amazon.com reader reviews. A woman calling herself Starbaby says....

A recent article in L.A. Parent Magazine ( www.laparent.com ) asked, Is Motherhood Depressing? The article’s title was meant to be provocative – questioning whether the mere act of being a mother – supposedly the world’s most rewarding (and yes, the real oldest) profession, could emotionally debilitate even the most well-balanced woman. In reality, the story was about the difficulties of parenting while dealing with a psychological disorder, profiling one woman’s struggle with clinical depression. It cited a study which suggests that a growing number of women and men are finding that child rearing has sent them into a Prozac dependency, needing daily medication to survive from school drop-off to bedtime and every dirty diaper-, temper tantrum- and homework-induced meltdown in between. My personal belief is whatever it takes to get through the day without blood being shed is, to quote my favorite ex-con Martha Stewart, “a good thing.” My husband recently received very sad news which brought the message home. He learned an acquaintance from college who was married, had kids and was depressed, killed herself and her children while her husband was away serving in Iraq. All this got me thinking about the many parents I know who are not saddled with lifetime depression issues or even survivors of postpartum depression, but who still wonder aloud and often, why they feel their lives as parents have left them so frustrated, sad and often angry. Is motherhood depressing? Maybe it is, yes, but for reasons that we can change.