Today's the first time we've included MomsRising on a MotherTalk Blog Tour , and it's fitting that the book is Arianna Huffington's Becoming Fearless , her excursion into what stops us women in our tracks, and what life looks like when we meet fear where it is, toss it to the wind, and figure out what the hell we want in life and how to get it.

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).

My new fave bloggers are Amy and Marc from Equally Shared Parenting , described as"a cyber-home for fathers and mothers who have made (or wish to make) a conscious decision to share equally in the raising of their children, household chores, breadwinning, and time for recreation." I've written about them several times at Everyday Mom: click here and here , the second being Amy's response to my nosy questions.

Crossposted at Everyday Mom In The Truth Behind the Mommy Wars I wrote about how the US is one of five nations world-wide that do not supply paid family leave to parents of new babies. We're in the doghouse, it turns out, with Leshotho, Liberia, Swaziland and Papua New Guinea. Here's a nice link to a recent article in USA Today . It's based on a recent Harvard report, and has a link to the report itself.

When Judith Warner's book Perfect Madness reached the shelves a year or so back, it wasn't immediately clear that she'd become a forceful political advocate for mothers. Yes, the book did end with a slew of policy proposals. The majority of the pages offered cultural analysis, though, and more often than not, Warner seemed to tread perilously close to blaming mothers--affluent, over achieving, hyper-perfectionist mothers, the prime focus of the book--for the malaise upon us. The book's political ending was nice, but it felt tacked on. How, after all, would improved access to quality daycare really make life easier for the mom committed to hand painting paper plates for her child's birthday party? The blogosphere, especially, took aim. The lack of online word limits allowed an almost limitless analysis of Perfect Madness, and most bloggers were relentlessly critical of the book.

Crossposted from Playground Revolution The New Republic last week published an essay about three books on motherhood with the inane title: "Mommies, Mommies, Mommies: Meow Mix." I'm not making this up. I couldn't make up a title with such a high cringe factor if my life depended on it. I won't link to it, because, a, you have to subscribe to TNR to get to it, and b, because if all of us smart annoyed moms start clicking their website, they win. Their hit numbers go up and yes, that's good for them. Mother snark has become a tried and true way for magazines and newspapers to ride our rage and rack up sales. We must resist. Glance at a copy on a newstand, then announce loudly to everyone in hearing range that this magazine is snarky and mean to mothers. But don't buy it. Sadly, I've already been in contact with an editor at TNR who seems to think it was a fine piece, and funny. She didn't respond to my charge that their standard for journalism on women's issues is astoundingly lower than their standard for covering other issues in the magazine. She sidestepped it. Snark is clearly okay when it comes to us gals, especially gals with kids at their side.