Here are some other places you can find me online these days:

on my WeTV blog, I posted about Mommy Jobs, co-sleeping drama, and bizarre baby products.

Follow me on Twitter. Come on. Even my dad is doing it.

I posted on the Chicago Moms Blog about my creepy Craigslist encounter with a sex offender and Free-Range Kids.

I’m a family travel expert on Away.com

In honor of Mother’s Day, all this week I’ll be posting about my own mother.

I wrote this essay in 2004 and it was published on LiteraryMama later that year. It remains one of the most personal things I’ve ever written for publication.

Blueberries for Mom

by Meagan Francis

Mom buckles me into the backseat of our 1979 station wagon, fastening the seatbelt snugly. She is thirty-seven, young-looking, pretty. She wears a belted sweater in a rusty shade of orange — just slightly outdated and out-of-season for a July morning in 1982.

We are going blueberry picking.

My mother died when my son Isaac, was six weeks old. By that time her face was prematurely aged from years of drinking. Her hair, like her personality, tended to be unpredictable, frizzled, choppy. Though it was 1999, Mom still wore the circa-1979 belted-orange sweater, still drove old cars, and still earned a 1979 living wage. It was as though at some point Mom’s connection to the outside world just stopped.

I sat nursing my new baby at the memorial service, listening numbly as the pastor spoke, then a few of her friends. Gee, isn’t it nice that they’re all saying such good things about Mom, I thought to myself as I casually adjusted Isaac’s latch on my nipple. Out of the corner of my eye I saw others — more distant relatives, acquaintances of Mom’s — watching me. “How brave she is,” I imagined them murmuring to each other. In truth, I just wanted to get home and get back to life.

When your mother is an alcoholic, you learn how to detach.

“We’ll have to drive a little further this year,” Mom says, gripping the burnt-sienna steering wheel, squinting as she anticipates her turn. “They took down most of the woods to build more holes for the golf course.”

I clutch my bucket with excitement as Mom pulls up to the edge of the dense northern Michigan woods.

The next day, we made the three-hour car trip to Cheboygan, where Mom’s ashes were buried in the plot next to my would-have-been big brother, Patrick, who’d died suddenly, in 1970, at six weeks old — the same age as the fat baby I held football-like under my arm as I stood next to her grave. His death was when Mom’s drinking began, so my older sister tells me.

It was a mild November day and I felt uncomfortable, like I wasn’t doing the grieving-daughter-thing quite right. Her death felt, to me, less like a loss and more like a release — a reprieve from that sinking feeling that somebody you love is going downhill, and there’s nothing you can do but try to keep yourself from going down with them.

Later, on the car ride home, I glimpsed at the death certificate and saw the cause of death: cirrhosis of the liver due to alcoholism. I felt a momentary surge of anger at the faceless coroner for his diagnosis.

When your mother is an alcoholic, it’s hard to get past the impulse to cover up.

“Look over here!” Mom says. “I found a patch!”

“Right, honey.”

It wasn’t until later, much later, when I was able to remember not just Mom-last-month but also the Mom I knew when I was five, eight, ten, that I began to grieve. Easier to cry for the loss of the mother who made Christmas ornaments with you every year than the mother who showed up drunk to your wedding and attempted to dance Latin-style with your new husband’s crazy uncle. Her death made everybody’s job easier. Now we could just remember Mom the way we all wished she’d always been.

I think it took me a long time to accept that Mom was an alcoholic because her usual behavior didn’t fit with my childish definition of “drunk.” I’d seen drunk in the glassy eyes of my boisterous uncle as he swung me dangerously over his head, laughing at my delighted squeals as the sober adults in the room nervously watched on, ready to spring up at a moment’s notice to rescue a catapulting child from going through the front-room window. I’d seen drunk in the loud but good-natured political debates around the table of my aunt’s house: die-hard liberals, right-wing conservatives, political scandals, and a couple bottles of good liquor. That was drunk, not Mom’s bitter, angry irrationality that just happened to be combined with a sizeable dose of Ernest and Julio.

And drinking wasn’t the entirety of what made Mom difficult — it was simply the factor that could take her from slightly manic to something more, something harder to explain away. Sober Mom might nag me to do the dishes, but only drunk Mom would add, “You’re just like your father, you think only of yourself, and you’ll always be selfish.” Sober Mom might sternly chastise my friend and me for trying to leave the house wearing too much makeup, but only drunk Mom would tell us we looked like a couple of two-bit floozies, her hands clenched, tears in her eyes: angry, but more than angry — threatened. Sober Mom welcomed debate, seemed to encourage my spirited side. Drunk, she seemed overwhelmed by the fact that I had opinions of my own, wounded by the force of my preteen will, and unable to cope.

On days like those, my best friend wouldn’t commiserate, “Man, your mom’s being a bitch,” but would instead pretend — badly — that she didn’t notice, perhaps imagining the conversation her parents would have over the dinner table when she told about what she’d seen: It’s sad, isn’t it. I wonder if we can do anything?

Sometimes when I’ve had a glass of wine and I lean in over my children to tuck them into bed and kiss them good-night, I wonder if they smell the wine on my breath and if that memory will be forever etched in their memories, and if they’ll one day associate me with that smell the way you associate pine needles with Christmas and melting candle wax with birthday cake. The smell of certain kinds of alcohol — particularly when covered up by a dose of mouthwash — jolts me into the past.

When your mother is an alcoholic, it can really take the fun out of drinking.

We’re home. Mom is probably having a glass of wine, and we’re sorting and cleaning the berries, then divvying them up into individual containers — some for freezing, some for snacking, some for baking. We’ve decided to make blueberry muffins today; blueberry pancakes tomorrow.

“You can get out a mixing bowl, the measuring cups, and a wooden spoon,” says Mom. “Thanks for being a great helper.”

I jump to the task, glowing.

My challenge becomes determining which of my mother’s behaviors were damaging (because, certainly, many were) and which were enriching. How can I separate the good from the bad? How can I take the person I am today and decide which parts Mom helped develop (so to emulate) and which parts she just messed up (so to avoid)?

It would be easier if it was as simple as “alcohol = always bad” and “no alcohol = always good.” But it was my mother who, though most likely three sheets to the wind at the time, introduced me to Harry Chapin and the original Broadway recording of Fiddler on the Roof. It was my mother who, while accusing me of doing things that my older brother actually did (thereby causing me to question my own sanity) and handing out irrelevant punishments, also encouraged my writing, praised my singing voice, and cuddled with me on the couch while watching TV.

I have moments with my own children that scare me — moments of disproportionate rage, violent urges that come and go so quickly and sharply they leave me breathless Sometimes my own (sober) voice seems to morph into the scary tone of drinking Mom — shaming, irrational, cruel, the sound that can make my children wither before my eyes. Other times, I hear the gentle, low humor of Mom on her good days: clever, quick-witted, fun. I’m not sure which I find more unsettling.

Mothering, for me, isn’t just a matter of following what feels right. What feels right, I’ve been told by therapists, books, and armchair psychologists, is skewed — based on an upbringing filled with uncertainty, dishonesty, and blurred boundaries. I am not allowed to trust my feelings because they will mislead me. At first, I dealt with this uncertainty by mothering in ways that seemed socially acceptable — the hope being that using society at large as a mothering litmus test would keep me from screwing up. Yet my ever-present urge to rebel (thanks, Mom) against much of what is considered “good parenting” has led me to make up my own rules as I go. An absence of predictable bedtimes — neglectful disregard of security-building routine, or that much more quality time to spend with Mom? I’m not supposed to worry my kids with my problems, that much I know — but how much does a thoughtful parent hold back? What’s healthy?

I find myself thinking about my parenting goals not in terms of “most wonderful,” but of “least harmful” — when my kids look back on their childhood, I don’t want them to remember a few really great moments amid a bunch of purposely forgotten black X-marks. My hope is not that the once-in-awhile good will be so outstanding that it blots out the bad, but that the bad will be infrequent enough that it fades away naturally. I wonder, sometimes, if I’m succeeding. I also wonder just how screwed up that kind of outlook is.

When your mother is an alcoholic, you learn to doubt yourself.

Mom and I have just finished the last of the golden-brown muffins. We put our empty milk glasses and plates (mine licked clean of crumbs) into the sink, then head upstairs to bed.

I dream of Ma Ingalls in a belted orange sweater, holding a fat, happy gnome in her hand.

Due to my work for 23andMe, I’ve now got my genetic information–and my husband’s–at my fingertips.

Muah-ha-ha.

Really, though, it’s been surprisingly un-scary. One thing I’m realizing is that even when I’m at an increased risk of contracting one disease, I’m at a lesser risk of getting something else. Most of us don’t get through life without some sort of illness, particularly if we live to a grand old age, so if it’s not one thing, it’s likely to be another.

One of the coolest things about the information there is the analysis of traits. I’m fascinated that there is a way to tell, from my DNA, whether I am likely to be a sprinter (nope), likely to be tolerant of lactose (yep) and what type of ear wax I have (wet. Ew.)

It got me to thinking about the other traits I’m proud (?) to call my own, and wondering what my genes say about them.

For instance, I cannot walk into a kitchen without opening every single cupboard door and then leaving them open after I leave the room. I have tried to train myself out of this habit, but I’ve been at it since I was a kid, and can’t seem to stop. It must be encoded in my genes. Right?

I have an impressively long tongue. I am the only one of my siblings who can touch the tip of my nose with my tongue (when I was a kid, my sibs would try to get me to pick my nose with my tongue. I’m ashamed to say I gave in more than once). Was there perhaps a recessive gene for longer-than-usual tongues that got passed down from one of my ancestors?

As of now, I can’t get that information from my 23andMe data, but I do know that I’m not resistant to malaria, that I’m at a decreased risk of contracting both types of diabetes (yay!) and that I’m at an increased risk of age-related macular degeneration (boo!) And since we’re always finding out more about what our genes mean, it’s possible that one day I will be able to unlock the secrets of my long tongue or finally explain why I am cupboard challenged.

Do you have any traits that you think might be explainable by genetics?

(Pregnant? Trying to get pregnant? Or previously pregnant? Visit the 23andMe Pregnancy Community to take part (free) in discussions, take fun surveys and contribute to pregnancy-related health research.)

If you knew that I had all five of my babies with midwives (three underwater, two in a freestanding birth center and two at home); that I breastfed them on demand, or that they have all slept in my bed along the way, you might draw certain conclusions about my parenting style.

And you might be right. Or you might not. Either way, I’m not putting a label on it.

In a recent post I mentioned an alternative parenting community I used to hang out with when I first went online, and the cruelty and judgment that went on there. I think that behavior was outside the norm: I don’t see this kind of blatant meanness and cult-like behavior going on much on the web anymore (though it’s possible I’m just not looking in the right places).

But being both on the giving and receiving ends of judgment, I’m savvy enough to recognize it even when it’s subtle. And one of the ways I think judging gets perpetuated is through this need to define ourselves with neat little labels that sum up our beliefs, parenting practices, or whatever we are into these days. Because you know what? Once you’ve stuck that label firmly it place, it can be pretty hard to shrug off when it no longer fits.

I really do understand the urge. When I was a newer mom especially, I tried so hard to make some sense of this motherhood thing. One way to do that was by figuring out what kind of mom I was going to be, and then throwing myself into it, heart and soul. Labeling myself was a way of fitting in and exploring who I was. Giving myself a label (“natural”, “attachment parent”, etc) was comforting in a way.

Of course, there was the rotten downside:

* By labeling myself, I limited my options. If you go around calling yourself this or that and then you want to change things up a bit, it’s easy to start worrying about whether it fits with the label, rather than whether it’s the right option for you at the moment. What happens when something on the laundry list no longer works for you?

* By labeling myself, I allowed other people to make assumptions about me. If another mom had had a bad run-in with a rabid “crunchy” group online, they would sometimes assume that I was like that too. Based on experiences they’d had with other people who wore the attachment parent label, they might also assume I a) was extremely permissive b) never left my kids—ever—even to go to the bathroom c) extremely judgmental d) pathologically obsessed with everything my kids e) had given birth alone in the mountains with only a cat as my midwife, and then the cat and I shared the placenta with fava beans on the side.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t have a problem with labeling techniques or approaches. I think that attachment parenting is a legitimate and lovely parenting style and one that I identify with more often than not (though I really believe it was meant to be a parenting style for babies and very young children, and has become in some cases, twisted and mis-applied by well-meaning folk…but that’s another post for another day). And of course, this isn’t just an attachment parenting thing—I just use that as an example because that’s where my personal experience lies. On the other side of the fence, you could, say, use Ferber methods without being a “Ferberizer”. See the distinction? One word describes a technique. The other slaps a label on a PERSON.

At the end of the day, not that much has changed about the way I parent now and the way I did when my first child was a baby. I still believe strongly in birth choices and favor out-of-hospital birth and midwives for myself. I am very supportive of breastfeeding. I like carrying my babies around. I avoid over-using medications.

But I no longer define MYSELF by the kind of mom I am, or the kind of mom I want to become. And you know what? I’m way better off for it. More flexible, more compassionate, more confident. Definitely a whole lot happier. And maybe even a better mom.

(But not better than the rest of you, of course. )

This entry was inspired by a recent post by Caitlin at Chicago Moms Blog. It’s an edited version of a post I put up about a year and a half ago.

in honor of Mother’s Day–and because reading all the mom-centric stuff around the blogosphere has got me thinking about her–I’ll be posting about my mother all week.

This piece was inspired by Mara’s post about what her mother taught her about travel.

What did my mother teach me about travel?

On first consideration it would be easy to say “not much”. My parents divorced when I was young, and my mother didn’t have much money or time to take us on exotic adventures. Anywhere we went had to be navigable, round-trip, within a weekend, because my mom ran an in-home daycare and couldn’t take weekdays off. We didn’t go on vacations to either coast. We didn’t have a cabin on the lake. The only reason we even made it into Canada was that we lived about five miles from the border, and the shopping was better there on the occasion we needed something beyond JCPenney or KMart. I was fourteen years old before I made it out of the Midwest, and every trip that took me further than a Great Lake state was with my dad.

But even though she didn’t physically take me on many trips, my mom taught me a lot about the way I experience travel today.

First of all, whether it was through the music we watched, the books we read or the movies we watched, Mom seemed to make a point of opening up the world to us. I knew that there were many places outside my realm that were fascinating, exciting and worth visiting….even if I couldn’t do it right away.

Second, she made a point of exploring what was available to us in our small city in Michigan’s remote Upper Peninsula. Whether we were blueberry picking in the woods, skipping stones on Lake Superior or watching freighters roll by on the St. Mary’s River, she took pleasure in the small details…the kind that are available to anyone in any town, no matter how small or unglamorous or remote.

One of my favorite things to do as a traveler (and travel writer) is discover the undiscovered. That diner with the fantastic pancakes in a sleepy small town. Or a quiet beach off the beaten path. The simplest things often bring the most pleasure, and often they’re right under our noses. That’s what my mom taught me about travel: you don’t have to go thousands of miles away to find something worth discovering. History and art and culture, natural wonders…it’s all there for the finding, no matter where you are.

Come to think of it, I guess my mom taught me quite a bit about travel. How about yours?

In honor of Mother’s Day–and because reading all the Mother’s Day posts in the blogosphere this week has gotten me thinking about her–I’ll be posting about my mother all week.

This essay was originally published in Skirt! magazine.

When I was a girl of about 11, probably just having gotten my hands on a beauty magazine, I decided to ask my mother one of those womanly questions that I just knew had to be weighing on her mind.

“Mom,” I said, “If you had to change one thing about your figure, what would it be?”

“Change?” she asked, looking at me blankly as though the thought had never crossed her mind before, her hands resting on her normal-woman-sized hips as they often did.

“Well…hmm.” She twisted her lips, deep in thought, mulling over the question. “I guess it would have to be my saddlebags,” she finally said without much conviction.

“Saddlebags? What are those?” I asked, picturing a leather parcel slung across a horse’s back.

“Oh, you know,” Mom said, patting the space under her behind. “When you are young, everything in this area stays pretty tight, but when you get older it starts to sag a little. I guess if I had to change something, I’d tighten it back up again. ”

“Oh.” I said, wandering away. I vaguely remember being disappointed that she didn’t choose something more glamorous, like a boob job.

My mother did not identify as a feminist. She had never been a hippie or burned a bra. She wore makeup, in shades of Avon black eyeliner that had been rolling around in her makeup case since the late ‘60s and rose rouge that swirled up on a thick, creamy stick. Mom wore dresses and high heels to church; at home she was jeans and sweaters. She dyed her hair and shaved her legs. But she never obsessed about clothing, hair or makeup, never commented on the shapes of other women, and never, ever made a big deal about anything having to do with her own body image.

I try to picture my mother’s shape when I was a girl. Was she average, thin, heavy? I can remember her feel during a hug—soft in all the right places, definitely not skinny. I try to peg her size in my head. 10? 12? I think. 14?

And then it occurs to me that I’ve always had this “problem” noticing weight on other people. I’m always the last to notice when a friend has dropped a few sizes; always the one saying “huh?” when an acquaintance complains about how overweight she is. I lost 20 pounds in a matter of months from nursing my constantly-hungry infant, and didn’t notice until my pants literally fell off my hips. Likewise, I never seemed to notice that I’d gained weight until nothing fit and I was making an emergency trip to Target with my jeans held together by a diaper pin.

For most of my life, there were three kinds of women: extremely large, extremely thin, and everybody else. The vast majority of people, “regular” people, soft, curvy, flawed people, fell into the “everybody else” category.

When watching the movie “Chicago” on the big screen over five years ago, I had a revelation when Catherine Zeta-Jones and Renee Zellweger appeared on screen next to each other.

“Wait a second,” I thought to myself. “Catherine Zeta-Jones isn’t skinny!”

Later, I mentioned my discovery to a friend. “Yeah,” she said. “Haven’t you noticed that before?”

Oh. I guess I didn’t, until I saw the way she dwarfed the waifish Zellweger on screen. She’s a movie star, and she’s gorgeous—I guess I just assumed she was also 100 pounds. And sadly, now each time I see Zeta-Jones, a part of me thinks “Wow, she’s gorgeous even if she IS bigger than the average star!”–as though ravishing beauty and normal weight are usually mutually exclusive traits, with her being the exception to the rule.

As much as I’d like to think I exist on some plane where media images don’t affect my psyche, I’ve begun to realize that Mom’s influence is fading. Assaulted by the constant onslaught of tight, thin bodies in magazines, movies and videos, I find myself starting to notice things I never did before—a few inches of meat on a woman’s thighs, softness in her belly, a roll of flesh under her bra strap. I can look at a friend or acquaintance and within seconds mentally judge her size, whereas before, an 8, 10 and 12 all looked essentially the same. Now I differentiate, sort, classify.

At least this awareness didn’t come as a young teen, while my body was being christened into adulthood with pimples, flat hair, a flat chest, and big feet. I eventually realized that my thighs are different from the thighs of a supermodel, but the realization didn’t come on the same day that I didn’t get my hoped-for date for the Prom.

I didn’t keep my innocence forever, but it was good while it lasted. Thanks, Mom.

Today’s Mother’s Day, and I’ve been thinking a lot about my own mother, who died going on ten years ago, when I was still far too young to appreciate her. Mom and I had a complicated relationship, but the older I get–and the further I get away from the more dysfunctional aspects of her life (time has a great way of sanding away the bad and leaving the good) the more I see the many gifts she gave me. Here are a few.

Gift: The knowledge that people are more important than money or things, and that family is everything. My mother’s greatest wish for my siblings and I was that we would stay close as we grew up. We all get along very well today, which I think she’d be happy to know.

Gift: Making do. No, better than making do–being truly content with what you have. My mom re-used everything, but not in a sloppy pack-rat kind of way (when she died, her home had remarkably little clutter for us to go through). She simply used everything within an inch of its life, and felt no need to rush out and buy knick-knacks or a new sofa or curtains in the latest style. I don’t ever remember feeling deprived, even though I was acutely aware that friends of mine had more toys and new clothes than I did. Sure, I would have loved a few more pair of acid-wash jeans in Junior High, but not always getting what I wanted did a lot to help me be more appreciative and content with whatever straws I draw in life now. And it’s the memory of her resourcefulness that makes me feel a huge twinge of conscience whenever I’m being wasteful or lose perspective on how very materially blessed I am.

Gift: She wasn’t small-minded. My mom wasn’t college-educated, and she didn’t hang out with an artsy or intellectual bunch. Yet I grew up on a media diet of classical music, Harry Chapin and Fiddler on the Roof, NOVA and Masterpiece Theatre, Sesame Street and Peter and the Wolf in addition to the piles of books we brought home from the library. Mom didn’t read celebrity magazines or tabloids or watch vapid morning shows…ever. We had conversations about history, music, religion. I think my mom recognized that life was too short–and the possibilities for learning important things too endless–to spend much time indulging in petty entertainment, a lesson I would do well to remember more often.

Gift: Body-un-consciousness. My mom never dieted. She never commented on the size of her thighs or butt. More important, she didn’t comment on the way other women dressed or did their hair, or make remarks about my friends’ looks. She didn’t force me to clean my plate or hover over me to make sure I didn’t eat too much junk. She kept the house fairly free of unhealthy food (we weren’t allowed to have sugar cereal, for example) but wasn’t about to tell me how to spend my own money if I wanted to go to the corner store for Little Debbies. As a result I grew up with a remarkable absence of body-image issues. I’m not going to say I never moaned over my flat chest when I was a teen, or that nowadays I don’t notice that everything’s heading southward, but I feel like I’m able to notice these things without letting them take over my life. In fact, I wrote an essay about her comfort in her own skin, which I’ll put up in a separate post.

What gifts did your mother pass on that helped make you who you are today?